If you give "wealth" to everyone, it ceases to be wealth.
That's nonsense. The hallmarks of wealth--safety, education, abundant food, shelter, travel, etc.--are not relative, they are absolute.
In any case, it's the rest of the world which has two choices: incorporate within their own governments the rights and system of government upon which western democracies are built,
Western wealth was not built by democracies; it grew out of monarchies, repressive religious practices, undemocractic regimes, conquests, protectionism, and cut-throat business practices. Advising other nations that they can become wealthy by skipping right ahead to 21st century western democracies is deeply dishonest.
Anything else is just waiting for a handout.
I find this smugness really astounding. The West has gotten plenty of handouts from the third world nations. In fact, we continue to get handouts. That's what our wealth is based on: cheap third world labor, third world raw materials, and third world dumping grounds for our problems. We have more responsibility to the world than just to say "it's not our problem". Our economic system would collapse if other countries followed our model.
It's unfortunate that issues like these are treated as legal matters in the US, not policy choices. Cell phone carriers have a valid argument that by tying phones to their service, they can offer more integrated and customer friendly service (sounds familiar?). But that is likely to be outweighed by the benefits to consumers of giving them phone and number portability between carriers. The choice between the two is a policy choice, not a legal matter (I think the same applies to Microsoft's business practices, which are quite similar).
The people who watch television and become angry are not becoming angry because of some blind hatred of people who are different. Rather, they see the enormous wealth and waste in the West and get upset. They see that other people enjoy freedoms that they never thought possible. So, yes, they are becoming "less tolerant": "less tolerant of inequality, poverty, and suppression".
Because of its enormous disparities in wealth, and because of the phantasy world portrayed in the media, the US is a particularly bad example to the world.
Living in the West, we have two choices: either we keep our wealth secret, or we work more strongly towards equality, opportunity, and wealth in all the nations of the world. But if we flaunt our wealth and don't share it, the consequences are predictable.
I just don't get it. Why are people so eager to follow the advice of Windows and Mac UI "experts"? Do you like Windows and the Mac so much that you want your UIs to look and feel just like them? Why don't you just use Windows then? You already paid for it.
I find the software that these people produce absolutely dreadful. Making software so simple that a disinterested moron can use it results in software that usually only a disinterested moron would want to use.
Just as bad is this desire for consistency. Is your car consistent with your washing machine? No? So, why does your spreadsheet need to be consistent with your word processor? Seems to me that if you can get the data from one to the other, you're fine.
Leave the whiners to Microsoft. When you write open source software, write software that you yourself want to use; chances are there are many more people like yourself who like the choices you make. Don't get all worked up about the advice of programmers and experts whose main goal in life is to expand the market share of their product by making it appealing and trivial.
Any objective person will see that IE was the better browser then "Netscape Communicator" and it was gaining incredible popularity well before IE was "integrated" into the OS.
You got your history wrong. IE only started becoming a better browser around the time Microsoft had basically managed to destroy Netscape's business model through bundling and dirty tricks. Of course, a completely demoralized Netscape couldn't do what was necessary and compete with Microsoft.
It has taken open sourcing Netscape to counter Microsoft's dirty tricks. But the open source strategy has been successful. IE development has largely stalled, and Mozilla today is a better browser than IE.
Limiting all cars in the US to 80mph would be a good start if people were serious about speed limits. Hawaii, being an island, could require 55mph limits for all cars. Those would be simple, effective measures for a start.
If you can't go faster than 70 mph, but the traffic around you is doing 80, then all those non speed limited cars may end up crashing into you because they expect you're going faster.
People who crash into slow traffic on the highway should not be driving. Which points to another shortcoming with US driving safety: if people cared about safety, they'd require serious driver education, as opposed to the minimal training currently required.
All of this brings me back to my original point: the US isn't serious about driving safety. The US is serious about putting lots of expensive and unnecessary gadgets into cars.
What the submitter fails to mention in all that rhetoric is that these disks are the size of a US quarter, which I find pretty interesting.
Just what I always wanted: a box full of fragile little discs the size of a quarter.
Face it, optical discs for audio are dead, or at least should be if it were a question of convenience and technology. The space required to store 500M on a modern hard drive is much smaller than the size of a quarter.
