While that's good, it does kind of bother me a bit that this is also something that I have to specifically go to Google and request.
It is, if you will, like having to send Google a takedown notice, rather than being able to set my own robots.txt. Unless you consider blinds to be the robots.txt of the real world...
Damn. It gets more confusing all the time! Spiders used to be a type of software, a metaphor for real-world arachnids -- well, now we have real-world spiders as a metaphor for search-engine spiders!
That's assuming it works. There was a story sometime about a Sony DVD player unable to play certain Sony "DVDs" which had broken the spec, in an effort to not be playable or rippable on PCs, while still being playable on hardware players.
You'd expect them to have tested it, and I'm sure they did. But you'd also have expected them to test it on their own player.
So, basically, I'm no longer convinced there's an intelligent business decision being made anywhere.
I am not a lawyer. So I should say first, thank you for what you are doing here, and I wish I could help more.
Because I am not a lawyer, I have no idea if this would work:
Tell them it is not in their best interest to keep it hidden. Tell them that if they do, whatever ends up being admissible can be torn to shreds by any of the arguments found in the other comments already.
In particular, you might generate some evidence of your own. Disclose names and IP addresses that conflict with the ones MediaSentry provides. But also disclose your own actual algorithm and records: a completely random selection. This is an idea stolen from another comment, of course -- I just think it should be followed to its natural conclusion.
Another possibility is, don't disclose that random algorithm. You might hint that it's random, but refuse to disclose it unless MediaSentry discloses theirs. This is riskier -- I have no idea what happens if they call your bluff. But if they continue to refuse to provide evidence, I think you've cast enough ambiguity on the evidence to have the whole thing either stricken entirely, or ignored by the jury.
And finally, some of us should be able to serve as "expert" witnesses. Probably overkill, as all it should take is common sense. However, it might help to have someone who is otherwise unbiased -- particularly if you can find someone who supports copyright law and thinks filesharing is wrong and evil, but who will also agree that there is not enough evidence, or the evidence as presented is worthless.
Most of my legal knowledge is from Slashdot and Law & Order, so again, I have no idea if this would work.
The last thing I want in a production enviroment is some runtime optimiser fiddling away under the bonnet. I want the binary to be consistant in its operation with no extranious BS going on other than the OS VM system itself.
The thing is, it's very likely that this optimizer is better than you are.
It took me a very long time to understand and embrace this concept. It finally clicked when I read this paper about spamfiltering. Specifically:
The statistical approach is not usually the first one people try when they write spam filters. Most hackers' first instinct is to try to write software that recognizes individual properties of spam. You look at spams and you think, the gall of these guys to try sending me mail that begins "Dear Friend" or has a subject line that's all uppercase and ends in eight exclamation points. I can filter out that stuff with about one line of code....
When I did try statistical analysis, I found immediately that it was much cleverer than I had been. It discovered, of course, that terms like "virtumundo" and "teens" were good indicators of spam. But it also discovered that "per" and "FL" and "ff0000" are good indicators of spam. In fact, "ff0000" (html for bright red) turns out to be as good an indicator of spam as any pornographic term.
I've tried a statistical spamfilter myself, and it works. It's that old principle of, at a certain point, the computer is better at it than you are -- or, at the very least, more reliably better and with so much less effort that you'd have to be insane to do it manually.
A simple example: C code. It compiles to some fairly ugly assembly, yet there are compiler optimization flags that will make it, on average, pretty decent. It's theoretically possible you could write better assembly, but it would take so obscenely much time, and the compiler is already doing it for you, so why bother? You wait until the performance is actually hurting you, and then you find a tight loop, take the smallest part of your program which the compiler didn't do quite as good a job with as you could -- and there, you write assembly.
Besides which the optimiser is not going to be able to 2nd guess what the OS is going to do - it might try and optimise some pipeline calc on the fly just for the VM to be swapped out halfway through.
