/dev/random to the dsp device ? I prefer to the midi device, then it sounds like someone throwing a drumkit and grand piano down the stairs at the same time.
If you really like this go ahead, but be warned - by someone who actually bought a Vaio Premium SZ and suffers daily for it - that Sony in japan *sucks* with a nuclear capability. The laptop crashed 5 times a day on average running the OS only... literally nothing else installed, it would crash repeatedly browsing Slashdot or digg. It was sent back to the factory twice, no change. I asked for a refund or a change to another model, nothing.
I installed Ubuntu and it works, but most of the peripherals like the webcam and fingerprint reader don't. But at least it doesn't crash anymore.
I can't speak for Sony outside of Japan, but I strongly recommend against buying from Sony in Japan. Seriously the *worst* product and customer service I've ever dealt with, especially for a product that cost over US$3500 at the time.
There's a good reason Vaio happens to be a four letter word.
Wow - it seems when I said "... to favour SSDs the same way previous generations of filesystems tried...", some people took that to mean *exactly* the same way the magnetic drives do.
Please tell me you don't think I'm that stupid.
My meaning was that it should be possible to use foreknowledge of the underlying hardware's mechanics/strengths/weaknesses to make decisions about block allocation that favour that hardware. To put it simply, "playing to the strengths" of the hardware.
The comment about sequential reads causing the SSD to lose on performance compared with magnetic drives caught my attention. Isn't this highly dependent on the filesystem you use and its strategy for block allocation ?
Wouldn't it be possible to design the block allocation algorithm to favour SSDs the same way previous generations of filesystems tried to put the next block on the disk to be the one under the head at the current moment (or whatever it was they did) ?
Hmmm... I wouldn't say it's as simple as that. As an english speaker who picked up japanese so I could work in japan, I can say from experience that the chinese language speakers I had around me learning japanese had it tougher than I did, mainly because they were subconsciously trying to treat japanese as a dialect of chinese. It took them twice as long to get productive because of how much they had to unlearn, and they usually ticked off most of the japanese people they were trying to help them learn because of the chinese thing. The korean guys ? they picked up japanese *really* quickly. My guess is that their language is much closer (and they seemed to try a lot harder than the rest of us did).
I'd advise that despite what you might read in the media about "china being the next japan" economically, learning its language as a shortcut to other languages in the region is probably going to hurt you more than help in practice.
That said, mandarin does cover a larger geographic area of asia, so I guess the moral is that mandarin will help you if you land in a mandarin speaking country, but hurt you if you don't.
Agreed. The case study project used when I was studying neural nets as a noob was a tank game (teaching tanks how to collect pellets randomly distributed over a target area and not hit other tanks) had all the core elements described as being important in Ms Pac Man, and that was quite a while ago.
Methinks this is just a case of Ms Pac Man being used for recognizability to people who don't know the field. Certainly nothing groundbreaking.
"In the print edition of Forbes there's a great (albeit sometimes painful) tradition of doing "follow-through" articles where a reporter either takes a victory lap for making a good call or falls on his sword for making a bad one. Online publications don't typically ask for follow-throughs. But I need to write one."
Ah ah ah.... no hiding behind "it's only a metaphor" please. If you had been right, I have no doubt you would have *physically* taken a victory lap of the Forbes office, so it's only fair that you *physically* fall on your sword as you described since you were wrong.
Please make sure to put down a drop sheet first for easy cleanup afterwards. Thank you... and GO!
This is an interesting line of thinking (that I happen to agree with)....
it basically implies that in terms of stability, XP will be superior to Vista for the next 2-3 years presumably, so using Vista will be the domain of people who either
a) don't have mission-critical requirements (e.g. home users) or b) need some feature that Vista has that XP doesn't.
As someone who has recently bought a fully stacked Sony Vaio SZ93 notebook (which only supports Vista) and had to "roll it back" to Linux/XP due to the endless crashing, lockups and data corruption/loss, I can tell you that group (b) above is a *very* small group indeed. With the exception of some eye candy, Vista Business has zero in the way of features that would mandate an update from XP. The only reason I notice that I'm not using Vista is the lack of crashing.
The really amazing part: I switched to Ubuntu Feisty in the end, and the end result was *way* cooler desktop effects, which is the most strongly marketed reason to switch to Vista.
Back to the point though... if everyone thinks like you do (which I think they should) MS will have resort to obsoleting XP early or more of this forcing Vista-only support from OEMs, or Vista will have a slow uptake indeed. Personally, I'm expecting:
i) MS will force Vista-only support, and ii) most people won't think like this: they'll buy it anyway
Source is an interesting one
on
Hardening Linux
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· Score: 1
I thought this was pretty light content wise, until I noticed it was from the publication that includes Stan "ISO" Beer among its staff writers.... (can't find any references to the "What's an ISO image ?" article, but those of you who remember the article will no doubt remember this guy fondly).
