My point was that, in the US, most people's only interaction with the police is the act of receiving a ticket. Regardless of how nice the police are in such a case, this creates an antagonistic relationship between the citizens and the police. This is not good. Throw in the concept of speed traps (these are really idiotic, in my opinion), and you create a system where the police are *against* the public, and vice-versa.
In the UK, you almost never get pulled over by a police officer, at least for speeding. There are speed cameras everywhere. They are usually pretty well marked. You know they're coming in enough time to slow down (there are signs usually about 1 mile before the cameras). They aren't desinged to catch speeders in the act; instead, they're designed to prevent speeding in the first place. And they are pretty effective, too.
In the end, you end up with a photo of your license plate sent to your house (yes, I know--with moving violations in the States, you must be able to connect the driver with the car--that's not a problem here). This means that in such cases you aren't faced with a situation between law enforcement and citizens that often leads towards an antagonistic relationship between the two. This simply doesn't happen in the UK. If you have an antagonistic first-person relationship with the police, it's for other reasons (such as your race or religion... hehehe... just kidding).
This is the case in Boston, Los Angeles, Seattle, or Houston. It is an inevitable outcome of a situation where citizens' primary contact with law enforcement is through the writing of speed tickets.
You forgot, "and if you get away, we can track you anywhere in the city with CCTV".
That said, the UK cops are a hell of a lot better than the US cops. In fact, the general attitude of the people towards the cops is a lot better than in the States. Most people here in the UK don't have 3+ run-ins with the cops as a result of speeding (one beneficial side effects of speed cameras is that the police don't create fear among the masses as a result of more trivial crimes such as speeding).
But every cop I've seen walking the beat here in Scotland has a bullet-proof vest. And those nightsticks look like they hurt. But, luckily for me, Aberdeen is a whole lot safer than London--it is quite rare for cops to carry weapons on their person.
I'm reading some of the replies and thinking to myself that the/. readers don't understand what a backup system is.
A backup system is not simply redundancy (i.e. RAID). A backup system for files typically can recreate any version of a file requested by the user (as backed up according to the backup regimen). Thus, if you have nightly backups, you might keep every night for the past month, every month end, and every year end for a given document. RAID won't give you this.
I'm familiar with some expensive IBM products that do this. However, they're expensive. Basically, ADSM (ADSTAR Data Storage Manager, or something) is a product that allows regular backups of products, and access to every incremental version of the documents. On the backend, it can be hooked up to a huge disk cache and a robotic tape library. The end result is terabytes of near-online access data, with automatic versioning. Pretty nice. And if your disk cache was large enough, it would never hit the tapes. It seems to me that this could be modified to remove the tapes and present what the user requires.
I'm not aware of anything open source or free (as in beer) that does this. It would be really nice, though.
Hell, I've always dreamed about an automatic versioning filesystem. Documents would be automatically versioned. You could use CVS to handle this. Perhaps you could do something as simple as have some code executed upon every file close for files that are opened with write access. When these files are closed, they are added as new versions of the document within CVS.
When the disk reaches some capacity watermark, a disk cleanup agent would be invoked. Its goal would be to remove redundant versions of old binary files from CVS. Rules could be attached to the agent to perform tasks such as retaining specifc versions of binary files (i.e. retaining the first version, the latest version, and all versions from the last named version).
Users could tag specific versions of files. These versions would always be retained.
I know this would incur a significant performance hit for disk access. Perhaps I could limit such disk access to specific directories or mount points. In this manner, I could have a mount point for documents, all of which would be automatically versioned.
Plugins for Explorer could be built to allow users to tag versions of documents and retrieve specific old versions of files. I'm thinking something like TortoiseCVS, a beautiful piece of software. In fact, for prototyping, TortoiseCVS would be enough.
Now, is anything like that available? No? Perhaps I should do something about that.
Most likely 1). It takes about 3 years for a patent to get through the patent process. This is part of the reason the USPTO recently changed the rules regarding patents--20 years from the initial filing date, instead of 17 years from the patent's grant date. Three years from 1998 means that the patent was likely granted this year.
Wow...I have to comment on this one. The author seems to be on track. But there are some serious misunderstandings here.
"You need at least three speakers in front of you, preferably five, to be able to accurately position sounds." Hmm... I don't think so. Go listen to some Maggies at your local high-end hi-fi store. Two speakers will image far better than any 5.1 speaker setup costing anywhere near their price. They're beautiful. Imaging has a *lot* to do with phase, and most speakers put a filter smack dab in the middle of our most sensitive hearing range (we are most sensitive to 1kHz-3kHz, and most speakers put a filter at ~2kHz). With the exception of first order filters (which have tons of problems in their own right, and are rarely used), filters screw up phase horribly.
"...they'll say they have 15Hz-30kHz or better frequency range". I assume you mean amplifiers will be rated this way. Speakers will never be rated this good. Not even $70,000 speakers. Yes, computer speakers will exagerate claims. But not this great. Most computer speakers have a -3dB (half perceived volume) point of around 80Hz. A decent $1000+ pair of speakers will have a -3dB point of around 50Hz. Both will usually quote the -60dB point, which is around 60Hz and 35Hz accordingly. Most subwoofers will hit their -60dB point around 25-30Hz. Some extraordinary woofers will push that down below 20Hz. But that's very rare. However, most computer speakers will focus on the 100Hz-2kHz region. Most people perceive mid bass (around 100Hz) as deep bass, so this fools a lot of people.