It might be swapped out anyway. And by the time you're being swapped out, it doesn't really matter how fast you were running. Those few extra cycles spent in runtime optimizations aren't going to be the final straw.
The existence of swap also creates problems for having your program be entirely deterministic in its performance. If you want that, you write in C, probably mostly ASM, and you put it on a Real-Time OS.
Most people don't need things to be that consistent -- it's good enough if it is fast on average. Even things like a game -- computers are fast enough that a garbage collection cycle or a bit of runtime optimization will take place in much less than a single frame or tick.
And you're also assuming that such a VM won't communicate with the OS, or be a part of the OS. Take a look at Microsoft's Singularity for an idea of where that might go.
Because I don't see any good reason for having an extra layer between my program and the OS if its not required.
But you give no reason for that preference, other than not liking runtime optimizations.
I see no reason to have an OS at all if it's not required -- let's all write x86 assembly while we're at it! -- but it's certainly a nice thing to have.
And what about Java-the-VM? Best thing that happened to computing these last 20 years...
Without checking, I'll bet you $10 that Sun didn't invent the concept of a VM.
Not a single buffer overflow in the VM since it exist
You don't need a VM to do that.
I mean, really, what does your language offer you? Can I easily turn on and off remote profiling of running apps written in your favorite language? Really? How easy is it?
Depends on the app, but I think Ruby Waves will do that and more.
Can you run "eval" in Java? Can you open existing classes and monkeypatch them, tweak them to your bidding?
So back to the point: there are still fools today that think that 'Java is dead', or that 'Java didn't cut it' or, pathetically, that 'Java is slow' (these trolls needs to be hit with a cluestick)...
Actually, I think that.NET is a better Java than Java. And I hate Microsoft, too, but those are the facts.
Well, I've got some news for you: <inane rambling list of things Java is run in>
By that logic, C must be the fucking grail!
you cannot buy a Blu-Ray player without having a JVM (it's part of the Blu-Ray specs)
Part of a certain version of the specs. I'm fairly sure there were early players which did not have a JVM. The one that Blu-Ray does have is not anywhere near a full-fledged desktop JVM.
Talking of GMail, what does Google think of Java? That it's so convenient they want you to use that instead of messing with ugly EcmaScript for AJAXy-like development
Wow. Between EcmaScript and Java, I'll take EcmaScript every time. The fact that you choose Java tells me that either you are a fan of static typing, or you have no idea just how powerful EcmaScript is. (I'll give you a hint -- the guy who invented it wanted to do a LISP interpreter, but his boss told him to write some C-like script. So he wrote a LISP interpreter with C-like syntax -- and that is EcmaScript.)
I should also mention: I worked on HD-DVD. Anyone I talked to about it who had worked with both said they preferred working with HD-DVD. I wonder why that is?
I will say that aside from the storage/bandwidth issue, HD-DVD was ahead technologically for most of the race. (That said, as a user, I mostly just want to watch the movie, so more storage and bandwidth makes a lot of sense.)
GWT anyone?
Yeah, I hate it.
GWT depends on browser identification. It actually serves you an entirely different script based on which browser you're running. If it doesn't recognize your browser, it serves you a non-AJAX version.
In my mind, that is broken by design, yet many people consider it to be a feature. And because of this broken design, I have to keep a Firefox window open for no reason other than to run my Google Apps.
most sites you visit
Excuse me? Are you kidding me?
The top two languages, according to a casual Google search, are PHP and ASP, in that order. So Java is at best third, unless we can find some actual statistics to pin it on. The only sites I ever notice a JSP page on are various corporate websites which are basically HTML brochures. The only site I actually use that I know is running Java is Gmail.
Now, if you're wondering why you got modded down, let me take you on a brief tour:
Re-read this. A thousand times: no buffer-overflows.
Quoted in a context where it's actually inaccurate, yet you're arrogant enough to insult our intelligence.