Portability and price will draw in the 18-34 age group first, predicts Bob Higgins, chairman and CEO of Albany, N.Y.-based Trans World Entertainment.
The last thing I want is a zillion coin-sized discs, each holding the tiny amount of 500Mbytes. A hard disk is much more convenient for the home stereo, as is a portable MP3 player for the car and running around. The ability to copy between them is essential.
This sounds like a bunch of clueless executives designing hardware that is of absolutely no appeal to people who actually listen to music.
Hello you guys out there: discs are dead. Give us music-on-demand for a reasonable price and with no technological copy restrictions and people will subscribe to your services for the convenience of it.
If this were about avoiding speeding, there would be a much simpler solution: put speed limiters in cars. But this isn't about speeding or saving lives, this is about control, surveillance, and profits.
If companies were really concerned about speeding as a cause of accidents, they'd put speed limiters into cars. It's cheap and requires no high-tech gadgets. We also know the other major causes of accidents already: driver fatigue and driver unfamiliarity with conditions; those would be easily addressed with driver training and other simple mechanisms.
Putting a lot of expensive high-tech electronics into cars to collect crash data is stupid. First, you pay for a lot of gadgetry. Then, insurance companies will have a field day holding people responsible and refusing to pay out.
But I do know that Eisner is a pirate. His company has been stealing from the public domain and denying people their legal fair use rights.
Disney's Michael Eisner and others say Hollywood will defend its intellectual property at all costs
It's obvious that he will do whatever it takes: he is already going as far as bribing our politicians, giving free speech rights only to the wealthiest, and destroying our democracy.
And what for? Disney rarely if ever produces anything other than useless fluff. The company is optimizing the same thing the drug industry is optimizing: a quick, addictive product that gets our children hooked early and lacks intellectual content or social merit. Disney shouldn't be censored, but we certainly don't need to make any special effort to protect their trashy content beyond the minimum.
Over the last couple of years, I have had to pay for five additional copies of Windows that I did not want and do not use. I need to use Windows to talk to my bank, order books, file my taxes electronically, communicate with vendors and the government, and talk to a variety of devices; other people cannot provide those services no matter how much they try because of exclusionary arrangements and shrewd technological restrictions created by Microsoft. Microsoft is now busily working on inserting itself into a wide variety of other essential social and business functions, and it looks like they are getting away with it.
All of this isn't because Microsoft is any better than anybody else (their products are mediocre at best), it's for the same kind of reasons other monopolies have come over the years: Microsoft leverages dominance in one area to get their will in other areas. The only reason Microsoft hasn't completely taken over is because some of their worst excesses, both legal and technically, have been reigned in by the government--so far. But the company just keeps trying again and again. Unlike the robber barons, where you could draw the line for a few products and be done with it, Microsoft just keeps doing the same illegal thing over and over and over again with every new technology at a pace at which the legal system just can't keep up.
In any case, my main point is that Microsoft has no business talking about the benefits of the free market: Microsoft itself is one of the biggest centrally run economies in the world. If Gates thinks the free market is so great, why is he running a centrally planned entity?
Furthermore, even if Microsoft weren't a government-certified monopoly, the market for computer software clearly is ailing: there are nowhere near enough competitors around in the desktop and server OS market. It's really down to a handful of vendors and systems.
Microsoft has the size of a major banana republic, it is run in a non-democratic, top-down manner, it is more centrally planned than the Soviet Union ever was, and its top brass has been able to get away with more money than the Saudi royal family.
It's amazing how the head of such an institution can argue that competition, capitalism, and free markets are good. Mr. Gates: if those values are so good, do the right thing: break up your company. Competition and free markets only exist when there are many small players.
What Gates really wants is an unregulated market so that he can continue to monopolize it, just like the robber barons and oil magnates of the early 20th century.
Linux handles dual processors just fine on x86. Beyond that, it is highly questionable whether SMP makes sense, let alone whether SMP on an x86 platform makes sense.
SMP is intrinsically not a scalable approach. The Linux community has concentrated on approaches that actually are scalable, like clustering and process migration.
