When was the last time you watched The Buns of Navarone, listened to Give Peas A Chance, read The Da Vinco Cod, or saw Bring Me the Bread of Alfredo Garcia?
You don't think that, say, if you were to protest to the RIAA, they'd say "Nothing to do with us. We don't even sell music. Go and complain to the people who do."?
And maybe that Apple might be grateful for the protest, as it'd give them more leverage next time they're negotiation with the RIAA?
I've posted before that ultimately, no form of DRM can be reasonable. Apple's may be more lenient than most, for which kudos to them. But it's still going to prevent all sorts of fair, licensed and/or legal use, and will do so more and more in future. A protest to the greatest provider of DRM, even if not the most heinous, doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
I usually set the default font in Firefox and make sure that web pages aren't allowed to change it.
Until now I've never needed to do this. Most sites honour my choice of fonts, and the few that don't still look bearable.
UNTIL NOW! The new/. Light look won't use my own fonts, and looks crap, forcing me to override it (and every other site too). NOT good for a site that's supposed to be about portability, user choice, etc...
I remember when we had bad actions. Most people do some good actions, and most people do some bad ones from time to time as well, though some are worse than others. Crimes, they were called.
Now, we have bad people. Paedophiles. Illegal immigrants. Terrrrrists. Filesharers. You know.
"Hey, you're a bad person. So we're going to give you all these labels. And lock you away; you don't deserve to be free. And take away many of your rights; you don't deserve to have them. And you know what the best part of this is? By distinguishing bad people so strongly, that automatically makes the rest of us good people. I'm a good person! Therefore nothing I do is wrong -- by definition -- and I can feel all morally superior."
I think that Larry, and the rest of us, should distinguish between laziness in thinking and laziness in doing.
Laziness in doing, as Larry says, can often be an asset, a spur to creativity and efficiency. Finding a better way to achieve things is work that can pay off time and time again.
But laziness in thinking is quite the opposite. If you can't be bothered to think, but stick to the familiar process, you'll be doing the same thing every time, which can end up more work overall.
Some things aren't worth thinking about, of course, but it can be surprisingly hard to tell in advance where the benefits might lie.
I can't see anyone here asking what seems to me the fundamental question: Why is it being rewritten?
What problems are there with the existing code? Performance, reliability, scalability, maintainability, major new functionality, portability, or something else? Or some combination? The reasons will have a strong bearing on whether VB is appropriate.
I don't know VB myself (other than hearing constant comments about its bugginess, lack of scalability, the way it encourages quick hacks and bad design, platform dependence...). But it might be that the reasons for the rewrite (e.g. portability or scalability) pretty much rule it out. Alternatively, if the system performs and scales well and is maintainable and reliable enough, and is likely to remain so for the long term, then perhaps VB might not be such a bad idea after all.
Other folks have already pointed out that the decision also depends strongly on the nature of the system. But I think the reasons for the rewrite are also vital.
Every report on p2p I've ever read talks about "illegally downloading music" or "used for illegal software downloads" with no mention of copylefted / public domain / other non-infringing uses.
They don't need to mention it. If material is public domain, or you have the copyright holder's permission (e.g. under a suitable licence), then that's legally downloading music. So if you're talking about 'illegally downloading music', you're automatically excluding that.
But yes, I agree with the general point that far too many people tend to assume that all free downloading is illegal.
I guess they've finally realised that after two decades of copying Apple, and giving the world Microsoft Bob as their only real innovation, their R&D department might need a bit of help...
Okay, here's a crackpot idea. Probably rubbish, but that never stopped Dvorak:)
Since Jobs returned, the product line-up has been simple. Remember the grid? Consumer/pro vs mobile/desktop. Four simple boxes, with only 2 or 3 models in each. (The only major aberrations have, IIRC, been the Cube, which didn't sell; eMacs, which were really just a subdivision of the consumer mobile section; and the Mini, with a different target audience.) In that light:
This new laptop is much closer to the MacBook Pro than I expected.
Hmmmm. Would that be enough to move it into the same section of the grid?
If so, that leaves the 'consumer portable' section empty. Put that together with all the rumours over the past decade about tablets, and you get...?
all P2P users should quarantine their P2P software inside a virtual machine.
You mean: quarantine their P2P-sourced software, or quarantine their P2P file transfer software itself?
The first makes sense in most cases. (For Windows users, anyway.) Though it probably makes even more sense never to download executables via P2P anyway. But I can't see much need for the second.
