You made some good points but you glazed over an important detail: languages must support some basic features to implement the.net framework, and adding these features in to languages fundamentally changes that language.
Even microsoft could not get their vb compiler to be backwards compatable with old code. if you have vb 6 code, you're stuck with it.
The fact that COM can bridge all the languages that don't have the same basic object model is sort of genius in a sick way, but as it turns out, no one really cares about that.
Ladies and gentlemen, er, we've just lost the picture, but, uh, what we've seen speaks for itself. The Corvair spacecraft has been taken over -- "conquered", if you will -- by a master race of giant space ants^H^H^H spiders. It's difficult to tell from this vantage point whether they will consume the captive earth men or merely enslave them. One thing is for certain, there is no stopping them; the ants^H^H^H spiders will soon be here. And I, for one, welcome our new insect^H^H^H^H arachnid overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a trusted TV personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves.
Giant Squid roaming the forests - Owhhh, C'mon! What possible advantage is there in it? They can get all the food they need, without the hassle of vertebrae, in the ocean.
Dear Admiral Akbar, It's a trap! Stay in the ocean!
regards...
I agree that tortoise has some really great features. but it breaks down badly if you have more that a few dozen files per directory. I've never looked at the tortoise code, but wincvs performance is way better, even in 'flat mode'.
I don't use wincvs too much, but it's really easy to train people on, and despite its quirks, it's is pretty nice.
subversion sounds like a really cool tool. I've been following it for about a year now. it has some great advantages over cvs, such as multi-file atomicity, and good support for refactoring.
I really hope that building ancillary tools like nice clients (wincvs) and useful add-ons (bonsai) is easy enough to do, because that's really where the critical mass is wrt widespread adoption.
Couldn't the USPTO application process be simplified by consulting the emacs docs for every single patent application? If emacs can't do whatever the patent is for, it's practically a certainty that the idea is new.
to get a real answer, you need to say what services you are running. http? smtp? soap? database?
if it's just http, you can use redirects to mitigate the dns delay. https complicates this since you'll have to get certs for your temporary dns names (i.e., https://old/ redirecting to https:/new/, which also responds to https://old/)
if it's just about anything else, you might consider setting up a vpn between your existing datacenter and your new datacenter, and setup both environments to answer to the same dns names and have your old environment tunnel to your new one.
in short, doing this with zero downtime is highly dependent on the services you are running. it's not a generic problem that has one solution.
To be clear, I was talking about the theoretical differences between analog and digital, not the practical differences between CDs and records. You clearly know more about the implementation than I do, and I think that we both know more about the theoretical differences than most people do.
Regarding frequency response: you're right that it makes only a small difference, and possibly one that most people don't notice anyway. my point is not that 'the higher-order harmonics that a cymbal produce are critical to the recording', rather that by rolling off hard at 20k, you lose a lot of the interaction of instruments. I know I can't hear anything near 20k if it's just a synthesizer pumping out a sine wave, but I *can* tell the difference between room where the drums don't bleed into any of the other instruments, because there is a noticeable interaction, and that interaction is not completely there if your rolling off the entire room at an arbitrary frequency. again, you can achieve this effect with careful mike placement, but you have to try to.
Signal processing: I was talking about dsp, or any algorithm needed to record or replay. digital music media is just data, analog is more like a fossil of a recording. I can drag a needle over a record myself to replay the sound, I don't need a cpu or ram or anything. I wasn't referring to all the steps that engineers to tweak the overall frequency curve of the final recording, just the fact that an analog recording can be made and replayed without a computer or special algorithm.
wow, your post is full of a lot of good information (and some rude remarks), I'm glad I read it. I do, however, take exception to your accusation that my original post is full of 'techno-babble'. I'm just calling it like I see it, pointing out the differences between digital and analog in plain english.
Frequency Response: digital music *must* filter out everything above half its sample rate (plus or minus a few hertz for data). Conventional CD's filter out everything above 22kHz. some people can hear a 25kHz pitch, some cannot. but nearly everyone can hear the interaction of 24 and 25, which can manifest itself within their hearing range. recording techniques improve this situation, and higher sampling rates are coming, but this is still a fundamental limit.
Dynamic Range: analog music naturally compresses from the quietest to the loudest portions in much the same way the human ears work. when you go to a really loud concert, does the sound clip? no, your ears compress the sound. digital music can emulate this with algorithms, and some of them are quite good, but again, all decent analog equipment does this as a side effect, and no digital recorder will ever get this excatly right (although digital recordings can best the 96dB range that good tape machines can offer, does anyone listen to music in a *totally silent* environment?)
Simplicity: no processing is required to record/play analog. the medium is a physical imprint of the sound waves in the room as a function of time. all you need is a magnet and some energy.
Of course, analog media is not as convienient as modern digital media, but since I have a home with the space in my home, I will keep listening to my big, bulky, dusty records because they just sound better.
