And it does so quite purposefully, deep in the Mozilla core:
// First, replace all nbsp characters with spaces, // which the unicode encoder won't do for us. static PRUnichar nbsp = 160; static PRUnichar space = ' '; aString.ReplaceChar(nbsp, space);
So, when you edit a wiki page, not only are the non-breakable spaces you just inserted not saved, but all the ones that were already present on the page are also destroyed. Way to please your fellow wikizens!
Note that this also affects sending mail in Mozilla (and probably Thunderbird), uploading files, etc. Patches have quickly been proposed, rejected, accepted for inclusion in the next next next release, someday, maybe.
DEC had an ultra-optimized math library (calculations on arrays, Fourier transforms, etc.), improved over decades by generations of PhDs. There were different versions of the routines for the different generations of CPUs, for the different cache sizes of a same model, maybe even for various speeds of RAM. Needless to say, the simple fact of linking against that library instead of the standard one improved the speed of math intensive code by a good 10 to 20 percent (those numbers out of my fuzzy memory, but that far from insignificant).
Add to that compilers that were producing top-notch machine language for the target architecture (producing images that ran twice as fast as what gcc gave you at best), CPUs that were spanking the rest of the world as far as floating-point performance was concerned, and you can understand why the scientific community has kept using Alphas for so long.
boa13 writes "There's a new device to help with lack of contents on your web site. It's apparently a device that will spit out dupes when you don't have time to properly read the stories submitted by your users. You post a story once and when you're running short of stuff to publish, it will spit out a rehash that sounds like it's new and fresh, but is actually quite stale, so that casual users will not notice that you don't do a proper job of moderating submitted stories. Frankly I have to think this would be annoying after awhile. As if dealing with improperly written and biased stories wasn't enough, now you get to research the linked articles to discover if it's that old AP story rehashed one more time. Talk about insanity!";-)
Get your daily dose of unmaintainable code straight from the guys who were just tasked to maintain it! Alex Papadimoulis provides it at http://www.thedailywtf.com/. There hasn't been a week yet where I've not said "WTF?" looking at the incredible production code snippets (or screenshots) that despaired programmers around the world send to him.
I frequently look at both projects, and it seems to me that Git is more active and has a bigger base (users and developers). These past ten weeks or so, Mercurial seems to have slowed down, while Git has accelerated towards 1.0. Besides, Git performance has improved a lot in the past few months, and disk usage has gone way down, the comparisons you can find on the web are now meaningless and outdated. Also, Git has been ported to Cygwin, and works on most Unices.
However, Mercurial offers a better user experience, is easier to get into, is truly-cross-platform, and so might be a better choice for smaller projects. On the long term, I would place my bet on Git, though.
I suspect 99.9% of Apache software used is the web server. Perhaps the Apache group has grown too far.
I suspect you're wrong. At work, we're using tons of products made by Apache, in addition to the webserver itself. Ant, Tomcat, Struts, and plenty of XML-related and Struts-related libraries, off the top of my head. All these projects are high-quality software, and used as such by many companies working with Java around the world.
Apache is as bright a beacon in the Java world as it is in the webserver world.
Funny how a fiber optic cable making company forgot to include that in their analysis.
They're talking about high-bandwidth installations, and talking to business people. I doubt these people are interested in hack jobs the grandparent describes, especially since it's a sure way to say goodbye to your high bandwidth (tens of gigabits or so).
Re:tell me something i didn't know....
on
Fiber Optic vs Copper
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
They also said that the price for installing fiber and the price for installing copper are now similar. This is news. Fiber used to be plenty more expensive to install than copper.
Connecting to your friend's 56k modem would yield only 33.6 in each direction IIRC.
That's because the modems did 56k down, 33.6k up, at best. Your download being your friend's upload, and vice-versa, the best you could do together was 33.6k. I guess ISPs have special modems that do 33.6k down, 56k up.
It must have been a hard choice for mtndue1, torn between hyping up his scoop so that he would have a chance to be published on Slashdot and not telling outright lies. So he took both approaches:
Sony is halting the production of CRT's for televisions at many of its plants
Sony will shut down some of its CRT television assembly factories by March 2008 (emphasis mine)
No, I didn't read the fine article, but I did laugh out loud.
