The 3rd party scenario is relatively CPU and network intensive. You have to handshake a TCP connection, then poll the server, then close the connection again. And you have to do it every X minutes (and most users will set X to as small a number as they can).
Google can set it up so that the client establishes a TCP connection and then using periodic keepalives, keeps it up. Then instead of the client polling every X minutes, the server can simply send the client notification (one little packet) when there is new mail. By eliminating polling and TCP handshake overheads, it's a little more server-friendly. It might require a little more RAM to keep track of all those TCP connections, but RAM is cheap and each connection only consumes a few bytes.
"your assumption -- that revenge is inherently inimical to civilization -- does not obviously hold."
Correct. Criminal punishment is a form of revenge. Once a crime hs been committed, it can't be uncommitted; the damage is done, and no form of punishment or retribution or revenge will undo it. So why do we fine, incarcerate, or execute criminals?
Revenge -- righteous, justified revenge by the will of the people -- does have its place in society, because it has a deterrent effect on future crime. On the other hand, popping a cap in the guy that stole your girlfriend or your weed does not.
I find your argument unconvincing. Movies that would have gotten R 10 or 15 years ago now score a mere PG-13. Every year movie studios stretch the PG-13 limit just a little bit farther.
"or pay $10 a year to get your own domain, and add your own names to map the ip addresses"
Good idea... but not quite there either. DNS Time To Lives are usually 12-72 hours, so it could be days before you could view your desired website after updating your domain. You'd have to have your own DNS server out on the internet, point to your own DNS server when you registered the domain name, then set the TTL on your DNS records to like 1 minute or something. Then have a web-based DNS administration tool for your server.
Whoa, I don't think that will work unless you modify the host file on the proxy server. Your browser sends the hostname to the proxy server, which will in turn do its own DNS lookup for that hostname. It's not going to consult your hosts file.:)
No, I think the only thing you can do is an nslookup on the IP and hope it comes back with a hostname. If so, just use that hostname in the address bar of your browser in place of the IP. If not, you're SOL.
Or, ask your IT guy, nicely, to please change his proxy ACLs. If he refuses, beat him with a clue stick.
"you've got to have a very feature-rich application"
Not really. What you need are a few powerful, flexible features. Take Bash for example. If I want to add some text onto the end of a file, I don't need a feature that adds text to the end of files. It's already inherent in the design. `echo "MyText" >> myfile`
The problem with this is, your average luser isn't bright enough to synthesize and bring tools together to get the desired result. Consequently, you have assinine wizards for the simplest tasks.
On the other hand, who wants to spend their time learning a set of elaborate operations to get the desired result? A few people, us Slashdot geeks at least. But a lot of people just want to get the job done, even if it's a quick and dirty, no-thought-required wizard.
What is the perfect balance between elegance-and-difficulty, and bloat-and-simplicity? Do you want a world where everyone has to learn awk and sed, or a world where copying and pasting requires a wizard? Since every user is different, there is no perfect answer.
"It is specifically targetted at the French market"
Doen't matter. If the servers are not in France, France's laws mean squat. Regulating web content on a server outside of France is outside of their jurisdiction.
If the French feel so strongly about this, they need to build a Wall of France like the one China has, so they can protect their subjects er, citizens, from all that nasty evil content.
This hydrogen stuff ain't that great. You have to make hydrogen, and the process has environmental impact when you scale it up for widespread use.
Fuel cells have their place, but it's not in cars. Diesel gives you about twice the fuel mileage and it's easier to refine. Diesel cars is a concept that has caught on among savvy Europeans, but sadly, we Americans aren't that bright. The perfect car would be a diesel/electric hybrid. Diesels may not accelerate like their gasoline cousins, but this is irrelevant in a hybrid when you have batteries and electric motors to supply the get-up-n-go while the diesel calmly keeps those batteries juiced.
So by all means, keep developing hydrogen power. But there's already a better solution available now when it comes to cars. Not as sexy, maybe, but it makes a whole lot more sense.
Hmmm... the issue sidearm of the Russian army was the Tokarev*, and later the Makarov, nicknamed the "Mak". So is a tokamak a fusion reactor built from military surplus Communist pistols?
* Actually, it was designated the TT-33 by the government but "Tokarev" is what a lot of people call it.
Interesting. I presume skip would only work with a specially shaped vehicle (aka flat rock or airfoil). No doubt less effective with a brick-shaped shuttle from the Enterprise.
Hey, that was on a Star Trek TNG episode. I thought bouncing off an atmosphere was silly, because the bounce you'd get from THIN high-altitude atmosphere would not be enough to lift you very high.
I'm no physicist but I'm skeptical of the whole atmosphere-skipping thing.