Surely the degree of accuracy to which you would have to measure the face to make it unique would imply that a good case of acne would be enough to deny access to your accounts.
Or better still, a broken nose ? Imagine having to go explain to the bank that you needed to change your pin because you were drunk and got into a fight at a pub ? There goes your chance at getting a homeloan...
For the non-Japanese-speakers, the bit he says when she first walks up is just "Hello, nice to meet you" or near enough, and the bit at the end that she says is "Hey ! Hey ! Who's that guy ? Isn't he kinda geeky/uncool ?", to which Hodgman responds "Bonjourno", proving her point.
My point was that Oracle haven't done anything *innovative*. Toplink was bought by Oracle in 2002, long after hibernate became popular. Nothing innovative in buying something.
Grails seems like more evidence of the same M.O. from what I can see. Wait till something's cool then buy it... that's the behvaiour of a venture capitalist, not a market leader in java.
That's the sound a thousands of Java devs thinking "so what".
Oracle *really* wants to be seen as a market leader in java, but the last time they did anything really innovative was Java Stored Procedures, and that was the 1990s. The only people I've ever met who use Oracle Java products (eg Oracle Application Server) were people who liked being wined and dined by a sales rep. I've never met anyone who did their own performance tests and ended up choosing OAS.
Happy to be proven wrong, but 7+ years since the last success story makes me think there ain't much more to come from these guys. Jump on a buzzword and rush an average product to market, hoping to piggyback sales off the database's reputation... that seems to be the M.O.
... then why are we so often told the female initiated divorce rate is so high (over 50% when I heard last. sorry no sources). If they were *that* good at picking spouses, then you'd think that you'd see more guys initiating divorces than women, right ?
Am I missing something ? (and please spare the "women don't know what they want" comments... more than a little harsh in my view).
You can blame it squarely on Ubuntu then, since the Fedora Core 5 install I did was completely stock. Select Japanese + English in the installer options, then run the one line link command to set.xinputd correctly as was described in the Release Notes (and this is optional: only needed if you want English as the default).
But the above steps are required to make multilinguals work in any app. Java plays along nicely otherwise. My guess is that your Ubuntu has some issues, not Java.
What ? Eclipse has no issues with languages at all
on
Will Sun Open Source Java?
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· Score: 2, Informative
I run a dual English/Japanese Fedora AMD64 and x86 win32 system, and have never had any troubles with java and language input or display on any of them. Especially with Eclipse which I use probably 5-10 hours of every day. SCIM-Anthy is great, it very quickly learned and suggested the most commonly used kanji versions too, as windows does.
I call bullshit - just because you don't know how to set up your machine properly doesn't mean java has language problems.
Agreed... I tried first Fedora Core 5 and then Dapper Drake flight 6 on the same hardware not a week ago, and after 2 or 3 hours of Ubuntu gladly switched back to Fedora. There was no appreciable speed difference at all, and if anything the poorer driver auto-detection (rumours of it being better were why I tried it in the first place) and x86_64 package availability was enough to send me back to Fedora.
I guess for every "in the wild" example there's a counter-example...
I've been using Yahoo Small Business Email for about 3 years now, and while it's fine for IMAP/POP3, the SMTP service sucks. I can understand the use of graylisting, but from a user perspective, it makes the server unusable because the time it takes to process is longer than some devices will wait. My desktop PCs are fine, but my Symbian based mobile phone needs an SMTP relay on the road, and that always times out waiting the 1 minute plus that Yahoo takes to work it's way through the graylist process - truly: regularly more than a minute.
At home I had to set up an internal relay, but that means VPN-ing home before sending mail whenever I take the laptop on the road with wireless connections, or a local server, which would need somewhere to relay to.
The only reason for not switching is the cost... they are literally the cheapest out there (US$10 a year).
My point is just that if Yahoo need to add a greylisting system that takes a minute plus to process, they should add enough hardware to make it perform well enough that more than just PCs can use it.
Ah but you do need to sign an NDA... because the conditions on the license for distributing the APIs say that you're not allowed to release anything that implements the APIs without passing the TCK. I got pulled up on this by a Sun staff member when releasing my servlet container implementation.
Slashdot Mirror
Ironic name: tsubame means sparrow in japanese, and also has the slang usage of toy-boy (as in a cougar's toy-boy).
Not sure what to read into that ...
