Bottom line: Neither is superior in all ways. Pick the things that matter to you.
Basically a) larger size, and b) refresh rate are the only reasons to get plasma according to the referred article. Everything else is either a push or in favor of LCD.
I presume that there is some amount of "we spent all this damn money making all this capacity to manufacture plasma, so we better recover that investment as much as we can". My assumption is that between plasma and LCD, LCD is going to win. If you believe that and you manufacture both, push plasma as much as possible to cut your losses, and LCD will take care of itself.
Seatle or SF Areas? That should be a better question. It is the quaility of life, not the job.
Just so we're clear, Google has a thriving (200 person+) operation in Kirkland, WA, which is about 15 minutes from Microsoft's main campus in Redmond. It's a "company within the company" -- the larger operation is certainly in CA, but this is a smaller division with exactly the same corporate culture and perqs as the CA main campus has (food, giant monitors, the feeling like you died and went to IKEA [heaven or hell], Python, etc.). In fact, Steve Yegge (of "Good Agile Bad Agile" fame) is in that office, and his observations of the Google culture are from the Kirkland perspective.
Taco Bell in collaboration with disk manufacturer Memory Tech Japan, has successfully integrated their seven layer burrito technology with the HD-DVD and DVD standards, creating the industry's first "seven plus three" format. Initial reports hail the format as having "crystal clear audio, flawless picture and a zesty festive flavor".
Why is everyone so interested in handsfree computer use for programming. You'd think there would be other reasons why you might want to, say, browse the web without having to type. In case you need to, uh, knit or something while you're browsing. Yeah, that's it.
Is the question "can it do PGP" or is the question "can it do encrypted mail"?
There is a Firefox GMail S/MIME plugin if your goal is encrypted mail that's compatible with the encryption built into most current email clients. I think this also addresses your concern of key storage, since I believe it's in your Firefox keystore.
Maybe the openBSD & openSSH projects should seperate?
Yeah, I was wondering the same thing. I mean, I don't know anything about OpenBSD, but I sure do like OpenSSH. If eighty cents of every dollar I spend supporting OpenSSH gets flushed down the OpenBSD toilet, is that a good use of my contribution?
I'm glad that OpenSSH exists and I want to support it. Why does my contribution to OpenSSH have to subsidize OpenBSD? I don't know anything about it, it seems like another scrappy fighter in the OS fight, and I don't really want to be involved with that. I don't mind that the maintainers want to tie these two projects together, but don't come crying to me if you're running out of money subsidizing hackathons and other things for OpenBSD, and then threaten OpenSSH's life because you want to use money people contribute to it to prop up OpenBSD.
Sometimes there are economic realities. Face them. Either separate OpenSSH into its own financial entity, or increase revenue. I know the plan is to increase revenue, but if it doesn't happen, then put OpenSSH off on its own and concede (economic) defeat on OpenBSD.
Yes, I know, talking out of my ass, don't know anything about it, blah blah. This is Slashdot, would you expect any more?;)
To participate in the Ultimate Virtual Appliance Challenge (the "Challenge"), you must be at least 18 years old. The Challenge is open to individuals or teams of up to 10 people (the "Participant"), but not to corporate entries. By participating in the Challenge, Participants agree to be bound by these rules and to all decisions of VMware, which are final, binding and conclusive in all matters. To keep the Challenge legal and fair, we need to prohibit certain participants, see below.
. . .
PROHIBITED PARTICIPANTS
We want a fair and legal Challenge!
Full and part-time employees of VMware as well as those who are performing internships during the Challenge duration and those involved in the production (including prize suppliers), implementation and distribution of this Challenge and their advertising or promotion agencies, parent companies, service providers, agents, officers, subsidiaries or affiliates, or any other persons or entities directly associated with the Challenge and members of the immediate families and/or persons living in the same household as such persons, are ineligible to enter the Challenge. Prizes will not be awarded to residents of Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan, or Syria.
Freaked my shit out when the parent said it's only open to students, and moderators should probably fact check a little better before slapping an Informative on something. My two cents.
The bottom line is that you don't have to be a student, you can't work for VMWare, and you can't be a rat bastard commie terrorist. I'll bet they write shitty code anyway. The terrorists that is.
This is not a Betamax/VHS battle from the consumer's point of view. I mean, maybe the content providers and equipment manufacturers may view it this way, but there's a fundamental difference from the standpoint of the consumer.
