Re:We don' need no steenking standards...
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Why not keep HTML easy for humans to write? Why make it harder to write programs to write HTML, by forcing us to gum things up with quotes when it doesn't make the slightest difference in any browser used today?
One word: AJAX. Lots of people are writing HTML fragments that are then revised or repopulated using DOM methods. I haven't tried, but I'm betting you'll quickly run into trouble trying to stick some content into (say) a span if you've written it as "<span id=foo name=huh>" and try to get a reference to it via document.getElementById("foo"). I recently had to write a page-scraper, and the pages I was working with were a motley mish-mash of styles and conventions accreted over the last seven or eight years. I wound up annotating them so that I could reliably find certain sections I needed in most browsers. If I hadn't had the ability to modify them, I'd have been seriously stuck.
I'm not some standards-for-standards-sake developer, but if accepted standards exist (and have existed for several years), then I think it's reasonable to expect people writing new code to follow them. I wouldn't accept C (or Java) code that didn't have subordinate code blocks indented, why should I cut HTML coders more slack?
drive can spin up, read or write data, then shut down again, all in less time than it takes to perform the same task using flash
Interesting, but don't current drives rely on the mass of the disks to help keep speed fluctuations down? How are you going to spin up the drive and keep its speed stable long enough to read the data? Clutch and brake with a flywheel? Can you make a micromotor (and I mean manufacture, not just design) with smooth enough speed control that you can hit it hard to spin up the disk, then taper off the voltage/current as the speed comes up so that as soon as the disk hits operational speed, the motor is only pulling enough current (probably in micro-amps) to maintain the speed?
I wouldn't even have considered this, but if it's claimed these drives will be quicker than flash, then that targets definite performance thresholds.
You've already got to deal with the varying linear velocity as you slew in and out, in addition to variability in the motor's spin rate
Yes, but don't forget, the change in linear velocity can be calculated, so it's easy to factor that it. Variations in the motor speed can be tracked pretty closely by monitoring the power fluctuations within the drive electronics, and can probably be incorporated directly into the modulation electronics. With disk stretch, though, you're talking about a potentially non-linear (if it's affected by temperature) time-variant (as metal fatigue sets in, the material may become more or less "stretchy") phenomena that may or may not be measurable.
Interesting point about more data bandwidth being available, I don't know enough about current head-position-tracking methods to know whether that'll help or not. Can't imagine you wouldn't need it, though.
Uh, PP explicitly states that they'll use titanium or some other high-strength material. It's not likely to "flex", especially when you consider that modern disk heads are about 1/3 sq. cm. And if it could flex from air pressure, then I'm sure it would wrap itself right around the arm the first time it was tilted while in operation.
a lot of the more useful tools are "smaller market" things
Oh, granted, for actually getting a job, the job boards are not necessarily the best tool. What I have found handy about them is to peruse the offerings that target my skill set, then see who's asking. You can pretty quickly build up a picture of who the players in the market are, and then start dredging the web to find out more about them. If they're a slap-dash body shop, then disgruntled ex-employees aren't shy.
a lot of the job board ads are written by HR weenies with no clue about what the long words mean
Which is fine, really, since they're not the ones who (ultimately) need the workers. The development manager knows what they want, and generally specifies the must-have, should-have and nice-to-have. The weenie may add the "N years of experience" BS, but they don't advertise for Java developers if they need someone to write.NET code. So I think they are useful as a guideline, but not gospel.
Job boards are a notoriously inaccurate way of gauging which programming languages are actually useful or in demand
Well, I can see "useful", but job boards pretty much define what languages are "in demand". After all, isn't that where the demands are made?