/dev/random to the dsp device ? I prefer to the midi device, then it sounds like someone throwing a drumkit and grand piano down the stairs at the same time.
If you really like this go ahead, but be warned - by someone who actually bought a Vaio Premium SZ and suffers daily for it - that Sony in japan *sucks* with a nuclear capability. The laptop crashed 5 times a day on average running the OS only ... literally nothing else installed, it would crash repeatedly browsing Slashdot or digg. It was sent back to the factory twice, no change. I asked for a refund or a change to another model, nothing.
I installed Ubuntu and it works, but most of the peripherals like the webcam and fingerprint reader don't. But at least it doesn't crash anymore.
I can't speak for Sony outside of Japan, but I strongly recommend against buying from Sony in Japan. Seriously the *worst* product and customer service I've ever dealt with, especially for a product that cost over US$3500 at the time.
There's a good reason Vaio happens to be a four letter word.
Wow - it seems when I said " ... to favour SSDs the same way previous generations of filesystems tried ...", some people took that to mean *exactly* the same way the magnetic drives do.
Please tell me you don't think I'm that stupid.
My meaning was that it should be possible to use foreknowledge of the underlying hardware's mechanics/strengths/weaknesses to make decisions about block allocation that favour that hardware. To put it simply, "playing to the strengths" of the hardware.
The comment about sequential reads causing the SSD to lose on performance compared with magnetic drives caught my attention. Isn't this highly dependent on the filesystem you use and its strategy for block allocation ?
Wouldn't it be possible to design the block allocation algorithm to favour SSDs the same way previous generations of filesystems tried to put the next block on the disk to be the one under the head at the current moment (or whatever it was they did) ?
> If you're looking in asia, mandarin.
Hmmm ... I wouldn't say it's as simple as that. As an english speaker who picked up japanese so I could work in japan, I can say from experience that the chinese language speakers I had around me learning japanese had it tougher than I did, mainly because they were subconsciously trying to treat japanese as a dialect of chinese. It took them twice as long to get productive because of how much they had to unlearn, and they usually ticked off most of the japanese people they were trying to help them learn because of the chinese thing. The korean guys ? they picked up japanese *really* quickly. My guess is that their language is much closer (and they seemed to try a lot harder than the rest of us did).
I'd advise that despite what you might read in the media about "china being the next japan" economically, learning its language as a shortcut to other languages in the region is probably going to hurt you more than help in practice.
That said, mandarin does cover a larger geographic area of asia, so I guess the moral is that mandarin will help you if you land in a mandarin speaking country, but hurt you if you don't.
Agreed. The case study project used when I was studying neural nets as a noob was a tank game (teaching tanks how to collect pellets randomly distributed over a target area and not hit other tanks) had all the core elements described as being important in Ms Pac Man, and that was quite a while ago.
Methinks this is just a case of Ms Pac Man being used for recognizability to people who don't know the field. Certainly nothing groundbreaking.
"In the print edition of Forbes there's a great (albeit sometimes painful) tradition of doing "follow-through" articles where a reporter either takes a victory lap for making a good call or falls on his sword for making a bad one. Online publications don't typically ask for follow-throughs. But I need to write one."
.... no hiding behind "it's only a metaphor" please. If you had been right, I have no doubt you would have *physically* taken a victory lap of the Forbes office, so it's only fair that you *physically* fall on your sword as you described since you were wrong.
... and GO!
Ah ah ah
Please make sure to put down a drop sheet first for easy cleanup afterwards. Thank you
Hail Mary = Catholic
Mary was just his mum = Protestant (includes Church of England)
Here endeth the lesson.
This is an interesting line of thinking (that I happen to agree with) ....
... if everyone thinks like you do (which I think they should) MS will have resort to obsoleting XP early or more of this forcing Vista-only support from OEMs, or Vista will have a slow uptake indeed. Personally, I'm expecting:
it basically implies that in terms of stability, XP will be superior to Vista for the next 2-3 years presumably, so using Vista will be the domain of people who either
a) don't have mission-critical requirements (e.g. home users) or
b) need some feature that Vista has that XP doesn't.
As someone who has recently bought a fully stacked Sony Vaio SZ93 notebook (which only supports Vista) and had to "roll it back" to Linux/XP due to the endless crashing, lockups and data corruption/loss, I can tell you that group (b) above is a *very* small group indeed. With the exception of some eye candy, Vista Business has zero in the way of features that would mandate an update from XP. The only reason I notice that I'm not using Vista is the lack of crashing.
The really amazing part: I switched to Ubuntu Feisty in the end, and the end result was *way* cooler desktop effects, which is the most strongly marketed reason to switch to Vista.