I grew up with paperbacks, but now I read as much as possible from the screen of my Psion 5mx. Yes, on the minus side, it lacks the smell of paper, the crinkling of pages, the odd faded page where the ink was running out, the cracked spine causing it to fall open at particular pages, the occasional ragged edge, the dust and food stains caught between pages... But on the plus side, it lacks all those things!
Both formats have their advantages, but it can be hard to get beyond your familiarity and preconceptions and see them. For example, I never need to worry about bookmarks falling out of my Psion, and I carry around with me the equivalent of about three bookcases, without straining. And I can read them as many times as I like without worrying about them falling apart (which has happened to several of my favourite paperbacks).
And as for bedtime reading, my 5mx is smaller than almost all paperbacks and is very comfortable to read in bed. Especially given its backlight, which lets me read with all the lights off. Beat that for coziness!
To play Devil's Advocate for a minute here... While bits may be just bits, that only covers what they are; there's also the matter of when they arrive, and how many of 'em there are. And it's those features which the telcos are worried about.
Look at it this way. You're trying to funnel bits from A to M, where A is supplied by B and C, and M then forwards them on to N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, and V. (Okay, this is getting a little unwieldy, but bear with me.)
Suppose B is supplying streaming media. One of the characteristics of that is that any packet delayed by more than a second (say) is worthless and shoud be dropped, and your customers will be annoyed. And suppose C is supplying web or file transfers; of similar traffic but no time-dependence.
Who should you give priority to? If you let C's packets override B's, then the file transfer folk will get slightly faster transfers, but the streaming folk will get lots of dropouts and stuff. Bad news. However, if you give B's packets priority, then the streaming folk will get good results, and the file transfer folk will only get slightly slower downloads, which is still very usable. Good news all round. So if you can identify streaming packets and give them priority, then everyone's happy!
Now, in the real world, of course, things are never that simple. And the knock-on effects of this (apart from giving the telcos a new revenue stream) seem highly undesirable. But I can see where the telcos are coming from here, at least.
No, not at all. There's one huge difference: the CIA are the good guys, remember! They're trying to protect your freedom! How can anything they do to protect your freedom be wrong?!
So just shut the feck up and let them get on with it, wise guy. Or it's you they'll be 'protecting' next, capisce?
If you want to write clearly, first THINK CLEARLY.
If your ideass are muddled, your writing will be muddled. If your thoughts are slapdash and inaccurate, that too will be reflected in your writing.
Now, I'm a real pedant when it comes to written material. I don't have to look for spelling errors; they leap off the page at me and interrupt my reading. Grammatical and punctuation errors grate similarly and annoy me intensely. But although it pains me, I'll try to overlook that if the text makes it worth my while. So if you have something worth writing, you're already ahead.
Far too often, though, I have no idea at all what the writer is even trying to say, however carefully I read. And while that can result from very poor writing ability, much more often I think it's because the writer has no idea what they're trying to say either!
So know what you want to say. Think about it first. You don't have to plan out every detail, but if your writing is to have a point, you'll need to know what that point is. Sometimes it's good to start by speaking it, either to a helpful friend/colleague or just in your imagination; and there are many worse ways to write. Other times you know what you want to say so well you can write out a final draft immediately. Most of the time you'll need to go back and edit. And careful proofreading can save a lot of embarrassment.
The technical aspects -- spelling, punctuation, grammar, sentence structure, style, voice, etc. -- are important, but there's no point having them all unless you have something to say! And that something starts in your head. Clear writing needs clear thinking.
I had a quick look at both Pitman's and Teeline, but neither seemed suitable. (For example, Pitman's needs you to distinguish light and firm strokes, and I tended to use a fountain pen which prevented that. It also needs a horizontal line, which I didn't want to rely on, and optimises for writing speed at the expense of paper used. Teeline looked better, but is alphabetic rather than phonetic, making it longer-winded than necessary. And neither seemed to degrade gracefully enough, considering my very poor handwriting at that time!) So, in true geek fashion, I took ideas from both and invented my own.
Like Pitman's, my shorthand is phonetic, not alphabetic: you write down the sound. English spelling is quite long-winded, so that alone reduces the amount you have to write considerably. Like Teeline, consonants are simple strokes that join up easily, while vowels are small dots or lines placed alongside the consonant strokes but optional -- you don't bother adding them when they're obvious. Put all that together, and you can record speech in far fewer strokes than normal handwriting. Also like Teeline, my strokes are fairly compact, so it takes up less space too.