With Betamax/VHS, there were pretty significant mechanical differences between the formats -- having a single unit that could play both types of media was essentially impossible without having two completely separate (expensive and futzy) transports. In the case of DVD, HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, they are all 12cm spinning optical discs with exactly the same physical characteristics from the transport point of view. Yes, there is a difference from the logical data formatting and laser point of view, but there is no reason that I can see (other than licensing from the respective consortiums) that a single player couldn't play CD, VCD, DVD, HD-DVD and Blu-Ray.
So fine, as a consumer, I don't give a shit. Frankly, I'm going to be buying DVDs as long as they make them, and I'm perfectly happy with that. Unless the Blu-Ray or HD-DVD consortium prevents manufacturers from making a unit that can play both types, I'm going to buy a new player that handles all of the formats, and they can jerk off as long as they want figuring out who's a winner, and I can buy pretty much whatever comes out and be able to play it.
I characterize Objective C and the Interface Builder integration and a lot of those concepts to have been ten years ahead of its time when it was in its heyday (let's say 1988). So it's a 1998 environment in 2005 -- it's not really getting any younger -- they used up their "ahead of their time" card awhile ago.
As much as everyone loves the warm fuzzy "objects send messages" purity, it all starts falling apart on hardcore refactorings (renaming messages and classes) which I consider to be a Large Problem with maintaining a large codebase. Don't get me wrong, I like Objective C. But man, it was a sad day when I learned that they're not going to keep Java up-to-date. Maybe Cocoa# is my savior.
I programmed in Windows for 15 years before becoming more of a "server guy" and now an "OS X guy". I do agree with the comments that the API is far easier to grasp than the mishmash of shit that Microsoft shovels on you (Win32/COM/WinFX/MFC/ATL/Etc. etc.) But that doesn't have anything to do with Objective C or Xcode. That's just smart API design which isn't language or environment dependent.
Then JAVA was going to be completely portable to all operating systems. But not all Java virtual machines are identical, and different version of Java came out, and things diverged.
I maintain a 300KLOC Java source code base for a mail server product on four platforms (Windows, Linux, Solaris and OS X). We started out with AIX and HP/UX also, but removed those as targets because the markets weren't there (not because of portability issues). We don't ship on OS X, but it is my day-to-day development environment, so I still make sure it works on there. The issues I remember having are:
End of line conventions. Make sure you use CRLF or LF as appropriate, which is available through the Java environment as the line.separator property.
Path separator. Slash or backslash as appropriate, and actually if you just use slash all the time, the java.io.File methods will figure it out. But that's also available through the environment file.separator property.
Filesystem case semantics. This is a harder one. Windows is case-retentive and case-insensitive. Most other OS's are case-retentive AND case-sensitive. So on Windows "foo.txt" and "FOO.TXT" are the same file, but not on other platforms. Don't be a jerk -- use the right case. That's usually just sloppy.
The most important thing that saved our bacon was having a comprehensive set of unit tests. We operate under the principle that "if it's not tested, the functionality doesn't exist", and maintain about 90% code coverage through unit tests. It's very easy to track down cross-platform niggling issues when you have a clean, automated unit testing system that makes a loud crashing noise when something smells bad. I was able to do the Solaris platform testing in about a day and fix the stuff that snapped off (basically that list above).
As far as "But not all Java virtual machines are identical, and different version of Java came out, and things diverged", I'm tempted to say that this is fearmongering and that this does not present a practical problem. However I will confess that we have only ever tested with the Sun JVM, the OS X port of that, and the IBM JVM, which I think all tie back to the Sun code. It's not clear what the practical reasons for using another JVM are, and I presume that it has something to do with licensing and philosophy moreso than practicality. If you only use features within the scope of your target JVM, you don't have any problems, so make sure they're matched up.
There's no subscription. There's no RSS feed. They're audio files with talking. I have a 2 hour car ride today, and I would have loved it if this were an actual "podcast" and I could have clicked one link to sync all of the audio commentary to my iPod.
Are audio files with music "podcasts" also? How about audio files with video attached?
Sorry. "You must be less than this pedantic to read Slashdot." Moving along now.
I couldn't agree with this more. We did a startup in 2001 and kept a web presence up and running the whole time. The primary things we agreed would always be available:
A technology overview. The things we were working on for technology.
A blog for each of the principals. Not that we always updated it, but we tried.
