Well, since it's currently only 1 Gig, you could probably put it on a flash card and read it from a handheld. It wouldn't be an ipod. but probably wouldn't require destroying a perfectly good piece of equipment either. You could probably even get weekly updates (hopefully in a diff file) to make sure your copy is in sync with the rest of the internet. Now that I think about it, this would be a really good application. There's lots of times when I'd like to look up something off wikipedia, but not connected to the internet.
No, to steal a quote from Fight Club, this is how a recall is done:
Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field (A) multiply it by the probable rate of failure (B) then multiply the result by the average out of court settlement (C). A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of the recall, we don't do one.
However, with computers, there's usually no out of court settlements, as they can usually just replace the part, with no harm done to the user. Therefore, it's very rare that you will ever see a recall on computer equipment. It's almost always cheaper to fix the ones that come back with defects, and leave the rest in the field.
But in this case, the guy putting out the fire wasn't the guy who set the fire. This is the same as MS not causing the threat, but them being the only ones there with the power to fix it.
However, sometimes it's nice to see a cover band, only pay $5, and get to be 10 feet from the band, and be able to get good cheap bear because you're in an actual bar. As opposed to paying $100, to sit 300 yards away from the actual band, and overpaying for crap beer in a plastic cup.
Lyrics sites are being shut down. As well as they can anyway. Most of them are hosted overseas, and there isn't much the RIAA can do, try as they may. I think it's hillarious. If people know how to play the song, they will play it, and others will hear it, and then people will go buy the album. People won't not buy the album because they can play the songs themselves. Because it's really hard to drive down the interstate playing guitar, and your friends don't like it when you call them up at 3 in the morning and ask them to play that song again for you.
Depending on what you read, and who you listen to, it may be true that all consoles are sold at loss. The Grandparent of your post stated that this is case. Even if they are, it doesn't matter if you still end up making money in the end. Basically, I don't care whether or not any console is sold at a loss, as long as the company ends up making money off the venture, I'm ok with that. MS lots billions on the XBox, yet they were able to have another go at it, simply because they have so much money in the bank.
Although you may be right, Nintendo and Sony both made money off their consoles in the end (after licensing and first party game sales). XBox on the other hand cost MS $4 billion, even with everything taken into account.
The XBox wasn't even much of a gaming system. It was basically a PC, marketed as a gaming system. Which is why if you compare just numbers the XBox looks twice as good as GC, yet when you actually compare the games that run on them, XBox and GC look about the same, maybe marginally better on XBox. The XBox was large and klunky, and I know people that bought even late generation XBoxes that had problems with the CD drives dying. Let's not forget the original giant XBox controller. How that thing got out the door and into the hands of the public is beyond me. Did they not let anybody play it before it came out? What about girls and kids under 14. They would have quite a hard time using that monstrosity of a gamepad. The biggest issue I see with the 360 isn't the overheating issues (although that shouldn't be ignored) it's the fact that the only games anybody every talks about are either 20 years old, or only require a 20 year old system. After all that hub-bub about how powerful it is, people aren't even playing games that even require that kind of power. You'd be better off going to your local mall and picking up a Controller that hooks to the TV and comes with 101 Nintendo games.
I never said that XML was the silver bullet, or that it was the answer to all life's problems. A lot of the problems with XML tend to stem from the fact that you have to (or at least usually the way it's implemented) load the entire document into memory and parse it before you can start using it. And then, to get to any specific point within the document, you have to search from the beginning. This makes it quite a kludge when you are dealing large data files in the GB range. I'd rather use CSV for exchanging large amounts of data across a network in this situaion. However, in the situation we are talking about, that being Ajax, where you are generally sending no more than 1 K of text, usually less than 250 B, it doesn't really make that much of a difference. I have no problem with using key value pairs. I think that it could be useful in a lot of cases. However, I've found that using XML makes the data a little easier to deal with on both sides. Key value pairs would be a little bit lighter, and would provide basically the same functionality, yet I feel more comfortable using XML.
This really is the sad state of affairs when MS releases a product. The XBox wasn't that good, and lost tons of money, and yet still they released the XBox 360, which had lots of problems too. Many people bought the XBox, because it was marketed like crazy, even though it was marginally more powerful than the GC, and cost quite a bit more. It should have cost way more, but MS was selling at a loss. This is the way MS operates. They will be able to sell quite a few units, just by marketing the crap out of it, and underpricing it, making the difference off licensing deals. Still they won't understand why they aren't doing as well as they thought, and will release another one in a couple years, making all the same mistakes they made the first time, while the real competition still makes a pretty good profit without even taking any regard to MS. MS has no ability to give users what they want. All I ever hear about with the 360 is the fact that you can play frogger, and some game called geometry wars. Do we really want to spend $400 on a system to play 20 year old games? If people are only interested in playing 20 year old games, then the Wii is going to kill this generation, because it has the entire Nintendo back catalog.
