If we would design email from scratch, we would not allow scripting or external links either. Actually, those external links should be banned from browsers as well. Also, we would create a nice definition on how a reply should work. Each and every mail client seems to get this wrong, even Thunderbird is a pita when replying to HTML formatted mail.
I've just asked one of my coworkers to remove the blue skies from his mail, since it is not only inprofessional, it can also completely screw up conversations. And that is the main reason for mail to exist, mailing lists are and always have been of secondary importance. Just receiving an outline with changes and a web link is alright with me.
Leave all that visual art for MSN, where *I* control who can contact me.
"(+) Definitely an option for some parts of the world, but not really going to work well for many countries as they don't have enough arable land to make all the biomass. And to make it replace fossil fuels for cars will require so much water to irrigate the crops we will probably have to start building massive numbers of desalination plants, etc. Personally I'd rather keep the land areas untouched and go for renewables, but some countries do manage this option ok."
I don't know, but wouldn't algae work? If those would work, you would gain quite a few areas to create alcohol in. And you wouldn't need desalination plants at all. Note: just an idea.
If I would create a reader that was dependent on version 0.91 of the distribution, it sure as hell would include the DTD in local storage. It makes no sense to create a reader that can also use, say, version 0.92 since you would not know what had changed (and there is no such thing as inheritence between versions of a DTD afaik). Actually, as other readers noted, it would be terribly stupid to make your web-server or client rely on a third party computer for which you cannot guarantee the uptime.
These URL's are mainly there for their Uniqueness, not so much as for a place of quaranteed storage. Of course, they are also a nice place to look for the actual definition, but after that you would need a local repository. This is the first thing an XML library should support, and the first thing a moderately intelligent programmer should look at. I get *very* annoyed if this kind of basic rules are ignored. And I've even seen them ignored by people pointing to the XML digital signature definitions, where security and reliability should be the first requirements in the design.
Also, what would happen if w3c.org or netscape.com go the way of the Gopher? If they go bust? It's a quickly changing world out there.
Yup, my motherboard should last about 1 year (mobo replacement, with *same* freaking part). That's according to the person that fixed it, under the company warranty deal. Bulging caps all over that thing, completely gone. We have a contract with a third party company that orders with Dell. It's a shame, because it is running very quietly and reliably (and even pretty quickly) otherwise. Fortunately I got away without any data corruption.
Well, what about the cost to the environment? You could at least use VMWare and safe yourself a few hundred bucks. Spend it on memory (for VMWare) and send some 200 dollar to a charity. It seems you have enough to spread around anyway. At least I am happy that I will never meet you on holidays in Afrika or Asia, since you won't go there.
There are billions of people out there. A lot of companies just want to make money, quick. If that means some bad publicity, so be it. Sometimes, even bad publicity can be good for brand recognition. Don't think that putting up bad service is always a bad thing for a company, just because you feel like it. These difficult cancelations don't cost companies squat. It is all automated, and when people really complain, the cancel button on *their* computer is probably very easy to reach. I wish it were otherwise...
Besides that, the price for manufacturing disks has always been a *very* small part of CD's / DVD's. I would be very amazed if this has changed for either format. From a Blu-Ray (hugging) site:
* First, and most importantly, manufacturing cost is not a consumer issue, as the cost of goods will have little, if any, bearing on the cost to consumers.
* That said, in the beginning stages of production, the Blu-ray Disc manufacturing cost could be slightly higher than current DVDs.
* Given the number of studios releasing titles on Blu-ray Disc (7 of the 8 majors), and with the replication of games to support PS3, we believe the volume of discs being created will quickly drive manufacturing costs to mass market prices comparable to current DVD replication cost
For now, the disks don't seem to be any influence, but that could be due to high initial pricing and availability of the titles (making manufacturing an even smaller part of the picture).
I haven't checked the information yet, but here's an abstract on the rest, found through google:
The Power6 processor will run between 4GHz and 5GHz and it has been proven to chew away data at a speed of 6GHz in the lab.
IBM see things a little differently and they decided to raise the frequency in both cores of the processor.
For high-end models, four POWER6 MPUs will be packaged in a single multi-chip module, along with four L3 victim caches, each 32MB.