Just across the border in France, an hours drive from where I live, you get 20mbit access, free phone use and free wireless modems for around $20 per month.
More likely around $40 per month, but that's still one third less than what you pay.
It's not that they own the networks, it's that they have better regulation.
Amen to that. My ISP (Free, in France) is the most innovative ISP I know: they regularly go against the former-governement-monopoly ISP (Wanadoo), but also against the status quo in the profession (other big ISPs, all backed-up by large private brick-n-mortar corps).
They were the ones to initiate a significant price cut, ~25% less than what everybody else was charging at the time, be called fools for that seemingly unsustainable pricing. Years later, they're still there, the competition has bitten the bullet and somewhat aligned their prices.
They were the ones to impose no speed limit on the connection, and also have a very simple pricing scheme. No complicated plans, options and bonuses: one flat monthly fee, you get the best your line can offer. Well, actually, while that's great for most people (30 euros per month for 6 Mbps down and 1 Mbps up in my case), it sucks for people who have poor lines (512 kbps max, for example), this is the only time competition has better prices to offer.
They were the ones to include free landline phone calls to the whole country, provided as part of the basic monthly subscription. Calls to other lines are cheap, except mobile phones. (They have not yet managed to negotiate sweet deals with the three providers who operate in France, operators who have, in totally unrelated news, recently been accused of collusion and price-fixing.) People who call you only pay the local-call price. The competition called them fools for the free calls, and have yet to really match the offer. Wanadoo is selling unlimited calls for an additional 10 euros per month. With almost 1 million regular users, Free is one of the biggest IP phone provider in the world.
They were the ones to include one hundred free TV channels, provided as part of the basic monthly subscription. Granted, a great number of them suck, but TV mostly sucks anyway. You can subscribe to plenty of additionnal, better channels, for one or two bucks a piece, and just as easily unsubscribe. Every month you start is due, that's the only (sane) limitation there is. The interface for un/subscription is pretty clear, no hidden costs and such. Oh, and there are radio channels, too.
In a related, disruptive move, they recently started providing realtime audience stats. The info is of not much value to customers (except it's fun to know what's currently hot, and actually see people zapping during commercials), but it's a great symbolic move. Information that was previously never shown to the unwashed masses is now offered for free.
Almost forgot, they're also offering the best free hosting there is in France. Unrelated to their DSL offer, you can open as many free web spaces as you want, each one having 1 GB of disk quota, unlimited bandwidth, PHP 4 or 5, MySQL, and decent performance.
My, I've been ranting about Free again! Did I say they were initially funded by porn money? What was the point initially? Oh yeah: clearly, the innovations we've seen in the past six years are not due to a government monopoly. The former monopoly has actually been dragged along screaming and kicking... Innovations were brought in by independant companies, but could only happen because there were regulations in place that forced the former monopoly to open its lines to competitors at a reasonable price, prevented it from vastly undercutting the competition (boy were they tempted to do that initially), and overall really regulated the sector, sometimes being a small hindrance but mostly boosting the growth of the whole sector.
Every international student, who graduates can apply for a work permit known as OPT (Optional Practical Training, I believe). This allows that student to seek employment in a field that is relevant to his/her education and or qualification. It is not automatic but nonetheless I have yet to hear a student get rejected for it.
I didn't get rejected, but I received it five months after the expiration of my I-20. Thanks to my University for forwarding the mail back to Europe, by the way. (In case you wonder how this came to be, that happened early 2003, at a time the administration was struggling to apply the stricter rules of a post-9/11 world.)
MSN Messenger has a huge market share in France: they're an obvious leader, and yes, everybody just calls the service "MSN". I hear this is also the case in other Western-European countries, but don't have first-hand experience. Clearly, Eastern-Europe is a very different market.
I don't know when they started publishing the format, it's been some time. Note that the keyword here is "open", used in the same way as fifteen years ago, when it only meant you could look inside the machine and were limited in what you could make with the information. It is very remote from open source or free software, or even standards.