The other problem is that you don't always get to use the browser you want. Many businesses are still IE only, and if that is where people are accessing your site from, they are going to be a little unhappy that they aren't getting the full experience, because your website doesn't run on the #1 browser (based on install base) in the world. There's a lot of other places such as web cafes where people don't really have a choice of what software they are running Although I would hate to run a web cafe with windows software, you'd have to reimage the computers every night. It would probably just be easier to run a Linux Live CD. Anyway, I think that AJAX provides a lot of the functionality that XUL does, while still allowing it to run on all modern browsers. Even among the geek community there's a lot of people who refuse to run anything but Opera, or even swear by IE. Some people are just stuck in their old ways.
I was thinking more on the server side. If you need to read the data on the server, it's easier for it to be in XML as the parser is already built, in just about every server side language available. Even on the server side, you most languages offer a split/tokenizer function, however, it's not always that easy. Key value pairs work well, but what happens to your data when you send CRLF in the middle of a value, or other weird characters that may interfere with your parsing. If you're seperating keys and values with character X, what happens when you want to send that character otherwise, how well does your split/tokenizer function handle that? XML has all this figured out already. I mean, I could write my own parser, but I really don't see the point when a simple XML schema is only minimally more verbose, allows me to send hierarchical data if I ever need to, and is already coded and well tested.
The XML thing makes it easier in that you don't have to program in the data encoder/decoder. It handles being able to put any text in it with proper escaping, and have the data be easily read on the other side. Plus if you use a simple XML schema, it's not that much heavier than using key/value pairs. I mean, you could use something really complicated, but you don't have to, and your probably better off using a simple schema for many reasons. I don't think it is any different than what you are doing, especially since that what everybody does mostly isn't ajax, and is often just something that's very similar, but leaves out the xml part, in exchange for what's easier depending on your application. I've found it easier to just send back JS wrapped in an XML container so that there doesn't have to be a large library of code on the client to handle every little situation that they may encounter. Most of the stuff that ends up happening as the result of the AJAX call (showing a message, updating a couple of HTML elements, or removing a few) only take 2 or 3 lines anyway, especially with a very small library of helper functions on the client side. Plus you don't have to put up with building a complicated XML parsing engine in JS on the client side.
Which is really hard to do on 32-bit Linux. I'm not sure how windows handles this situation. However, just deleting the cookie would also work. I imagine you could easily make a firefox plugin that would destroy all cookies from either a whitelist or blacklist of domains every time you start/shutdown the browser.
Well, idealy, you'd just need a program, (or a person) to do the inital installation, But I imagine a solution with OO.org Base and a MySQL/PostGres/SQLite backend. Plus if your database application grew up a little and was no longer personal, you could already be using a capable database engine. I don't imagine running small databases would be any more resource intensive in Postgres than in Access.
However, that makes no sense. For instance, if your function returns that most recent 5 records from a database table, then the result will often be different depending on when you run it. Then again, I guess you could count the database contents as an input, however, there's lots of functions where you wouldn't get the same output for the same inputs. Random number generators come to mind. Mind you, the whole purpose is to produce different results. However, if you consider all data used to be input, well, then apart from hardware faults flipping bits, it's impossible to get different outputs.
Amaraok is the best Audio player I've used for Linux, Windows or Mac. My only beef is that the lyrics feature doesn't seem to work anymore. It can't get the lyrics, for any songs.
I think the problem is not whether or not it can be detected by a professional, or a malware detection program, but whether or not it can be detected by the user of the computer. If you can run the entire OS in a VM, without the user knowing, then there's a lot of stuff you can do that would probably be a lot harder to do if you were just running regular malware. Although it's reassuring that this wasn't as bad as we expected, I still expect to see a few exploits that use this method to install malware, and spy on what the user is doing.
I think the other reason why managers stick with Access stems from the licensing aspect. It's a hell of a lot cheaper to run a database off Access than it is to run SQL Server. The express edition is free, and is still an upgrade from Access, although I highly doubt that when you call your MS rep to ask about SQL server, I doubt they really push the Express Edition. I'm also unsure of how many users you're allowed to have accessing it at a single time. I know it has a 4GB limit, which should be a nice upgrade from Access, which seems to crawl once you get up to a couple hundred megs.