The actual shapes were all my own; I got some ideas from other shorthands, but most from lots of trying stuff out. There are about fifteen consonant shapes. I started by having voiced and unvoiced pairs as mirror images, but ended up changing them around quite a bit so it's not very regular; a couple of letters have different forms at the ends or the middle of words. There's also a combining stroke which adds or changes the sound in a mostly predictable way; giving all the consonants of English and a few common combinations (an optimisation!).
There are also about fifteen vowels, made from five simple shapes in different positions and combinations; they can be easily combined for diphthongs. And I had to invent a few separate shapes for punctuation which would otherwise look like letters!
The result is something I'm fairly proud of; it's a little ungainly in some cases, but generally feels quite natural, and I think it's a good deal more precise than Pitman's at least (which seems optimised for business letters at the expense of other stuff). It looks more angular than some, but it's fairly compact, and doesn't need much vertical space. And unlike some others, I don't need loads of abbreviations for common words; my aim was to avoid special cases and get the general case.
It took a couple of weeks of practice and tweaking before it felt right, but I was surprised how quickly I learned it, and how quickly I reached and surpassed my normal handwriting speed. (Unfortunately, I never got comparatively fast at reading it, which is probably why my degree isn't better. But that's another story!)
It was a very interesting exercise, which taught me a lot about writing. And I still use it from time to time when taking minutes, or when I want to write something secret.
if you've accepted the mail for delivery and can't deliver it, you send a reject message.
Excuse me for asking, but: WHERE TO?
If you trust the 'From:' address on the mail, as many mail agents seem to, then you're likely to be sending a rather large amount of spam rejection messages back to completely innocent people whose email address has been trawled just like the original recipients. After you've been put in that position and received thousands of rejection messages a day for several days, you'll begin to understand why such trust isn't always warranted...
While StringBuilder is neat, it may not give much improvement for long.
According to this, Sun's next JVM (1.6 'Mustang') performs escape analysis. For example, if it can see that a StringBuffer is only used locally in one thread and never 'escapes' to the heap, then it knows no synchronisation will ever be needed, and it can bypass all that, effectively reducing it to a StringBuilder anyway. Mustang can also change lock granularity, move stuff from the heap to the stack, and make many other optimisations.
Tony Hoare said (and Donald Knuth quoted) that premature optimisation is the root of all evil; 'premature' is starting to look more and more like 'by the programmer', as decent compilers and runtimes start to do a better job of it than we can.
It will, pretty much. It's not about formatting, nor about housekeeping. (Large files like MP3s will have very tiny overhead.) No, the issue is whether you're counting in 1000s or 1024s. Your point should really be that
A 10 GB drive will not store 10 GiB worth of stuff
...which is completely true: a 10,000,000,000-byte drive won't store 10,737,418,240 bytes of information.
Slashdot Mirror
When was the last time you watched The Buns of Navarone, listened to Give Peas A Chance, read The Da Vinco Cod, or saw Bring Me the Bread of Alfredo Garcia?
(I mean 'cares' as in 'wants to improve', of course, not as in 'wants to use as an excuse to charge people more money'.)
And maybe that Apple might be grateful for the protest, as it'd give them more leverage next time they're negotiation with the RIAA?
I've posted before that ultimately, no form of DRM can be reasonable. Apple's may be more lenient than most, for which kudos to them. But it's still going to prevent all sorts of fair, licensed and/or legal use, and will do so more and more in future. A protest to the greatest provider of DRM, even if not the most heinous, doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
Until now I've never needed to do this. Most sites honour my choice of fonts, and the few that don't still look bearable.
UNTIL NOW! The new /. Light look won't use my own fonts, and looks crap, forcing me to override it (and every other site too). NOT good for a site that's supposed to be about portability, user choice, etc...
I remember when we had bad actions. Most people do some good actions, and most people do some bad ones from time to time as well, though some are worse than others. Crimes, they were called.
Now, we have bad people. Paedophiles. Illegal immigrants. Terrrrrists. Filesharers. You know.
"Hey, you're a bad person. So we're going to give you all these labels. And lock you away; you don't deserve to be free. And take away many of your rights; you don't deserve to have them. And you know what the best part of this is? By distinguishing bad people so strongly, that automatically makes the rest of us good people. I'm a good person! Therefore nothing I do is wrong -- by definition -- and I can feel all morally superior."
Laziness in doing, as Larry says, can often be an asset, a spur to creativity and efficiency. Finding a better way to achieve things is work that can pay off time and time again.
But laziness in thinking is quite the opposite. If you can't be bothered to think, but stick to the familiar process, you'll be doing the same thing every time, which can end up more work overall.