You can install a whole f*cking JVM without needing to be root... Wild.
Well, f*cking amazing! I can do that with really any language
There are four good reasons to run a VM, that I know of:
Reflection. It may be possible with a compiled program, but I've never seen it done, and most VMs make it much easier.
Runtime optimization. Optimizing at runtime means your program can take advantage of knowledge of the actual, running system to optimize itself. Psyco took advantage of this -- it compiled multiple versions of various things (to x86 binary, I might add) and then chose one to run based on the kind of load the program was actually getting.
Faster than interpreting. Take any so-called "scripting" language -- Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP, Visual Basic, JavaScript -- would you really expect a language which supports "eval" to compile to a traditional binary? But they can be compiled to bytecode, which is faster than interpreting them line by line.
Higher-level library calls. Example: If Perl6 and its Parrot VM are ever finished, Python and Ruby programs will be able to use CPAN modules directly, as though they had been written in Python or Ruby. Currently, this kind of thing happens in.NET all the time. And because it's a property of the runtime, it works the same way on any platform.
That's in addition to compile-once, run-anywhere, which is a good thing anyway. In college, for instance, there was one assignment in which we were to write against a library provided by the professor. We were given a jar file, not source code. I was able to develop and test on amd64 Linux and/or ppc OS X, depending which I wanted to use at the time. It was almost certainly graded on a 32-bit x86 Windows XP.
A better question now might be, what's the point of a traditional compiler? Or, why would you prefer one over a VM with JIT?
Once again, on Slashdot, I say, 'who cares?' This is a Windows vulnerability and I thought Slashdot was an open source outlet for news and for some stories that people so-called 'care about', not Windows vulnerabilities.
You're wrong on two counts.
One, this is an outlet for "news for nerds". As unfathomable as it might seem to you, there are nerds who are into Windows. Some even by choice.
Two, this is not a Windows vulnerability. It is a FireWire vulnerability -- actually, a FireWire design flaw. It is possible that the OS could be careful enough to prevent this kind of thing, but none of the current OSes are:
We want open source OS's (Linux, FreeBSD, Syllable, etc) to be the most-used, don't we?
I honestly can't say about Syllable or FreeBSD, but I know that neither Linux nor OSX have fixed this issue. There is an unstable fix for Linux, but it breaks some hardware.
The recommended fix, in all cases, is to disable your FireWire port when you're not using it.
Well, posting stories like this just to point and laugh at Microsoft makes the open source community look very pretentious, like looking at a 'Windows admin' and laughing at them because they do not know basic UNIX commands.
So does complaining about a story merely because it discusses a Windows vulnerability. Maybe not everyone saw this as an excuse to point and laugh at Microsoft? Maybe only you did?
Ignoring some of the vague language of standards -- like "MUST, SHOULD, MAY, OPTIONAL", etc, as another poster clarified -- there is another reason why standards-compliance is subjective.
If you define a standard as a particular chunk of language, it is possible to create something which is technically compatible with the language, but not with any existing implementation of it. It is possible that this is because the existing implementations followed the spirit of that language, and you followed the letter of it. See any DJB program for examples of this.
If you define a standard as a particular reference implementation or validator (hopefully accompanied with a chunk of language), it is also possible for there to be bugs in that implementation, which must therefore be reflected in all competing implementations, but were absolutely not the intent. See the Windows APIs -- particularly their backwards-compatibility hacks -- for an example of this.
In other words, it is possible that either the language or the implementation will not adequately describe what was intended. In such cases, it is possible to have degrees of compliance -- all of which are technically compliant.
I would argue that to minimize this, it would be helpful to have all three -- a spec (or at least a design document), a reference implementation, and a validator (which could also be used as functional tests while developing the actual implementation). Even so, it's not going to be perfect.
That said, it is usually very clear when something is not compliant to standards, and there should not be degrees of that. Many people seem to think there are, but that only leads to the mess of hacks that is the Quirks Mode of most browsers today.