Resumes for each of the principals.
Some amount of changing content on the front page. In our case we had company news, security news and virus outbreaks.
Technical notes. These were observations on technology longer than a blog entry. We did some nontrivial analysis of various Java technologies that ended up in here.
Downloads. We maintained a few free utilities for people to download that showcased some of our technology.
Based on this web presence, we were contacted several times with various offers, ultimately selling the technology to Sendmail, Inc. and taking full-time positions there working on the code. Now the product (Mailstream Manager) is going gangbusters under the Sendmail flag.
This is the second time we've done this kind of deal. The first time was pre-Google in 1996, so it was more of a "loud startup with good industry networking" since you couldn't STFW as effectively in those days;). This technology is still in use today in products from Tumbleweed Communications.
Getting back to this "Do Stealth Startups Suck?" theme -- our personal perspective is that if it's so cool that you have to keep it a secret, then it isn't very cool at all. If you can't maintain an edge even if the other guy knows exactly what you're doing, then you don't have an edge. We call this the "True Lies" approach -- at the end of True Lies, Schwarzenegger explains exactly his plan for escaping from the guy who's gonna torture him, and despite the fact that the guy knows the exact plan, Schwarzenegger is able to execute it and escape.
I love how everyone says "it has AAC support" about their products, and yet all the ones I've seen are not compatible with the songs from the iTunes Music Store.
So what's the deal? Does this phone support "plain AAC" (which is basically worthless), or does it support "playing songs downloaded from the iTunes Music Store"?
We use JFreeChart which works fine for us. We have fairly simple data to graph (a line chart with messages per second, bar charts for top spam and virus recipients) for the analysis summary in an email scanning product.
There was an interview on Engadget last November with Skype co-founder and CEO Niklas Zennström:
What is SkypeIn and what are the plans for it?
SkypeIn will allow phone calls from the traditional phone network in to Skype. We don't have a specific launch date yet, but hope to offer it sometime this winter.
I'm a server guy, so I usually write an HTTP server or an SMTP server. This gives me a feel for how I/O is done in the language, threading, exceptional cases, parsing, regular expressions, etc. Everything a growing boy needs. HTTP and SMTP are pretty simple protocols, and are actually useful to have once you've completed them -- my need for an RPN calculator or an eight queen solver or a wandering ant trail follower or a trainyard simulator or a Pavlov's triangle solver or a Towers of Hanoi seems to be less. I learned Java and Python this way, and my plan is to do the same in C# with Mono.
Slashdot Mirror
Bottom line: Neither is superior in all ways. Pick the things that matter to you.
Basically a) larger size, and b) refresh rate are the only reasons to get plasma according to the referred article. Everything else is either a push or in favor of LCD.
I presume that there is some amount of "we spent all this damn money making all this capacity to manufacture plasma, so we better recover that investment as much as we can". My assumption is that between plasma and LCD, LCD is going to win. If you believe that and you manufacture both, push plasma as much as possible to cut your losses, and LCD will take care of itself.
Seatle or SF Areas? That should be a better question. It is the quaility of life, not the job.
Just so we're clear, Google has a thriving (200 person+) operation in Kirkland, WA, which is about 15 minutes from Microsoft's main campus in Redmond. It's a "company within the company" -- the larger operation is certainly in CA, but this is a smaller division with exactly the same corporate culture and perqs as the CA main campus has (food, giant monitors, the feeling like you died and went to IKEA [heaven or hell], Python, etc.). In fact, Steve Yegge (of "Good Agile Bad Agile" fame) is in that office, and his observations of the Google culture are from the Kirkland perspective.
Taco Bell in collaboration with disk manufacturer Memory Tech Japan, has successfully integrated their seven layer burrito technology with the HD-DVD and DVD standards, creating the industry's first "seven plus three" format. Initial reports hail the format as having "crystal clear audio, flawless picture and a zesty festive flavor".
Why is everyone so interested in handsfree computer use for programming. You'd think there would be other reasons why you might want to, say, browse the web without having to type. In case you need to, uh, knit or something while you're browsing. Yeah, that's it.
OK, can gmail do PGP?
Is the question "can it do PGP" or is the question "can it do encrypted mail"?
There is a Firefox GMail S/MIME plugin if your goal is encrypted mail that's compatible with the encryption built into most current email clients. I think this also addresses your concern of key storage, since I believe it's in your Firefox keystore.
