"...In the list of "industry leaders" I noticed Apple missing. Is Apple going to be that stubborn with regard to Flash..."
Other missing industry leaders include Microsoft, whose Windows media streaming and Silverlight competes directly with Flash. Real Media, whose streaming media completes with Flash video. Then there is the last missing industry leader, Apple, whose Quicktime completes with Flash video.
Most news and multimedia sites have switched from Apple, Microsoft and Real streaming formats to Flash during the past two years.
Server: Linux, Sendmail, Spamassassin Client: Windows, Outlook
Not the most elegant solution but for companies that have 25 or fewer employees, it works. The lack of a shared mailbox, shared contacts and a shared calendar has not been an issue since our users can barely copy and paste. When I explain the difference between plain text formatted e-mail and rich text (html format) e-mail, their eyes glaze over and their brains proceed to lock up.
"...but here we are in 2008 with no punch cards..."
Yes and no. Yes, the physical punch cards are gone, but they live on in financial institutions in the form of Automated Clearing House (ACH) debits and credits which use the 96 column IBM punch card format. So, the next time you use your credit card, ATM card, e-check or pay a bill online through some company's web site, on the backend they are probably using ACH upload files (aka NACHA format) which was based on IBM's 96 column punch card to transfer financial data. Magnetic tape may be used on a contingency basis but it has to have an additional header record, be EBCDIC encoded and use 9 track tape. The IRS and many state tax agencies use ACH transfers, as an option, to refund personal income taxes instead of sending taxpayers a physical check.
Of course it was written in Java. "...1.6GHz processor, 2GB of RAM..." Almost every Java app I've run across requires 2GB of RAM and a 2GHz processor. The exception seems to be Limewire and "Hello, World!".
I too used Ada in college. Ada is a superset of Pascal. It's very similar to Borland's Delphi and Oracle's PL/SQL, which are basically their versions of Object Pascal.
The FAA should've used Java. Then the project would've taken 3x longer and had cost overruns of 400% and/or would've gotten cancelled, like most government projects.
...but after a few weeks with hundreds of tabs opened and closed, it takes up tons of memory and won't give it back.
Unfortunately, I found that out when I made the mistake of upgrading to FF2 last week. CPU usage went to 100% and stayed there, plus double the memory useage of v1.5. Thankfully, http://www.oldversion.com/ has v1.5.0.12. I was able to downgrade Firefox and all is well again. Apparently, lots of opened tabs and adblock is a highly toxic combo for v2.
The summary uses the acronym "SMB", which is used in TFA...At no point does anyone define this term or give enough contextual clues for it to be obvious...it must mean "small and medium business"...
I agree with your points and the lack of defining what SMB means had me perplexed as well. I usually associate SMB with the Samba project (server message block). The problem is that the submitter and the author of the original article are both techno-dweebs. They therefore assume that everyone is clairvoyant, knows everything that they know and are capable of reading their minds. In a perfect world, Slashdot would've rejected the submission for failing to clarify what "SMB" means.
...As for the web "slowing down", I think there may be a fundament for the idea that this might happen...yet the net is nowhere near saturated...
The notion of the web "slowing down" is because of the ad servers that many web sites are using. The advertisers frequently do not have the resources to handle traffic, particularily when a site gets Slashdotted or Dugg.
...most of the people who say these things are the highly connected tech savvy who generally socialize with their own kind. The rest of the population is perfectly happy with newspapers...
That sums up what I have seen. The tech savvy get their news from the web. The rest of the world continues to rely on print media.
I cancelled Monday to Saturday newspaper service because there is almost no original news in the newspaper (Los Angeles Times). The news that is printed is a refactoring of wire service (AP, UPI, Reuters, KRT, AFP) stories. Once the refactored wire service articles are eliminated, the remaining content reads more like an infomercial than news.
When I used to work for the L.A. Times, and we'd have our regular department level meetings, the usual topics were: profit margins, who has the highest net operating income, and which sales person had the best performance.
Newspapers, much like record companies, are not going to disappear. Newspapers, much like record labels, are experiencing a decline in revenue because they are putting out a mediocre product. Newspapers need to get back to their muckraking, yellow journalism roots, and start asking some tough questions instead of playing softball.
"...Using the latest version of Photoshop is likely to hinder their ability to practice as not many highschool kids in my experiance have the money to drop on the latest and greatest Adobe..."
