It means that theverylastaoluser@aol.com (seriously, who uses it anymore?) can now IM to smartpeople@gmail.com, and vice versa.
A longer explanation: IM has, historically, been a walled garden. That is, if you have MSN Messenger (or "Windows Messenger"), I need to have MSN Messenger in order to IM you. If I have Yahoo Messenger, we can't communicate.
There are ways around this, none of them very good. You could just install Yahoo Messenger also, and AIM, and that will cover almost everyone. (Almost -- there's still Gadu-Gadu, WinPopup, Groupwise, ICQ, IRC...)
IRC is a bit better, actually, because at least there's a standard protocol. Anyone can setup an IRC server, or write their own IRC client. If you're on Windows, you can just download mIRC and connect to anyone. (I like irssi on Linux and MacIRSSI on OS X.) But it's still a walled garden, in that you can't connect to EFnet and talk to people -- in rooms or in private messages -- who are on DALnet. (Or Freenode, or...)
But not everything is a walled garden. Email, for instance -- anyone can register a domain, setup a mailserver, and provide email for themselves, for friends, or for money. If you're a poor sap who has an @aol.com email address, I don't have to do anything special to be able to send mail to you from my @gmail.com address, or from my own domain.
All it takes for email to work is a domain name and a mailserver. And a mailserver can be any computer that's online all the time. Not that I recommend doing it yourself, just saying that email is wholly and completely democratized.
Well, that's what Jabber/XMPP is all about. Not only is the chat/IM protocol open, but Jabber servers can be configured to talk to other Jabber servers -- to arbitrarily connect to each other. So you can be on AOL Instant Messenger, and I can be on Google Talk, but we can add each other to our buddy lists and communicate. Not because there's any kind of big deal with AOL and Google, but because they both speak Jabber. And like email, I can setup my own Jabber server.
It's possible to pull people into a chatroom. On MSN, this is spontaneous and invite-only. On Yahoo, for awhile, there were IRC-like rooms -- they probably still exist, but Yahoo doesn't talk about them anymore. I'm fairly sure Jabber supports this functionality, too.
The trouble is, you can't have anything like a "room" which includes people from different networks. I believe this means that GTalk people will be able to join AOL chatrooms and vice versa.
Then google finally put out google talk, a great implementation...
...of Jabber (XMPP), which is exactly what AOL is about to do.
Call me old school but I like the TSR windows client. I don't want my IMs getting lost in browser tabs...I wish they'd port it to linux.
gaim supports Jabber. Kopete supports Jabber. There are probably a dozen more that I've never even heard of. And the current implementation of gmail does allow you to "pop out" an IM window. All of these will (theoretically) talk to AOL users now, too. Just what is it that you're missing?
(Or do I not understand what "TSR" stands for?)
Anyway, Google. PLEASE, please please grab AOl off of time warner...
Why?
Honestly, if AOL is dying (as you say), I don't see why anyone should stop them...
Web 2.0, if it meaningfully exists at all, is built on some rather horrible hacks that break down the server-client wall
I won't deny horrible hacks, but "server-client wall"?
building substantial applications, like accounting and financial software, in AJAX would be an unbelievably difficult job, and a rather hard one to justify.
I don't see how it would be either particularly difficult (there are plenty of good libraries out there now) or particularly hard to justify (Business Guy can now print his reports from ANYWHERE!)
I take a TDK CD-R or DVD+R, fill it with data, and lend it to a friend.
Fine, but that's not "backup".
How much do you pay per month for Internet access, and in which country?
I have Internet access anyway. I'm on Slashdot, aren't I?
By "cable", do you mean something with a 3.5 mm stereo miniplug on one end and what looks like an audio cassette on the other end? Because I've seen plenty of home and car stereos without line inputs, including the stereos in both cars that I've driven.
I also mean something with a 3.5 mm on one end and an RCA plug on the other end. In the case of cars, there's also FM adapters.
But then I have to carry the laptop into the room with the home theater and leave it there until other members of the family have finished watching the movie.
Well, that much is true. I don't think I'll ever use a laptop as a primary computer, so I always forget these things. (I can leave the laptop there and go use my desktop...)
Another definition of God is the Universe, and the patterns that make up the Universe. Both of these exist and are observable. Therefore, God is a scientific fact.
Another definition of God is an omnipotent, omnipresent, omnibenevolent entity. Only two of these can be logically true. Therefore, God cannot exist.