So, if you want a gold-plated SMP machine, just get the real thing from Sun or IBM. If you want cost-efficient scalable systems, go with Linux on PCs.
It IS NOT, repeat IS NOT governments job to force the economy into any position what so ever.
It is the government's job to regulate commerce and create laws that permit a free market to exist in the first place. Without government, regulations, and laws, a free market cannot exist.
As Adam Smith said, the 'invisible hand' will give these people their last mile connectivity.
I doubt Adam Smith said that. In any case, it's also not true. If you can't affordably get telephone and Internet access in some regions, they may simply become depopulated. As a society, we decided long ago that that's not what we want, which is why we have regulatory and financial support for rural communities.
When I tried it, the same USB keyboards and mice worked on Sun, Apple, and PC (Windows or Linux). So, I don't understand what kind of "mutation" you need. If you want to, you can throw in a USB-to-PS/2 converter to hook up newer USB keyboards to older PS/2 computers.
O'Caml is an excellent choice. I think it should definitely be your first choice.
Nevertheless, C++ can be fast, powerful, and simple as well. People have problems with C++ if they don't understand it well or if they work with people who don't understand it well. That is a real problem (most commercial and open source C++ programs and libraries are awful), but don't blame the language.
The OSX GUI is resource hungry, but it's fine on a 600MHz G3 or pretty much any G4. Make sure you have at least 256M of RAM.
Apple could have saved themselves some problems by going with X11+Render rather than Quartz; they would have gotten pretty much the same imaging model (transparency, affine transforms,...), and the GUI would look exactly the same, but the system would be faster and less resource intensive. Even using the unoptimized X11 server available for OSX right now, X11 apps are often more responsive on OSX than native Quartz-based apps.
As for browsers, I prefer Mozilla: while Microsoft has done a decent job of porting IE to the Mac, Mozilla works a little better in my experience, and Mozilla's rate of improvement seems better.
"The DMCA's been so bloody controversial," Bill Hagen, the IEEE's intellectual property rights manager said Tuesday. "On one hand, it protects our content.
This comment is quite telling. Authors write articles for the IEEE at their own expense. Sometimes they even pay page charges. And most of the editorial and reviewing for the IEEE is done for free. And in return, the IEEE claims that it is "their content" and charges steep fees for access to it. It's a really unfair arrangement, and the IEEE can only get away with that because students and professionals must publish or perish and there is no way to avoid the IEEE if you work in the field. You can avoid buying Microsoft, but there is no way to avoid paying the IEEE.
You don't need "digital rights management software". A simple 20 line Perl script to rotate image URLs every few hours will do the trick. Or you can do what a lot of other sites do and set a cookie on your preferred ports of entry (every HTML page, or maybe just a few) and kick people back to your front page if they don't have the cookie. If you don't like cookies, you can do the same thing by encoding a session ID in the URLs. Another choice is to have people log in to your account. There are zillions of other, simple ways of dealing with this issue in whatever way you like and to whatever level of "protection" you require, ways that require no additional effort on behalf of your authors or users.
If your web hackers are so incompetent that they don't know how to deal with these kinds of issues, you are in the wrong business. But because of incompetence like yours, we risk having deep linking ruled illegal, threatening the very fabric of the web.
What's your point? Your link is to some basic index data structures. Index data structures are slow. Really high performance database applications can't afford the overhead of index data structures and avoid using them (which is what I was describing).
Besides, you don't need something of the complexity of Interbase to get B-trees or similar structures. Berkeley DB has B-trees, and so does MySQL. And the fewer features the database has, the more it can optimize its implementation of the index structures.
Slashdot Mirror
Dyes have been used for tagging in biology for a long time, so the idea isn't quite as novel as it may seem at first sight.
That's nonsense. The hallmarks of wealth--safety, education, abundant food, shelter, travel, etc.--are not relative, they are absolute.
In any case, it's the rest of the world which has two choices: incorporate within their own governments the rights and system of government upon which western democracies are built,
Western wealth was not built by democracies; it grew out of monarchies, repressive religious practices, undemocractic regimes, conquests, protectionism, and cut-throat business practices. Advising other nations that they can become wealthy by skipping right ahead to 21st century western democracies is deeply dishonest.