It's assuming a lot of things, but I was among those who complained the loudest on the threads in which it was announced that IE8 would require an explicit HTTP header (something like "Browser-Compatibility: IE8") to enable standards-compliant mode. Today, I feel like I made a difference.
Yes, it is suspect, as is anything coming out of Microsoft. But if they do finally manage to pull it off, it is a good thing.
You supposedly want "freedom" and yet you throw a fit when some entity takes your software and uses it to their advantage.
When "freedom" is defined as freedom for the end-user, I think they do pretty well.
Fucking patchouli-stinking communist.
Must be trolling hour. My turn! Fucking long-haired, crack-smoking, Metallica-wannabe anarchist.
I'm not so goddamn arrogant as to think I can dictate how you use my inventions.
Cool! So what do you do for a day job? Where did you find a company that's not so goddamn arrogant as to think it can dictate how the end-user can use your inventions?
For that matter, why the fuck did you use BSD, then? If you really want us to "use it as you see fit", follow sqlite's fine example and release public domain. I might even maintain the GPL fork.
Let me know when you want to have an actual discussion. Or we can just flame each other like retards.
He knows there's a size limit but he thinks this means users were forced to meet the size limit by compressing their video
I did some HD-DVD work. Typically, these would cram it right up to the 30 gig limit. Being generous, and assuming the movie is two and a half hours long, that still means 5 minutes per gig.
Which means to reach that level of quality, you get 30 seconds of video.
I'd suggest that for the things on YouTube where I'd want quality, I'd probably also want 5 minutes or so of video, at least.
users could have limited the length of the crappy home movies they were uploading.
You say this after quoting me on "re-encoding crap will give you crap", yet you seem to agree that they are crappy home movies. And you know what, I think most of usseem to agree that they are crappy. So why quote that bit?
In conclusion, this guy is dumb.
Well, I did get one fact wrong, but so did you. In conclusion, this guy is the only one among us who knows what he's talking about.
It was more an invitation to RTFM, but I just realized that Google isn't helping much, and I can't find the original articles. So here's the short version:
Performance is how fast an app runs for a given amount of hardware. This is usually measured in how fast it is with respect to a single core of a single CPU.
Scalability is how well the app behaves when you just throw more hardware at it. That is, if you give it another ten CPUs and five gigs of RAM, will it be able to take advantage of that?
Ruby performance sucks. It is impossibly slow, even compared to languages like Perl or Python. I make no excuses for that. Look at the performance improvements of rails 1.9, and you'll get an idea of just how bad 1.8 is.
But Rails scales very well -- in the simplest example, the default configuration for Rails nowdays is a mongrel cluster, even on a single machine. It's a really strange and perverse design where you put a load-balancing proxy in front of at least three Rails/Mongrel webservers, each listening on a different local port. And unless you've done something stupid, this will Just Work, right out of the box.
But as long as your database server can handle it, you can just throw another server behind that load balancer. A lot of work has gone into making load balancers and database servers scalable, and you can take advantage of that, if you really need to. (For awhile, Ruby is still going to be the bottleneck.)
What this means is that I probably would not write a performance-critical desktop app (like, say, a game) in Ruby. But for web apps, it makes sense. If you can write the same app twice as fast, with half the people, you can afford to throw four times the server resources at it -- and as a bonus, you got it up in half the time as your competitor, who thought scalability == performance.
Rails scales, it doesn't perform. As a language, it's impossible for Ruby to scale or not scale -- that is up to the app, unless you were going to suggest Erlang.
The difference between scalability and performance is important, and dirt-simple. And it will help you no matter what your platform is.
Apparently, recently, they've added the ability for video decoding to be hardware-accelerated, but only when the video is fullscreen. I'm still amazed that the vector graphics aren't accelerated, even if it's when Flash is a plugin -- at this rate, we'll have hardware-accelerated SVG in Firefox before we'll have properly hardware-accelerated Flash.