Another definition of God is "that which created Man". Therefore, God exists as the physical laws and the pattern of natural selection.
Another definition of God is "what did all those miracles in the Bible." Therefore, God is a myth, and were he real, he'd be a bastard.
You cannot disprove God, because there is no consistent definition of God. Therefore, any such definition you adopt can be refuted simply by your target claiming not to believe in that definition, and instead, to believe in another -- very likely one that you can't refute.
In short, you, and everyone else, need to stop attacking the God issue as if it can be resolved logically, one way or another. Everyone has some arbitrary axioms, many of which they're not aware. This process will not convince anyone of anything they didn't already believe, except that you are an asshat.
Intelligent life-forms don't like their intelligence insulted.
And intelligent life-forms know how to use that tone, so that other life-forms, no matter how intelligent or not, have no excuse not to listen to the content.
Asperger's or not, you do have a goal here, right? I mean, beyond just ranting about how much you hate "primitive primates", you actually do want to change things, right?
Oh, and by the way: You didn't have much intelligent content, either.
Blech, didn't quite finished that. Meant to finish the "Can you call it Christianity" with "Can you call it Islam, or ANY of the major religions, if it asks people to kill themselves for it?"
In that case, let's talk about UI. Remember back when you said:
I don't understand how the internet is even useful, since anything you define on the web you could have simply included as an option on the disc AND it will be les suser configurable.
Ok, now I see the problem. You said "web", when what we both meant was REST.
You see, HDi is a script that runs off disc or persistent storage. It's Javascript and XML. It has an API which allows it to fetch things over HTTP, but it does NOT have a web browser. Thus, the only relevance of "web" here is as REST -- it's really just a form of restricted Internet access that has nothing directly to do with the Web.
("Restricted" because it does not allow protocols other than HTTP, or ports other than 80 (or 443 for SSL), etc etc)
So, anything BDJ can do, HDi can do. And right now, HDi can do it better.
not for example show active movies in the UI the same way you could with BD-J.
Not only can I show active movies in the UI, I can download or stream them, too. Could watch the original movie, while streaming in a live director's commentary talking head...
There's a reason people would prefer real apps on the iPhone over web apps.
Yes, there is, but it has nothing to do with XML or JavaScript.
Because for your single example the user could more easily choose the exact series of test patterns desired based on a more refined GUI not hampered by DHTML limitations or the availability of network which as I said only 20% of people would have hooked up anyway.
Except HD-DVD markup is not HTML, though it resembles it. And HDi does not require availability of the network, so I could still fall back to your way if it was not available.
Correct. But it's not a good idea in even your example that is unlike any other disc sold on the market.
Let's talk about that after you understand how my example works.
All flash video to date is streamed over the network.
Also not true. (Alright, technically it's Director, but it's the same tech.) And that's not counting downloading the flv file directly and watching from mplayer or VLC.
You mean the same iPod which lets people download and "own" songs and store them locally?
Or copy them from their friends, or download them from the Internet.
I wouldn't even rate it as possible. J2ME programming is a lot easier
Than what?
Grandma will not have a 1st gen player though, she's not a bleeding edge buyer
Let me offer one: No one's proven God. Therefore the need to disprove God does not exist
That's another debate altogether. I was replying to someone who claims that God has been disproven, which is nonsensical -- partly because religion is extremely talented at rewriting itself to be kinda-maybe-sorta possible.
Is there conclusive proof of the claims such products make? If not, then by definition it isn't science.... Contrast that to the holy books of the major religions, which don't have (and arguably don't need) any sort of substantiation by fact.
You're absolutely right.
But here's a question: Can you call it Christianity if people aren't reading the Bible? Am I still a Jew if I work on Saturday?
If we were to put organized religion toe to toe against organized science, I kind of hope the science would stand on its own merits. Instead we've got asshats like the troll I was replying to, who would rather reduce it to an attempt to find the worst examples of each -- including things which are arguably outside the formal definition of whatever you are arguing against.
Which Mac model is ideal for this sort of home server role?
Probably this. However, that doesn't seem at all to be what the GP was talking about -- they run a Linux laptop.
In other words, one still needs to figure a USB DVD recorder into the total cost of the machine.
Who said DVD recorder? They have these amazing inventions called "hard drives" now...
To play a proprietary video game.