"...but they will have a crystal-clear, completely flat, frequency response across the entire audible range". No. They won't. No speaker has anything close to a flat frequency response. Go do some waterfall plots of any speaker, regardless of price, and you'll see what I mean. Dips and peaks of 5dB or more are common, even on the most expensive of speakers. And once you go off-center on the speakers, the response gets even worse. To find a speaker that covers the entire audible range, you'll also be looking at a speaker system costing thousands of dollars. I'd look towards Hsu Research for budget subwoofers that can cover the lower end of the audible spectrum. High frequencies aren't as hard to produce. But, in any event, you won't find any speaker that approaches a linear response.
But, yes, I agree that you should use your own ears to test audio systems. If possible, test them in your own home, as the room in which they are placed makes a significant difference to the sound.
America isn't currrently producing nuclear and (if we believe our government, at least) toxic weapons.
America hasn't produced landmines in years.
Now, as for the part about working out *why* the events happened, I think our responses to date have shown an effort to figure out *why* the events happened. We're not going to carpet bomb Afghanistan (I think and hope...again, if we are to believe our leaders). We're going to do something that is more effective against the terrorists in a manner that will minimize the likelyhood of future terrorist attacks. That likely means toppling the Taliban, and supporting a secular government in its place, following up with tons of humanitarian aid. This sounds to me like the US is beginning to understand the threat, and what drives this threat.
I, quite frankly, am totally surprised. I have been pretty strongly anti-Bush until this conflict. Even now, I'd say I'm more pro-Powell than anything. But I have been thoroughly impressed with our government's handling of this situation.
As an American in the UK, let me say how amazed I have been at the compassion and solidarity shown by the Brits in this crisis. There are a few people that have been rather offensive. And a few more that criticized our certain heavy hand in the early days, only to turn around and criticize our lack of response now. You're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't, I guess.
Oh well. I'm just sitting here hoping this isn't the beginning of WWIII. Cheers, and peace!
Fires snuff themselves out in space. You need gravity to allow heat to rise sufficiently enough to cause convection, which brings fresh oxygen to the fire. I think you'd need to look at alternative methods of ingestion.
I might suggest a vaporizer. These things heat up the weed to the point of vaporization, and are often sourced by an electric heating element. That should work in space.
This sounds awfully similar to the vision that is being implemented by the JBoss Group for their WebOS. For those unfamiliar with JBoss, it is an open source implementation of Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE). However, the v3.0 release (known as the "rabbit hole" release) also contains a bunch of new technologies. Things like:
Seamless distribution. The entire application server itself, as well as applications written within it, can be distributed automatically. Very cool.
Worldwide scalability. Leveraging Java application servers' focus on scalability, this thing scales to the biggest hardware and to clusters
Fault-tolerance. The clustering abilities provide high availability to JBoss (something JBoss lacked in pre-v3.0 releases).
Self-tuning. Hmmm....no quick answer here. It can all be configured by way of JMX (Java Management eXtensions). I assume that, in the future, people will add self-tuning features.
Self-configuration. Same as self-tuning.
Security. Java has a very nicely developed security model already. JBoss uses this pervasively, as does any Java application server.
Resource controls. Gee, this sounds to me like declaritive security. That, again, is offered by J2EE.
This sounds to me like MS is actually playing catch-up with open source software.
For those of you unfamiliar with JBoss, check it out. It's really nice. For those of you who doubt Java as a platform for application development, go talk to IBM or BEA. They both have tremendous businesses built upon Java application server technology. It's fast, stable, robust, flexible, scalable, and is buzzword-compliant with about anything else I can think of. Besides, I can write applications far quicker with Java than I can with other platforms.
You're way off. If this were the case, fans would not be required or used. Don't forget the inefficencies (heat) of the power supply. Each device in an old machine, from the network cards to the video card to the hard drive, as well as everything on the motherboard, all generate heat. The total draw of the components and CPU will likely exceed 50W. I think whe you throw in fans and the power supply, you're going to find it is very close to, if not well above 100W.
Just out of curiosity, how do you come up with this opinion? It really flies in the face of the conventional wisdom of Gore's and Bush's relative levels of intelligence and intellect.
Also, it sounds like you've got more first (or second) hand experience with Gore. Have you or these folks you know spent much time with him? More than 5 minutes? I want to know--if I should change my opinion of Gore, I want it to be substantiated on something other than heresay.
And don't put words in my mouth. I didn't say intellect != intelligence. I said that oration skills != intelligence. I'm not sure I understand your distinction between intellect and intelligence.
Re:Al Gore, an intellect by all accounts? I disagr
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Bobby Fischer Online?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
My wife's adviser for her PhD in geology was called to testify on global warming to some government committee a few years ago. In this, he was questioned by a number of respected individuals in the science field, many of whom were geologists (although not of the same specialty as my wife's adviser). At the end, Gore came in for a short 5-minute Q&A period. My wife's adviser said that the questions Gore put forth were the most intelligent and thought provoking of the bunch. Obviously he had been well briefed by his aides, but my wife's adviser says that it was clearly his own thinking (follow-up questions to his answers and such). He would most surely disagree with your opinions about Gore.