Maybe the openBSD & openSSH projects should seperate?
Yeah, I was wondering the same thing. I mean, I don't know anything about OpenBSD, but I sure do like OpenSSH. If eighty cents of every dollar I spend supporting OpenSSH gets flushed down the OpenBSD toilet, is that a good use of my contribution?
I'm glad that OpenSSH exists and I want to support it. Why does my contribution to OpenSSH have to subsidize OpenBSD? I don't know anything about it, it seems like another scrappy fighter in the OS fight, and I don't really want to be involved with that. I don't mind that the maintainers want to tie these two projects together, but don't come crying to me if you're running out of money subsidizing hackathons and other things for OpenBSD, and then threaten OpenSSH's life because you want to use money people contribute to it to prop up OpenBSD.
Sometimes there are economic realities. Face them. Either separate OpenSSH into its own financial entity, or increase revenue. I know the plan is to increase revenue, but if it doesn't happen, then put OpenSSH off on its own and concede (economic) defeat on OpenBSD.
Yes, I know, talking out of my ass, don't know anything about it, blah blah. This is Slashdot, would you expect any more? ;)
The documentation states you have to be a full time student.
Just so we're clear, the rules for the Ultimate Virtual Application Challenge indicate:
Freaked my shit out when the parent said it's only open to students, and moderators should probably fact check a little better before slapping an Informative on something. My two cents.
The bottom line is that you don't have to be a student, you can't work for VMWare, and you can't be a rat bastard commie terrorist. I'll bet they write shitty code anyway. The terrorists that is.
This is not a Betamax/VHS battle from the consumer's point of view. I mean, maybe the content providers and equipment manufacturers may view it this way, but there's a fundamental difference from the standpoint of the consumer.
With Betamax/VHS, there were pretty significant mechanical differences between the formats -- having a single unit that could play both types of media was essentially impossible without having two completely separate (expensive and futzy) transports. In the case of DVD, HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, they are all 12cm spinning optical discs with exactly the same physical characteristics from the transport point of view. Yes, there is a difference from the logical data formatting and laser point of view, but there is no reason that I can see (other than licensing from the respective consortiums) that a single player couldn't play CD, VCD, DVD, HD-DVD and Blu-Ray.
So fine, as a consumer, I don't give a shit. Frankly, I'm going to be buying DVDs as long as they make them, and I'm perfectly happy with that. Unless the Blu-Ray or HD-DVD consortium prevents manufacturers from making a unit that can play both types, I'm going to buy a new player that handles all of the formats, and they can jerk off as long as they want figuring out who's a winner, and I can buy pretty much whatever comes out and be able to play it.
I characterize Objective C and the Interface Builder integration and a lot of those concepts to have been ten years ahead of its time when it was in its heyday (let's say 1988). So it's a 1998 environment in 2005 -- it's not really getting any younger -- they used up their "ahead of their time" card awhile ago.
As much as everyone loves the warm fuzzy "objects send messages" purity, it all starts falling apart on hardcore refactorings (renaming messages and classes) which I consider to be a Large Problem with maintaining a large codebase. Don't get me wrong, I like Objective C. But man, it was a sad day when I learned that they're not going to keep Java up-to-date. Maybe Cocoa# is my savior.
I programmed in Windows for 15 years before becoming more of a "server guy" and now an "OS X guy". I do agree with the comments that the API is far easier to grasp than the mishmash of shit that Microsoft shovels on you (Win32/COM/WinFX/MFC/ATL/Etc. etc.) But that doesn't have anything to do with Objective C or Xcode. That's just smart API design which isn't language or environment dependent.
Then JAVA was going to be completely portable to all operating systems. But not all Java virtual machines are identical, and different version of Java came out, and things diverged.
I maintain a 300KLOC Java source code base for a mail server product on four platforms (Windows, Linux, Solaris and OS X). We started out with AIX and HP/UX also, but removed those as targets because the markets weren't there (not because of portability issues). We don't ship on OS X, but it is my day-to-day development environment, so I still make sure it works on there. The issues I remember having are:
The most important thing that saved our bacon was having a comprehensive set of unit tests. We operate under the principle that "if it's not tested, the functionality doesn't exist", and maintain about 90% code coverage through unit tests. It's very easy to track down cross-platform niggling issues when you have a clean, automated unit testing system that makes a loud crashing noise when something smells bad. I was able to do the Solaris platform testing in about a day and fix the stuff that snapped off (basically that list above).