You have to agree to a licence to get the Flash specification. You notably have to agree to use the information only to generate Flash files, and not play them. That's all you can get for free. I don't know if you can pay to get a licence to create Flash players, or if Macromedia reserves that right for themselves exclusively.
people say that this wouldn't be realistic with ADSL services
And yet it works. Free offers more than 60 channels as part of the flat monthly fee (mostly public channels and crappy channels), and offers something like 140 others using various pricing schemes: one or two bucks per month and per channel (the channel sets the price, you can cancel any time, though every month you start is fully due), various packs, and a premium Canalsat offer. I've watched it at a friend's, and the quality is very nice, except you can get occasional temporary freezes or garbage, especially when you do intensive downloads in parallel. Most of the times, it works just as well as regular TV.
They also offer radio channels, and distribute a modified videolan client to help you stream your media (music, videos) from your computer to your TV.
By the way, as a typical Free move, they now show realtime statistics of what people are watching. Ain't that cool? Freebox TV Stats
I don't have a TV, so I don't use that service, but I do use the phone service quite a lot. Your typical IP phone, with some echo at the beginning of a call, slight distorstions sometimes, but free and unlimited calls to all landlines in France, and cheap rates for the rest of the world.
Not everything's perfect though. Their customer service has improved a lot, it used to totally suck, it is now mediocre at best. You pay a fee when you leave (the more you stay, the less you pay). You pay 400 euros if you damage the Freebox (ouch!). That, and several less important annoyances.
But overall, for someone who's on the geek side of things, their offer is a great value that beats everything else currently offered.
(Oops, I forgot to rant about their top-notch and free web hosting, their tech friendlyness, and... oh well.)
Nice to see the Free business model (offer all the bandwidth a phone line can support and a multi-purpose, multi-service "box" for a flat, low monthly fee) taking over the world! When Free started with their idea in late 1999, their were considered fools by the rest of the French industry, and actually had to build their own DSLAM and Freeboxes, since nobody would do it for them. Now the Freebox is in its fourth major version (fifth soon?), Free is the second ISP in France and every ISP here offers some kind of unimaginative rip-off (Livebox, NeufBox, CBox...), trying to match the excellent price/service ratio offered by Free. Not bad for a independant company funded, not by rich industry conglomerates, but by porn money!
By the way, the service offered by Be in the U.K. is still more expansive than what Free offers in France (35 euros vs. 30 euros), and while they do mention services such as phone and TV, they don't say if they're going to be included in the flat monthly fee, like Free does. Somehow I doubt it. Maybe their customer service won't suck, though.
More information on the Freebox (in French, but with pictures): http://www.f-b-x.net/
Though I haven't seen "Kiki's delivery service" yet which I heard wasn't as good. I'm sure it is though.
Kiki's excellent, too, but almost purely a coming of age movie. Early-teen stuff, no war, no epic, no magic... except for the magic of a beautiful, idealistic European town, the magic of nice people, the magic of life, the magic of music and excellent storytelling. Oh, and some broom flights, too.
I want to know which one is better for my needs now.
And this is why the comparison is wrong. It does not compare them "now", it compares them "overall". Do you care about ten-years-old flaws that were quickly fixed and have not bothered anyone since then? I think not. Do you care about flaws in a special vendor version that no sane person uses now? I think not. Would you be interested in knowing that the above-mentioned flaws were created by the very vendor the proprietary technology of whom you are trying to evaluate? I think you should.
What should interest you is how many security issues are found per year. The article lets you learn that (even though it doesn't explicitly do the math for you). What should also interest you is how the Java community and Sun reacted to the flaws, how fast and how well they were fixed. The article is tight-lipped about that.
Actually, since no flaws have been found for.Net, there is no way to know how Microsoft will react in such a case. Past reactions should at the very least have you worried.
(And actually, there have been flaws, but the authors of the study chose to ignore them, see appendix A for why. Unfortunately, there's no appendix B for how they chose the Java flaws.)
The researchers, the blog and the Slashdot summary claim that.Net has fared better than Java as far as security goes. I wonder how you twist that into believing they claim Java has no security.
Slashdot Mirror
There really is nothing good to report on this game update.
Maybe that's because you're biased, haven't done much research, and happy people don't make a fuss: they're busy playing.
And it does so quite purposefully, deep in the Mozilla core:
So, when you edit a wiki page, not only are the non-breakable spaces you just inserted not saved, but all the ones that were already present on the page are also destroyed. Way to please your fellow wikizens!