Oh, yes. My wife's adviser is a conservative southerner from Alabama. Most definitely not a Gore supporter.
You can be quite intelligent and now be an excellent orator. In fact you can be quite intelligent and not be very good at English. Don't put down Gore's intelligence. In fact, all the democrat presidents (and Gore) from the last half century stack up as wonderfully intelligent. However, most of them performed as president very poorly. Intelligence is not strongly correlated with the quality of one's presidency.
Dalai Lama! He is an unwitting victim. He didn't break a Russian law. He broke an American law, while on Russian soil. How would you like it if Russian laws applied to you? I don't think you'd like it. Now, after breaking said law, let's say you take a business trip to Moscow. While in Russia, the Russian authorities nab you. That would suck. There would be a huge outcry against it. Yet that is exactly what happened here. The US tried to impose its laws on the citizen of another country while that citizen was outside the US. That's really bad.
He did not break the law on American soil. And he's not an American citizen (American citizens can be held liable within the US for crimes they commit outside the US borders, even if they're legal in the country where the crime was committed). I'm not sure how US law really applies here. But, then again, I'm not really sure of the reasoning behind the DMCA.
The Internet promised to be the next generation platform for pornography and piracy. I can remember back in the mid-80s being able to download porn images (er...I mean a good friend told me they remember...). The Internet certainly has delivered on these promises.
I'd love to see a breakdown of total Internet bandwidth allocated to porn and piracy. I'd bet it consumes >90% of the total bandwidth used. Movies, music, and babes...now, if only they could figure out a way to download alcohol and drugs.
Re:These guys really thought this out!
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Data Mining?
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· Score: 3, Informative
Dry air results in static electricity. Unless the data center is in a swamp (e.g. Houston, New Orleans), the data center probably has both a dehumidifier and a humidifier. Humidifiers are very common in data centers.
Anyone remember a day when crackers were called hackers, and there was no distinction between the two that resulted from intentions? Yes, long before crackers were crackers, they were hackers. And hackers didn't mind such a distinction. You see, most people didn't write about us.
OK. A screwdriver can be used as a hammer. It works as a hammer. It's not the appropriate tool to use if you need to hammer a nail, though.
CGI/Perl is scalable? Really? Can you run one web server with multiple CGI/Perl instances, without using some sort of proxy? I consider proxies cheating, because, that isn't a feature of CGI/Perl. It is, in essence, using a screwdriver as a hammer.
CGI/Perl has transactional support? Really? Maybe the DB aspect has transactional support. Maybe people have built transactional frameworks atop CGI/Perl. But, again, you're using a screwdriver as a hammer.
CGI/Perl has declaritive security? Hahahahahaha. OK. I've stopped laughing.
CGI/Perl has a rich set of built-in connectors to legacy systems? Really? Where? Please show me. I haven't been able to get my CGI-based e-commerce website to integrate to SAP and CICS, and I want to know! Really, this is another situation of using a screwdriver for a hammer.
And, just because millions are using the wrong tool for the job, doesn't make the tool the right tool for the job. Case in point? Windows, as a robust and reliable platform for mission critical applications.
Also, just because an application chooses not to deploy these features does not make these features go away. Just because you've "seen them not deployed under J2EE when they could have" doesn't make J2EE any less enterprise-class. And, these four features I mentioned--*if* there's a solution for these using CGI/Perl, then I can assure you it's the architectural equivalent of duct tape.
Yes, you can. You need to use the Generic Java (gj) compiler. The resulting bytecode is compatible with any standard JVM.
Also, Sun is planning to officially add generics to Java for the upcoming JDK1.5 release.
However, I would contend that most cases where templates are used in real world programming, they shouldn't. Readability and maintainability can go out the window without judicious care programming templates. Templates are ideal for containers, where they assist readability and maintainability. But in many (most?) cases, they result in code that is difficult to maintain.
This is, in my opinion, the reason Java will overtake C/C++ in popularity/use. Java code, with all its simplifications over C++, is easier to maintain and write. The results in fewer projects that end in failure. It also results in code bases that last longer, due to easier maintenance.
Dude, I don't know if you've done any benchmarks, but Tomcat sucks royally. It's about 1/3-1/5 the speed of JRun and Jetty, the latter of which is available free of charge for non-commercial use.
Tomcat v3.3 (in beta now) is a performance release to Tomcat, and improves things a lot. But it's still quite a bit slower than Jetty & JRun.
Tomcat v4.0 has the promise of working better. It's got the right architecture. Craig McClanahan, the chief architect, deserves big kudos for laying things out nicely, and writing really good code. But it's still in beta, too. I haven't done any benchmarks since beta 1 (before any performance tuning, IIRC), but it was pretty slow back then--slower than Tomcat v3.2.
All I mean to say is that Tomcat is a very poor implementation of a servlet engine. It is the reference. It does work reliably. But it is not very efficient.
If you've got a commercial site, use Jetty or JRun.
-Scalability. Replicate tiers from the solution to provide solutions that scale beyond a single computer.
