I think we agree - I'd have had no problem with a well-justified, carefully-explained "well, it depends on this, this and this". To just say "well, it depends" is lazy and unhelpful.
Of course, it could be an undercover Microsoft advertisement too, seeing as they're always banging on about providing lower TCO. Perhaps they're just hoping that managers will see an "independent" article as giving credibility to their claims... whoops, must keep control of my cynicism gland;)
There were no real "key findings" in the article. Is it really worthy of Slashdot to mention a survey whose outcome was "well, it depends"? Never mind that, was it really worth writing the original article?
Either the author had nothing better to write about, or they felt like inflating their ego a little by assuming that people in business are pretty thick and need to be told the blindingly obvious.
Yes, and you can do it legally with a free decoder.
Thomson have licensed the MP3 codec universally to software developers providing it's not for profit. Though, strictly speaking, a patent only covers the commercial exploitability of a product or concept, so that kind gesture is a little empty.
Remember that guy who patented the "means of exercising a cat" using a laser pointer? Does that mean you can't tease a cat in your home? No. You can do that all you like. What you can't do is charge money for the service of exercising cats using laser pointers.
As an aside, the argument "people wouldn't pay for you to play with their cat" doesn't apply with MP3 players. That said, no-one in their right mind would pay for a software MP3 player...
"People" is a special case: the word "people" (as in "plural of 'person'") is different to the word "people" (as in "race"). "A people" is valid English but "a media" isn't, AFAIK.
Obligatory grammar pedantry...
on
The Media in 2014
·
· Score: 4, Informative
how big enterprises like google and amazon converged medias
'Media' is the plural of 'medium'. Hence, 'medias' is nonsense.
Terrorists are not some big organised group like the Bush administration would like you to believe.
The plans that terrorists make are not technologically advanced. They do not rely on things like GPS. They rely on things like knives, guns and home-made bombs.
Has the US been attacked since September 11th 2001? No.
Is this because of anti-terror measures? No.
Bush is scaremongering because the only thing that keeps him in power is the belief wrongly held by over half the population of the USA that there's some evil force out there that is coming to get you, and that he's the only person that can save you from it.
Good for seeing what popular searches are.
on
Google Suggest
·
· Score: 1
And, if you type in "speed o", fourth or so on the list is the ever popular speed of light in furlongs per fortnight.
How does this come up with results, though? Does it just base them on the popularity of the search, or does it base them on how many produce results that users click through to?
In the UK we have strong data protection laws as well. However, many companies that take our data make us waive the right by saying that we are aware that the data may be moved outside the UK (Bank call centres in India?) and our rights do not apply.
I think India's far from one of the worst offenders. Companies don't have to say anything about what they're doing with their data, as long as the data protection laws give you at least as much protection as the UK laws do.
For that reason, it is illegal for data about you (a UK citizen) to be processed in the US without your permission.
If you don't want your details handled by a country with lax data protection laws, just use another company!
Because of the high alcohol content, the gin can be brought down to below zero celsius - put it in your freezer and it'll be a liquid at -18. The salt, I imagine, is there for the same reason - it allows the solution containing the DNA to be brought down to sub-zero temperatures without freezing.
I doubt this thing can be more that 33% efficient. That means that the device will run 3 times warmer than current battery-operated versions
Either your maths has gone a bit screwy or you have some unstated assumptions.
Suppose it's 33% efficient - that means 67% is dissipated as heat (let's assume it's all dissipated as heat).
For it to be three times warmer, that means that batteries must dissipate one third the amount of heat (or roughly 22%), which means that you're assuming batteries are 78% efficient.
Now, it may just be that battery efficiency is around the 80% mark, but I think you've come to the right answer via the wrong route.
Programmtic threading is specifically disallowed by the EJB spec: your EJB will not deploy if it contains any thread management: how is that not stripping threads out of Java?
Your code triggers the creation of threads. One part of your application sticks a message on a JMS queue; a thread is fired up to handle it. A client logs in and uses a session bean; a thread is fired up to handle it.
The threads are all there, you're just not allowed to touch them. Which is what J2EE is about: you write the business logic; the J2EE server manages it.
Now, I'm not saying that's necessarily a good thing - certainly not if you're an experienced programmer and you want to have control over threads - but it does mean you can't get it wrong.
J2EE is overengineered for everything, and darn too complex to learn.
It took me one week as part of a work placement in a summer holiday to learn all about EJBs. Either it can't be that hard, or I'm a genius.;)
Oh, and I think it's a little contradictory to argue this line, then argue along the lines of just doing some no-brainer form-filling with the application server.