Use Cases are the closest thing to a silver bullet I've come across. if you treat use cases as a high-level, *living* spec, and not a UI abstract and or component diagram, you save everyone a lot of trouble.
example:
Use Case For the "View of Contact Addresses"
Actor: user
Preconditions: there are at least one contact in the database
Motivation: Actor wants to locate a pacticular address
Outcome: Actor locates particular address
Step 1) (left blank until you agree on the above)
Step 2) (blank)
Step 3) (blank)
If you *start* with this, than you and the client have a lot of wriggle room as to how you finish the use case. with a sortable tree? or a text input that looks up contacts by name? it doesn't really matter as long you both agree to the above.
too often, the two parties talk to each other and both come away with two entirely different ideas of what the use case is. if you come up with a really basic use case (like above), *write it down* and pass it to the client for review, you've saved yourself a ton of work.
actually the FDA or whatever had the decimal point of the iron content of spinach wrong:
As for spinach, Popeye was wrong.
The initial "discovery" that spinach had as much iron as meat was made way back in the 1890's. During the Second World War, American Popeye propaganda cartoons encouraged the populace to eat lots of spinach - a good thing when there was not much meat around. In fact, in WW II, Americans ate 35% more spinach, and the people of Crystal City in Texas put up a statue to Popeye to commemorate that famous 35%.
But it's all wrong. The original German scientists way back in the 1890's did their experiment right, but they wrote the result down wrong. They put the decimal point in the wrong place. They over-estimated the amount of iron in spinach by 10 times. This error was corrected by German scientists in the 1930's, but the information did not cross the Atlantic until a long time after WW II. To get his iron, Popeye would have been better off chewing on the can.
http://www.abc.net.au/science/k2/moments/s301760.h tm
Drop Column PostgreSQL now supports the ALTER TABLE... DROP COLUMN functionality.
HURRAY! this has been my biggest annoyance with postgresql since I've started using it. there are workarounds for older versions, but they become arduous when you have a lot of existing data.
I would venture that all rpm-based distros are pretty much the same, sans some kernel tweaks and the default settings. i.e., you could turn any rpm distro into another rpm distro if you have some basic knowledge of the apps you are using.
that said, I switched to gentoo about 6 months ago, and I have learned more about linux in those 6 months than all the previous several years combined. the way (I think) most people work with tools like rpm is to just install packages off the cd or rpmfind.net, without ever really looking at what you're doing. when you have to actually compile traceroute, as with gentoo for example, you know much more about your system, its components dependencies, etc.
so, I would say, yes there are differences between distros, and the most important one is the package maneger, whether it be rpm, portage, apt-get, or manually compiling all your apps yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
Even microsoft could not get their vb compiler to be backwards compatable with old code. if you have vb 6 code, you're stuck with it.
The fact that COM can bridge all the languages that don't have the same basic object model is sort of genius in a sick way, but as it turns out, no one really cares about that.
Ladies and gentlemen, er, we've just lost the picture, but, uh, what we've seen speaks for itself. The Corvair spacecraft has been taken over -- "conquered", if you will -- by a master race of giant space ants^H^H^H spiders. It's difficult to tell from this vantage point whether they will consume the captive earth men or merely enslave them. One thing is for certain, there is no stopping them; the ants^H^H^H spiders will soon be here. And I, for one, welcome our new insect^H^H^H^H arachnid overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a trusted TV personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves.
Dear Admiral Akbar, It's a trap! Stay in the ocean!
regards...
if you look at this image you can see the human arms photoshopped onto a marketing droid.
if you view the html source, you can see redundant font tags surrounding grammatical errors. a clear sign of someone adding in a 'blog' feel to site.
if you look at this image, you can see 156 different shadows at the same time. clearly run through photoshop.
and finally, THE SITE IS NOT SLASHDOTTED!!
if you start compiling OOo now, it might be finished building by the time OS 10.8 comes out.
I don't use wincvs too much, but it's really easy to train people on, and despite its quirks, it's is pretty nice.
I really hope that building ancillary tools like nice clients (wincvs) and useful add-ons (bonsai) is easy enough to do, because that's really where the critical mass is wrt widespread adoption.
Couldn't the USPTO application process be simplified by consulting the emacs docs for every single patent application? If emacs can't do whatever the patent is for, it's practically a certainty that the idea is new.
see this for well thought out appraisal of opera's ui, particularly vis-a-vis mozilla's ui.
if it's just http, you can use redirects to mitigate the dns delay. https complicates this since you'll have to get certs for your temporary dns names (i.e., https://old/ redirecting to https:/new/, which also responds to https://old/)
if it's just about anything else, you might consider setting up a vpn between your existing datacenter and your new datacenter, and setup both environments to answer to the same dns names and have your old environment tunnel to your new one.
in short, doing this with zero downtime is highly dependent on the services you are running. it's not a generic problem that has one solution.
did 'NASA' become plural this weekend?