On the management side, IBM is also improving their virtualization capabilities in the POWER6. In particular products, a single processor may be able to host 2-300 virtual instances, although theoretically up to 1024 VMs are possible. Memory partitioning and migration have been added as well, which reduces system down time for repairs.
IBM is claiming a factor of two performance increase, which would be consistent with the vastly higher clockspeeds and increases in raw system bandwidth.
IBM's roadmaps currently include the POWER6+, which is presumably a 45nm derivative product. Judging by past practices, the POWER6+ will debut in the second half of 2008, probably just in time to dash the hopes of rivals.
The Power and PowerPC lines will grow one step closer together with Power6, which incorporates the AltiVec instruction set that speeds up many multimedia tasks. AltiVec, also known as VMX, increases efficiency by letting a single processing instruction be applied to multiple data elements. That's helpful for video and audio tasks on desktop machines, but servers will benefit as well in, for example, high-performance computing tasks such as genetic data processing, McCredie said
Where Power5 can transfer data on and off the chip at a rate of 150 gigabytes per second, Power6 can do so at 300GBps, McCredie said.
Oh, and it is also good for BCD's (binary coded decimals) which obviously points to the expected customers (high end financial firms, presumably).
Yes, to find bookmarks you still have to go to: add bookmark. This kind of stupidity still is present, even after a complete redesign of the interface. It was the first thing I tried. You can like the new interface or not, but underneath, it's still pretty much Word number XXX. I suppose they did not want to change too many things at once, or they still don't care about such things.
Working with lists and tables is *much* nicer in Open Office Writer, as is the crash-resistency and, again, bookmarks. I like putting large documents in Writer instead of Word. Instead of being arogant, it would be nice if Microsoft could also copy a few features from Open Office, instead of only focussing on the design.
All said and done, like context sensitive GUI's. They are much needed to reduce complexity. I wish more programs would focus on this more, instead of just throwing in options. I don't need table options (except "add table") when I am not in a table. The Eclipse platform has Preferences that you can search. These are the kind of thing that we need.
If you need to relearn an application each time the interface changes, the training was not adequate. The teacher should focus on the gist of the application, not just: type this and this to save a file. Explain different formats and file locations, but don't teach people to save a file by learning key combinations. As in the real world, things change - the possibility of change should be part of the course.
Likewise, but I would not take the effort to look on eBay when I can get a 1 GB card in the store next door for 12,50. Also, I use Eclipse for development (Java/C/C++) and that does not fit on one 128 MB card - or the datasheets of all the processors, or a small instruction video, etc.
And not crash. And only load plugins when needed. And not mess with the status bar. And would use close buttons on the title bar like they should be used. And not mess up firefox. And not save PDF files on the temp folder by default. And copy correctly. And not enforce uninforcable anti copying protection. And have a reasonable search method. And use the pointer like it should be. And have normal scrolling behaviour. And not use weird keyboard shortcuts. And have bookmarks etc.
I probably am still missing a few gripes. Since I just want it to display PDF files, I use foxit reader, which seems to get it right.
In the Netherlands there is this celebrity that wanted to become a politician (Emil Ratelband). He wanted all foreign persons to learn the national anthem before getting the Dutch nationality. Unfortunately, he was not prepared that well. When asked, he could not sing it himself. Now that was top entertainment and the end of his political career. We shouldn't put a stop to that kind of fun:)
Why would somebody want to sell memory cards on eBay anyway? The only reason I can think of is because it was an original accessoiry for a digital camera or something. But the biggest one tested was 128 MB, which sells for - uh cannot find that one. 1 GB sells for 12,50 over here (SD).
I admit, JavaOS is dead and lejos is for Lego bricks, so that leaves jnode.org. Note that there are already many OS's out there, and end-users typically don't care what kind of language the OS is written in. Most bricks of operating systems are found in C/C++ libraries, with nice GNU or BSD licenses.
It does not have to be *as* fast as malloc/free. It needs to be sufficiently fast to run applications with. Explicit malloc/free's are very problematic, you need to keep score of each object, and that is not always easy to do. At least it is already much faster (the default GC of Java) than smart pointers (reference counting), which is the direct opponent against the GC I suppose.