When I was a kid, a local rental shop started charging by the half hour for kids to play the consoles like Neo Geo and Super Nes. It gave them a lot of nice advertising, as people would come into the shop just to watch people play, and often decide to rent a game, or rent one of the systems. I remember them doing quite well, although they did close eventually. The store was always full, and they sold a lot of stuff that people really wanted, like those hard cases that rental games came it. It was much better to keep your games in those than in the crappy sleeves that the games usually came in. Back when most people still had NES, they were enabling people to play Neo Geo and Super nintendo, and I probably spent enough playing games on rental time to buy an entire system. I'm sure they made a lot of money.
Yeah, when I went to buy my iPod Shuffle, they were all out, so I asked what else they had. The guy pointed me to some SanDisk models, which he said were pretty good. He also mentioned that they had some Sony models, and then pointed to the returns shelf where they had a pile of them. He said that most of the Sony products get returned, and that people generally hate them. Based on the fact that I was upgrading from NetMD, I knew what he was talking about. A really good product, bogged down by crappy software and DRM. I see blu-ray (and HD-DVD) ending up the same way.
I really don't see why they don't just let you burn it to a regular DVD+/-R, with no CSS. CSS is useless anyway, was broken years ago, and only exists to stop you from playing DVDs from other regions. It would be much easier to implement a system where you let people/stores burn on regular DVDs with regular DVD burners, on regular computers. If they sold the movies for a reasonable price, people wouldn't really be that interested in copying them, and they'd make a lot of money.
I think it has something to do with how close the cells are to the cells of the host. In the case of cancer cells, they contained somewhat damaged DNA, which is the cause of the tumour, yet your body still doesn't attack it, because for some reason or another it doesn't see it as a threat. I think the same thing would apply here. Remember that all breeds of dogs are the same species, even though there's a wide variation of DNA out there to account for all the different breeds. Perhaps dogs have a much larger margin which their body considers safe for presence in their own body due to such a large variation in the genes present in the species.
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Well, since it's currently only 1 Gig, you could probably put it on a flash card and read it from a handheld. It wouldn't be an ipod. but probably wouldn't require destroying a perfectly good piece of equipment either. You could probably even get weekly updates (hopefully in a diff file) to make sure your copy is in sync with the rest of the internet. Now that I think about it, this would be a really good application. There's lots of times when I'd like to look up something off wikipedia, but not connected to the internet.
I don't think the people of Cerro De Pasco would very much disagree with you.
No, you see, I'm Mac and a PC, because now you can run Mac OS and Windows at the same time. Touché
No, to steal a quote from Fight Club, this is how a recall is done:
Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field (A) multiply it by the probable rate of failure (B) then multiply the result by the average out of court settlement (C). A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of the recall, we don't do one.
However, with computers, there's usually no out of court settlements, as they can usually just replace the part, with no harm done to the user. Therefore, it's very rare that you will ever see a recall on computer equipment. It's almost always cheaper to fix the ones that come back with defects, and leave the rest in the field.
But in this case, the guy putting out the fire wasn't the guy who set the fire. This is the same as MS not causing the threat, but them being the only ones there with the power to fix it.
However, sometimes it's nice to see a cover band, only pay $5, and get to be 10 feet from the band, and be able to get good cheap bear because you're in an actual bar. As opposed to paying $100, to sit 300 yards away from the actual band, and overpaying for crap beer in a plastic cup.
Lyrics sites are being shut down. As well as they can anyway. Most of them are hosted overseas, and there isn't much the RIAA can do, try as they may. I think it's hillarious. If people know how to play the song, they will play it, and others will hear it, and then people will go buy the album. People won't not buy the album because they can play the songs themselves. Because it's really hard to drive down the interstate playing guitar, and your friends don't like it when you call them up at 3 in the morning and ask them to play that song again for you.
Depending on what you read, and who you listen to, it may be true that all consoles are sold at loss. The Grandparent of your post stated that this is case. Even if they are, it doesn't matter if you still end up making money in the end. Basically, I don't care whether or not any console is sold at a loss, as long as the company ends up making money off the venture, I'm ok with that. MS lots billions on the XBox, yet they were able to have another go at it, simply because they have so much money in the bank.
Although you may be right, Nintendo and Sony both made money off their consoles in the end (after licensing and first party game sales). XBox on the other hand cost MS $4 billion, even with everything taken into account.