J2EE is about more than just shopping carts, and thus it WILL take longer to learn than a system that's suited to running an online shopping cart.
Java AS suck RAM big time (and CPU too). BEA advises customers to use open-source technology (Apache) to server static content, cuz' it would kill the server.
That's because application servers are not web servers. Sledgehammer and nut spring to mind.
PHP actually is running the internet far more than java has ever been
See above. Java is about running applications that just so happen to have a web front-end. PHP is about hosting websites that just so happen to have some application logic behind them.
J2EE only has it place in big enterprises that are willing to get it becuase the big bucks it costs come with some big name company that offers support.
Yes they are. Session beans, entity beans and message-driven beans all support clustering. Deploy them on more than one server (JBoss does this, at least), and they'll work in clustered mode, with requests distributed between them using one of various strategies.
EJBs are also not for distributed data management
Remember that clustering and distribution are two different things. If you're accessing the same table from many different locations, you may get problems because you're going to have to use Commit Option B, which checks the data in the local entity cache is valid before it does a read.
In other words, one should not make EJBs out of database recordsets
Too flaming right you shouldn't! Making database recordsets out of EJBs is another matter entirely. Making EJBs out of database recordsets implies that someone else has put the data there first; if that's the case, what happens when they change their data format? It's part of good system design that you just wouldn't do something like that.
I thought EJBs were designed to strip Java of it's best bits: inheritance and threads and bloat the development process
No, not at all. EJBs don't strip Java of threads; they make it easier to write them correctly. Now, I'll admit that, for a decent programmer, it sticks a few hurdles in your way.
That said, it does make it easier in many respects: a thread is created when something new comes into your system - either by JMS or by a remote call. If you need to do something on a regular basis, use a scheduler for it.
Now, I've had reason to need a thread outside of the means J2EE provides, and it is a pain. I'd sooner have the distributability, the nice architecture, and the ability to quickly write applications that can readily be scaled out of the box, than the ability to grab hold of a thread easily.
...but doesn't it seem a little silly to base computational applications on what is essentially a glorified webserver? Sure, use LAMP for your shopping cart, but enterprise applications are more than just shopping carts.
"There is no impedance mismatch, everything talks SOAP/HTTP" - well, yes, that's great, but you shouldn't be talking SOAP/HTTP internally. There are faster means of communication, so use them.
"Apparently what is needed is a language/environment that is loosely typed in order to encapsulate XML well and that can efficiently process text" - only on input and output. In intermediary stages, you should be using a much more efficient format. If you're doing something clever, it's going to involve much more than just plain old text.
"J2EE and.NET applications were never designed with grids in mind" - well, I can't speak for.NET, but J2EE is designed for clustering and distribution. Have you seen EJBs? EJBs are designed for interaction across computers.
RTFA and you'll see that LAMP is being pushed for "text-pumping". Why aren't they saying it's any good for anything else? Because it most likely isn't.
I believe the article makes reference to Sinclair's other efforts at transportation: the Zike (a folding electric scooter) and the Zeta (a motor which attaches to a normal bicycle, harnessing energy when you go downhill and using it to propel you uphill at a stately 8mph, as I remember).
These relatively unknown inventions were peddled in the small ads sections of newspapers for a long time. The electric scooter sold for about 500, the bike motor for about 200. But no, I don't know anyone who had one.
The problem with parallel data transfer is that, if you have lots of data channels running at the same time, you have to synchronise the arrival of all this data. It's very difficult to do this at high speeds (if you look at your motherboard you'll probably find a few places where the track wiggles back and forth to synchronise the arrival of data).
In recent years, it has become possible to run data connections at very high speeds - but only when you have only one data line. A USB 1.0 connection is comparable in speed to an ECP parallel connection, and there are far faster serial technologies nowadays.
For most home (and, indeed, server) applications, I would have thought that having a dual core processor won't make much of a difference, just as processor speed doesn't - rather, what is important is the speed you can get data in and out of the processor.
Overall CPU speed doesn't seem to make much of a difference when the bus speed is the same, certainly not in the systems I've tested. However, up the CPU bus speed, and you'll find your performance greatly improved, because you're getting data to the processor quicker.
Some years ago, I tested this theory with a couple of old 686 chips - one 200, one 233. I benchmarked the 200 and 233 both at 75MHz bus - virtually identical results. Then I ran them at the same CPU speed, but 83MHz bus, and the benchmark results improved by exactly 83/75. What does this tell you?:-)
Analysts usually manage to miss the point...
on
Real DRM
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
"That this can support MP3 and MPEG-4 is significant because up until now you haven't seen adoption of these formats by major content providers because they lacked digital rights management,"
It's not significant in the slightest. The reason MP3 and such formats are popular is because they're open. Just because Real are adopting open standards and making them closed doesn't mean that consumers will benefit from it.