Technically, there's nothing wrong with Photoshop 5. Version 10/CS3 has many more bells and whistles but for high school students learning the ropes they could use Photoshop LE (aka v5 OEM), which was included when I purchased a $50 graphics tablet and again when I bought a $75 scanner.
"The people who run Facebook aren't stupid - there's so much money involved here..."
The Facebook people are smart on technological issues but not when it comes to copyright and trademark issues. Facebook's latest idea of using member's photos when the user writes a review of a product and creating an implicit ad, if the user doesn't opt out, is a class action lawsuit waiting to happen.
Read up on the Taster's Choice lawsuit and how it cost Nestle $15.6 million USD for using the photo of a person, who did sign a contract with Nestle.
"...That's a direct letter violation of of the GPL.Sounds like the author of asus_acpi has a lawsuit on his/her hands..."
This is where the whole concept of the GPL becomes a jumbled mess. Asus is a Taiwan based business. China claims that Taiwan is a renegade province. Asus, much like many other manaufacturers, subcontracts a significant portion of its business to conpanies in mainland China. So, in which country is Richard Staallman and his cohorts at the FSF going to file their GPL violation lawsuit? Bear in mind that the GPL is a U.S./Eurocentric entity. You should also factor in that the GPL in not international law and Asia countries, for the most part, have a vastly different view of copyright issues than western countries.
It also shows why you shouldn't trust Microsoft products for critical work.
If you have ever read Microsoft's EULA for their development tools (C#/VB/.NET/etc.) Microsoft states that their products should *NOT* be used in mission critical systems.
Interestingly enough, the area the 6th covers is not exactly a bastion of liberal, Democratic, hedonistic, blue state America. I would have expected the sixth to find some way to uphold and validate 2257 not strike it down.
Usenet.com? Yes. NNTP? no. The real problem with Usenet.com is that they provide a web gateway to access their newsgroups. To a n00b, the web browser is *THE* internets and how all the tubes connect together via The Google. Most other usenet providers avoid the web gateway and require the old fashion NNTP client. By not providing a web gateway and not providing a web-based (searchable) index of their content, other commercial NNTP hosts avoid the potential Usenet.com issues.
...If you DONT run a datacentre, stuff the CPU, look at your AC costs! Who cares if the processor is taking 50W or 58W when your AC is using 3kW!...
Pentium I, II and 3's run in the sub 75W range. I've read acticles which claim that Pentium 4's and the multicores processors chew up anywhere from 125W to 300W simply by idling. I have to guess that someone running a P4 with Vista is sucking up 300 watts, and when they play Halo, the consumption probably hits 500 watts.
"Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts"
The more I read about GPL v3, the more poisonous and viral it appears to be. Overall, the BSD and MIT licenses appear to be the most reasonable. The revival of PCC is a direct response to GPL v3 since GCC (and much of the software hosted at FSF) will more than likely migrate to GPL v3, which seems to make many of the BSD folks quite nervous.
"...And why would you want a "learning language" that you will never use again?..."
Delphi (Borland's Object Pascal) is really good if you are writing COM plugins for M$ products. The Delphi plugin will compile into s single DLL with a very tiny footprint whereas the M$ Visual Studio equivalents require a number of redistributable runtime libraries (think: DLL hell) and/or the installation of one of the.NET frameworks.
"True, but if your list of usernames leaks out it saves remote attackers having to try non-existent usernames in a dictionary attack..."
This is an excellent point that many of the flamers fail to understand. Yes, a local user account has read access to/etc/passwd, but a hacker looking to tap into a 0-day exploit does not. My guess about Skype is that they are harvesting usernames and selling those to spammers and/or providing those usernames to a government agency. In case anyone missed it, the U.S. government has been doing quite a bit of data mining since 9/11/2001 so being able to discretely grab all the usernames off of a computer would play into this.
"...I would think these large sites are going to pitch a bitch..."
I would think these large sites would understand the concept of not putting all your eggs (servers) in one basket. There is a reason why smart companies use replication and clustering, and datacenters spread across the country.
...I'm still trying to figure out what XP and Vista do that Windows 95 didn't...
Better USB and flash memory card support. Using flash thumb drives with Win98 is problematic. With Win95 it's almost impossible since M$ refused to include patches that were compatible with Win95. So, a 2 or 3 meg patch would've brought Win95 up to speed, but since the OS is M$'s cash cow that generates most of their profit, M$ has no motivation to patch Win95.