Back to the point though
i) MS will force Vista-only support, and
ii) most people won't think like this: they'll buy it anyway
I thought this was pretty light content wise, until I noticed it was from the publication that includes Stan "ISO" Beer among its staff writers .... (can't find any references to the "What's an ISO image ?" article, but those of you who remember the article will no doubt remember this guy fondly).
Surely the degree of accuracy to which you would have to measure the face to make it unique would imply that a good case of acne would be enough to deny access to your accounts.
...
Or better still, a broken nose ? Imagine having to go explain to the bank that you needed to change your pin because you were drunk and got into a fight at a pub ? There goes your chance at getting a homeloan
Hey - no one said anything about the laptop being a Dell, okay ?
For the non-Japanese-speakers, the bit he says when she first walks up is just "Hello, nice to meet you" or near enough, and the bit at the end that she says is "Hey ! Hey ! Who's that guy ? Isn't he kinda geeky/uncool ?", to which Hodgman responds "Bonjourno", proving her point.
Phtttt ... and you call yourself Rich ...
real rich people know the answers to this stuff.
My point was that Oracle haven't done anything *innovative*. Toplink was bought by Oracle in 2002, long after hibernate became popular. Nothing innovative in buying something.
... that's the behvaiour of a venture capitalist, not a market leader in java.
Grails seems like more evidence of the same M.O. from what I can see. Wait till something's cool then buy it
That's the sound a thousands of Java devs thinking "so what".
... that seems to be the M.O.
Oracle *really* wants to be seen as a market leader in java, but the last time they did anything really innovative was Java Stored Procedures, and that was the 1990s. The only people I've ever met who use Oracle Java products (eg Oracle Application Server) were people who liked being wined and dined by a sales rep. I've never met anyone who did their own performance tests and ended up choosing OAS.
Happy to be proven wrong, but 7+ years since the last success story makes me think there ain't much more to come from these guys. Jump on a buzzword and rush an average product to market, hoping to piggyback sales off the database's reputation
... then why are we so often told the female initiated divorce rate is so high (over 50% when I heard last. sorry no sources). If they were *that* good at picking spouses, then you'd think that you'd see more guys initiating divorces than women, right ?
... more than a little harsh in my view).
Am I missing something ? (and please spare the "women don't know what they want" comments
You can blame it squarely on Ubuntu then, since the Fedora Core 5 install I did was completely stock. Select Japanese + English in the installer options, then run the one line link command to set .xinputd correctly as was described in the Release Notes (and this is optional: only needed if you want English as the default).
But the above steps are required to make multilinguals work in any app. Java plays along nicely otherwise. My guess is that your Ubuntu has some issues, not Java.
I run a dual English/Japanese Fedora AMD64 and x86 win32 system, and have never had any troubles with java and language input or display on any of them. Especially with Eclipse which I use probably 5-10 hours of every day. SCIM-Anthy is great, it very quickly learned and suggested the most commonly used kanji versions too, as windows does.
I call bullshit - just because you don't know how to set up your machine properly doesn't mean java has language problems.
Agreed ... I tried first Fedora Core 5 and then Dapper Drake flight 6 on the same hardware not a week ago, and after 2 or 3 hours of Ubuntu gladly switched back to Fedora. There was no appreciable speed difference at all, and if anything the poorer driver auto-detection (rumours of it being better were why I tried it in the first place) and x86_64 package availability was enough to send me back to Fedora.
...
I guess for every "in the wild" example there's a counter-example
I've been using Yahoo Small Business Email for about 3 years now, and while it's fine for IMAP/POP3, the SMTP service sucks. I can understand the use of graylisting, but from a user perspective, it makes the server unusable because the time it takes to process is longer than some devices will wait. My desktop PCs are fine, but my Symbian based mobile phone needs an SMTP relay on the road, and that always times out waiting the 1 minute plus that Yahoo takes to work it's way through the graylist process - truly: regularly more than a minute.
... they are literally the cheapest out there (US$10 a year).
At home I had to set up an internal relay, but that means VPN-ing home before sending mail whenever I take the laptop on the road with wireless connections, or a local server, which would need somewhere to relay to.
The only reason for not switching is the cost
My point is just that if Yahoo need to add a greylisting system that takes a minute plus to process, they should add enough hardware to make it perform well enough that more than just PCs can use it.
Heheh - kinda like "renovator's dream home".
Ah but you do need to sign an NDA ... because the conditions on the license for distributing the APIs say that you're not allowed to release anything that implements the APIs without passing the TCK. I got pulled up on this by a Sun staff member when releasing my servlet container implementation.
Couldn't agree more though otherwise about NDAs.