However, the PHBs will love it, because it contains both MP3 (popular with consumers, but see above) and DRM (popular with the accounts department).
(I know that MP3 isn't totally open as there are patent issues, but I think my point remains.)
If the court ruling goes in favour of Lexmark, rather than in favour of common sense (you can put whatever toner you like in your printer, right? It's your printer after all), then the extension of the ruling to other cases is inevitable.
This means that there is the potential for manufacturers of other products that have consumables associated with them (your car, say) to put methods (a funny-shaped fuel filler, say) in to ensure that you can only use their consumables (fuel), and that a circumvention device (plastic funnel) so that you can use other consumables (fuel) will be ruled illegal.
The real problem is not the availability...
on
Windows Media Player 9
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
...it's the fact that these are controlled standards. The internet is a free place, and standards should be as free as possible. MS may be releasing WMP 9 such that we'll see a client on Linux, but that doesn't mean that this is a good thing.
What we'll see is a proliferation of WMP DRM through our systems, as well as Real and QuickTime. What we really need is a single open standard that can be played back on anything without proprietary software. If it's secure, so much the better for the content creators - but I don't see why they can't settle for a simple copyright at the end, like they do for their web pages.
What happens, say, when the domain name isn't stolen, but is being held by someone, when another company wants it?
In the UK, I believe there was a case where someone had legitimately bought www.marks-and-spencer.co.uk (Marks & Spencer is a department store chain, for those who don't know). However, Marks & Spencer decided that they wanted the name, filed legal action and got the name.
The question is, though, was this legitimate? Arguably, if the initial owner of the site was attempting to profit from the name, or pass off as the real thing, then M&S should inherit the name. However, if they aren't doing such actions which are illegal under current law, there is no reason why the name should be transferred to M&S.
Slightly off-topic perhaps, but it raises a lot more interesting questions. In my opinion, standard law should cover this kind of situation - what would happen if someone managed to steal a profitable company's telephone number?
Slashdot Mirror
I think we agree - I'd have had no problem with a well-justified, carefully-explained "well, it depends on this, this and this". To just say "well, it depends" is lazy and unhelpful.
;)
Of course, it could be an undercover Microsoft advertisement too, seeing as they're always banging on about providing lower TCO. Perhaps they're just hoping that managers will see an "independent" article as giving credibility to their claims... whoops, must keep control of my cynicism gland
There were no real "key findings" in the article. Is it really worthy of Slashdot to mention a survey whose outcome was "well, it depends"? Never mind that, was it really worth writing the original article?
Either the author had nothing better to write about, or they felt like inflating their ego a little by assuming that people in business are pretty thick and need to be told the blindingly obvious.
Yes, and you can do it legally with a free decoder.
Thomson have licensed the MP3 codec universally to software developers providing it's not for profit. Though, strictly speaking, a patent only covers the commercial exploitability of a product or concept, so that kind gesture is a little empty.
Remember that guy who patented the "means of exercising a cat" using a laser pointer? Does that mean you can't tease a cat in your home? No. You can do that all you like. What you can't do is charge money for the service of exercising cats using laser pointers.
As an aside, the argument "people wouldn't pay for you to play with their cat" doesn't apply with MP3 players. That said, no-one in their right mind would pay for a software MP3 player...
"print media", "news media", etc. are all valid -- and so, "all medias" is also valid.
No, because "print media" indicates more than one. Your examples show that "all media" is valid, but not "all medias".
"People" is a special case: the word "people" (as in "plural of 'person'") is different to the word "people" (as in "race"). "A people" is valid English but "a media" isn't, AFAIK.
how big enterprises like google and amazon converged medias
'Media' is the plural of 'medium'. Hence, 'medias' is nonsense.
Terrorists are not some big organised group like the Bush administration would like you to believe.
The plans that terrorists make are not technologically advanced. They do not rely on things like GPS. They rely on things like knives, guns and home-made bombs.
Has the US been attacked since September 11th 2001? No.
Is this because of anti-terror measures? No.
Bush is scaremongering because the only thing that keeps him in power is the belief wrongly held by over half the population of the USA that there's some evil force out there that is coming to get you, and that he's the only person that can save you from it.
And, if you type in "speed o", fourth or so on the list is the ever popular speed of light in furlongs per fortnight.
How does this come up with results, though? Does it just base them on the popularity of the search, or does it base them on how many produce results that users click through to?