Regarding frequency response: you're right that it makes only a small difference, and possibly one that most people don't notice anyway. my point is not that 'the higher-order harmonics that a cymbal produce are critical to the recording', rather that by rolling off hard at 20k, you lose a lot of the interaction of instruments. I know I can't hear anything near 20k if it's just a synthesizer pumping out a sine wave, but I *can* tell the difference between room where the drums don't bleed into any of the other instruments, because there is a noticeable interaction, and that interaction is not completely there if your rolling off the entire room at an arbitrary frequency. again, you can achieve this effect with careful mike placement, but you have to try to.
Signal processing: I was talking about dsp, or any algorithm needed to record or replay. digital music media is just data, analog is more like a fossil of a recording. I can drag a needle over a record myself to replay the sound, I don't need a cpu or ram or anything. I wasn't referring to all the steps that engineers to tweak the overall frequency curve of the final recording, just the fact that an analog recording can be made and replayed without a computer or special algorithm.
wow, your post is full of a lot of good information (and some rude remarks), I'm glad I read it. I do, however, take exception to your accusation that my original post is full of 'techno-babble'. I'm just calling it like I see it, pointing out the differences between digital and analog in plain english.
Frequency Response: digital music *must* filter out everything above half its sample rate (plus or minus a few hertz for data). Conventional CD's filter out everything above 22kHz. some people can hear a 25kHz pitch, some cannot. but nearly everyone can hear the interaction of 24 and 25, which can manifest itself within their hearing range. recording techniques improve this situation, and higher sampling rates are coming, but this is still a fundamental limit.
Dynamic Range: analog music naturally compresses from the quietest to the loudest portions in much the same way the human ears work. when you go to a really loud concert, does the sound clip? no, your ears compress the sound. digital music can emulate this with algorithms, and some of them are quite good, but again, all decent analog equipment does this as a side effect, and no digital recorder will ever get this excatly right (although digital recordings can best the 96dB range that good tape machines can offer, does anyone listen to music in a *totally silent* environment?)
Simplicity: no processing is required to record/play analog. the medium is a physical imprint of the sound waves in the room as a function of time. all you need is a magnet and some energy.
Of course, analog media is not as convienient as modern digital media, but since I have a home with the space in my home, I will keep listening to my big, bulky, dusty records because they just sound better.
example:
Use Case For the "View of Contact Addresses"
Actor: user
Preconditions: there are at least one contact in the database
Motivation: Actor wants to locate a pacticular address
Outcome: Actor locates particular address
Step 1) (left blank until you agree on the above)
Step 2) (blank)
Step 3) (blank)
If you *start* with this, than you and the client have a lot of wriggle room as to how you finish the use case. with a sortable tree? or a text input that looks up contacts by name? it doesn't really matter as long you both agree to the above.
too often, the two parties talk to each other and both come away with two entirely different ideas of what the use case is. if you come up with a really basic use case (like above), *write it down* and pass it to the client for review, you've saved yourself a ton of work.
As for spinach, Popeye was wrong. The initial "discovery" that spinach had as much iron as meat was made way back in the 1890's. During the Second World War, American Popeye propaganda cartoons encouraged the populace to eat lots of spinach - a good thing when there was not much meat around. In fact, in WW II, Americans ate 35% more spinach, and the people of Crystal City in Texas put up a statue to Popeye to commemorate that famous 35%. But it's all wrong. The original German scientists way back in the 1890's did their experiment right, but they wrote the result down wrong. They put the decimal point in the wrong place. They over-estimated the amount of iron in spinach by 10 times. This error was corrected by German scientists in the 1930's, but the information did not cross the Atlantic until a long time after WW II. To get his iron, Popeye would have been better off chewing on the can. http://www.abc.net.au/science/k2/moments/s301760.h tm
I've heard good things about IBM's offerings, and I think that they've teamed up with Opera, although that may be only for PDAs and mobile phones.
what's to stop a reasonably computer-savy kid from editing their hosts file? or pointing their nic to an alternate dns server?
I suppose these tricks also probably work for net-nanny or similar, but now that this is law, it's certain to give parents a false sense of security.
Screw metric! My car gets forty rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it!!!
PostgreSQL now supports the ALTER TABLE
HURRAY! this has been my biggest annoyance with postgresql since I've started using it. there are workarounds for older versions, but they become arduous when you have a lot of existing data.
this is a *very welcomed* implementation.
I didn't think that was possible.
ask slashdot
ever.
screen shot
The goal of Water is to be easier to learn than Visual Basic
I stopped reading right there.
that said, I switched to gentoo about 6 months ago, and I have learned more about linux in those 6 months than all the previous several years combined. the way (I think) most people work with tools like rpm is to just install packages off the cd or rpmfind.net, without ever really looking at what you're doing. when you have to actually compile traceroute, as with gentoo for example, you know much more about your system, its components dependencies, etc.
so, I would say, yes there are differences between distros, and the most important one is the package maneger, whether it be rpm, portage, apt-get, or manually compiling all your apps yourself.
At least I assumed that the folks speaking at 95 db into a highly compressed mic did so because they were deaf and unable to hear themselves.