All seriousness aside, I started out coding for mainframes, mostly assembly. To this day some of the most screaming and cool programs I ever wrote were on mainframes (wrote (in assembly) an on-line trouble logging system to replace a paper system back in '76).
I did lots of COBOL programming and maintenance...
My crystal ball says mainframes may come back, but not like that - not with assembler and COBOL on punchcards. My guess is you'll just log into a linux box (virtual box, that is) with all your familiar Gnu tools, and won't even need a special skillset unless it has something to do with legacy support.
Or drop $130 on a PS2 plus a lifetime supply of games available for $5-$15 each.
Maybe I'm in an unusual position having just recently bought a PS2, but I don't see how the new hardware will create any really new possibilities for games. It's not like the move from 2d to 3d. I bought Gran Tourismo "A" Spec for $3 and have played it for hours.
You won't be putting games on the hard drive, it will be for downloadable content and saved games.
Doesn't "dowloadable content" include games? With 5 gigabit downlinks already fairly common, I don't think online game distribution is much of a stretch within the 5 year window of the PS3.
On pricewatch I see that 20 gig drives start at $22, and 60 gig for $40. In contrast, Sony's $100 premium for the 20 to 60 gig upgrade seems like a large premium.
Maybe the 60 gigger has some home media center features? It would make sense.
Thus, the problem is not the bandwidth, but the fact that the quantum network can not transmit non-random data with perfect security.
After you hit your nonrandom plaintext with a one time key (i.e. randomly flip each bit, or not) it is completely randomized. That's why the one-time-pad system is provably secure.
Once you have your key though, the can use the Vernam cipher (one time pad [wikipedia.org]) which is provably unbreakable, to send the actual data over a standard telco line, copletly securely.
No, the key for a one time pad is just as long as the data itself. So if the quantum network has too little bandwidth to send the whole message, it also has too little bandwidth to send the key for a one time pad.
I am curious why the quantum net itself is necessarily slow? It can't just be that 3/4 of the photos are discarded, since a normal fiber optical network already sends many more than 4 photos for each bit of information (don't they?)
"Dead in the water" doesn't mean you're dead, it means you're not going anywhere fast. In a rapidly changing market that probably would be deadly, but in a world where many people are satisfied with Windows 2000 and Word 97, Microsoft can stay right where they are and continue milking their cash cows for a long, long time.
Deploying with Flash probably gives them the freedom to change the codec, copy protection, and/or bitrate whenever they want without the user noticing. (If they're really high-tech they could vary the bitrate according to the fullness of the receiving buffer, but now I'm asking too much).
Anyways, this constant juggling of video codecs highly annoys me. Why can't players (including hardware players) simply come with some kind of codec virtual machine, and embed the codec itself in the video header? Or at least have it implemented in some platform-independent way that can be transparently downloaded when necessary.
Recently, I've gone through nearly three busy weeks when I haven't had time and haven't been in the mood to watch a movie. At that point, my subscription isn't very cost-effective.
You have just discovered the secret of the marketing masterstroke known as the MONTHLY BILL. This weapon has been known to our enemies for some time.
$120 isn't too bad, but on the other hand that's about what I just paid for a Playstation 2. There's a huge catalog of great used games for about $10 each. And they actually work.
I'm not so sure. Workstations and servers were a great cash-cow for Sun through the 90s, and you really say they were foolish to pursue that market? But now those markets have dimished, and it's pretty hard to cope when your core market diminishes. SGI, DEC, and who knows how many others have faced the same problems and done no better.
I'm afraid I don't know which Prolog book is best. Tthere are so many, and I've never finished any of them. I'm not a serious Prolog programmer, but recently my kids were stuck on a logic puzzle and I just had to dust it off. It's definitely the way to go if you want to do deductive reasoning.
No law supercedes the Constitution, which guarantees every citizen's right to privacy and the right to a due process warrant for search and seizure. It doesn't say "unless the President thinks it's a national security matter".
I don't think that matters anymore. The President never did offer a legal defense of his violation of the FISA act, he just said "it's something I want to do." And everybody went for it. In congress, Russ Feingold tried to get Bush censured (which is really just a gesture) and it went nowhere.
To me Lisp was an epiphany! I had fifteen years commercial experience, including SmallTalk/Java/C++, as a programmer before I found it. Fifteen wasted years.
Hmmm. I'm not trying to be a jerk, but it makes me wonder:
1) Do you have a CS degree? If so it would be strange that you weren't exposed to lisp in the beginning.
2) Have you tried Prolog? It's another different way of thinking that you might like.
I agree swap is pretty useless, and have often run systems without it, with no ill effects. But there are other programs that hit the disk. In linux, it's not that easy to stop all accesses to the disk. You have daemons like syslog that access every minute or so. There is (or used to be) some special module or patch that would defer writes to memory. This allows the disk to sleep more. I don't bother with that anymore because in my experience the runtime only increased 10 minutes or so. IME the drive is a smaller factor than the screen and, especially, the cpu.