I actually lucked into a "senior support" position, where I have to write interfaces to move data between systems. As long as it works, that's OK with my boss[1], so I have written stuff in C, Java, Ruby, Perl, and...well, there was that one in COBOL, but that wasn't my choice. Anyway, my point is, maybe try to find yourself a job where you can do development, but don't have to play the development game. --- [1] Fortunately, once these things are in place they either don't change or need to be completely rewritten, so I don't have any concerns about leaving unmaintainable code for someone else.
by the same token, when the media is damaged, you still have a valid license to the music/video, bought and paid for, and they should pony up another copy
Exactly my point. Record companies didn't replace broken vinyl albums, what makes you think they'll replace a snapped CD? Interestingly, though, my ca. 1986 copy of Greetings from Asbury Park N.J. does contain a notice that, if the consumer believes that their copy has a manufacturing defect, they should contact Columbia Records and ask for a replacement. And believe me, if that CD goes opaque or otherwise becomes unplayable due to age or other circumstances beyond my control, I'm going to give them a call.
When I had albums I used to be able to make tapes of them so I could listen to them on my (any brand portable tape player). This was legal, and easy to do. I could even make copies of my audio tapes with no prolbem. My cheap Sanyo receiver could dub audio tapes at 2x speed. And I could make my own mix-tapes off of stuff I recorded off the radio. All legal for personal use, simple to do.
So you can't make tapes from your albums anymore? You can't copy your audio tapes? I don't see anything listed here that you can't do today.
But now I can't play my legally purchased DVD's from Japan in my American DVD player
Why didn't you get the American version of the DVDs? You know that DVDs are region-encoded, and should have either gotten a region-free player or purchased the American-encoded version. AFAIK, you have never been able to play Japanese DVDs on an American DVD player.
I can't (legally) copy my DVD's.
Could you ever?
I can't copy my PlaysForSure files to my iPod (and listen to them)
OK, by now it's pretty apparent that you've lost the plot. My point was that you're still able to do the things you used to do (copy albums to tape, dupe tapes). You're complaining that the media companies won't let you do the same things to new media that you used to be able to do with old media. Cry me a river, honey. What I said was that once there's a media protection standard in place, it'll become ubiquitious (eliminating your PFS->iPod problem) and then we can pressure the media companies to return to commonly-accepted fair-use practices. Since they'll no longer have the piracy argument to cloud the issue, it'll be a much more straightforward fight.
I used to be able to record shows freely from TV to VHS.
Funny, I've still got a VHS recorder hooked up to my TV, and it works just fine. Maybe you just need to clean the heads...
Yep, just like if you dropped a vinyl album and it broke.
Or if I want to play my DVD on a device that uses a different format, too bad for me.
Yep, just like if you wanted to play your vinyl album on your 8-track player. Or your wax cylinder on your Gramophone. Imagine if the Beatles had been around earlier, how many times would you have had to buy The White Album by now?
Seriously, I don't think the media companies are restricting people's usage any more than they used to, it's just that people want more from their media because the potential is greater. You might as well complain that you can't listen to satellite radio on your car's AM radio even though you purchased a subscription...
Hopefully, once they've figured out their One True DRM, it'll be incorporated into everything, so I'll be able to copy shows from my TiVo onto a DVD so my daughter can watch them in the car. And yeah, I realize that if there wasn't any DRM I could probably do that today, but that's not the point. The industry is fixated on curbing piracy, and I'm not a pirate, so I say the sooner they get something they're comfortable with in place, the sooner I can start lobbying for digital medium independence. Once the DRM BS is settled, we can start agitating for our rights under fair use again, and have a better argument ("Hey, as long as it's protected, I can copy my own DVDs onto my media server and watch them from a hotel in Bangkok, right? I mean, I purchased the right to view them, didn't I?").
severely burned on version 3.0 (had it kernel panic in the middle of a demo, trying to run Tomcat of all things!)
FWIW, I regularly see messages on the tomcat-users mailing list from people having trouble with seemingly-routine things. Almost always, if they're running Linux, it's FC. I don't know if there's something wrong with the Java port or what, but it caught my attention after just 2-3 weeks on the list. Usually they recommend CentOS (or Ubuntu if the person's developing on their own machine).
I think that you can store and retrieve more information much more easily and effectively in terms of this virtual 3-D environment than in an ordinary set of folders.
Bah. You're just using a set of mnemonics to organize your information. What I want to see is a system that automatically accumulates meta-information as I use it. So instead of "looking" for something, I just grab my Magic Frickin Wand (TM) and say "Presto! A broom-cutter!" and it appears before me in a puff of smoke.