I used to set up Win95 machines with Office97 on a 500 meg HD and still had 150+ megs of free space. No idea what all the garbage is that clogs up XP/Vista, but I do know that a 10 gig partition ain't enough.
"...the kernel itself is nothing without the GNU userland (and compiler, BTW)..."
So, using your logic, anyone who develops programs using Microsoft's Visual Studio should designate their app as a MSVS/You-App-Name.
FYI: Intel also makes several compiler's for Linux. Intel's C/C++ compiler generates smaller and faster executing code than GNU/GCC. MySQL offers a Linux binary version of their database created using Intel's C/C++ compiler.
"...The whole reason they have common carrier status is so they can't be held accountable for what people transmit over their wires. Selectively blocking stuff opens up the door to force them to block all illegal content, and (potenitlly) liability if they don't..."
My guess about AT&T is that they will create a blacklist of domains and IP addresses. This is the cheap easy way to filter content. People using shared hosts (i.e. shared IP addresses) are going to be unhappy campers but by blacklisting entire domains and IP addresses, AT&T avoids the liability that occurs if they were packet sniffing or trying to analyze each individual download or file transfer. In addition, AT&T can't really filter ports because there are legitimate Bitorrent paysites out there, can't say the same for Gnutella though.
"...why is it "illegal" to record a sporting event (via audio, video, or text) and distribute it publicly?..."
At the roughly 50 or so NCAA games I've attended during the last two years, prior to the game and immediately before they play the national anthem, the announcer tells the audience anyone with a camera to turn-off their camera flash for the safety of the athletes. I've seen numerous examples where audience members used the flash on the cameras during the games only to have the facilities security come up to the audience member to tell them to "TURN-OFF THEIR CAMERA FLASH!". No one was ever kicked out, nor was any equipment confiscated.
At the NCAA games I've been to, you'll frequently see 20 to 100 people in the audience using digital cameras or cellphones equipped with digital cameras. I suspect that the NCAA does crack down during the sweet 16, big 8, final 4, championship games, and other high value games. During the NCAA playoffs, championships or high value games, the NCAA usually has an exclusive coverage agreement with a broastcaster wherein the broastcaster paid the NCAA for the right to be the sole provider of coverage.
Slashdot Mirror
"...In the list of "industry leaders" I noticed Apple missing. Is Apple going to be that stubborn with regard to Flash..."
Other missing industry leaders include Microsoft, whose Windows media streaming and Silverlight competes directly with Flash. Real Media, whose streaming media completes with Flash video. Then there is the last missing industry leader, Apple, whose Quicktime completes with Flash video.
Most news and multimedia sites have switched from Apple, Microsoft and Real streaming formats to Flash during the past two years.
Server: Linux, Sendmail, Spamassassin
Client: Windows, Outlook
Not the most elegant solution but for companies that have 25 or fewer employees, it works. The lack of a shared mailbox, shared contacts and a shared calendar has not been an issue since our users can barely copy and paste. When I explain the difference between plain text formatted e-mail and rich text (html format) e-mail, their eyes glaze over and their brains proceed to lock up.
"...but here we are in 2008 with no punch cards..."
Yes and no. Yes, the physical punch cards are gone, but they live on in financial institutions in the form of Automated Clearing House (ACH) debits and credits which use the 96 column IBM punch card format. So, the next time you use your credit card, ATM card, e-check or pay a bill online through some company's web site, on the backend they are probably using ACH upload files (aka NACHA format) which was based on IBM's 96 column punch card to transfer financial data. Magnetic tape may be used on a contingency basis but it has to have an additional header record, be EBCDIC encoded and use 9 track tape. The IRS and many state tax agencies use ACH transfers, as an option, to refund personal income taxes instead of sending taxpayers a physical check.
Of course it was written in Java. "...1.6GHz processor, 2GB of RAM..." Almost every Java app I've run across requires 2GB of RAM and a 2GHz processor. The exception seems to be Limewire and "Hello, World!".
"Likewise, I also used Ada in college."
I too used Ada in college. Ada is a superset of Pascal. It's very similar to Borland's Delphi and Oracle's PL/SQL, which are basically their versions of Object Pascal.
The FAA should've used Java. Then the project would've taken 3x longer and had cost overruns of 400% and/or would've gotten cancelled, like most government projects.