Anything else is just waiting for a handout.
I find this smugness really astounding. The West has gotten plenty of handouts from the third world nations. In fact, we continue to get handouts. That's what our wealth is based on: cheap third world labor, third world raw materials, and third world dumping grounds for our problems. We have more responsibility to the world than just to say "it's not our problem". Our economic system would collapse if other countries followed our model.
It's unfortunate that issues like these are treated as legal matters in the US, not policy choices. Cell phone carriers have a valid argument that by tying phones to their service, they can offer more integrated and customer friendly service (sounds familiar?). But that is likely to be outweighed by the benefits to consumers of giving them phone and number portability between carriers. The choice between the two is a policy choice, not a legal matter (I think the same applies to Microsoft's business practices, which are quite similar).
Because of its enormous disparities in wealth, and because of the phantasy world portrayed in the media, the US is a particularly bad example to the world.
Living in the West, we have two choices: either we keep our wealth secret, or we work more strongly towards equality, opportunity, and wealth in all the nations of the world. But if we flaunt our wealth and don't share it, the consequences are predictable.
I find the software that these people produce absolutely dreadful. Making software so simple that a disinterested moron can use it results in software that usually only a disinterested moron would want to use.
Just as bad is this desire for consistency. Is your car consistent with your washing machine? No? So, why does your spreadsheet need to be consistent with your word processor? Seems to me that if you can get the data from one to the other, you're fine.
Leave the whiners to Microsoft. When you write open source software, write software that you yourself want to use; chances are there are many more people like yourself who like the choices you make. Don't get all worked up about the advice of programmers and experts whose main goal in life is to expand the market share of their product by making it appealing and trivial.
You got your history wrong. IE only started becoming a better browser around the time Microsoft had basically managed to destroy Netscape's business model through bundling and dirty tricks. Of course, a completely demoralized Netscape couldn't do what was necessary and compete with Microsoft.
It has taken open sourcing Netscape to counter Microsoft's dirty tricks. But the open source strategy has been successful. IE development has largely stalled, and Mozilla today is a better browser than IE.
In 15 years, desktop graphics will be completely based on 3D acceleration; PDF/PostScript won't make it in the long term for the desktop.
If you can't go faster than 70 mph, but the traffic around you is doing 80, then all those non speed limited cars may end up crashing into you because they expect you're going faster.
People who crash into slow traffic on the highway should not be driving. Which points to another shortcoming with US driving safety: if people cared about safety, they'd require serious driver education, as opposed to the minimal training currently required.
All of this brings me back to my original point: the US isn't serious about driving safety. The US is serious about putting lots of expensive and unnecessary gadgets into cars.
Dataplay is write-once, requires a mechanical drive to read/write, probably slower than CF, and tries to keep you from moving data around.
Yes, I'd say Dataplay sucks, while CF doesn't.
Just what I always wanted: a box full of fragile little discs the size of a quarter.
Face it, optical discs for audio are dead, or at least should be if it were a question of convenience and technology. The space required to store 500M on a modern hard drive is much smaller than the size of a quarter.
The last thing I want is a zillion coin-sized discs, each holding the tiny amount of 500Mbytes. A hard disk is much more convenient for the home stereo, as is a portable MP3 player for the car and running around. The ability to copy between them is essential.
This sounds like a bunch of clueless executives designing hardware that is of absolutely no appeal to people who actually listen to music.
Hello you guys out there: discs are dead. Give us music-on-demand for a reasonable price and with no technological copy restrictions and people will subscribe to your services for the convenience of it.
If this were about avoiding speeding, there would be a much simpler solution: put speed limiters in cars. But this isn't about speeding or saving lives, this is about control, surveillance, and profits.
Putting a lot of expensive high-tech electronics into cars to collect crash data is stupid. First, you pay for a lot of gadgetry. Then, insurance companies will have a field day holding people responsible and refusing to pay out.
Disney's Michael Eisner and others say Hollywood will defend its intellectual property at all costs
It's obvious that he will do whatever it takes: he is already going as far as bribing our politicians, giving free speech rights only to the wealthiest, and destroying our democracy.