As far as "But not all Java virtual machines are identical, and different version of Java came out, and things diverged", I'm tempted to say that this is fearmongering and that this does not present a practical problem. However I will confess that we have only ever tested with the Sun JVM, the OS X port of that, and the IBM JVM, which I think all tie back to the Sun code. It's not clear what the practical reasons for using another JVM are, and I presume that it has something to do with licensing and philosophy moreso than practicality. If you only use features within the scope of your target JVM, you don't have any problems, so make sure they're matched up.
Paris Hilton looking an Intel Inside sticker and saying "That's hot."
"Hot and underpowered" -- sounds like a good campaign for Paris herself...
My apologies to Paris, who I presume only "plays underpowered" for TV ratings. Snicker.
Mitch: This is coherent light.
Mitch's dad: Oh, so it talks.
Sigh. Now everything's a "podcast".
There's no subscription. There's no RSS feed. They're audio files with talking. I have a 2 hour car ride today, and I would have loved it if this were an actual "podcast" and I could have clicked one link to sync all of the audio commentary to my iPod.
Are audio files with music "podcasts" also? How about audio files with video attached?
Sorry. "You must be less than this pedantic to read Slashdot." Moving along now.
"Discovery Gapfiller" -- the shows that are on between American Chopper and Mythbusters.
Spit take.
Gulfstream:~/debug blake$ ps axum | grep -i dashboard | awk '{print $6}'29896
24040
19860
16180
5116
432
Last one is the "grep" command, so don't count that. These are the RSS memory use in K used by:
Maybe I'm not interpreting these numbers correctly. Woe be to the 256MB machine Mac widget freak.
I couldn't agree with this more. We did a startup in 2001 and kept a web presence up and running the whole time. The primary things we agreed would always be available:
Based on this web presence, we were contacted several times with various offers, ultimately selling the technology to Sendmail, Inc. and taking full-time positions there working on the code. Now the product (Mailstream Manager) is going gangbusters under the Sendmail flag.
This is the second time we've done this kind of deal. The first time was pre-Google in 1996, so it was more of a "loud startup with good industry networking" since you couldn't STFW as effectively in those days ;). This technology is still in use today in products from Tumbleweed Communications.
Getting back to this "Do Stealth Startups Suck?" theme -- our personal perspective is that if it's so cool that you have to keep it a secret, then it isn't very cool at all. If you can't maintain an edge even if the other guy knows exactly what you're doing, then you don't have an edge. We call this the "True Lies" approach -- at the end of True Lies, Schwarzenegger explains exactly his plan for escaping from the guy who's gonna torture him, and despite the fact that the guy knows the exact plan, Schwarzenegger is able to execute it and escape.
Could use some work on the failure console output.6 ;3H[16;3H [16;
3H[16;3H[16;3H[16;3H[16;3H[16;3H[16;3H[1
(rest of irony deleted due to filter)
I love how everyone says "it has AAC support" about their products, and yet all the ones I've seen are not compatible with the songs from the iTunes Music Store.
So what's the deal? Does this phone support "plain AAC" (which is basically worthless), or does it support "playing songs downloaded from the iTunes Music Store"?
"What the heck's this 'Unrecoverable Application Exception track driver'"?
"Roseanne, it's 'United Arab Emirates', not 'Unrecoverable Application Exception'"
"Oh. Never miiiind."
</RoseanneRosannaDanna>
We use JFreeChart which works fine for us. We have fairly simple data to graph (a line chart with messages per second, bar charts for top spam and virus recipients) for the analysis summary in an email scanning product.
www.java.com is only offering j2re-1.4.2_05, a vulnerable version.
You should probably go to http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/download.html instead which has 1.4.2_06, which I've been using for weeks.
WAKE UP prandal!
I'm a server guy, so I usually write an HTTP server or an SMTP server. This gives me a feel for how I/O is done in the language, threading, exceptional cases, parsing, regular expressions, etc. Everything a growing boy needs. HTTP and SMTP are pretty simple protocols, and are actually useful to have once you've completed them -- my need for an RPN calculator or an eight queen solver or a wandering ant trail follower or a trainyard simulator or a Pavlov's triangle solver or a Towers of Hanoi seems to be less. I learned Java and Python this way, and my plan is to do the same in C# with Mono.
"I smell a wumpus."