The XBox wasn't even much of a gaming system. It was basically a PC, marketed as a gaming system. Which is why if you compare just numbers the XBox looks twice as good as GC, yet when you actually compare the games that run on them, XBox and GC look about the same, maybe marginally better on XBox. The XBox was large and klunky, and I know people that bought even late generation XBoxes that had problems with the CD drives dying. Let's not forget the original giant XBox controller. How that thing got out the door and into the hands of the public is beyond me. Did they not let anybody play it before it came out? What about girls and kids under 14. They would have quite a hard time using that monstrosity of a gamepad. The biggest issue I see with the 360 isn't the overheating issues (although that shouldn't be ignored) it's the fact that the only games anybody every talks about are either 20 years old, or only require a 20 year old system. After all that hub-bub about how powerful it is, people aren't even playing games that even require that kind of power. You'd be better off going to your local mall and picking up a Controller that hooks to the TV and comes with 101 Nintendo games.
I never said that XML was the silver bullet, or that it was the answer to all life's problems. A lot of the problems with XML tend to stem from the fact that you have to (or at least usually the way it's implemented) load the entire document into memory and parse it before you can start using it. And then, to get to any specific point within the document, you have to search from the beginning. This makes it quite a kludge when you are dealing large data files in the GB range. I'd rather use CSV for exchanging large amounts of data across a network in this situaion. However, in the situation we are talking about, that being Ajax, where you are generally sending no more than 1 K of text, usually less than 250 B, it doesn't really make that much of a difference. I have no problem with using key value pairs. I think that it could be useful in a lot of cases. However, I've found that using XML makes the data a little easier to deal with on both sides. Key value pairs would be a little bit lighter, and would provide basically the same functionality, yet I feel more comfortable using XML.
This really is the sad state of affairs when MS releases a product. The XBox wasn't that good, and lost tons of money, and yet still they released the XBox 360, which had lots of problems too. Many people bought the XBox, because it was marketed like crazy, even though it was marginally more powerful than the GC, and cost quite a bit more. It should have cost way more, but MS was selling at a loss. This is the way MS operates. They will be able to sell quite a few units, just by marketing the crap out of it, and underpricing it, making the difference off licensing deals. Still they won't understand why they aren't doing as well as they thought, and will release another one in a couple years, making all the same mistakes they made the first time, while the real competition still makes a pretty good profit without even taking any regard to MS. MS has no ability to give users what they want. All I ever hear about with the 360 is the fact that you can play frogger, and some game called geometry wars. Do we really want to spend $400 on a system to play 20 year old games? If people are only interested in playing 20 year old games, then the Wii is going to kill this generation, because it has the entire Nintendo back catalog.
The other problem is that you don't always get to use the browser you want. Many businesses are still IE only, and if that is where people are accessing your site from, they are going to be a little unhappy that they aren't getting the full experience, because your website doesn't run on the #1 browser (based on install base) in the world. There's a lot of other places such as web cafes where people don't really have a choice of what software they are running Although I would hate to run a web cafe with windows software, you'd have to reimage the computers every night. It would probably just be easier to run a Linux Live CD. Anyway, I think that AJAX provides a lot of the functionality that XUL does, while still allowing it to run on all modern browsers. Even among the geek community there's a lot of people who refuse to run anything but Opera, or even swear by IE. Some people are just stuck in their old ways.
I was thinking more on the server side. If you need to read the data on the server, it's easier for it to be in XML as the parser is already built, in just about every server side language available. Even on the server side, you most languages offer a split/tokenizer function, however, it's not always that easy. Key value pairs work well, but what happens to your data when you send CRLF in the middle of a value, or other weird characters that may interfere with your parsing. If you're seperating keys and values with character X, what happens when you want to send that character otherwise, how well does your split/tokenizer function handle that? XML has all this figured out already. I mean, I could write my own parser, but I really don't see the point when a simple XML schema is only minimally more verbose, allows me to send hierarchical data if I ever need to, and is already coded and well tested.