Note that this also affects sending mail in Mozilla (and probably Thunderbird), uploading files, etc. Patches have quickly been proposed, rejected, accepted for inclusion in the next next next release, someday, maybe.
Bugzilla entries:
DEC had an ultra-optimized math library (calculations on arrays, Fourier transforms, etc.), improved over decades by generations of PhDs. There were different versions of the routines for the different generations of CPUs, for the different cache sizes of a same model, maybe even for various speeds of RAM. Needless to say, the simple fact of linking against that library instead of the standard one improved the speed of math intensive code by a good 10 to 20 percent (those numbers out of my fuzzy memory, but that far from insignificant).
Add to that compilers that were producing top-notch machine language for the target architecture (producing images that ran twice as fast as what gcc gave you at best), CPUs that were spanking the rest of the world as far as floating-point performance was concerned, and you can understand why the scientific community has kept using Alphas for so long.
In other news...
;-)
boa13 writes "There's a new device to help with lack of contents on your web site. It's apparently a device that will spit out dupes when you don't have time to properly read the stories submitted by your users. You post a story once and when you're running short of stuff to publish, it will spit out a rehash that sounds like it's new and fresh, but is actually quite stale, so that casual users will not notice that you don't do a proper job of moderating submitted stories. Frankly I have to think this would be annoying after awhile. As if dealing with improperly written and biased stories wasn't enough, now you get to research the linked articles to discover if it's that old AP story rehashed one more time. Talk about insanity!"
Get your daily dose of unmaintainable code straight from the guys who were just tasked to maintain it! Alex Papadimoulis provides it at http://www.thedailywtf.com/. There hasn't been a week yet where I've not said "WTF?" looking at the incredible production code snippets (or screenshots) that despaired programmers around the world send to him.
The best one, so far:
enum Bool
{
True,
False,
FileNotFound
};
I frequently look at both projects, and it seems to me that Git is more active and has a bigger base (users and developers). These past ten weeks or so, Mercurial seems to have slowed down, while Git has accelerated towards 1.0. Besides, Git performance has improved a lot in the past few months, and disk usage has gone way down, the comparisons you can find on the web are now meaningless and outdated. Also, Git has been ported to Cygwin, and works on most Unices.
However, Mercurial offers a better user experience, is easier to get into, is truly-cross-platform, and so might be a better choice for smaller projects. On the long term, I would place my bet on Git, though.
And we get to deal with terrible contracts, awful customer service, billing nightmares and locked phones! Yay for choice and freedom!
;-)
So, there's at least one thing on which France and the U.S. can agree!
I suspect 99.9% of Apache software used is the web server. Perhaps the Apache group has grown too far.
I suspect you're wrong. At work, we're using tons of products made by Apache, in addition to the webserver itself. Ant, Tomcat, Struts, and plenty of XML-related and Struts-related libraries, off the top of my head. All these projects are high-quality software, and used as such by many companies working with Java around the world.
Apache is as bright a beacon in the Java world as it is in the webserver world.
Funny how a fiber optic cable making company forgot to include that in their analysis.
They're talking about high-bandwidth installations, and talking to business people. I doubt these people are interested in hack jobs the grandparent describes, especially since it's a sure way to say goodbye to your high bandwidth (tens of gigabits or so).
They also said that the price for installing fiber and the price for installing copper are now similar. This is news. Fiber used to be plenty more expensive to install than copper.
Connecting to your friend's 56k modem would yield only 33.6 in each direction IIRC.
That's because the modems did 56k down, 33.6k up, at best. Your download being your friend's upload, and vice-versa, the best you could do together was 33.6k. I guess ISPs have special modems that do 33.6k down, 56k up.
HD in this article meant Hard Disc, not Hi-Definition.
You meant the reverse, or you didn't read the article.
It must have been a hard choice for mtndue1, torn between hyping up his scoop so that he would have a chance to be published on Slashdot and not telling outright lies. So he took both approaches:
Sony is halting the production of CRT's for televisions at many of its plants
Sony will shut down some of its CRT television assembly factories by March 2008 (emphasis mine)
No, I didn't read the fine article, but I did laugh out loud.
Just across the border in France, an hours drive from where I live, you get 20mbit access, free phone use and free wireless modems for around $20 per month.