Now, when YouTube has the option to also serve the video in a straight mp4 container (or similar)...
To me, that is the point. That is what made the show powerful.
If you notice, not all the humans share the same perspective. And among those that do, they are hardly presented in a positive light.
The whole point of the show is to raise these moral ambiguities, and to force you to think.
And while we're at it -- the Cylons destroyed twelve planets, and are now attempting to wipe out the rest of the humans. They can and do manipulate the humans, and I would argue, continue to cause as much damage as the humans to them. The "workers revolution" did end up getting brushed off, after which, they started to talk about how to make things better in the future -- but equality would have been irrelevant if there had been no future.
It is difficult to find a "good guy" in the show, as in life -- yet all the characters are real. We can empathize with what they do, even if it seems abhorrent -- in many cases, I find myself asking, "Would I honestly do any different, were I in that situation?"
It would, however, be a benefit to the people who need more reliability than they think they do. I'd say those outnumber the people who truly wouldn't mind if their software exploded -- honestly, how many people do you know who have backups?
Slashdot Mirror
While that's good, it does kind of bother me a bit that this is also something that I have to specifically go to Google and request.
It is, if you will, like having to send Google a takedown notice, rather than being able to set my own robots.txt. Unless you consider blinds to be the robots.txt of the real world...
Damn. It gets more confusing all the time! Spiders used to be a type of software, a metaphor for real-world arachnids -- well, now we have real-world spiders as a metaphor for search-engine spiders!
And this is exactly where music was, not so long ago. Just you wait.
And there are some fairly large libraries of movies out there, though most of them in crappy quality (DRM'd, too) and/or of questionable legality.
Hang on -- I wasn't paying that much attention, but I thought Universal was HD-DVD exclusively? I know Warner was the one that switched...
That's assuming it works. There was a story sometime about a Sony DVD player unable to play certain Sony "DVDs" which had broken the spec, in an effort to not be playable or rippable on PCs, while still being playable on hardware players.
You'd expect them to have tested it, and I'm sure they did. But you'd also have expected them to test it on their own player.
So, basically, I'm no longer convinced there's an intelligent business decision being made anywhere.
It looks as though those 11 files were in some 25 minutes (roughly), and that they were logged in three seconds.
Of course, taking three seconds to log might be suspect, but we have no context for that.
I am not a lawyer. So I should say first, thank you for what you are doing here, and I wish I could help more.
Because I am not a lawyer, I have no idea if this would work:
Tell them it is not in their best interest to keep it hidden. Tell them that if they do, whatever ends up being admissible can be torn to shreds by any of the arguments found in the other comments already.
In particular, you might generate some evidence of your own. Disclose names and IP addresses that conflict with the ones MediaSentry provides. But also disclose your own actual algorithm and records: a completely random selection. This is an idea stolen from another comment, of course -- I just think it should be followed to its natural conclusion.
Another possibility is, don't disclose that random algorithm. You might hint that it's random, but refuse to disclose it unless MediaSentry discloses theirs. This is riskier -- I have no idea what happens if they call your bluff. But if they continue to refuse to provide evidence, I think you've cast enough ambiguity on the evidence to have the whole thing either stricken entirely, or ignored by the jury.
And finally, some of us should be able to serve as "expert" witnesses. Probably overkill, as all it should take is common sense. However, it might help to have someone who is otherwise unbiased -- particularly if you can find someone who supports copyright law and thinks filesharing is wrong and evil, but who will also agree that there is not enough evidence, or the evidence as presented is worthless.
Most of my legal knowledge is from Slashdot and Law & Order, so again, I have no idea if this would work.
The thing is, it's very likely that this optimizer is better than you are.