I agree that "Ridiculously strong intellectual property is not a requirment for capitalism", and yes, I would be happier in a capitalistic world with weaker IP laws... but even still, I don't think that would be the optimal solution. Again, I think that IP laws are just a symtom of the disease that is capitalism run amok.
And yet... AOL and MS have said that they will work together in a corporate environment. You picked a bad example because IM is free and cell service is not -- whole different ballgame.
Besides, the cabling standards have converged too. Now you have DOCSIS 1.1 and Cat5 as de-facto standards.
All it takes is time -- companies will eventually standardize and cooperate. Not out of the goodness of their hearts, to be sure, but to make profit by pleasing customers.
Sigh. An obvious troll from a non-libertarian. Libertarians most certainly do not believe that everything should be privately owned. You might do some reading on the Libertarian Party's website.
Some of the ideas presented in the parent may be stupid or unworkable, but the poster is hardly a troll. Just because you don't agree with what someone has to say, doesn't mean you should mod them down.
(Incidentally, that was one of the most interesting posts I've read on Slashdot.)
Part of the problem is that thanks to the Cold War, most Americas think that capitalism is the One True Way... Our Way Or The Highway... We Are Right So Everyone Else Is Wrong. In reality, capitalism is most certainly NOT the most efficient economical model! And, anybody who says so (like I just did) tends to be labeled "unamerican" or "communist". I'm NOT advocating Communism, I think that sucks too. But I think that our current mindset and body of laws are tailored to 'economics of scarcity' and are poorly equipped to deal with economics of abundance, such as software and music that can be copied endlessly without appreciable "real costs". The fact that we are having so many problems with patents, copyrights, the RIAA, MPAA, etc tells me that our current system needs reworking.
Our problem is not necessarily the laws; they are merely a symtom of the disease. The real problem is economics and the centuries of traditions that are now outmoded and obsolete.
I think you're wrong. Cell phone companies would not jam each other etc. If two companies tried to use the same frequencies, both of their customers would suffer. Since cell phone companies don't thrive on ticked off customers who can't get calls through, they would have to resolve their differences in other ways.
Slashdot Mirror
The 3rd party scenario is relatively CPU and network intensive. You have to handshake a TCP connection, then poll the server, then close the connection again. And you have to do it every X minutes (and most users will set X to as small a number as they can).
Google can set it up so that the client establishes a TCP connection and then using periodic keepalives, keeps it up. Then instead of the client polling every X minutes, the server can simply send the client notification (one little packet) when there is new mail. By eliminating polling and TCP handshake overheads, it's a little more server-friendly. It might require a little more RAM to keep track of all those TCP connections, but RAM is cheap and each connection only consumes a few bytes.
"your assumption -- that revenge is inherently inimical to civilization -- does not obviously hold."
Correct. Criminal punishment is a form of revenge. Once a crime hs been committed, it can't be uncommitted; the damage is done, and no form of punishment or retribution or revenge will undo it. So why do we fine, incarcerate, or execute criminals?
Revenge -- righteous, justified revenge by the will of the people -- does have its place in society, because it has a deterrent effect on future crime. On the other hand, popping a cap in the guy that stole your girlfriend or your weed does not.
I find your argument unconvincing. Movies that would have gotten R 10 or 15 years ago now score a mere PG-13. Every year movie studios stretch the PG-13 limit just a little bit farther.
"or pay $10 a year to get your own domain, and add your own names to map the ip addresses"
:)
Good idea... but not quite there either. DNS Time To Lives are usually 12-72 hours, so it could be days before you could view your desired website after updating your domain. You'd have to have your own DNS server out on the internet, point to your own DNS server when you registered the domain name, then set the TTL on your DNS records to like 1 minute or something. Then have a web-based DNS administration tool for your server.
Arright, I think we have a solution!
Whoa, I don't think that will work unless you modify the host file on the proxy server. Your browser sends the hostname to the proxy server, which will in turn do its own DNS lookup for that hostname. It's not going to consult your hosts file. :)
No, I think the only thing you can do is an nslookup on the IP and hope it comes back with a hostname. If so, just use that hostname in the address bar of your browser in place of the IP. If not, you're SOL.
Or, ask your IT guy, nicely, to please change his proxy ACLs. If he refuses, beat him with a clue stick.
Oh yeah. So, anyone know if Yahoo a registered company in France?
"you've got to have a very feature-rich application"
:)
Not really. What you need are a few powerful, flexible features. Take Bash for example. If I want to add some text onto the end of a file, I don't need a feature that adds text to the end of files. It's already inherent in the design. `echo "MyText" >> myfile`
The problem with this is, your average luser isn't bright enough to synthesize and bring tools together to get the desired result. Consequently, you have assinine wizards for the simplest tasks.
On the other hand, who wants to spend their time learning a set of elaborate operations to get the desired result? A few people, us Slashdot geeks at least. But a lot of people just want to get the job done, even if it's a quick and dirty, no-thought-required wizard.