-Transactional support.
-Built-in declaritive security. Leave the role of security to the deployers where it belongs, not with developers.
-A rich API that has built-in connectors to legacy systems, such as CICS.
In short, you need an application server.
Hmmm....CGI+Perl doesn't offer any of this. Gee, J2EE does. So does Site Server (many people forget that MS invented the market we now call "application servers").
You know, I've heard that, during wartime situations, pilots often resort to things like duct tape to repair their aircrafts. Does that make duct tape suitable for commercial airlines? No. Just because one person uses it, successfully, for certain tasks does not mean that it is the appropriate tool for those tasks.
You ask what Open Source has to offer in the web services arena. JBoss is not the only one (though it is the best, IMHO).
Check out JOnAS, which serves as the core for Enhydra. Both are functional, real-world application servers.
Check out Exolab, consisting of OpenEJB, OpenJMS, OpenORB, and more. Again, this is another open-source application server.
For web services, check out Apache SOAP. The wonderful folks at IBM have gifted the open source community with a SOAP/WSDL/UDDI implementation. There was some talk a while back about JBoss integrating Apache SOAP into its offerings, although the mailing list now causes me to doubt this.
What does all this add up to? It looks to me that Mono and dotGNU provide migration paths for existing MS customers. J2EE provides a software scalability that is not possible with Microsoft application servers. Between Sun, SGI, and IBM, the MS/Intel hegemony don't stand a chance with respect to hardware scalability. And with JBoss, Microsoft can't compete on price. It seems to me that the Unix camp will do quite well with this whole web services thing.
That said, it's not like one side will win while the other side loses. No matter what happens, MS will have a sizable camp of die-hard devotees. Likewise with the Unix camp. Somewhere in between, web services will support mixed solutions. Throw in non-MS implementations of the CRE, and the current quality of Java under Windows (it's still better than Linux...and, yes, I have tried the IBM VM), and we've got a situation where the underlying platform is really not that important. Finally, I'll get to focus on what I do best (programming), while avoiding all the religious hype surronding MS vs. Unix.
Well, you're almost correct. Everything is correct except for the food. The food sucks in Amsterdam to a level not matched by any European city of similar size, with the exception of cities in the Scandanavian countries.
On my last six visits to Amsterdam, I was utterly amazed at how well the Dutch can slaughter cuisines that I previously thought couldn't be messed up. Mexican Stew? When's the last time I've had Mexican Stew in Texas or Mexico? Hahahaha.
There's good Asian food in Holland. And good cheese. The bread is better than the states, but not as good as in Belgium or France. Oh yes, and if fries are your thing, nobody does fries like the Dutch. But beyond that, good luck.
For the rest of it, you're dead on, though. I truly love Holland, although I prefer Den Hague and Haarlem to Amsterdam.
What a moron. Look, if a gay person doesn't interfere with my life, I think we should let that person live however they wish. The same goes with the use of drugs--as long as it doesn't interfere with my life, my neighbor can do whatever they want. I'm not brainwashed. I simply believe in the mantra of "live and let live".
You seem to be afraid that being around gay people will somehow make *you* gay. Sounds to me like you are a latent homosexual. You ought to experiment with this. You might find your real calling in life.
As for San Fran being a cesspool, I'm not quite sure what city you're talking about. I travel quite a bit, and I can honestly say that SF is one of the most beautiful cities in the world. The nightlife, the arts and entertainment, and the city & park life is wonderful, with few equals anywhere in the world.
Spread deadly diseases to the N. American continent? OMG. What planet are you on? Given your reasoning, next we should get rid of all the women. After all, AIDS is transmitted about 10x more easily from the man to the woman during sexual intercourse than it is the other way around. So perhaps God wants to get rid of the gays and the women (please not the sarcasm). You unenlightened twit.
As for the raping of 13 year-old boys, I think we should probably focus more on Catholic priests than on the homosexual community. There are a *lot* fewer priests out there, but there sure seems to be a lot higher percentage of priests raping little children than the homosexual community at large.
Where do you get these wonderful statistics about the average lifespan of homosexuals? I'd like to see even one reference to this, regardless of how dodgy the source might be.
Your opinions are pathetic, the result of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. Gays aren't another race of beings. They're really quite similar to you and me. In my experience, the members of the gay community are far more upstanding, on average, than the heterosexual community. Why? I'm not sure. But I've got a hypothesis that it's a result of the gay community being more open to people that aren't like themselves. Tolerance is good. And the Golden Rule is even better. Try practising it once in a while--you might find that a few of those gays you've always hated turn out to be genuinely good people. One might even become your best friend! Without "brainwashing" you to become gay (gasp!).
Or perhaps you should live in your own little world, bashing gays whenever you get the chance. I'm sure that makes you feel better about yourself--you don't have to come to terms with your own sexuality. Gays are nothing to be afraid of. They, with the exception of a few bad apples (I don't need to mention the problem with heterosexuals and rape here...there are bad apples on both sides), don't tend to impose their beliefs on others. They don't go seeking out heterosexuals so they can turn them. They are often in committed, monogomous relationships. They are usually caring, kind people. In short, they're just like the heterosexual community, except that their sexual preferences have required that they develop tolerance. It would be nice if you could learn a little, too.