The XML thing makes it easier in that you don't have to program in the data encoder/decoder. It handles being able to put any text in it with proper escaping, and have the data be easily read on the other side. Plus if you use a simple XML schema, it's not that much heavier than using key/value pairs. I mean, you could use something really complicated, but you don't have to, and your probably better off using a simple schema for many reasons. I don't think it is any different than what you are doing, especially since that what everybody does mostly isn't ajax, and is often just something that's very similar, but leaves out the xml part, in exchange for what's easier depending on your application. I've found it easier to just send back JS wrapped in an XML container so that there doesn't have to be a large library of code on the client to handle every little situation that they may encounter. Most of the stuff that ends up happening as the result of the AJAX call (showing a message, updating a couple of HTML elements, or removing a few) only take 2 or 3 lines anyway, especially with a very small library of helper functions on the client side. Plus you don't have to put up with building a complicated XML parsing engine in JS on the client side.
Which is really hard to do on 32-bit Linux. I'm not sure how windows handles this situation. However, just deleting the cookie would also work. I imagine you could easily make a firefox plugin that would destroy all cookies from either a whitelist or blacklist of domains every time you start/shutdown the browser.
Well, idealy, you'd just need a program, (or a person) to do the inital installation, But I imagine a solution with OO.org Base and a MySQL/PostGres/SQLite backend. Plus if your database application grew up a little and was no longer personal, you could already be using a capable database engine. I don't imagine running small databases would be any more resource intensive in Postgres than in Access.
However, that makes no sense. For instance, if your function returns that most recent 5 records from a database table, then the result will often be different depending on when you run it. Then again, I guess you could count the database contents as an input, however, there's lots of functions where you wouldn't get the same output for the same inputs. Random number generators come to mind. Mind you, the whole purpose is to produce different results. However, if you consider all data used to be input, well, then apart from hardware faults flipping bits, it's impossible to get different outputs.
Amaraok is the best Audio player I've used for Linux, Windows or Mac. My only beef is that the lyrics feature doesn't seem to work anymore. It can't get the lyrics, for any songs.
I think the problem is not whether or not it can be detected by a professional, or a malware detection program, but whether or not it can be detected by the user of the computer. If you can run the entire OS in a VM, without the user knowing, then there's a lot of stuff you can do that would probably be a lot harder to do if you were just running regular malware. Although it's reassuring that this wasn't as bad as we expected, I still expect to see a few exploits that use this method to install malware, and spy on what the user is doing.
I think the other reason why managers stick with Access stems from the licensing aspect. It's a hell of a lot cheaper to run a database off Access than it is to run SQL Server. The express edition is free, and is still an upgrade from Access, although I highly doubt that when you call your MS rep to ask about SQL server, I doubt they really push the Express Edition. I'm also unsure of how many users you're allowed to have accessing it at a single time. I know it has a 4GB limit, which should be a nice upgrade from Access, which seems to crawl once you get up to a couple hundred megs.
When I was a kid, a local rental shop started charging by the half hour for kids to play the consoles like Neo Geo and Super Nes. It gave them a lot of nice advertising, as people would come into the shop just to watch people play, and often decide to rent a game, or rent one of the systems. I remember them doing quite well, although they did close eventually. The store was always full, and they sold a lot of stuff that people really wanted, like those hard cases that rental games came it. It was much better to keep your games in those than in the crappy sleeves that the games usually came in. Back when most people still had NES, they were enabling people to play Neo Geo and Super nintendo, and I probably spent enough playing games on rental time to buy an entire system. I'm sure they made a lot of money.
Yeah, when I went to buy my iPod Shuffle, they were all out, so I asked what else they had. The guy pointed me to some SanDisk models, which he said were pretty good. He also mentioned that they had some Sony models, and then pointed to the returns shelf where they had a pile of them. He said that most of the Sony products get returned, and that people generally hate them. Based on the fact that I was upgrading from NetMD, I knew what he was talking about. A really good product, bogged down by crappy software and DRM. I see blu-ray (and HD-DVD) ending up the same way.
I really don't see why they don't just let you burn it to a regular DVD+/-R, with no CSS. CSS is useless anyway, was broken years ago, and only exists to stop you from playing DVDs from other regions. It would be much easier to implement a system where you let people/stores burn on regular DVDs with regular DVD burners, on regular computers. If they sold the movies for a reasonable price, people wouldn't really be that interested in copying them, and they'd make a lot of money.
I think it has something to do with how close the cells are to the cells of the host. In the case of cancer cells, they contained somewhat damaged DNA, which is the cause of the tumour, yet your body still doesn't attack it, because for some reason or another it doesn't see it as a threat. I think the same thing would apply here. Remember that all breeds of dogs are the same species, even though there's a wide variation of DNA out there to account for all the different breeds. Perhaps dogs have a much larger margin which their body considers safe for presence in their own body due to such a large variation in the genes present in the species.