And I agree, speaking on "several orders of magnitude" is taking it a bit far. It's much more secure, but since security is *very* hard to quantisize, talking of things like magnitude is stretching it. The idea still seems correct though, buffer overruns are virtually non-existent in Java. And applications generally don't crash with "this program referenced memory on 00000000h" or cryptic messages like that.
Which is also the problem with this approach, you still will be able to perform a buffer overrun, only the application will crash, enabling a denial of service attack. With cryptic error messages etc.
Hmm, funny you would mention that. It seems to be a pretty stupid bug, but maybe this is why it is still in beta, not just because Google tries to get out of their responsabilities.
Saying that that using something is misuse because it was not specifically designed for it, is stretching things.
Basically, XML is a flattened data structure (text) with a tree structure in it. It's not indexed, nor optimized for size. Since, if handled correctly, it can be read by humans as well as computers, it makes an excellent way of creating configuration files - especially when you can use schemes and have a good XML editor for when those odd moments that you have to look at the configuration manually.
Just creating a new configuration file format when the need arises is much worse than using XML, especially if the XML is presented in a readable form, and is not changed by the application itself. Not everybody likes to learn a completely new way of formatting configiruation options each time they learn a new program.
Maybe XML is overhyped at the moment, but just using XML for "blind data interchange" because that is what is was designed for is stupid as well.
The biggest obstacles of using Java are the runtime support it offers. This might sound strange, since Java has been developed with runtime capabilities from the start. But since the focus on the enterprise edition, not too much has been done to address this issue:
- finicly way to handle memory allocation - defining a maximum heap size to give hints to the garbage collector never seems like a good idea to me, unless you are an application server - command line support; you can use the Apache libs to create a GNU compatible CLI, but you still need to have a script in place to start your nl.name.app.Main.main() method - full support for native libs - java can easily be used to create cross platform applications, but sometimes you want to use functionality that is not cross-platform (an interface to C/C++ libraries on the other hand is not that difficult) - package and version handling
The package and version handling also seems to be addressed by the Java community process. This is very important, just downloading xxx MB for the JRE is not a good way of distributing binaries. There needs to be a runtime system that knows which versions of libaries are installed on the system, and utilities to download/remove additional packages. Just deploying every product with its own libraries, which is done most of the time if you use an application server, is just not feasable.
Fortunately, before there were also issues with Swing and startup times. These have been resolved. Also, the licensing problem seems to be gone - or will be gone - in the very near future. Speed, if it was ever an issue, is even better in version 1.6, and 1.7 might be even faster. Also, since Eclipse, there is a very viable, free, IDE, which will suite many people better than NetBeans, even though the GUI support is still sub-par (but improving rapidly).
Maybe the biggest hold-back is the quick and very dirty GUI support in most languages. The current Java IDE's all try to do it too "clean"; Java applications need to be usable for resolutions and font-sizes. If people cannot create a simple GUI application very quickly, a lot of people will drop a language before giving it the chance it deserves.
Mono and Kylix are not viable options in my opinion, relying too much on a single supplier.
Who are the idiots that mod this piece of crap up? The data on the front page (the MRZ, or machine readable zone) is used to create master keys for BAC (Basic Access Control). Although these keys are not that well protected because the entropy is low, they are NEVER transmitted in plain.
CAN'T YOU IDIOTS JUST READ THE SPECIFICATIONS? THEY ARE AVAILABLE ONLINE:
In the Dutch/German C'T magazine there have been schematics on how to build a detector to find ISO 14443 tags (which is what these passports are). Also, you can find another way to protect yourself against these sort of attacks here:
Slashdot Mirror
"... and there historically hasn't been a good mechanism to redirect that to a local DTD store."
You mean like an EntityResolver? Of course I agree on the last statements.
If we would design email from scratch, we would not allow scripting or external links either. Actually, those external links should be banned from browsers as well. Also, we would create a nice definition on how a reply should work. Each and every mail client seems to get this wrong, even Thunderbird is a pita when replying to HTML formatted mail.
I've just asked one of my coworkers to remove the blue skies from his mail, since it is not only inprofessional, it can also completely screw up conversations. And that is the main reason for mail to exist, mailing lists are and always have been of secondary importance. Just receiving an outline with changes and a web link is alright with me.