Unfortunately, I found that out when I made the mistake of upgrading to FF2 last week. CPU usage went to 100% and stayed there, plus double the memory useage of v1.5. Thankfully, http://www.oldversion.com/ has v1.5.0.12. I was able to downgrade Firefox and all is well again. Apparently, lots of opened tabs and adblock is a highly toxic combo for v2.
The summary uses the acronym "SMB", which is used in TFA...At no point does anyone define this term or give enough contextual clues for it to be obvious...it must mean "small and medium business"...
I agree with your points and the lack of defining what SMB means had me perplexed as well. I usually associate SMB with the Samba project (server message block). The problem is that the submitter and the author of the original article are both techno-dweebs. They therefore assume that everyone is clairvoyant, knows everything that they know and are capable of reading their minds. In a perfect world, Slashdot would've rejected the submission for failing to clarify what "SMB" means.
The notion of the web "slowing down" is because of the ad servers that many web sites are using. The advertisers frequently do not have the resources to handle traffic, particularily when a site gets Slashdotted or Dugg.
That sums up what I have seen. The tech savvy get their news from the web. The rest of the world continues to rely on print media.
I cancelled Monday to Saturday newspaper service because there is almost no original news in the newspaper (Los Angeles Times). The news that is printed is a refactoring of wire service (AP, UPI, Reuters, KRT, AFP) stories. Once the refactored wire service articles are eliminated, the remaining content reads more like an infomercial than news.
When I used to work for the L.A. Times, and we'd have our regular department level meetings, the usual topics were: profit margins, who has the highest net operating income, and which sales person had the best performance.
Newspapers, much like record companies, are not going to disappear. Newspapers, much like record labels, are experiencing a decline in revenue because they are putting out a mediocre product. Newspapers need to get back to their muckraking, yellow journalism roots, and start asking some tough questions instead of playing softball.
"...Using the latest version of Photoshop is likely to hinder their ability to practice as not many highschool kids in my experiance have the money to drop on the latest and greatest Adobe..."
Technically, there's nothing wrong with Photoshop 5. Version 10/CS3 has many more bells and whistles but for high school students learning the ropes they could use Photoshop LE (aka v5 OEM), which was included when I purchased a $50 graphics tablet and again when I bought a $75 scanner.
"The people who run Facebook aren't stupid - there's so much money involved here..."
The Facebook people are smart on technological issues but not when it comes to copyright and trademark issues. Facebook's latest idea of using member's photos when the user writes a review of a product and creating an implicit ad, if the user doesn't opt out, is a class action lawsuit waiting to happen.
Read up on the Taster's Choice lawsuit and how it cost Nestle $15.6 million USD for using the photo of a person, who did sign a contract with Nestle.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002168937_coffeemug03.html
Copyright and trademark lawyers must be foaming at the mouth like rapid dogs at Facebook's new advertising idea.
"...That's a direct letter violation of of the GPL.Sounds like the author of asus_acpi has a lawsuit on his/her hands..."
This is where the whole concept of the GPL becomes a jumbled mess. Asus is a Taiwan based business. China claims that Taiwan is a renegade province. Asus, much like many other manaufacturers, subcontracts a significant portion of its business to conpanies in mainland China. So, in which country is Richard Staallman and his cohorts at the FSF going to file their GPL violation lawsuit? Bear in mind that the GPL is a U.S./Eurocentric entity. You should also factor in that the GPL in not international law and Asia countries, for the most part, have a vastly different view of copyright issues than western countries.
It also shows why you shouldn't trust Microsoft products for critical work.
If you have ever read Microsoft's EULA for their development tools (C#/VB/.NET/etc.) Microsoft states that their products should *NOT* be used in mission critical systems.
"The Sixth Circuit includes Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee..."
http://www.ca6.uscourts.gov/internet/index.htm
Interestingly enough, the area the 6th covers is not exactly a bastion of liberal, Democratic, hedonistic, blue state America. I would have expected the sixth to find some way to uphold and validate 2257 not strike it down.
"They wanna take down USENET?"
Usenet.com? Yes. NNTP? no. The real problem with Usenet.com is that they provide a web gateway to access their newsgroups. To a n00b, the web browser is *THE* internets and how all the tubes connect together via The Google. Most other usenet providers avoid the web gateway and require the old fashion NNTP client. By not providing a web gateway and not providing a web-based (searchable) index of their content, other commercial NNTP hosts avoid the potential Usenet.com issues.