And what for? Disney rarely if ever produces anything other than useless fluff. The company is optimizing the same thing the drug industry is optimizing: a quick, addictive product that gets our children hooked early and lacks intellectual content or social merit. Disney shouldn't be censored, but we certainly don't need to make any special effort to protect their trashy content beyond the minimum.
That's because your questions are pretty much irrelevant to the issues of Microsoft, monopolies, and efficient markets.
All of this isn't because Microsoft is any better than anybody else (their products are mediocre at best), it's for the same kind of reasons other monopolies have come over the years: Microsoft leverages dominance in one area to get their will in other areas. The only reason Microsoft hasn't completely taken over is because some of their worst excesses, both legal and technically, have been reigned in by the government--so far. But the company just keeps trying again and again. Unlike the robber barons, where you could draw the line for a few products and be done with it, Microsoft just keeps doing the same illegal thing over and over and over again with every new technology at a pace at which the legal system just can't keep up.
In any case, my main point is that Microsoft has no business talking about the benefits of the free market: Microsoft itself is one of the biggest centrally run economies in the world. If Gates thinks the free market is so great, why is he running a centrally planned entity?
Furthermore, even if Microsoft weren't a government-certified monopoly, the market for computer software clearly is ailing: there are nowhere near enough competitors around in the desktop and server OS market. It's really down to a handful of vendors and systems.
It's amazing how the head of such an institution can argue that competition, capitalism, and free markets are good. Mr. Gates: if those values are so good, do the right thing: break up your company. Competition and free markets only exist when there are many small players.
What Gates really wants is an unregulated market so that he can continue to monopolize it, just like the robber barons and oil magnates of the early 20th century.
SMP is intrinsically not a scalable approach. The Linux community has concentrated on approaches that actually are scalable, like clustering and process migration.
So, if you want a gold-plated SMP machine, just get the real thing from Sun or IBM. If you want cost-efficient scalable systems, go with Linux on PCs.
It is the government's job to regulate commerce and create laws that permit a free market to exist in the first place. Without government, regulations, and laws, a free market cannot exist.
As Adam Smith said, the 'invisible hand' will give these people their last mile connectivity.
I doubt Adam Smith said that. In any case, it's also not true. If you can't affordably get telephone and Internet access in some regions, they may simply become depopulated. As a society, we decided long ago that that's not what we want, which is why we have regulatory and financial support for rural communities.
When I tried it, the same USB keyboards and mice worked on Sun, Apple, and PC (Windows or Linux). So, I don't understand what kind of "mutation" you need. If you want to, you can throw in a USB-to-PS/2 converter to hook up newer USB keyboards to older PS/2 computers.
Nevertheless, C++ can be fast, powerful, and simple as well. People have problems with C++ if they don't understand it well or if they work with people who don't understand it well. That is a real problem (most commercial and open source C++ programs and libraries are awful), but don't blame the language.
Apple could have saved themselves some problems by going with X11+Render rather than Quartz; they would have gotten pretty much the same imaging model (transparency, affine transforms, ...), and the GUI would look exactly the same, but the system would be faster and less resource intensive. Even using the unoptimized X11 server available for OSX right now, X11 apps are often more responsive on OSX than native Quartz-based apps.
As for browsers, I prefer Mozilla: while Microsoft has done a decent job of porting IE to the Mac, Mozilla works a little better in my experience, and Mozilla's rate of improvement seems better.
This comment is quite telling. Authors write articles for the IEEE at their own expense. Sometimes they even pay page charges. And most of the editorial and reviewing for the IEEE is done for free. And in return, the IEEE claims that it is "their content" and charges steep fees for access to it. It's a really unfair arrangement, and the IEEE can only get away with that because students and professionals must publish or perish and there is no way to avoid the IEEE if you work in the field. You can avoid buying Microsoft, but there is no way to avoid paying the IEEE.
If your web hackers are so incompetent that they don't know how to deal with these kinds of issues, you are in the wrong business. But because of incompetence like yours, we risk having deep linking ruled illegal, threatening the very fabric of the web.
Besides, you don't need something of the complexity of Interbase to get B-trees or similar structures. Berkeley DB has B-trees, and so does MySQL. And the fewer features the database has, the more it can optimize its implementation of the index structures.