Leave all that visual art for MSN, where *I* control who can contact me.
"(+) Definitely an option for some parts of the world, but not really going to work well for many countries as they don't have enough arable land to make all the biomass. And to make it replace fossil fuels for cars will require so much water to irrigate the crops we will probably have to start building massive numbers of desalination plants, etc. Personally I'd rather keep the land areas untouched and go for renewables, but some countries do manage this option ok."
I don't know, but wouldn't algae work? If those would work, you would gain quite a few areas to create alcohol in. And you wouldn't need desalination plants at all. Note: just an idea.
If I would create a reader that was dependent on version 0.91 of the distribution, it sure as hell would include the DTD in local storage. It makes no sense to create a reader that can also use, say, version 0.92 since you would not know what had changed (and there is no such thing as inheritence between versions of a DTD afaik). Actually, as other readers noted, it would be terribly stupid to make your web-server or client rely on a third party computer for which you cannot guarantee the uptime.
These URL's are mainly there for their Uniqueness, not so much as for a place of quaranteed storage. Of course, they are also a nice place to look for the actual definition, but after that you would need a local repository. This is the first thing an XML library should support, and the first thing a moderately intelligent programmer should look at. I get *very* annoyed if this kind of basic rules are ignored. And I've even seen them ignored by people pointing to the XML digital signature definitions, where security and reliability should be the first requirements in the design.
Also, what would happen if w3c.org or netscape.com go the way of the Gopher? If they go bust? It's a quickly changing world out there.
In post soviet russia, the government also controls commerce.
Yup, my motherboard should last about 1 year (mobo replacement, with *same* freaking part). That's according to the person that fixed it, under the company warranty deal. Bulging caps all over that thing, completely gone. We have a contract with a third party company that orders with Dell. It's a shame, because it is running very quietly and reliably (and even pretty quickly) otherwise. Fortunately I got away without any data corruption.
For 16+ years? He would had a stroke long before that.
Well, what about the cost to the environment? You could at least use VMWare and safe yourself a few hundred bucks. Spend it on memory (for VMWare) and send some 200 dollar to a charity. It seems you have enough to spread around anyway. At least I am happy that I will never meet you on holidays in Afrika or Asia, since you won't go there.
There are billions of people out there. A lot of companies just want to make money, quick. If that means some bad publicity, so be it. Sometimes, even bad publicity can be good for brand recognition. Don't think that putting up bad service is always a bad thing for a company, just because you feel like it. These difficult cancelations don't cost companies squat. It is all automated, and when people really complain, the cancel button on *their* computer is probably very easy to reach. I wish it were otherwise...
"Disclaimer: I am Canadian."
Phew, you Canadians are modest, even disclaiming to be one...
Besides that, the price for manufacturing disks has always been a *very* small part of CD's / DVD's. I would be very amazed if this has changed for either format. From a Blu-Ray (hugging) site:
n dex.html
* First, and most importantly, manufacturing cost is not a consumer issue, as the cost of goods will have little, if any, bearing on the cost to consumers.
* That said, in the beginning stages of production, the Blu-ray Disc manufacturing cost could be slightly higher than current DVDs.
* Given the number of studios releasing titles on Blu-ray Disc (7 of the 8 majors), and with the replication of games to support PS3, we believe the volume of discs being created will quickly drive manufacturing costs to mass market prices comparable to current DVD replication cost
Source: http://www.blu-raydisc.com/Section-14064/faqs/5/I
For now, the disks don't seem to be any influence, but that could be due to high initial pricing and availability of the titles (making manufacturing an even smaller part of the picture).
I haven't checked the information yet, but here's an abstract on the rest, found through google:
c essor-Trashes-Competition-with-6-GHz-17765.shtml1 606194731
The Power6 processor will run between 4GHz and 5GHz and it has been proven to chew away data at a speed of 6GHz in the lab.
IBM see things a little differently and they decided to raise the frequency in both cores of the processor.
For high-end models, four POWER6 MPUs will be packaged in a single multi-chip module, along with four L3 victim caches, each 32MB.
On the management side, IBM is also improving their virtualization capabilities in the POWER6. In particular products, a single processor may be able to host 2-300 virtual instances, although theoretically up to 1024 VMs are possible. Memory partitioning and migration have been added as well, which reduces system down time for repairs.