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My point was that, in the US, most people's only interaction with the police is the act of receiving a ticket. Regardless of how nice the police are in such a case, this creates an antagonistic relationship between the citizens and the police. This is not good. Throw in the concept of speed traps (these are really idiotic, in my opinion), and you create a system where the police are *against* the public, and vice-versa.
In the UK, you almost never get pulled over by a police officer, at least for speeding. There are speed cameras everywhere. They are usually pretty well marked. You know they're coming in enough time to slow down (there are signs usually about 1 mile before the cameras). They aren't desinged to catch speeders in the act; instead, they're designed to prevent speeding in the first place. And they are pretty effective, too.
In the end, you end up with a photo of your license plate sent to your house (yes, I know--with moving violations in the States, you must be able to connect the driver with the car--that's not a problem here). This means that in such cases you aren't faced with a situation between law enforcement and citizens that often leads towards an antagonistic relationship between the two. This simply doesn't happen in the UK. If you have an antagonistic first-person relationship with the police, it's for other reasons (such as your race or religion... hehehe... just kidding).
This is the case in Boston, Los Angeles, Seattle, or Houston. It is an inevitable outcome of a situation where citizens' primary contact with law enforcement is through the writing of speed tickets.
You forgot, "and if you get away, we can track you anywhere in the city with CCTV".
That said, the UK cops are a hell of a lot better than the US cops. In fact, the general attitude of the people towards the cops is a lot better than in the States. Most people here in the UK don't have 3+ run-ins with the cops as a result of speeding (one beneficial side effects of speed cameras is that the police don't create fear among the masses as a result of more trivial crimes such as speeding).
But every cop I've seen walking the beat here in Scotland has a bullet-proof vest. And those nightsticks look like they hurt. But, luckily for me, Aberdeen is a whole lot safer than London--it is quite rare for cops to carry weapons on their person.
I'm reading some of the replies and thinking to myself that the /. readers don't understand what a backup system is.
A backup system is not simply redundancy (i.e. RAID). A backup system for files typically can recreate any version of a file requested by the user (as backed up according to the backup regimen). Thus, if you have nightly backups, you might keep every night for the past month, every month end, and every year end for a given document. RAID won't give you this.
I'm familiar with some expensive IBM products that do this. However, they're expensive. Basically, ADSM (ADSTAR Data Storage Manager, or something) is a product that allows regular backups of products, and access to every incremental version of the documents. On the backend, it can be hooked up to a huge disk cache and a robotic tape library. The end result is terabytes of near-online access data, with automatic versioning. Pretty nice. And if your disk cache was large enough, it would never hit the tapes. It seems to me that this could be modified to remove the tapes and present what the user requires.
I'm not aware of anything open source or free (as in beer) that does this. It would be really nice, though.
Hell, I've always dreamed about an automatic versioning filesystem. Documents would be automatically versioned. You could use CVS to handle this. Perhaps you could do something as simple as have some code executed upon every file close for files that are opened with write access. When these files are closed, they are added as new versions of the document within CVS.
When the disk reaches some capacity watermark, a disk cleanup agent would be invoked. Its goal would be to remove redundant versions of old binary files from CVS. Rules could be attached to the agent to perform tasks such as retaining specifc versions of binary files (i.e. retaining the first version, the latest version, and all versions from the last named version).
Users could tag specific versions of files. These versions would always be retained.
I know this would incur a significant performance hit for disk access. Perhaps I could limit such disk access to specific directories or mount points. In this manner, I could have a mount point for documents, all of which would be automatically versioned.
Plugins for Explorer could be built to allow users to tag versions of documents and retrieve specific old versions of files. I'm thinking something like TortoiseCVS, a beautiful piece of software. In fact, for prototyping, TortoiseCVS would be enough.
Now, is anything like that available? No? Perhaps I should do something about that.
Cheers.
Most likely 1). It takes about 3 years for a patent to get through the patent process. This is part of the reason the USPTO recently changed the rules regarding patents--20 years from the initial filing date, instead of 17 years from the patent's grant date. Three years from 1998 means that the patent was likely granted this year.
"You need at least three speakers in front of you, preferably five, to be able to accurately position sounds." Hmm... I don't think so. Go listen to some Maggies at your local high-end hi-fi store. Two speakers will image far better than any 5.1 speaker setup costing anywhere near their price. They're beautiful. Imaging has a *lot* to do with phase, and most speakers put a filter smack dab in the middle of our most sensitive hearing range (we are most sensitive to 1kHz-3kHz, and most speakers put a filter at ~2kHz). With the exception of first order filters (which have tons of problems in their own right, and are rarely used), filters screw up phase horribly.
"...they'll say they have 15Hz-30kHz or better frequency range". I assume you mean amplifiers will be rated this way. Speakers will never be rated this good. Not even $70,000 speakers. Yes, computer speakers will exagerate claims. But not this great. Most computer speakers have a -3dB (half perceived volume) point of around 80Hz. A decent $1000+ pair of speakers will have a -3dB point of around 50Hz. Both will usually quote the -60dB point, which is around 60Hz and 35Hz accordingly. Most subwoofers will hit their -60dB point around 25-30Hz. Some extraordinary woofers will push that down below 20Hz. But that's very rare. However, most computer speakers will focus on the 100Hz-2kHz region. Most people perceive mid bass (around 100Hz) as deep bass, so this fools a lot of people.