Some things aren't worth thinking about, of course, but it can be surprisingly hard to tell in advance where the benefits might lie.
What problems are there with the existing code? Performance, reliability, scalability, maintainability, major new functionality, portability, or something else? Or some combination? The reasons will have a strong bearing on whether VB is appropriate.
I don't know VB myself (other than hearing constant comments about its bugginess, lack of scalability, the way it encourages quick hacks and bad design, platform dependence...). But it might be that the reasons for the rewrite (e.g. portability or scalability) pretty much rule it out. Alternatively, if the system performs and scales well and is maintainable and reliable enough, and is likely to remain so for the long term, then perhaps VB might not be such a bad idea after all.
Other folks have already pointed out that the decision also depends strongly on the nature of the system. But I think the reasons for the rewrite are also vital.
They don't need to mention it. If material is public domain, or you have the copyright holder's permission (e.g. under a suitable licence), then that's legally downloading music. So if you're talking about 'illegally downloading music', you're automatically excluding that.
But yes, I agree with the general point that far too many people tend to assume that all free downloading is illegal.
I guess they've finally realised that after two decades of copying Apple, and giving the world Microsoft Bob as their only real innovation, their R&D department might need a bit of help...
Since Jobs returned, the product line-up has been simple. Remember the grid? Consumer/pro vs mobile/desktop. Four simple boxes, with only 2 or 3 models in each. (The only major aberrations have, IIRC, been the Cube, which didn't sell; eMacs, which were really just a subdivision of the consumer mobile section; and the Mini, with a different target audience.) In that light:
Hmmmm. Would that be enough to move it into the same section of the grid?
If so, that leaves the 'consumer portable' section empty. Put that together with all the rumours over the past decade about tablets, and you get...?
Last time I saw MPlayer, it was slow, ugly, and didn't even have a proper GUI. How does it compare now, e.g. for playing DVDs?
You mean: quarantine their P2P-sourced software, or quarantine their P2P file transfer software itself?
The first makes sense in most cases. (For Windows users, anyway.) Though it probably makes even more sense never to download executables via P2P anyway. But I can't see much need for the second.
The interface.
Er, what are they being sued over, again? Hmmm.
I grew up with paperbacks, but now I read as much as possible from the screen of my Psion 5mx. Yes, on the minus side, it lacks the smell of paper, the crinkling of pages, the odd faded page where the ink was running out, the cracked spine causing it to fall open at particular pages, the occasional ragged edge, the dust and food stains caught between pages... But on the plus side, it lacks all those things!
Both formats have their advantages, but it can be hard to get beyond your familiarity and preconceptions and see them. For example, I never need to worry about bookmarks falling out of my Psion, and I carry around with me the equivalent of about three bookcases, without straining. And I can read them as many times as I like without worrying about them falling apart (which has happened to several of my favourite paperbacks).
And as for bedtime reading, my 5mx is smaller than almost all paperbacks and is very comfortable to read in bed. Especially given its backlight, which lets me read with all the lights off. Beat that for coziness!
Look at it this way. You're trying to funnel bits from A to M, where A is supplied by B and C, and M then forwards them on to N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, and V. (Okay, this is getting a little unwieldy, but bear with me.)
Suppose B is supplying streaming media. One of the characteristics of that is that any packet delayed by more than a second (say) is worthless and shoud be dropped, and your customers will be annoyed. And suppose C is supplying web or file transfers; of similar traffic but no time-dependence.
Who should you give priority to? If you let C's packets override B's, then the file transfer folk will get slightly faster transfers, but the streaming folk will get lots of dropouts and stuff. Bad news. However, if you give B's packets priority, then the streaming folk will get good results, and the file transfer folk will only get slightly slower downloads, which is still very usable. Good news all round. So if you can identify streaming packets and give them priority, then everyone's happy!
Now, in the real world, of course, things are never that simple. And the knock-on effects of this (apart from giving the telcos a new revenue stream) seem highly undesirable. But I can see where the telcos are coming from here, at least.
No, not at all. There's one huge difference: the CIA are the good guys, remember! They're trying to protect your freedom! How can anything they do to protect your freedom be wrong?!
So just shut the feck up and let them get on with it, wise guy. Or it's you they'll be 'protecting' next, capisce?
If your ideass are muddled, your writing will be muddled. If your thoughts are slapdash and inaccurate, that too will be reflected in your writing.