IBM is claiming a factor of two performance increase, which would be consistent with the vastly higher clockspeeds and increases in raw system bandwidth.
IBM's roadmaps currently include the POWER6+, which is presumably a 45nm derivative product. Judging by past practices, the POWER6+ will debut in the second half of 2008, probably just in time to dash the hopes of rivals.
The Power and PowerPC lines will grow one step closer together with Power6, which incorporates the AltiVec instruction set that speeds up many multimedia tasks. AltiVec, also known as VMX, increases efficiency by letting a single processing instruction be applied to multiple data elements. That's helpful for video and audio tasks on desktop machines, but servers will benefit as well in, for example, high-performance computing tasks such as genetic data processing, McCredie said
Where Power5 can transfer data on and off the chip at a rate of 150 gigabytes per second, Power6 can do so at 300GBps, McCredie said.
Oh, and it is also good for BCD's (binary coded decimals) which obviously points to the expected customers (high end financial firms, presumably).
Sources:
http://news.softpedia.com/news/New-Power6-IBM-Pro
http://realworldtech.com/page.cfm?ArticleID=RWT10
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9584_22-6124451.html
Yes, to find bookmarks you still have to go to: add bookmark. This kind of stupidity still is present, even after a complete redesign of the interface. It was the first thing I tried. You can like the new interface or not, but underneath, it's still pretty much Word number XXX. I suppose they did not want to change too many things at once, or they still don't care about such things.
Working with lists and tables is *much* nicer in Open Office Writer, as is the crash-resistency and, again, bookmarks. I like putting large documents in Writer instead of Word. Instead of being arogant, it would be nice if Microsoft could also copy a few features from Open Office, instead of only focussing on the design.
All said and done, like context sensitive GUI's. They are much needed to reduce complexity. I wish more programs would focus on this more, instead of just throwing in options. I don't need table options (except "add table") when I am not in a table. The Eclipse platform has Preferences that you can search. These are the kind of thing that we need.
If you need to relearn an application each time the interface changes, the training was not adequate. The teacher should focus on the gist of the application, not just: type this and this to save a file. Explain different formats and file locations, but don't teach people to save a file by learning key combinations. As in the real world, things change - the possibility of change should be part of the course.
Likewise, but I would not take the effort to look on eBay when I can get a 1 GB card in the store next door for 12,50. Also, I use Eclipse for development (Java/C/C++) and that does not fit on one 128 MB card - or the datasheets of all the processors, or a small instruction video, etc.
And not crash. And only load plugins when needed. And not mess with the status bar. And would use close buttons on the title bar like they should be used. And not mess up firefox. And not save PDF files on the temp folder by default. And copy correctly. And not enforce uninforcable anti copying protection. And have a reasonable search method. And use the pointer like it should be. And have normal scrolling behaviour. And not use weird keyboard shortcuts. And have bookmarks etc.
I probably am still missing a few gripes. Since I just want it to display PDF files, I use foxit reader, which seems to get it right.
In the Netherlands there is this celebrity that wanted to become a politician (Emil Ratelband). He wanted all foreign persons to learn the national anthem before getting the Dutch nationality. Unfortunately, he was not prepared that well. When asked, he could not sing it himself. Now that was top entertainment and the end of his political career. We shouldn't put a stop to that kind of fun :)
Why would somebody want to sell memory cards on eBay anyway? The only reason I can think of is because it was an original accessoiry for a digital camera or something. But the biggest one tested was 128 MB, which sells for - uh cannot find that one. 1 GB sells for 12,50 over here (SD).
"Java is a bit nicer than C++ but it just can't perform at the level of C (how many OS'es are written in Java?)"
http://www.jnode.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaOS
http://lejos.sourceforge.net/
I admit, JavaOS is dead and lejos is for Lego bricks, so that leaves jnode.org. Note that there are already many OS's out there, and end-users typically don't care what kind of language the OS is written in. Most bricks of operating systems are found in C/C++ libraries, with nice GNU or BSD licenses.