"...but they will have a crystal-clear, completely flat, frequency response across the entire audible range". No. They won't. No speaker has anything close to a flat frequency response. Go do some waterfall plots of any speaker, regardless of price, and you'll see what I mean. Dips and peaks of 5dB or more are common, even on the most expensive of speakers. And once you go off-center on the speakers, the response gets even worse. To find a speaker that covers the entire audible range, you'll also be looking at a speaker system costing thousands of dollars. I'd look towards Hsu Research for budget subwoofers that can cover the lower end of the audible spectrum. High frequencies aren't as hard to produce. But, in any event, you won't find any speaker that approaches a linear response.
But, yes, I agree that you should use your own ears to test audio systems. If possible, test them in your own home, as the room in which they are placed makes a significant difference to the sound.
Hmmm...you've got a few statements wrong.
America isn't currrently producing nuclear and (if we believe our government, at least) toxic weapons.
America hasn't produced landmines in years.
Now, as for the part about working out *why* the events happened, I think our responses to date have shown an effort to figure out *why* the events happened. We're not going to carpet bomb Afghanistan (I think and hope...again, if we are to believe our leaders). We're going to do something that is more effective against the terrorists in a manner that will minimize the likelyhood of future terrorist attacks. That likely means toppling the Taliban, and supporting a secular government in its place, following up with tons of humanitarian aid. This sounds to me like the US is beginning to understand the threat, and what drives this threat.
I, quite frankly, am totally surprised. I have been pretty strongly anti-Bush until this conflict. Even now, I'd say I'm more pro-Powell than anything. But I have been thoroughly impressed with our government's handling of this situation.
As an American in the UK, let me say how amazed I have been at the compassion and solidarity shown by the Brits in this crisis. There are a few people that have been rather offensive. And a few more that criticized our certain heavy hand in the early days, only to turn around and criticize our lack of response now. You're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't, I guess.
Oh well. I'm just sitting here hoping this isn't the beginning of WWIII. Cheers, and peace!
Yeah, and J2EE is even newer than Swing. BTW, I think Swing has been out since '97. But, on this point we're just squabbling over semantics.
Fires snuff themselves out in space. You need gravity to allow heat to rise sufficiently enough to cause convection, which brings fresh oxygen to the fire. I think you'd need to look at alternative methods of ingestion.
I might suggest a vaporizer. These things heat up the weed to the point of vaporization, and are often sourced by an electric heating element. That should work in space.
- Seamless distribution. The entire application server itself, as well as applications written within it, can be distributed automatically. Very cool.
- Worldwide scalability. Leveraging Java application servers' focus on scalability, this thing scales to the biggest hardware and to clusters
- Fault-tolerance. The clustering abilities provide high availability to JBoss (something JBoss lacked in pre-v3.0 releases).
- Self-tuning. Hmmm....no quick answer here. It can all be configured by way of JMX (Java Management eXtensions). I assume that, in the future, people will add self-tuning features.
- Self-configuration. Same as self-tuning.
- Security. Java has a very nicely developed security model already. JBoss uses this pervasively, as does any Java application server.
- Resource controls. Gee, this sounds to me like declaritive security. That, again, is offered by J2EE.
This sounds to me like MS is actually playing catch-up with open source software.For those of you unfamiliar with JBoss, check it out. It's really nice. For those of you who doubt Java as a platform for application development, go talk to IBM or BEA. They both have tremendous businesses built upon Java application server technology. It's fast, stable, robust, flexible, scalable, and is buzzword-compliant with about anything else I can think of. Besides, I can write applications far quicker with Java than I can with other platforms.
You're way off. If this were the case, fans would not be required or used. Don't forget the inefficencies (heat) of the power supply. Each device in an old machine, from the network cards to the video card to the hard drive, as well as everything on the motherboard, all generate heat. The total draw of the components and CPU will likely exceed 50W. I think whe you throw in fans and the power supply, you're going to find it is very close to, if not well above 100W.
Just out of curiosity, how do you come up with this opinion? It really flies in the face of the conventional wisdom of Gore's and Bush's relative levels of intelligence and intellect.
Also, it sounds like you've got more first (or second) hand experience with Gore. Have you or these folks you know spent much time with him? More than 5 minutes? I want to know--if I should change my opinion of Gore, I want it to be substantiated on something other than heresay.
And don't put words in my mouth. I didn't say intellect != intelligence. I said that oration skills != intelligence. I'm not sure I understand your distinction between intellect and intelligence.
My wife's adviser for her PhD in geology was called to testify on global warming to some government committee a few years ago. In this, he was questioned by a number of respected individuals in the science field, many of whom were geologists (although not of the same specialty as my wife's adviser). At the end, Gore came in for a short 5-minute Q&A period. My wife's adviser said that the questions Gore put forth were the most intelligent and thought provoking of the bunch. Obviously he had been well briefed by his aides, but my wife's adviser says that it was clearly his own thinking (follow-up questions to his answers and such). He would most surely disagree with your opinions about Gore.