I get most of those through Steam. But consider that GP uses Linux -- I haven't seen a proprietary Linux game that requires the game disc be kept in the drive. It's perfectly reasonable to use an external drive that you leave behind, or another computer entirely, to get stuff off the original DVDs.
Even apart from game discs, not all car or home stereos have an iPod dock, and not all TV sets have an Apple TV box. For these, one needs to record a CD or DVD.
Or buy a $10 cable to connect your iPod to that home sterio. I think a CD recorder, and the media, would cost a bit more.
I just checked, and yes, it looks like this thing has TV out (S-video and DVI). So, again, for far less than a DVD recorder, you can plug it into a home theater.
That said, for most purposes, I'd rather just get an EEE PC. Sorry, but Apple came to the ultraportable party late (as usual), with a big pile of Microsoftian bullshit about Innovation (it's got multitouch, and that's it), and it's more than three times the price of the most expensive EEE PC I can buy.
Well, there's a problem right there. No one person knows all the intended uses of a zone transfer. I learned a new one today from a sibling post -- actually migrating DNS information to a new host, when switching service providers.
the secondary server is operated by the same party that operates the primary server.
*chokes on breakfast*...what?
I've been using it for almost a year now, for dynamic DNS. It means I get to configure and run a real DNS server, and set it up exactly the way I like, and then, when I need to update the records on my real DNS servers (at zoneedit.com, dyndns.com, etc), I only have to change one setting -- the master host. This means that, for example, if I want to switch to another system, I don't have to learn a new API (or write one to crawl their website) that's much more complicated than a single POST request, updating which master server they should update from.
(Just been reading that zoneedit.com sucks, so I'm considering switching to dyndns.com, which honestly is pretty cheap, and their service which does zone transfers is cheaper than their service which has a web interface.)
That is to say: I operate the primary server, and the secondary and tertiary servers are operated by a third party, even if these secondary and tertiary servers are listed in my domain as primary and secondary servers. This is hardly unique to dynamic DNS -- it's also used in cases where there is a static IP, but you only want to maintain one server, and you (obviously) can't guarantee five nines of uptime on that server. So you pay someone to run a secondary DNS server.
A secondary intended purpose for zone transfers is to permit trouble shooting in which case zone transfers may sometimes be undertaken via the manually conducted host -l command. In those instances, however, the person conducting the diagnosis acts with the authorization of the operator of the system and is usually the network administrator for the system.
That's reasonable, but answer this: If I were to use the "host" command -- just "host", by itself, looking up MX records and such -- should I be worried about it being illegal? What about "whois" and such? There are plenty of times when it's reasonable to expect that a third party should run diagnostics -- such as when the first party is completely clueless, and needs to be told so.
Some other poster put it very clearly -- geeks generally believe that if you make a service public, it is public. It's certainly possible to limit zone transfers to the IP address of the secondary DNS server. This would not be an absolute protection, but it would at least show what the intent was.
This has been debated fairly often with respect to open wireless access points. What you have here is, according to the machine protocols involved, a machine shouting "Look at me! My name is LINKSYS, and I'm open! Just connect if you want to get online!" It is trivially easy, in most cases, to have it instead broadcast "My name is LINKSYS, and you'll need a password to connect!" Or, alternatively, to not brodcast at all -- to just sit in a corner until someone says, "Hey, LINKSYS! Let me connect!"
It's not quite that bad, but it's similar. "Hey, ns1.example.com! Would you mind telling me what all the subdomains of example.com are?" (There are legitimate reasons for doing this, too -- maybe I'm a spider, and I want to find web pages which aren't specifically linked to by www.example.com.) At this point, if ns1.example.com says "Sure! There's mail.example.com, and www.example.com, and, oh yeah, super.secret.stuff.example.com"... how is this your fault? If super.secret.stuff was really that secret, ns1.example.com could've left it out, or could've said "No, sorry, I'm not going to tell you."
And BDJ allows for an even richer interface, or at least the same level of customizability.
I'm still confused. What is not "rich" about REST?
And unless you at least include web support, I don't see how it's the same level of customizability.
No, no it's not because it's such a corner case, a complete aberration from the general use of movies on disc. It's nothing like that, a use that while technically possible is not what the technology was built and is targeted for.
Again, I'll direct you to HTTP -- a simple file-sharing protocol, with far fewer features than FTP, which is now being used to deliver applications, for RPC between applications...