Everybody seems to want to make this simulacrum of the real world, why not make the kind of world you'd live in if you had a choice?
The basic DOM functions are about as browser compatible as you can get. It's the DOM0 and IE specific stuff that you'll get in trouble for.
Heh, for me it was the other way around. I wrote some JS to screen-scrape a page couldn't figure out why var fld = document.getElementsByTagName("input")["somefield" ]; wasn't working on IE. Then I read the spec and found that Moz/FF actually enhanced GEBTN() to return a node list indexable by a string, whereas IE stuck to the standard and just returned an integer-index-only node list.
If they don't posess the technical skills to port it, the appliance is useless to them
Are you kidding? I wrote Windows apps that connected Oracle DBs running on Solaris, VMS, and MVS. It's called ODBC, and it doesn't care where your database is, you just configure the parameters and away it goes. So an appliance would still be very handy, even if your hypothetical programmer couldn't port it to Linux (or more likely wouldn't port it, since you'd then require your users to switch, and probably get significant pushback).
Oh, and don't confuse installing Oracle with configuring it. Installing it is not terribly difficult (once you've installed all the patches they want), but configuring it is not something to be taken lightly. Should you use materialized views? If so, how often should they be refreshed? Are chained rows slowing down your queries? Would adding another rollback segment and shrinking the others improve commit speed? What values of freelists and pctfree will improve concurrent access? At what point should a table be partitioned? When should a partition be split? These are usually not questions you can answer until your application has been in production for awhile, unless you already have a good idea how your app is going to behave, and (often) how the other applications in the instance behave also.
I can see your point about Moores law — a new Opteron box with a RAID controller and Gigabit ethernet should certainly outperform an older Sun server running 100base-T and U160 drives. However, the biggest obstacle to a wholesale move to a different DB & OS platform is the actual migration costs. Any shop that's so big it has dozens of Sun servers running Oracle is going to have Solaris admins and Oracle DBAs. These people are not going to shrug their shoulders and say "OK, I guess I'm going to do BSD/PostgreSQL now". These people are going to raise hell, provide Incontrovertible Proof that making the switch will lead to Inevitable Doom, and need to be replaced. So now you're going to have to hire new people who don't know your business, and the first thing they're going to have to do is migrate all your business-critical stuff over to the new platforms. Better hope those departing employees weren't too disgruntled to document everything thouroughly (or kept the docs up-to-date if they were concientious). And better hope your new PostgreSQL DBAs know Oracle real well (or be prepared to send your developers to PostgreSQL training), or they're not going to be able to port your thousands of lines of PL/SQL code. Unless, of course, you want to hire some consultants (who may know your industry, but probably not your business) to convert your legacy software to new, untested code and then turn it over to the staff who weren't involved in the conversion to support. Super happy fun time!
So while it seems like a good idea, unless you're working under a mandate from the CIO to replace Oracle or Solaris, it's probably cheaper and less disruptive to just stick with what you've got. Just ask any of those people who still run OpenVMS — they'll tell you!
several Opteron-based servers running FreeBSD and using PostgreSQL as the database can often be used to replace hundreds of Sun servers running Oracle
FreeBSD's network stack and file system are so much faster than Solaris' that you can replace a dozen or so Sun boxes with a single Opteron-based FreeBSD box? Because I know that most of the large database systems I've seen are bandwith-limited at one end or the other, they're rarely CPU-bound. Maybe your old Sun systems are hooked to a 10base-T hub, and you got a Gigabit switch for the Opterons? Or did your IT staff just figure out that most of your databases are small enough that they don't need to be on a separate server?
Seriously, I like both BSD and PostgreSQL, but you're going to taint them both if you keep spewing fanboi FUD like this.
Too many developers that I've talked to are still leary of EJBs
Yep, me too. But once they've had a chance play with JEE 5, they'll find it's not so bad. Annotations have pretty much solved the deployment descriptor nightmare (I'll put an ejb-jar.xml file up against a Sendmail config file any day!), so now it's mostly just a matter of writing the beans themselves, not first writing them then trying to hook them up.