I won't be impressed with them until they come out with some of the ideas here.
"iRule. Override all iPods within a given radius with your choice of music" - now we're talking.
In the UK we have strong data protection laws as well. However, many companies that take our data make us waive the right by saying that we are aware that the data may be moved outside the UK (Bank call centres in India?) and our rights do not apply.
I think India's far from one of the worst offenders. Companies don't have to say anything about what they're doing with their data, as long as the data protection laws give you at least as much protection as the UK laws do.
For that reason, it is illegal for data about you (a UK citizen) to be processed in the US without your permission.
If you don't want your details handled by a country with lax data protection laws, just use another company!
Because of the high alcohol content, the gin can be brought down to below zero celsius - put it in your freezer and it'll be a liquid at -18. The salt, I imagine, is there for the same reason - it allows the solution containing the DNA to be brought down to sub-zero temperatures without freezing.
When was the last time religion allowed a person to walk after being paralyzed for 20 years
;)
Depends whether or not you believe the Bible; if so, about 2000 years ago.
(FWIW, I don't.)
I doubt this thing can be more that 33% efficient. That means that the device will run 3 times warmer than current battery-operated versions
Either your maths has gone a bit screwy or you have some unstated assumptions.
Suppose it's 33% efficient - that means 67% is dissipated as heat (let's assume it's all dissipated as heat).
For it to be three times warmer, that means that batteries must dissipate one third the amount of heat (or roughly 22%), which means that you're assuming batteries are 78% efficient.
Now, it may just be that battery efficiency is around the 80% mark, but I think you've come to the right answer via the wrong route.
Programmtic threading is specifically disallowed by the EJB spec: your EJB will not deploy if it contains any thread management: how is that not stripping threads out of Java?
Your code triggers the creation of threads. One part of your application sticks a message on a JMS queue; a thread is fired up to handle it. A client logs in and uses a session bean; a thread is fired up to handle it.
The threads are all there, you're just not allowed to touch them. Which is what J2EE is about: you write the business logic; the J2EE server manages it.
Now, I'm not saying that's necessarily a good thing - certainly not if you're an experienced programmer and you want to have control over threads - but it does mean you can't get it wrong.
J2EE is overengineered for everything, and darn too complex to learn.
;)
It took me one week as part of a work placement in a summer holiday to learn all about EJBs. Either it can't be that hard, or I'm a genius.
Oh, and I think it's a little contradictory to argue this line, then argue along the lines of just doing some no-brainer form-filling with the application server.
J2EE is about more than just shopping carts, and thus it WILL take longer to learn than a system that's suited to running an online shopping cart.
Java AS suck RAM big time (and CPU too). BEA advises customers to use open-source technology (Apache) to server static content, cuz' it would kill the server.
That's because application servers are not web servers. Sledgehammer and nut spring to mind.
PHP actually is running the internet far more than java has ever been
See above. Java is about running applications that just so happen to have a web front-end. PHP is about hosting websites that just so happen to have some application logic behind them.
J2EE only has it place in big enterprises that are willing to get it becuase the big bucks it costs come with some big name company that offers support.
"the big bucks it costs" - *COUGH*
even in enterprise contexts, the largest part of the majority of apps is pretty stupid form entry and validation
If that's the case, you don't need a big server cluster to manage it...
EJBs are not for clustering
Yes they are. Session beans, entity beans and message-driven beans all support clustering. Deploy them on more than one server (JBoss does this, at least), and they'll work in clustered mode, with requests distributed between them using one of various strategies.
EJBs are also not for distributed data management
Remember that clustering and distribution are two different things. If you're accessing the same table from many different locations, you may get problems because you're going to have to use Commit Option B, which checks the data in the local entity cache is valid before it does a read.
In other words, one should not make EJBs out of database recordsets
Too flaming right you shouldn't! Making database recordsets out of EJBs is another matter entirely. Making EJBs out of database recordsets implies that someone else has put the data there first; if that's the case, what happens when they change their data format? It's part of good system design that you just wouldn't do something like that.
No, not at all. EJBs don't strip Java of threads; they make it easier to write them correctly. Now, I'll admit that, for a decent programmer, it sticks a few hurdles in your way.
That said, it does make it easier in many respects: a thread is created when something new comes into your system - either by JMS or by a remote call. If you need to do something on a regular basis, use a scheduler for it.
Now, I've had reason to need a thread outside of the means J2EE provides, and it is a pain. I'd sooner have the distributability, the nice architecture, and the ability to quickly write applications that can readily be scaled out of the box, than the ability to grab hold of a thread easily.