Well, I just upgraded from a 3 year old 4200 rpm drive to a 100G 7200 rpm TravelStar 7K100, and I went ahead and did some tests while I was at it:
Copy a big directory: 2m18s -> 1m17s (Wow!)
Boot up: 54s -> 47s (Ok...)
Compile some code: 58s -> 56s (Meh.)
In short, it depends on what you're doing. Unfortunately the things I wait for the most, didn't speed up much. Overall, going from 4200rpm to 7200rpm is an OK upgrade but I think overrated.
Power consumption of the laptop as a whole only increased by 1%, so that's good.
IMHO the first thing to check is RAM. If you don't have enough, adding some will make a world of difference. Oddly, upgrading the hard drive on a laptop with too little RAM would probably make a big difference by speeding up swapping, yet that's the wrong upgrade, since upgrading the RAM would make a far bigger difference and lessen the need for a fast drive.
Can you tell me how this would have effected you personally?
I'm a Vonage subscriber. If Comcast has the go-ahead to wreck Vonage in favor of their own phone service, I won't have any freedom in choosing a VOIP provider.
The loss in market share shows that their technology has fallen behind, i.e. their price/performance are not as good as AMD. (Either that or Intel's marketing has fallen behind that of AMD, which I don't believe for a moment).
But who knows what the side effects of direct electrical stimulation of the pleasure center might be? It could be the ultimate addiction. Happiness by any natural means might become impossible.
Slashdot Mirror
"Defensive" would be getting the guy's silly claim thrown out. Joining him in the silliness is something else. So hurry, smile while you still can :)
Whoops, how about megabit. Off by 3 orders of magnitude but still a nice chunk of bandwidth :)
Maybe I'm in an unusual position having just recently bought a PS2, but I don't see how the new hardware will create any really new possibilities for games. It's not like the move from 2d to 3d. I bought Gran Tourismo "A" Spec for $3 and have played it for hours.
Maybe the 60 gigger has some home media center features? It would make sense.
I am curious why the quantum net itself is necessarily slow? It can't just be that 3/4 of the photos are discarded, since a normal fiber optical network already sends many more than 4 photos for each bit of information (don't they?)
Anyways, this constant juggling of video codecs highly annoys me. Why can't players (including hardware players) simply come with some kind of codec virtual machine, and embed the codec itself in the video header? Or at least have it implemented in some platform-independent way that can be transparently downloaded when necessary.
$120 isn't too bad, but on the other hand that's about what I just paid for a Playstation 2. There's a huge catalog of great used games for about $10 each. And they actually work.
On the other hand, Wendy's cheating you out of a 6 patty burger probably saved you an enema.
I'm not so sure. Workstations and servers were a great cash-cow for Sun through the 90s, and you really say they were foolish to pursue that market? But now those markets have dimished, and it's pretty hard to cope when your core market diminishes. SGI, DEC, and who knows how many others have faced the same problems and done no better.
Even one modern x86 would easily whoop that box. The processors aren't especially fast, even for 400 mhz.
Isn't the shuttle program already teetering on the brink? I can't imagine they'd fly again if there were another accident.
I'm afraid I don't know which Prolog book is best. Tthere are so many, and I've never finished any of them. I'm not a serious Prolog programmer, but recently my kids were stuck on a logic puzzle and I just had to dust it off. It's definitely the way to go if you want to do deductive reasoning.
1) Do you have a CS degree? If so it would be strange that you weren't exposed to lisp in the beginning.
2) Have you tried Prolog? It's another different way of thinking that you might like.
I agree swap is pretty useless, and have often run systems without it, with no ill effects. But there are other programs that hit the disk. In linux, it's not that easy to stop all accesses to the disk. You have daemons like syslog that access every minute or so. There is (or used to be) some special module or patch that would defer writes to memory. This allows the disk to sleep more. I don't bother with that anymore because in my experience the runtime only increased 10 minutes or so. IME the drive is a smaller factor than the screen and, especially, the cpu.
Copy a big directory: 2m18s -> 1m17s (Wow!)
Boot up: 54s -> 47s (Ok...)
Compile some code: 58s -> 56s (Meh.)
In short, it depends on what you're doing. Unfortunately the things I wait for the most, didn't speed up much. Overall, going from 4200rpm to 7200rpm is an OK upgrade but I think overrated. Power consumption of the laptop as a whole only increased by 1%, so that's good.
IMHO the first thing to check is RAM. If you don't have enough, adding some will make a world of difference. Oddly, upgrading the hard drive on a laptop with too little RAM would probably make a big difference by speeding up swapping, yet that's the wrong upgrade, since upgrading the RAM would make a far bigger difference and lessen the need for a fast drive.
The loss in market share shows that their technology has fallen behind, i.e. their price/performance are not as good as AMD. (Either that or Intel's marketing has fallen behind that of AMD, which I don't believe for a moment).
But who knows what the side effects of direct electrical stimulation of the pleasure center might be? It could be the ultimate addiction. Happiness by any natural means might become impossible.