It took me a very long time to understand and embrace this concept. It finally clicked when I read this paper about spamfiltering. Specifically:
I've tried a statistical spamfilter myself, and it works. It's that old principle of, at a certain point, the computer is better at it than you are -- or, at the very least, more reliably better and with so much less effort that you'd have to be insane to do it manually.
A simple example: C code. It compiles to some fairly ugly assembly, yet there are compiler optimization flags that will make it, on average, pretty decent. It's theoretically possible you could write better assembly, but it would take so obscenely much time, and the compiler is already doing it for you, so why bother? You wait until the performance is actually hurting you, and then you find a tight loop, take the smallest part of your program which the compiler didn't do quite as good a job with as you could -- and there, you write assembly.
It might be swapped out anyway. And by the time you're being swapped out, it doesn't really matter how fast you were running. Those few extra cycles spent in runtime optimizations aren't going to be the final straw.
The existence of swap also creates problems for having your program be entirely deterministic in its performance. If you want that, you write in C, probably mostly ASM, and you put it on a Real-Time OS.
Most people don't need things to be that consistent -- it's good enough if it is fast on average. Even things like a game -- computers are fast enough that a garbage collection cycle or a bit of runtime optimization will take place in much less than a single frame or tick.
And you're also assuming that such a VM won't communicate with the OS, or be a part of the OS. Take a look at Microsoft's Singularity for an idea of where that might go.
But you give no reason for that preference, other than not liking runtime optimizations.
I see no reason to have an OS at all if it's not required -- let's all write x86 assembly while we're at it! -- but it's certainly a nice thing to have.
Without checking, I'll bet you $10 that Sun didn't invent the concept of a VM.
You don't need a VM to do that.
Depends on the app, but I think Ruby Waves will do that and more.
Can you run "eval" in Java? Can you open existing classes and monkeypatch them, tweak them to your bidding?
Actually, I think that .NET is a better Java than Java. And I hate Microsoft, too, but those are the facts.
By that logic, C must be the fucking grail!
Part of a certain version of the specs. I'm fairly sure there were early players which did not have a JVM. The one that Blu-Ray does have is not anywhere near a full-fledged desktop JVM.
Wow. Between EcmaScript and Java, I'll take EcmaScript every time. The fact that you choose Java tells me that either you are a fan of static typing, or you have no idea just how powerful EcmaScript is. (I'll give you a hint -- the guy who invented it wanted to do a LISP interpreter, but his boss told him to write some C-like script. So he wrote a LISP interpreter with C-like syntax -- and that is EcmaScript.)
I should also mention: I worked on HD-DVD. Anyone I talked to about it who had worked with both said they preferred working with HD-DVD. I wonder why that is?
I will say that aside from the storage/bandwidth issue, HD-DVD was ahead technologically for most of the race. (That said, as a user, I mostly just want to watch the movie, so more storage and bandwidth makes a lot of sense.)
Yeah, I hate it.
GWT depends on browser identification. It actually serves you an entirely different script based on which browser you're running. If it doesn't recognize your browser, it serves you a non-AJAX version.
In my mind, that is broken by design, yet many people consider it to be a feature. And because of this broken design, I have to keep a Firefox window open for no reason other than to run my Google Apps.
Excuse me? Are you kidding me?
The top two languages, according to a casual Google search, are PHP and ASP, in that order. So Java is at best third, unless we can find some actual statistics to pin it on. The only sites I ever notice a JSP page on are various corporate websites which are basically HTML brochures. The only site I actually use that I know is running Java is Gmail.
Now, if you're wondering why you got modded down, let me take you on a brief tour:
Quoted in a context where it's actually inaccurate, yet you're arrogant enough to insult our intelligence.
Well, f*cking amazing! I can do that with really any language
There are four good reasons to run a VM, that I know of:
That's in addition to compile-once, run-anywhere, which is a good thing anyway. In college, for instance, there was one assignment in which we were to write against a library provided by the professor. We were given a jar file, not source code. I was able to develop and test on amd64 Linux and/or ppc OS X, depending which I wanted to use at the time. It was almost certainly graded on a 32-bit x86 Windows XP.