More likely around $40 per month, but that's still one third less than what you pay.
It's not that they own the networks, it's that they have better regulation.
Amen to that. My ISP (Free, in France) is the most innovative ISP I know: they regularly go against the former-governement-monopoly ISP (Wanadoo), but also against the status quo in the profession (other big ISPs, all backed-up by large private brick-n-mortar corps).
They were the ones to initiate a significant price cut, ~25% less than what everybody else was charging at the time, be called fools for that seemingly unsustainable pricing. Years later, they're still there, the competition has bitten the bullet and somewhat aligned their prices.
They were the ones to impose no speed limit on the connection, and also have a very simple pricing scheme. No complicated plans, options and bonuses: one flat monthly fee, you get the best your line can offer. Well, actually, while that's great for most people (30 euros per month for 6 Mbps down and 1 Mbps up in my case), it sucks for people who have poor lines (512 kbps max, for example), this is the only time competition has better prices to offer.
They were the ones to include free landline phone calls to the whole country, provided as part of the basic monthly subscription. Calls to other lines are cheap, except mobile phones. (They have not yet managed to negotiate sweet deals with the three providers who operate in France, operators who have, in totally unrelated news, recently been accused of collusion and price-fixing.) People who call you only pay the local-call price. The competition called them fools for the free calls, and have yet to really match the offer. Wanadoo is selling unlimited calls for an additional 10 euros per month. With almost 1 million regular users, Free is one of the biggest IP phone provider in the world.
They were the ones to include one hundred free TV channels, provided as part of the basic monthly subscription. Granted, a great number of them suck, but TV mostly sucks anyway. You can subscribe to plenty of additionnal, better channels, for one or two bucks a piece, and just as easily unsubscribe. Every month you start is due, that's the only (sane) limitation there is. The interface for un/subscription is pretty clear, no hidden costs and such. Oh, and there are radio channels, too.
In a related, disruptive move, they recently started providing realtime audience stats. The info is of not much value to customers (except it's fun to know what's currently hot, and actually see people zapping during commercials), but it's a great symbolic move. Information that was previously never shown to the unwashed masses is now offered for free.
Almost forgot, they're also offering the best free hosting there is in France. Unrelated to their DSL offer, you can open as many free web spaces as you want, each one having 1 GB of disk quota, unlimited bandwidth, PHP 4 or 5, MySQL, and decent performance.
My, I've been ranting about Free again! Did I say they were initially funded by porn money? What was the point initially? Oh yeah: clearly, the innovations we've seen in the past six years are not due to a government monopoly. The former monopoly has actually been dragged along screaming and kicking... Innovations were brought in by independant companies, but could only happen because there were regulations in place that forced the former monopoly to open its lines to competitors at a reasonable price, prevented it from vastly undercutting the competition (boy were they tempted to do that initially), and overall really regulated the sector, sometimes being a small hindrance but mostly boosting the growth of the whole sector.
Every international student, who graduates can apply for a work permit known as OPT (Optional Practical Training, I believe). This allows that student to seek employment in a field that is relevant to his/her education and or qualification. It is not automatic but nonetheless I have yet to hear a student get rejected for it.
I didn't get rejected, but I received it five months after the expiration of my I-20. Thanks to my University for forwarding the mail back to Europe, by the way. (In case you wonder how this came to be, that happened early 2003, at a time the administration was struggling to apply the stricter rules of a post-9/11 world.)
Screw all this fancy ncurses and smart tty crap! write forever!
$ write
usage: write user [tty]
MSN Messenger has a huge market share in France: they're an obvious leader, and yes, everybody just calls the service "MSN". I hear this is also the case in other Western-European countries, but don't have first-hand experience. Clearly, Eastern-Europe is a very different market.
SWF an open format? WTF since when?
I don't know when they started publishing the format, it's been some time. Note that the keyword here is "open", used in the same way as fifteen years ago, when it only meant you could look inside the machine and were limited in what you could make with the information. It is very remote from open source or free software, or even standards.
You have to agree to a licence to get the Flash specification. You notably have to agree to use the information only to generate Flash files, and not play them. That's all you can get for free. I don't know if you can pay to get a licence to create Flash players, or if Macromedia reserves that right for themselves exclusively.