Pentium I, II and 3's run in the sub 75W range. I've read acticles which claim that Pentium 4's and the multicores processors chew up anywhere from 125W to 300W simply by idling. I have to guess that someone running a P4 with Vista is sucking up 300 watts, and when they play Halo, the consumption probably hits 500 watts.
"Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts"
The more I read about GPL v3, the more poisonous and viral it appears to be. Overall, the BSD and MIT licenses appear to be the most reasonable. The revival of PCC is a direct response to GPL v3 since GCC (and much of the software hosted at FSF) will more than likely migrate to GPL v3, which seems to make many of the BSD folks quite nervous.
"...And why would you want a "learning language" that you will never use again?..."
.NET frameworks.
Delphi (Borland's Object Pascal) is really good if you are writing COM plugins for M$ products. The Delphi plugin will compile into s single DLL with a very tiny footprint whereas the M$ Visual Studio equivalents require a number of redistributable runtime libraries (think: DLL hell) and/or the installation of one of the
"True, but if your list of usernames leaks out it saves remote attackers having to try non-existent usernames in a dictionary attack..."
/etc/passwd, but a hacker looking to tap into a 0-day exploit does not. My guess about Skype is that they are harvesting usernames and selling those to spammers and/or providing those usernames to a government agency. In case anyone missed it, the U.S. government has been doing quite a bit of data mining since 9/11/2001 so being able to discretely grab all the usernames off of a computer would play into this.
This is an excellent point that many of the flamers fail to understand. Yes, a local user account has read access to
"...I would think these large sites are going to pitch a bitch..."
I would think these large sites would understand the concept of not putting all your eggs (servers) in one basket. There is a reason why smart companies use replication and clustering, and datacenters spread across the country.
Better USB and flash memory card support. Using flash thumb drives with Win98 is problematic. With Win95 it's almost impossible since M$ refused to include patches that were compatible with Win95. So, a 2 or 3 meg patch would've brought Win95 up to speed, but since the OS is M$'s cash cow that generates most of their profit, M$ has no motivation to patch Win95.
I used to set up Win95 machines with Office97 on a 500 meg HD and still had 150+ megs of free space. No idea what all the garbage is that clogs up XP/Vista, but I do know that a 10 gig partition ain't enough.
"...the kernel itself is nothing without the GNU userland (and compiler, BTW)..."
So, using your logic, anyone who develops programs using Microsoft's Visual Studio should designate their app as a MSVS/You-App-Name.
FYI: Intel also makes several compiler's for Linux. Intel's C/C++ compiler generates smaller and faster executing code than GNU/GCC. MySQL offers a Linux binary version of their database created using Intel's C/C++ compiler.
Q: "Shouldn't an artist be able to give away his own music..."
A: If the music sucks then I think the answer is quite clear.
"...The whole reason they have common carrier status is so they can't be held accountable for what people transmit over their wires. Selectively blocking stuff opens up the door to force them to block all illegal content, and (potenitlly) liability if they don't..."
My guess about AT&T is that they will create a blacklist of domains and IP addresses. This is the cheap easy way to filter content. People using shared hosts (i.e. shared IP addresses) are going to be unhappy campers but by blacklisting entire domains and IP addresses, AT&T avoids the liability that occurs if they were packet sniffing or trying to analyze each individual download or file transfer. In addition, AT&T can't really filter ports because there are legitimate Bitorrent paysites out there, can't say the same for Gnutella though.
"...why is it "illegal" to record a sporting event (via audio, video, or text) and distribute it publicly?..."
At the roughly 50 or so NCAA games I've attended during the last two years, prior to the game and immediately before they play the national anthem, the announcer tells the audience anyone with a camera to turn-off their camera flash for the safety of the athletes. I've seen numerous examples where audience members used the flash on the cameras during the games only to have the facilities security come up to the audience member to tell them to "TURN-OFF THEIR CAMERA FLASH!". No one was ever kicked out, nor was any equipment confiscated.
At the NCAA games I've been to, you'll frequently see 20 to 100 people in the audience using digital cameras or cellphones equipped with digital cameras. I suspect that the NCAA does crack down during the sweet 16, big 8, final 4, championship games, and other high value games. During the NCAA playoffs, championships or high value games, the NCAA usually has an exclusive coverage agreement with a broastcaster wherein the broastcaster paid the NCAA for the right to be the sole provider of coverage.