A better question now might be, what's the point of a traditional compiler? Or, why would you prefer one over a VM with JIT?
You're wrong on two counts.
One, this is an outlet for "news for nerds". As unfathomable as it might seem to you, there are nerds who are into Windows. Some even by choice.
Two, this is not a Windows vulnerability. It is a FireWire vulnerability -- actually, a FireWire design flaw. It is possible that the OS could be careful enough to prevent this kind of thing, but none of the current OSes are:
I honestly can't say about Syllable or FreeBSD, but I know that neither Linux nor OSX have fixed this issue. There is an unstable fix for Linux, but it breaks some hardware.
The recommended fix, in all cases, is to disable your FireWire port when you're not using it.
So does complaining about a story merely because it discusses a Windows vulnerability. Maybe not everyone saw this as an excuse to point and laugh at Microsoft? Maybe only you did?
I wouldn't mind S/MIME, either.
But the answer is no, as far as I know. Haven't looked into it recently, though.
Also, it would be kind of a pain to work into my current spam system, though I'm sure it's possible.
Ignoring some of the vague language of standards -- like "MUST, SHOULD, MAY, OPTIONAL", etc, as another poster clarified -- there is another reason why standards-compliance is subjective.
If you define a standard as a particular chunk of language, it is possible to create something which is technically compatible with the language, but not with any existing implementation of it. It is possible that this is because the existing implementations followed the spirit of that language, and you followed the letter of it. See any DJB program for examples of this.
If you define a standard as a particular reference implementation or validator (hopefully accompanied with a chunk of language), it is also possible for there to be bugs in that implementation, which must therefore be reflected in all competing implementations, but were absolutely not the intent. See the Windows APIs -- particularly their backwards-compatibility hacks -- for an example of this.
In other words, it is possible that either the language or the implementation will not adequately describe what was intended. In such cases, it is possible to have degrees of compliance -- all of which are technically compliant.
I would argue that to minimize this, it would be helpful to have all three -- a spec (or at least a design document), a reference implementation, and a validator (which could also be used as functional tests while developing the actual implementation). Even so, it's not going to be perfect.
That said, it is usually very clear when something is not compliant to standards, and there should not be degrees of that. Many people seem to think there are, but that only leads to the mess of hacks that is the Quirks Mode of most browsers today.
I will actually thank Microsoft for it.
It's assuming a lot of things, but I was among those who complained the loudest on the threads in which it was announced that IE8 would require an explicit HTTP header (something like "Browser-Compatibility: IE8") to enable standards-compliant mode. Today, I feel like I made a difference.
Yes, it is suspect, as is anything coming out of Microsoft. But if they do finally manage to pull it off, it is a good thing.
When "freedom" is defined as freedom for the end-user, I think they do pretty well.
Must be trolling hour. My turn! Fucking long-haired, crack-smoking, Metallica-wannabe anarchist.
Cool! So what do you do for a day job? Where did you find a company that's not so goddamn arrogant as to think it can dictate how the end-user can use your inventions?
For that matter, why the fuck did you use BSD, then? If you really want us to "use it as you see fit", follow sqlite's fine example and release public domain. I might even maintain the GPL fork.
Let me know when you want to have an actual discussion. Or we can just flame each other like retards.
You're right, I did mean Ruby 1.9 vs Ruby 1.8. Sorry about that.
I did some HD-DVD work. Typically, these would cram it right up to the 30 gig limit. Being generous, and assuming the movie is two and a half hours long, that still means 5 minutes per gig.
Which means to reach that level of quality, you get 30 seconds of video.
I'd suggest that for the things on YouTube where I'd want quality, I'd probably also want 5 minutes or so of video, at least.