Or, take Javascript. It was built to validate form submissions, and to do the things that CSS does now. And Javascript is now being used to develop applications.
Was built and is targeted have little impact on the reality of what it can do, or even on what it might be a good idea to make it do.
But not for Linux systems, generally.
What does that have to do with anything?
I was replying to your estimate that only 20% of BD players will be connected to the Internet.
Flash bound is internet bound.
No, it's not. And that was also "at worst".
Network based storage is still a good twenty years off from acceptance - people like to own things, and ownership is physical to most people. Sorry, that's just how humans work and like all other endeavors that attempt to ignore human nature, it will always be a small thing in a very big pond.
Oh, thanks! I didn't know that.
I guess I'll go tell that to Apple. This iPod thing was a failure after all.
It's pretty easy to run that calculation - anything I pay to won music is lower than infinity.
You're going to live forever? How??
It's quite a few when you multiply that by the average size of the US population, and consider how many discs Netflix needs to operate.
So why haven't they bought Netflix?
I don't mean that literally. I mean, if Netflix is actually as successful or moreso than a model of buy-to-own, it's the studios' fault for not cashing in on it.
Judging by the movie industry as a whole then you are obviously an aberration, which is why I don't think much of the arguments you put forth make much sense...
I've done nothing but point out flaws in your arguments.
...right. Because my own buying habits being an aberration make my arguments flawed.
Just like you don't "know" the sun will rise tomorrow? Those are the level of odds we are talking about.
Guessing you didn't major in statistics.
Try this one: Calculate the odds that one or more studio CEOs will suddenly go batshit insane and back HD-DVD. Compare those with the odds that the sun goes poof.
That seems unlikely since consumer burning tools will generally use subsets of functionality, I don't know how many people will be doing general BD-J stuff.
Probably not many. Possibly enough.
In any case, all it takes is a particular subset of the functionality that works on the PS3, but blows up Grandma's first-gen standalone player.
The CPython interpreter is open source - if you think the GIL is so stupid, where's your patch to get rid of it without destroying performance?
Right up there with Duke Nukem Forever. Real Soon Now (TM).
No, I have a day job, and right now, I do that day job with Ruby.
Python programmers that actually understand the GIL and what it is for appreciate the fact that simple data structures don't have to go through synchronisation primitives on every access.
If by "Python programmers" you mean the people writing it, then sure.
Python users, I would think, would rather have some sort of scaling other than IPC. Otherwise, you're asking a 50% performance hit (or more) to use Python in the first place (instead of C), and another 50% performance hit by being completely unable to scale.
Regardless, all of this is offtopic -- I call the GIL "stupid" because I wish Python didn't have it, and because I find it strange and frustrating that it was created in the first place. But the only reason I mentioned it at all was to prevent anyone from claiming that Python had a native threading solution -- effectively, it doesn't. Python's ability to use native threads (instead of green threads) is simply not useful.
using threads with shared memory is a lousy way to try to take full advantage of multiple cores
And using indentation is a lousy way of defining scope.
It's a matter of taste, but ultimately, this is a limiting choice. Were there no GIL, users would be free to implement any kind of threading they wanted, including libraries to provide share-nothing architectures (Erlang-esque). Except that copying data structures around within the same address space is a lot cheaper than serializing, sending through a socket, and parsing, so you still lose.
I just skimmed it, so tell me if I'm missing something, but did they just not know about functional languages?
A purely functional language can, indeed, thread as much as you care to. A function without side effects can't really have any contention issues with any other functions, right?
In fact, I think that is the main distinction -- ever play with make? Did you notice that it's a declarative language? Check out the "-j" option -- unless you've done something clever, your Makefile will already scale to as many cores as you have, and if you wrap gcc (with distcc and such), it will scale to quite a few machines, too.
Or just take any purely functional language like Haskell, and you find similar features, where it's basically a matter of tuning performance settings -- much like tweaking the cache values on a MySQL database.
Now, they are correct in that it's very unlikely that you'll find an auto-parallelizing C compiler anytime soon. Or C#, or Java, or any imperative language, which is a shame -- I know I think and program much more quickly in an imperative language than in a functional one.