What is the perfect balance between elegance-and-difficulty, and bloat-and-simplicity? Do you want a world where everyone has to learn awk and sed, or a world where copying and pasting requires a wizard? Since every user is different, there is no perfect answer.
I still think Word is bloated though.
"It is specifically targetted at the French market"
Doen't matter. If the servers are not in France, France's laws mean squat. Regulating web content on a server outside of France is outside of their jurisdiction.
If the French feel so strongly about this, they need to build a Wall of France like the one China has, so they can protect their subjects er, citizens, from all that nasty evil content.
This hydrogen stuff ain't that great. You have to make hydrogen, and the process has environmental impact when you scale it up for widespread use.
Fuel cells have their place, but it's not in cars. Diesel gives you about twice the fuel mileage and it's easier to refine. Diesel cars is a concept that has caught on among savvy Europeans, but sadly, we Americans aren't that bright. The perfect car would be a diesel/electric hybrid. Diesels may not accelerate like their gasoline cousins, but this is irrelevant in a hybrid when you have batteries and electric motors to supply the get-up-n-go while the diesel calmly keeps those batteries juiced.
So by all means, keep developing hydrogen power. But there's already a better solution available now when it comes to cars. Not as sexy, maybe, but it makes a whole lot more sense.
Hmmm... the issue sidearm of the Russian army was the Tokarev*, and later the Makarov, nicknamed the "Mak". So is a tokamak a fusion reactor built from military surplus Communist pistols?
* Actually, it was designated the TT-33 by the government but "Tokarev" is what a lot of people call it.
Interesting. I presume skip would only work with a specially shaped vehicle (aka flat rock or airfoil). No doubt less effective with a brick-shaped shuttle from the Enterprise.
"You know what flat stones can do on water?"
Hey, that was on a Star Trek TNG episode. I thought bouncing off an atmosphere was silly, because the bounce you'd get from THIN high-altitude atmosphere would not be enough to lift you very high.
I'm no physicist but I'm skeptical of the whole atmosphere-skipping thing.
Don't follow that link at work!
I agree that "Ridiculously strong intellectual property is not a requirment for capitalism", and yes, I would be happier in a capitalistic world with weaker IP laws... but even still, I don't think that would be the optimal solution. Again, I think that IP laws are just a symtom of the disease that is capitalism run amok.
And yet... AOL and MS have said that they will work together in a corporate environment. You picked a bad example because IM is free and cell service is not -- whole different ballgame. Besides, the cabling standards have converged too. Now you have DOCSIS 1.1 and Cat5 as de-facto standards. All it takes is time -- companies will eventually standardize and cooperate. Not out of the goodness of their hearts, to be sure, but to make profit by pleasing customers.
Sigh. An obvious troll from a non-libertarian. Libertarians most certainly do not believe that everything should be privately owned. You might do some reading on the Libertarian Party's website.
How did that get modded Offtopic? It's about WIFI and spreadspectrum, which is what the article is about!
Some of the ideas presented in the parent may be stupid or unworkable, but the poster is hardly a troll. Just because you don't agree with what someone has to say, doesn't mean you should mod them down.
(Incidentally, that was one of the most interesting posts I've read on Slashdot.)
Part of the problem is that thanks to the Cold War, most Americas think that capitalism is the One True Way... Our Way Or The Highway... We Are Right So Everyone Else Is Wrong. In reality, capitalism is most certainly NOT the most efficient economical model! And, anybody who says so (like I just did) tends to be labeled "unamerican" or "communist". I'm NOT advocating Communism, I think that sucks too. But I think that our current mindset and body of laws are tailored to 'economics of scarcity' and are poorly equipped to deal with economics of abundance, such as software and music that can be copied endlessly without appreciable "real costs". The fact that we are having so many problems with patents, copyrights, the RIAA, MPAA, etc tells me that our current system needs reworking.
Our problem is not necessarily the laws; they are merely a symtom of the disease. The real problem is economics and the centuries of traditions that are now outmoded and obsolete.
I think you're wrong. Cell phone companies would not jam each other etc. If two companies tried to use the same frequencies, both of their customers would suffer. Since cell phone companies don't thrive on ticked off customers who can't get calls through, they would have to resolve their differences in other ways.
LOL! Although MI2 waa only the 2nd worst movie ever. That title goes to Dungeons & Dragons.
Ok, I award 10 out of 10 points for being on the right side, but I still think your quote sounds anti. ;)
You get no karma for Funny (which, incidentally, is a dumb move), so some mods give people other moderations to reward witticisms.
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
But... gunning down kids in a schoolyard is already illegal. What makes you think a law need to be changed?
-1 Offtopic
Yep. Shoutcast, IIRC.