Now, I'm a real pedant when it comes to written material. I don't have to look for spelling errors; they leap off the page at me and interrupt my reading. Grammatical and punctuation errors grate similarly and annoy me intensely. But although it pains me, I'll try to overlook that if the text makes it worth my while. So if you have something worth writing, you're already ahead.
Far too often, though, I have no idea at all what the writer is even trying to say, however carefully I read. And while that can result from very poor writing ability, much more often I think it's because the writer has no idea what they're trying to say either!
So know what you want to say. Think about it first. You don't have to plan out every detail, but if your writing is to have a point, you'll need to know what that point is. Sometimes it's good to start by speaking it, either to a helpful friend/colleague or just in your imagination; and there are many worse ways to write. Other times you know what you want to say so well you can write out a final draft immediately. Most of the time you'll need to go back and edit. And careful proofreading can save a lot of embarrassment.
The technical aspects -- spelling, punctuation, grammar, sentence structure, style, voice, etc. -- are important, but there's no point having them all unless you have something to say! And that something starts in your head. Clear writing needs clear thinking.
I had a quick look at both Pitman's and Teeline, but neither seemed suitable. (For example, Pitman's needs you to distinguish light and firm strokes, and I tended to use a fountain pen which prevented that. It also needs a horizontal line, which I didn't want to rely on, and optimises for writing speed at the expense of paper used. Teeline looked better, but is alphabetic rather than phonetic, making it longer-winded than necessary. And neither seemed to degrade gracefully enough, considering my very poor handwriting at that time!) So, in true geek fashion, I took ideas from both and invented my own.
Like Pitman's, my shorthand is phonetic, not alphabetic: you write down the sound. English spelling is quite long-winded, so that alone reduces the amount you have to write considerably. Like Teeline, consonants are simple strokes that join up easily, while vowels are small dots or lines placed alongside the consonant strokes but optional -- you don't bother adding them when they're obvious. Put all that together, and you can record speech in far fewer strokes than normal handwriting. Also like Teeline, my strokes are fairly compact, so it takes up less space too.
The actual shapes were all my own; I got some ideas from other shorthands, but most from lots of trying stuff out. There are about fifteen consonant shapes. I started by having voiced and unvoiced pairs as mirror images, but ended up changing them around quite a bit so it's not very regular; a couple of letters have different forms at the ends or the middle of words. There's also a combining stroke which adds or changes the sound in a mostly predictable way; giving all the consonants of English and a few common combinations (an optimisation!).
There are also about fifteen vowels, made from five simple shapes in different positions and combinations; they can be easily combined for diphthongs. And I had to invent a few separate shapes for punctuation which would otherwise look like letters!
The result is something I'm fairly proud of; it's a little ungainly in some cases, but generally feels quite natural, and I think it's a good deal more precise than Pitman's at least (which seems optimised for business letters at the expense of other stuff). It looks more angular than some, but it's fairly compact, and doesn't need much vertical space. And unlike some others, I don't need loads of abbreviations for common words; my aim was to avoid special cases and get the general case.
It took a couple of weeks of practice and tweaking before it felt right, but I was surprised how quickly I learned it, and how quickly I reached and surpassed my normal handwriting speed. (Unfortunately, I never got comparatively fast at reading it, which is probably why my degree isn't better. But that's another story!)
It was a very interesting exercise, which taught me a lot about writing. And I still use it from time to time when taking minutes, or when I want to write something secret.
Excuse me for asking, but: WHERE TO?
If you trust the 'From:' address on the mail, as many mail agents seem to, then you're likely to be sending a rather large amount of spam rejection messages back to completely innocent people whose email address has been trawled just like the original recipients. After you've been put in that position and received thousands of rejection messages a day for several days, you'll begin to understand why such trust isn't always warranted...
According to this, Sun's next JVM (1.6 'Mustang') performs escape analysis. For example, if it can see that a StringBuffer is only used locally in one thread and never 'escapes' to the heap, then it knows no synchronisation will ever be needed, and it can bypass all that, effectively reducing it to a StringBuilder anyway. Mustang can also change lock granularity, move stuff from the heap to the stack, and make many other optimisations.
Tony Hoare said (and Donald Knuth quoted) that premature optimisation is the root of all evil; 'premature' is starting to look more and more like 'by the programmer', as decent compilers and runtimes start to do a better job of it than we can.
So go on, don't leave us in suspense -- what are the other two???
(If neither of them was "The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'." then perhaps there should have been 4 in all!)
It will, pretty much. It's not about formatting, nor about housekeeping. (Large files like MP3s will have very tiny overhead.) No, the issue is whether you're counting in 1000s or 1024s. Your point should really be that