Oh, yes. My wife's adviser is a conservative southerner from Alabama. Most definitely not a Gore supporter.
You can be quite intelligent and now be an excellent orator. In fact you can be quite intelligent and not be very good at English. Don't put down Gore's intelligence. In fact, all the democrat presidents (and Gore) from the last half century stack up as wonderfully intelligent. However, most of them performed as president very poorly. Intelligence is not strongly correlated with the quality of one's presidency.
I see. You're that one person for which Microsoft created Bob! I knew you existed somewhere.
With Bob, the computer has one button. But don't touch it--you might break it! (sorry...paraphrasing a Dilbert cartoon).
Dalai Lama! He is an unwitting victim. He didn't break a Russian law. He broke an American law, while on Russian soil. How would you like it if Russian laws applied to you? I don't think you'd like it. Now, after breaking said law, let's say you take a business trip to Moscow. While in Russia, the Russian authorities nab you. That would suck. There would be a huge outcry against it. Yet that is exactly what happened here. The US tried to impose its laws on the citizen of another country while that citizen was outside the US. That's really bad.
He did not break the law on American soil. And he's not an American citizen (American citizens can be held liable within the US for crimes they commit outside the US borders, even if they're legal in the country where the crime was committed). I'm not sure how US law really applies here. But, then again, I'm not really sure of the reasoning behind the DMCA.
The Internet promised to be the next generation platform for pornography and piracy. I can remember back in the mid-80s being able to download porn images (er...I mean a good friend told me they remember...). The Internet certainly has delivered on these promises.
I'd love to see a breakdown of total Internet bandwidth allocated to porn and piracy. I'd bet it consumes >90% of the total bandwidth used. Movies, music, and babes...now, if only they could figure out a way to download alcohol and drugs.
Dry air results in static electricity. Unless the data center is in a swamp (e.g. Houston, New Orleans), the data center probably has both a dehumidifier and a humidifier. Humidifiers are very common in data centers.
Anyone remember a day when crackers were called hackers, and there was no distinction between the two that resulted from intentions? Yes, long before crackers were crackers, they were hackers. And hackers didn't mind such a distinction. You see, most people didn't write about us.
-sigh-
OK. A screwdriver can be used as a hammer. It works as a hammer. It's not the appropriate tool to use if you need to hammer a nail, though.
CGI/Perl is scalable? Really? Can you run one web server with multiple CGI/Perl instances, without using some sort of proxy? I consider proxies cheating, because, that isn't a feature of CGI/Perl. It is, in essence, using a screwdriver as a hammer.
CGI/Perl has transactional support? Really? Maybe the DB aspect has transactional support. Maybe people have built transactional frameworks atop CGI/Perl. But, again, you're using a screwdriver as a hammer.
CGI/Perl has declaritive security? Hahahahahaha. OK. I've stopped laughing.
CGI/Perl has a rich set of built-in connectors to legacy systems? Really? Where? Please show me. I haven't been able to get my CGI-based e-commerce website to integrate to SAP and CICS, and I want to know! Really, this is another situation of using a screwdriver for a hammer.
And, just because millions are using the wrong tool for the job, doesn't make the tool the right tool for the job. Case in point? Windows, as a robust and reliable platform for mission critical applications.
Also, just because an application chooses not to deploy these features does not make these features go away. Just because you've "seen them not deployed under J2EE when they could have" doesn't make J2EE any less enterprise-class. And, these four features I mentioned--*if* there's a solution for these using CGI/Perl, then I can assure you it's the architectural equivalent of duct tape.
Also, Sun is planning to officially add generics to Java for the upcoming JDK1.5 release.
However, I would contend that most cases where templates are used in real world programming, they shouldn't. Readability and maintainability can go out the window without judicious care programming templates. Templates are ideal for containers, where they assist readability and maintainability. But in many (most?) cases, they result in code that is difficult to maintain.
This is, in my opinion, the reason Java will overtake C/C++ in popularity/use. Java code, with all its simplifications over C++, is easier to maintain and write. The results in fewer projects that end in failure. It also results in code bases that last longer, due to easier maintenance.
Dude, I don't know if you've done any benchmarks, but Tomcat sucks royally. It's about 1/3-1/5 the speed of JRun and Jetty, the latter of which is available free of charge for non-commercial use.
Tomcat v3.3 (in beta now) is a performance release to Tomcat, and improves things a lot. But it's still quite a bit slower than Jetty & JRun.
Tomcat v4.0 has the promise of working better. It's got the right architecture. Craig McClanahan, the chief architect, deserves big kudos for laying things out nicely, and writing really good code. But it's still in beta, too. I haven't done any benchmarks since beta 1 (before any performance tuning, IIRC), but it was pretty slow back then--slower than Tomcat v3.2.
All I mean to say is that Tomcat is a very poor implementation of a servlet engine. It is the reference. It does work reliably. But it is not very efficient.
If you've got a commercial site, use Jetty or JRun.
Enterprise-class solutions usually consist of:
-Scalability. Replicate tiers from the solution to provide solutions that scale beyond a single computer.
-Transactional support.
-Built-in declaritive security. Leave the role of security to the deployers where it belongs, not with developers.