Annotations are HAWT!!!
Fo shizzle! When I wrote my first web service, it was your typical Java trudge across two specs, three tutorials and fifty or so Javadoc pages. Now, I just prefix a class with "@WebService" and about 80% of the work gets done behind the scenes. I use NetBeans for my IDE, and it's got a lot of support built in too. When I needed to add a web service client to my project, I just right-clicked on my project and "Add->File->Web Services->Web Service Client". I think Eclipse has a better debugger, but for actually cranking out code, I prefer NB.
But I highly doubt that nVidia will be able to get a CPU out that out-performs an Intel or AMD
Maybe they don't have to. If they can just make something that can accelerate MMX/3D Now (sort of a graphics pre-processor) and plug that into a Socket F slot, it'd be like a two-stage accelerator: first accelerate the calculations that produce the graphics, then accelerate the display. Maybe they could find a way to do a micro-op translation of MMX instructions into something more RISC-like, and run them on a RISC core.
At least, I hope it's something like that, because I agree with PP: nVidia doesn't have much of a chance to beat both Intel and AMD at the x86 game.
might file a First Amendment lawsuit if their sites were blocked
What? If their site were dropped by an ISP, they might have a case, but I don't think they have much of a case if it's blocked. Their site is up, people can get to it, just not from some schools. It's like radio stations that refuse to broadcast Howard Stern — he's still free to make his show, they just choose to not distribute it.
"The principal planned attack involved packing three limousines with gas cylinders, explosives and the like and detonating them in underground car parks," Mr Lawson said.
Wow! No chance at all of carrying out that principal attack, eh?
Um, could you? I could pretty easily lay my hands on a bunch of propane cylinders (it'd just take about twenty trips to twenty different hardware stores), but I don't know where I'd get my hands on any explosives (maybe I could roll my own from some black power or something, but I've never done that, so I couldn't say for sure). And I have no idea how I'd scrounge up three limos in an untraceable fashion. Every time (well, OK, the one time) I rented one, it came with a driver. What am I supposed to do, whack him and stuff his body in the trunk? Then where do I put the propane?
You could get a rough number by watching the page requests. If someone requests a page every couple of minutes, then it's easy to figure they're "online" from the time of the first request to the last. Draw a line whenever there's a N minute gap between requests. That's my first thought, though, I'm curious as to how other people would approach the problem.
Virtually all of the state's skate parks were shut down after a ruling by the state Supreme Court that overturned twenty years of case law by voiding the protection from liability lawsuits previously afforded to public parks. No word yet on whether the public pools will open next summer.
Sucks to be a kid here -- I may move to save my daughter the trauma. Too bad Wyoming doesn't have better broadband coverage...
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One word: AJAX. Lots of people are writing HTML fragments that are then revised or repopulated using DOM methods. I haven't tried, but I'm betting you'll quickly run into trouble trying to stick some content into (say) a span if you've written it as "<span id=foo name=huh>" and try to get a reference to it via document.getElementById("foo"). I recently had to write a page-scraper, and the pages I was working with were a motley mish-mash of styles and conventions accreted over the last seven or eight years. I wound up annotating them so that I could reliably find certain sections I needed in most browsers. If I hadn't had the ability to modify them, I'd have been seriously stuck.
I'm not some standards-for-standards-sake developer, but if accepted standards exist (and have existed for several years), then I think it's reasonable to expect people writing new code to follow them. I wouldn't accept C (or Java) code that didn't have subordinate code blocks indented, why should I cut HTML coders more slack?
Interesting, but don't current drives rely on the mass of the disks to help keep speed fluctuations down? How are you going to spin up the drive and keep its speed stable long enough to read the data? Clutch and brake with a flywheel? Can you make a micromotor (and I mean manufacture, not just design) with smooth enough speed control that you can hit it hard to spin up the disk, then taper off the voltage/current as the speed comes up so that as soon as the disk hits operational speed, the motor is only pulling enough current (probably in micro-amps) to maintain the speed?