...but doesn't it seem a little silly to base computational applications on what is essentially a glorified webserver? Sure, use LAMP for your shopping cart, but enterprise applications are more than just shopping carts.
.NET applications were never designed with grids in mind" - well, I can't speak for .NET, but J2EE is designed for clustering and distribution. Have you seen EJBs? EJBs are designed for interaction across computers.
"There is no impedance mismatch, everything talks SOAP/HTTP" - well, yes, that's great, but you shouldn't be talking SOAP/HTTP internally. There are faster means of communication, so use them.
"Apparently what is needed is a language/environment that is loosely typed in order to encapsulate XML well and that can efficiently process text" - only on input and output. In intermediary stages, you should be using a much more efficient format. If you're doing something clever, it's going to involve much more than just plain old text.
"J2EE and
RTFA and you'll see that LAMP is being pushed for "text-pumping". Why aren't they saying it's any good for anything else? Because it most likely isn't.
I believe the article makes reference to Sinclair's other efforts at transportation: the Zike (a folding electric scooter) and the Zeta (a motor which attaches to a normal bicycle, harnessing energy when you go downhill and using it to propel you uphill at a stately 8mph, as I remember).
These relatively unknown inventions were peddled in the small ads sections of newspapers for a long time. The electric scooter sold for about 500, the bike motor for about 200. But no, I don't know anyone who had one.
The problem with parallel data transfer is that, if you have lots of data channels running at the same time, you have to synchronise the arrival of all this data. It's very difficult to do this at high speeds (if you look at your motherboard you'll probably find a few places where the track wiggles back and forth to synchronise the arrival of data).
In recent years, it has become possible to run data connections at very high speeds - but only when you have only one data line. A USB 1.0 connection is comparable in speed to an ECP parallel connection, and there are far faster serial technologies nowadays.
For most home (and, indeed, server) applications, I would have thought that having a dual core processor won't make much of a difference, just as processor speed doesn't - rather, what is important is the speed you can get data in and out of the processor.
:-)
Overall CPU speed doesn't seem to make much of a difference when the bus speed is the same, certainly not in the systems I've tested. However, up the CPU bus speed, and you'll find your performance greatly improved, because you're getting data to the processor quicker.
Some years ago, I tested this theory with a couple of old 686 chips - one 200, one 233. I benchmarked the 200 and 233 both at 75MHz bus - virtually identical results. Then I ran them at the same CPU speed, but 83MHz bus, and the benchmark results improved by exactly 83/75. What does this tell you?
"That this can support MP3 and MPEG-4 is significant because up until now you haven't seen adoption of these formats by major content providers because they lacked digital rights management,"
It's not significant in the slightest. The reason MP3 and such formats are popular is because they're open. Just because Real are adopting open standards and making them closed doesn't mean that consumers will benefit from it.
However, the PHBs will love it, because it contains both MP3 (popular with consumers, but see above) and DRM (popular with the accounts department).
(I know that MP3 isn't totally open as there are patent issues, but I think my point remains.)
If the court ruling goes in favour of Lexmark, rather than in favour of common sense (you can put whatever toner you like in your printer, right? It's your printer after all), then the extension of the ruling to other cases is inevitable.
This means that there is the potential for manufacturers of other products that have consumables associated with them (your car, say) to put methods (a funny-shaped fuel filler, say) in to ensure that you can only use their consumables (fuel), and that a circumvention device (plastic funnel) so that you can use other consumables (fuel) will be ruled illegal.
...it's the fact that these are controlled standards. The internet is a free place, and standards should be as free as possible. MS may be releasing WMP 9 such that we'll see a client on Linux, but that doesn't mean that this is a good thing.
What we'll see is a proliferation of WMP DRM through our systems, as well as Real and QuickTime. What we really need is a single open standard that can be played back on anything without proprietary software. If it's secure, so much the better for the content creators - but I don't see why they can't settle for a simple copyright at the end, like they do for their web pages.
What happens, say, when the domain name isn't stolen, but is being held by someone, when another company wants it?
In the UK, I believe there was a case where someone had legitimately bought www.marks-and-spencer.co.uk (Marks & Spencer is a department store chain, for those who don't know). However, Marks & Spencer decided that they wanted the name, filed legal action and got the name.
The question is, though, was this legitimate? Arguably, if the initial owner of the site was attempting to profit from the name, or pass off as the real thing, then M&S should inherit the name. However, if they aren't doing such actions which are illegal under current law, there is no reason why the name should be transferred to M&S.
Slightly off-topic perhaps, but it raises a lot more interesting questions. In my opinion, standard law should cover this kind of situation - what would happen if someone managed to steal a profitable company's telephone number?