You say this after quoting me on "re-encoding crap will give you crap", yet you seem to agree that they are crappy home movies. And you know what, I think most of us seem to agree that they are crappy. So why quote that bit?
Well, I did get one fact wrong, but so did you. In conclusion, this guy is the only one among us who knows what he's talking about.
So what you are saying is, in order to not be fucked over by a big company, you must:
I have a better way: Expect that big corporations try not to be quite as much of an asshole as alienw is.
It was more an invitation to RTFM, but I just realized that Google isn't helping much, and I can't find the original articles. So here's the short version:
Performance is how fast an app runs for a given amount of hardware. This is usually measured in how fast it is with respect to a single core of a single CPU.
Scalability is how well the app behaves when you just throw more hardware at it. That is, if you give it another ten CPUs and five gigs of RAM, will it be able to take advantage of that?
Ruby performance sucks. It is impossibly slow, even compared to languages like Perl or Python. I make no excuses for that. Look at the performance improvements of rails 1.9, and you'll get an idea of just how bad 1.8 is.
But Rails scales very well -- in the simplest example, the default configuration for Rails nowdays is a mongrel cluster, even on a single machine. It's a really strange and perverse design where you put a load-balancing proxy in front of at least three Rails/Mongrel webservers, each listening on a different local port. And unless you've done something stupid, this will Just Work, right out of the box.
But as long as your database server can handle it, you can just throw another server behind that load balancer. A lot of work has gone into making load balancers and database servers scalable, and you can take advantage of that, if you really need to. (For awhile, Ruby is still going to be the bottleneck.)
What this means is that I probably would not write a performance-critical desktop app (like, say, a game) in Ruby. But for web apps, it makes sense. If you can write the same app twice as fast, with half the people, you can afford to throw four times the server resources at it -- and as a bonus, you got it up in half the time as your competitor, who thought scalability == performance.
The kinds of people who fall for phishing scams aren't likely to pay attention to what PayPal advises them to do.
So why not cut the middleman and just advise them to not fall for phishing scams -- that is, to always verify https://www.paypal.com/ in the URL?
Rails scales, it doesn't perform. As a language, it's impossible for Ruby to scale or not scale -- that is up to the app, unless you were going to suggest Erlang.
The difference between scalability and performance is important, and dirt-simple. And it will help you no matter what your platform is.
And those originals are still limited to something like 50 or 100 megs.
The point is that the originals are already poor quality. Re-encoding crap will give you crap, period.
Knowing Flash, it may or may not be worth it.
Apparently, recently, they've added the ability for video decoding to be hardware-accelerated, but only when the video is fullscreen. I'm still amazed that the vector graphics aren't accelerated, even if it's when Flash is a plugin -- at this rate, we'll have hardware-accelerated SVG in Firefox before we'll have properly hardware-accelerated Flash.
Now, when YouTube has the option to also serve the video in a straight mp4 container (or similar)...
I thought it was terrific, well-timed shouting, ranting, and screaming. No accounting for taste, I suppose.
To me, that is the point. That is what made the show powerful.
If you notice, not all the humans share the same perspective. And among those that do, they are hardly presented in a positive light.
The whole point of the show is to raise these moral ambiguities, and to force you to think.
And while we're at it -- the Cylons destroyed twelve planets, and are now attempting to wipe out the rest of the humans. They can and do manipulate the humans, and I would argue, continue to cause as much damage as the humans to them. The "workers revolution" did end up getting brushed off, after which, they started to talk about how to make things better in the future -- but equality would have been irrelevant if there had been no future.
It is difficult to find a "good guy" in the show, as in life -- yet all the characters are real. We can empathize with what they do, even if it seems abhorrent -- in many cases, I find myself asking, "Would I honestly do any different, were I in that situation?"
And that is what keeps bringing me back.
It would, however, be a benefit to the people who need more reliability than they think they do. I'd say those outnumber the people who truly wouldn't mind if their software exploded -- honestly, how many people do you know who have backups?