I wouldn't even have considered this, but if it's claimed these drives will be quicker than flash, then that targets definite performance thresholds.
Yes, but don't forget, the change in linear velocity can be calculated, so it's easy to factor that it. Variations in the motor speed can be tracked pretty closely by monitoring the power fluctuations within the drive electronics, and can probably be incorporated directly into the modulation electronics. With disk stretch, though, you're talking about a potentially non-linear (if it's affected by temperature) time-variant (as metal fatigue sets in, the material may become more or less "stretchy") phenomena that may or may not be measurable.
Interesting point about more data bandwidth being available, I don't know enough about current head-position-tracking methods to know whether that'll help or not. Can't imagine you wouldn't need it, though.
Uh, PP explicitly states that they'll use titanium or some other high-strength material. It's not likely to "flex", especially when you consider that modern disk heads are about 1/3 sq. cm. And if it could flex from air pressure, then I'm sure it would wrap itself right around the arm the first time it was tilted while in operation.
Which is fine, really, since they're not the ones who (ultimately) need the workers. The development manager knows what they want, and generally specifies the must-have, should-have and nice-to-have. The weenie may add the "N years of experience" BS, but they don't advertise for Java developers if they need someone to write
Well, I can see "useful", but job boards pretty much define what languages are "in demand". After all, isn't that where the demands are made?
I actually lucked into a "senior support" position, where I have to write interfaces to move data between systems. As long as it works, that's OK with my boss[1], so I have written stuff in C, Java, Ruby, Perl, and...well, there was that one in COBOL, but that wasn't my choice. Anyway, my point is, maybe try to find yourself a job where you can do development, but don't have to play the development game.
---
[1] Fortunately, once these things are in place they either don't change or need to be completely rewritten, so I don't have any concerns about leaving unmaintainable code for someone else.
Exactly my point. Record companies didn't replace broken vinyl albums, what makes you think they'll replace a snapped CD? Interestingly, though, my ca. 1986 copy of Greetings from Asbury Park N.J. does contain a notice that, if the consumer believes that their copy has a manufacturing defect, they should contact Columbia Records and ask for a replacement. And believe me, if that CD goes opaque or otherwise becomes unplayable due to age or other circumstances beyond my control, I'm going to give them a call.
So you can't make tapes from your albums anymore? You can't copy your audio tapes? I don't see anything listed here that you can't do today.
Why didn't you get the American version of the DVDs? You know that DVDs are region-encoded, and should have either gotten a region-free player or purchased the American-encoded version. AFAIK, you have never been able to play Japanese DVDs on an American DVD player.
Could you ever?
OK, by now it's pretty apparent that you've lost the plot. My point was that you're still able to do the things you used to do (copy albums to tape, dupe tapes). You're complaining that the media companies won't let you do the same things to new media that you used to be able to do with old media. Cry me a river, honey. What I said was that once there's a media protection standard in place, it'll become ubiquitious (eliminating your PFS->iPod problem) and then we can pressure the media companies to return to commonly-accepted fair-use practices. Since they'll no longer have the piracy argument to cloud the issue, it'll be a much more straightforward fight.
Funny, I've still got a VHS recorder hooked up to my TV, and it works just fine. Maybe you just need to clean the heads...
Yep, just like if you wanted to play your vinyl album on your 8-track player. Or your wax cylinder on your Gramophone. Imagine if the Beatles had been around earlier, how many times would you have had to buy The White Album by now?
Seriously, I don't think the media companies are restricting people's usage any more than they used to, it's just that people want more from their media because the potential is greater. You might as well complain that you can't listen to satellite radio on your car's AM radio even though you purchased a subscription...
Hopefully, once they've figured out their One True DRM, it'll be incorporated into everything, so I'll be able to copy shows from my TiVo onto a DVD so my daughter can watch them in the car. And yeah, I realize that if there wasn't any DRM I could probably do that today, but that's not the point. The industry is fixated on curbing piracy, and I'm not a pirate, so I say the sooner they get something they're comfortable with in place, the sooner I can start lobbying for digital medium independence. Once the DRM BS is settled, we can start agitating for our rights under fair use again, and have a better argument ("Hey, as long as it's protected, I can copy my own DVDs onto my media server and watch them from a hotel in Bangkok, right? I mean, I purchased the right to view them, didn't I?").