Here's Macromedia licencing page: http://www.macromedia.com/licensing/developer/
people say that this wouldn't be realistic with ADSL services
And yet it works. Free offers more than 60 channels as part of the flat monthly fee (mostly public channels and crappy channels), and offers something like 140 others using various pricing schemes: one or two bucks per month and per channel (the channel sets the price, you can cancel any time, though every month you start is fully due), various packs, and a premium Canalsat offer. I've watched it at a friend's, and the quality is very nice, except you can get occasional temporary freezes or garbage, especially when you do intensive downloads in parallel. Most of the times, it works just as well as regular TV.
They also offer radio channels, and distribute a modified videolan client to help you stream your media (music, videos) from your computer to your TV.
By the way, as a typical Free move, they now show realtime statistics of what people are watching. Ain't that cool? Freebox TV Stats
I don't have a TV, so I don't use that service, but I do use the phone service quite a lot. Your typical IP phone, with some echo at the beginning of a call, slight distorstions sometimes, but free and unlimited calls to all landlines in France, and cheap rates for the rest of the world.
Not everything's perfect though. Their customer service has improved a lot, it used to totally suck, it is now mediocre at best. You pay a fee when you leave (the more you stay, the less you pay). You pay 400 euros if you damage the Freebox (ouch!). That, and several less important annoyances.
But overall, for someone who's on the geek side of things, their offer is a great value that beats everything else currently offered.
(Oops, I forgot to rant about their top-notch and free web hosting, their tech friendlyness, and... oh well.)
Nice to see the Free business model (offer all the bandwidth a phone line can support and a multi-purpose, multi-service "box" for a flat, low monthly fee) taking over the world! When Free started with their idea in late 1999, their were considered fools by the rest of the French industry, and actually had to build their own DSLAM and Freeboxes, since nobody would do it for them. Now the Freebox is in its fourth major version (fifth soon?), Free is the second ISP in France and every ISP here offers some kind of unimaginative rip-off (Livebox, NeufBox, CBox...), trying to match the excellent price/service ratio offered by Free. Not bad for a independant company funded, not by rich industry conglomerates, but by porn money!
By the way, the service offered by Be in the U.K. is still more expansive than what Free offers in France (35 euros vs. 30 euros), and while they do mention services such as phone and TV, they don't say if they're going to be included in the flat monthly fee, like Free does. Somehow I doubt it. Maybe their customer service won't suck, though.
More information on the Freebox (in French, but with pictures): http://www.f-b-x.net/
Though I haven't seen "Kiki's delivery service" yet which I heard wasn't as good. I'm sure it is though.
Kiki's excellent, too, but almost purely a coming of age movie. Early-teen stuff, no war, no epic, no magic... except for the magic of a beautiful, idealistic European town, the magic of nice people, the magic of life, the magic of music and excellent storytelling. Oh, and some broom flights, too.
Why in the world does it cost $80?
Actually it doesn't. It seems like it's just a regular, $21.50 Keytronic E03600QUSUSBB-C keyboard, without any key labels.
Read the Keytronic description
Do you recognize this diagram?
I want to know which one is better for my needs now.
.Net, there is no way to know how Microsoft will react in such a case. Past reactions should at the very least have you worried.
And this is why the comparison is wrong. It does not compare them "now", it compares them "overall". Do you care about ten-years-old flaws that were quickly fixed and have not bothered anyone since then? I think not. Do you care about flaws in a special vendor version that no sane person uses now? I think not. Would you be interested in knowing that the above-mentioned flaws were created by the very vendor the proprietary technology of whom you are trying to evaluate? I think you should.
What should interest you is how many security issues are found per year. The article lets you learn that (even though it doesn't explicitly do the math for you). What should also interest you is how the Java community and Sun reacted to the flaws, how fast and how well they were fixed. The article is tight-lipped about that.
Actually, since no flaws have been found for
(And actually, there have been flaws, but the authors of the study chose to ignore them, see appendix A for why. Unfortunately, there's no appendix B for how they chose the Java flaws.)
The researchers, the blog and the Slashdot summary claim that .Net has fared better than Java as far as security goes. I wonder how you twist that into believing they claim Java has no security.