It does not have to be *as* fast as malloc/free. It needs to be sufficiently fast to run applications with. Explicit malloc/free's are very problematic, you need to keep score of each object, and that is not always easy to do. At least it is already much faster (the default GC of Java) than smart pointers (reference counting), which is the direct opponent against the GC I suppose.
And I agree, speaking on "several orders of magnitude" is taking it a bit far. It's much more secure, but since security is *very* hard to quantisize, talking of things like magnitude is stretching it. The idea still seems correct though, buffer overruns are virtually non-existent in Java. And applications generally don't crash with "this program referenced memory on 00000000h" or cryptic messages like that.
Which is also the problem with this approach, you still will be able to perform a buffer overrun, only the application will crash, enabling a denial of service attack. With cryptic error messages etc.
Hmm, funny you would mention that. It seems to be a pretty stupid bug, but maybe this is why it is still in beta, not just because Google tries to get out of their responsabilities.
Saying that that using something is misuse because it was not specifically designed for it, is stretching things.
Basically, XML is a flattened data structure (text) with a tree structure in it. It's not indexed, nor optimized for size. Since, if handled correctly, it can be read by humans as well as computers, it makes an excellent way of creating configuration files - especially when you can use schemes and have a good XML editor for when those odd moments that you have to look at the configuration manually.
Just creating a new configuration file format when the need arises is much worse than using XML, especially if the XML is presented in a readable form, and is not changed by the application itself. Not everybody likes to learn a completely new way of formatting configiruation options each time they learn a new program.
Maybe XML is overhyped at the moment, but just using XML for "blind data interchange" because that is what is was designed for is stupid as well.
The biggest obstacles of using Java are the runtime support it offers. This might sound strange, since Java has been developed with runtime capabilities from the start. But since the focus on the enterprise edition, not too much has been done to address this issue:
- finicly way to handle memory allocation - defining a maximum heap size to give hints to the garbage collector never seems like a good idea to me, unless you are an application server
- command line support; you can use the Apache libs to create a GNU compatible CLI, but you still need to have a script in place to start your nl.name.app.Main.main() method
- full support for native libs - java can easily be used to create cross platform applications, but sometimes you want to use functionality that is not cross-platform (an interface to C/C++ libraries on the other hand is not that difficult)
- package and version handling
The package and version handling also seems to be addressed by the Java community process. This is very important, just downloading xxx MB for the JRE is not a good way of distributing binaries. There needs to be a runtime system that knows which versions of libaries are installed on the system, and utilities to download/remove additional packages. Just deploying every product with its own libraries, which is done most of the time if you use an application server, is just not feasable.
Fortunately, before there were also issues with Swing and startup times. These have been resolved. Also, the licensing problem seems to be gone - or will be gone - in the very near future. Speed, if it was ever an issue, is even better in version 1.6, and 1.7 might be even faster. Also, since Eclipse, there is a very viable, free, IDE, which will suite many people better than NetBeans, even though the GUI support is still sub-par (but improving rapidly).
Maybe the biggest hold-back is the quick and very dirty GUI support in most languages. The current Java IDE's all try to do it too "clean"; Java applications need to be usable for resolutions and font-sizes. If people cannot create a simple GUI application very quickly, a lot of people will drop a language before giving it the chance it deserves.
Mono and Kylix are not viable options in my opinion, relying too much on a single supplier.
Who are the idiots that mod this piece of crap up? The data on the front page (the MRZ, or machine readable zone) is used to create master keys for BAC (Basic Access Control). Although these keys are not that well protected because the entropy is low, they are NEVER transmitted in plain.
I %20mrtds%20ICC%20read-only%20access%20v1_1.pdf
CAN'T YOU IDIOTS JUST READ THE SPECIFICATIONS? THEY ARE AVAILABLE ONLINE:
http://www.icao.int/mrtd/download/documents/TR-PK
In the Dutch/German C'T magazine there have been schematics on how to build a detector to find ISO 14443 tags (which is what these passports are). Also, you can find another way to protect yourself against these sort of attacks here:
: www.cs.vu.nl/~melanie/rfid_guardian/papers/acisp.0 5.pdf+rfid+vu&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2&lr=lang_nl|lang_e n|lang_de
http://209.85.135.104/search?q=cache:HuNI-ek20WkJ
They also link to the RFID detector in the C'T magazine (first reference).