-A rich API that has built-in connectors to legacy systems, such as CICS.
In short, you need an application server.
Hmmm....CGI+Perl doesn't offer any of this. Gee, J2EE does. So does Site Server (many people forget that MS invented the market we now call "application servers").
You know, I've heard that, during wartime situations, pilots often resort to things like duct tape to repair their aircrafts. Does that make duct tape suitable for commercial airlines? No. Just because one person uses it, successfully, for certain tasks does not mean that it is the appropriate tool for those tasks.
Check out JOnAS, which serves as the core for Enhydra. Both are functional, real-world application servers.
Check out Exolab, consisting of OpenEJB, OpenJMS, OpenORB, and more. Again, this is another open-source application server.
For web services, check out Apache SOAP. The wonderful folks at IBM have gifted the open source community with a SOAP/WSDL/UDDI implementation. There was some talk a while back about JBoss integrating Apache SOAP into its offerings, although the mailing list now causes me to doubt this.
Of course, I'm taking Mono and dotGNU.
What does all this add up to? It looks to me that Mono and dotGNU provide migration paths for existing MS customers. J2EE provides a software scalability that is not possible with Microsoft application servers. Between Sun, SGI, and IBM, the MS/Intel hegemony don't stand a chance with respect to hardware scalability. And with JBoss, Microsoft can't compete on price. It seems to me that the Unix camp will do quite well with this whole web services thing.
That said, it's not like one side will win while the other side loses. No matter what happens, MS will have a sizable camp of die-hard devotees. Likewise with the Unix camp. Somewhere in between, web services will support mixed solutions. Throw in non-MS implementations of the CRE, and the current quality of Java under Windows (it's still better than Linux...and, yes, I have tried the IBM VM), and we've got a situation where the underlying platform is really not that important. Finally, I'll get to focus on what I do best (programming), while avoiding all the religious hype surronding MS vs. Unix.
Well, you're almost correct. Everything is correct except for the food. The food sucks in Amsterdam to a level not matched by any European city of similar size, with the exception of cities in the Scandanavian countries.
On my last six visits to Amsterdam, I was utterly amazed at how well the Dutch can slaughter cuisines that I previously thought couldn't be messed up. Mexican Stew? When's the last time I've had Mexican Stew in Texas or Mexico? Hahahaha.
There's good Asian food in Holland. And good cheese. The bread is better than the states, but not as good as in Belgium or France. Oh yes, and if fries are your thing, nobody does fries like the Dutch. But beyond that, good luck.
For the rest of it, you're dead on, though. I truly love Holland, although I prefer Den Hague and Haarlem to Amsterdam.
LOL! That's great. Far better than my diatribe against this guy. Fantastic. Thx.
What a moron. Look, if a gay person doesn't interfere with my life, I think we should let that person live however they wish. The same goes with the use of drugs--as long as it doesn't interfere with my life, my neighbor can do whatever they want. I'm not brainwashed. I simply believe in the mantra of "live and let live".
You seem to be afraid that being around gay people will somehow make *you* gay. Sounds to me like you are a latent homosexual. You ought to experiment with this. You might find your real calling in life.
As for San Fran being a cesspool, I'm not quite sure what city you're talking about. I travel quite a bit, and I can honestly say that SF is one of the most beautiful cities in the world. The nightlife, the arts and entertainment, and the city & park life is wonderful, with few equals anywhere in the world.
Spread deadly diseases to the N. American continent? OMG. What planet are you on? Given your reasoning, next we should get rid of all the women. After all, AIDS is transmitted about 10x more easily from the man to the woman during sexual intercourse than it is the other way around. So perhaps God wants to get rid of the gays and the women (please not the sarcasm). You unenlightened twit.
As for the raping of 13 year-old boys, I think we should probably focus more on Catholic priests than on the homosexual community. There are a *lot* fewer priests out there, but there sure seems to be a lot higher percentage of priests raping little children than the homosexual community at large.
Where do you get these wonderful statistics about the average lifespan of homosexuals? I'd like to see even one reference to this, regardless of how dodgy the source might be.
Your opinions are pathetic, the result of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. Gays aren't another race of beings. They're really quite similar to you and me. In my experience, the members of the gay community are far more upstanding, on average, than the heterosexual community. Why? I'm not sure. But I've got a hypothesis that it's a result of the gay community being more open to people that aren't like themselves. Tolerance is good. And the Golden Rule is even better. Try practising it once in a while--you might find that a few of those gays you've always hated turn out to be genuinely good people. One might even become your best friend! Without "brainwashing" you to become gay (gasp!).
Or perhaps you should live in your own little world, bashing gays whenever you get the chance. I'm sure that makes you feel better about yourself--you don't have to come to terms with your own sexuality. Gays are nothing to be afraid of. They, with the exception of a few bad apples (I don't need to mention the problem with heterosexuals and rape here...there are bad apples on both sides), don't tend to impose their beliefs on others. They don't go seeking out heterosexuals so they can turn them. They are often in committed, monogomous relationships. They are usually caring, kind people. In short, they're just like the heterosexual community, except that their sexual preferences have required that they develop tolerance. It would be nice if you could learn a little, too.