SGI top talent, seeing future products cancelled and current projects crippled by cost-cutting measures, see the writing on the wall and jump ship.
Fixed that for ya...
Just so you know, you're not alone!
Everybody seems to want to make this simulacrum of the real world, why not make the kind of world you'd live in if you had a choice?
Heh, for me it was the other way around. I wrote some JS to screen-scrape a page couldn't figure out why var fld = document.getElementsByTagName("input")["somefield
Oh, and don't confuse installing Oracle with configuring it. Installing it is not terribly difficult (once you've installed all the patches they want), but configuring it is not something to be taken lightly. Should you use materialized views? If so, how often should they be refreshed? Are chained rows slowing down your queries? Would adding another rollback segment and shrinking the others improve commit speed? What values of freelists and pctfree will improve concurrent access? At what point should a table be partitioned? When should a partition be split? These are usually not questions you can answer until your application has been in production for awhile, unless you already have a good idea how your app is going to behave, and (often) how the other applications in the instance behave also.
I can see your point about Moores law — a new Opteron box with a RAID controller and Gigabit ethernet should certainly outperform an older Sun server running 100base-T and U160 drives. However, the biggest obstacle to a wholesale move to a different DB & OS platform is the actual migration costs. Any shop that's so big it has dozens of Sun servers running Oracle is going to have Solaris admins and Oracle DBAs. These people are not going to shrug their shoulders and say "OK, I guess I'm going to do BSD/PostgreSQL now". These people are going to raise hell, provide Incontrovertible Proof that making the switch will lead to Inevitable Doom, and need to be replaced. So now you're going to have to hire new people who don't know your business, and the first thing they're going to have to do is migrate all your business-critical stuff over to the new platforms. Better hope those departing employees weren't too disgruntled to document everything thouroughly (or kept the docs up-to-date if they were concientious). And better hope your new PostgreSQL DBAs know Oracle real well (or be prepared to send your developers to PostgreSQL training), or they're not going to be able to port your thousands of lines of PL/SQL code. Unless, of course, you want to hire some consultants (who may know your industry, but probably not your business) to convert your legacy software to new, untested code and then turn it over to the staff who weren't involved in the conversion to support. Super happy fun time!
So while it seems like a good idea, unless you're working under a mandate from the CIO to replace Oracle or Solaris, it's probably cheaper and less disruptive to just stick with what you've got. Just ask any of those people who still run OpenVMS — they'll tell you!
Seriously, I like both BSD and PostgreSQL, but you're going to taint them both if you keep spewing fanboi FUD like this.
Uhhhh... "display: inline-block" is CSS (CSS 2, anyway)... See here.
Fo shizzle! When I wrote my first web service, it was your typical Java trudge across two specs, three tutorials and fifty or so Javadoc pages. Now, I just prefix a class with "@WebService" and about 80% of the work gets done behind the scenes. I use NetBeans for my IDE, and it's got a lot of support built in too. When I needed to add a web service client to my project, I just right-clicked on my project and "Add->File->Web Services->Web Service Client". I think Eclipse has a better debugger, but for actually cranking out code, I prefer NB.
At least, I hope it's something like that, because I agree with PP: nVidia doesn't have much of a chance to beat both Intel and AMD at the x86 game.
I see no rights violation here.
resemble(remark(I))^clod(insensitive)
You could get a rough number by watching the page requests. If someone requests a page every couple of minutes, then it's easy to figure they're "online" from the time of the first request to the last. Draw a line whenever there's a N minute gap between requests. That's my first thought, though, I'm curious as to how other people would approach the problem.
Virtually all of the state's skate parks were shut down after a ruling by the state Supreme Court that overturned twenty years of case law by voiding the protection from liability lawsuits previously afforded to public parks. No word yet on whether the public pools will open next summer.
Sucks to be a kid here -- I may move to save my daughter the trauma. Too bad Wyoming doesn't have better broadband coverage...