And they are also correct in that language constructs can make the job a lot easier, even in imperative languages. Erlang is mostly functional, but not quite purely functional -- functions can have side effects (though they generally don't), and functions are guaranteed to be executed in order. But Erlang also has lightweight green threads (it calls them "processes"), and extremely powerful language constructs, to the point where I've heard it called "Concurrency-Oriented Programming" -- your entire program is already built around message passing. And while multicore isn't automatic, it does become trivial to modify your code to run on multiple cores or computers (it has its own built-in RPC), and the sockets library is good enough that you can do it the old-fashioned way, too.
And, of course, there's Python's continuations and other neat toys.
Cases #2, #3 and #4 all had thread level parallelism.
They had thread level parallelism in that they had a certain number of CPUs, real or virtual, visible to the user, and that this number was greater than 1, and greater than or equal to the number of CPUs.
I'm suggesting dropping the pipelines entirely, see how much money that saves you in terms of actual silicon and complexity, see if it justifies, say, adding another core or two for the same price. But that does require that people be able to scale with thread-level parallelism.
I should stress again that I don't really know what I'm talking about here. I'm not much of a hardware guy.
I guess because it's cheaper to use existing skills and libraries than to port everything to Erlang?
Well, there are other problems with Erlang. Serious, pervasive problems, like how closely it's tied to text, and how the text is defined as Latin1. Unicode support, if it exists at all, is tacked on as helper functions.
But something like Erlang or Haskell would make sense. I suggest Haskell, because it will compile to binary, and because you can set an arbitrary number of threads at runtime -- Erlang, you have to explicitly create and destroy "processes" (green threads), and if you're going to distribute them to more than one core (or a network), you have to do so explicitly. But, it is a lot easier to distribute things to a network than it is in Haskell.
Cotton is correct to argue that the simple ability to copy and manipulate digital data does not translate to fair use.
Which also contradicts his position that the debate about "content protection" is not a debate about fair use. If I can't even watch a DVD I bought without cracking the DRM, that would suggest that you cannot imply anything about fair use from the ability to copy and manipulate data. Therefore, anything which restricts my ability to copy and manipulate data may also be restricting my fair use, depending on the context.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought Jabber traversed NAT...
It means that theverylastaoluser@aol.com (seriously, who uses it anymore?) can now IM to smartpeople@gmail.com, and vice versa.
A longer explanation: IM has, historically, been a walled garden. That is, if you have MSN Messenger (or "Windows Messenger"), I need to have MSN Messenger in order to IM you. If I have Yahoo Messenger, we can't communicate.
There are ways around this, none of them very good. You could just install Yahoo Messenger also, and AIM, and that will cover almost everyone. (Almost -- there's still Gadu-Gadu, WinPopup, Groupwise, ICQ, IRC...)
IRC is a bit better, actually, because at least there's a standard protocol. Anyone can setup an IRC server, or write their own IRC client. If you're on Windows, you can just download mIRC and connect to anyone. (I like irssi on Linux and MacIRSSI on OS X.) But it's still a walled garden, in that you can't connect to EFnet and talk to people -- in rooms or in private messages -- who are on DALnet. (Or Freenode, or...)
But not everything is a walled garden. Email, for instance -- anyone can register a domain, setup a mailserver, and provide email for themselves, for friends, or for money. If you're a poor sap who has an @aol.com email address, I don't have to do anything special to be able to send mail to you from my @gmail.com address, or from my own domain.
All it takes for email to work is a domain name and a mailserver. And a mailserver can be any computer that's online all the time. Not that I recommend doing it yourself, just saying that email is wholly and completely democratized.
Well, that's what Jabber/XMPP is all about. Not only is the chat/IM protocol open, but Jabber servers can be configured to talk to other Jabber servers -- to arbitrarily connect to each other. So you can be on AOL Instant Messenger, and I can be on Google Talk, but we can add each other to our buddy lists and communicate. Not because there's any kind of big deal with AOL and Google, but because they both speak Jabber. And like email, I can setup my own Jabber server.
It's possible to pull people into a chatroom. On MSN, this is spontaneous and invite-only. On Yahoo, for awhile, there were IRC-like rooms -- they probably still exist, but Yahoo doesn't talk about them anymore. I'm fairly sure Jabber supports this functionality, too.
The trouble is, you can't have anything like a "room" which includes people from different networks. I believe this means that GTalk people will be able to join AOL chatrooms and vice versa.
...of Jabber (XMPP), which is exactly what AOL is about to do.
gaim supports Jabber. Kopete supports Jabber. There are probably a dozen more that I've never even heard of. And the current implementation of gmail does allow you to "pop out" an IM window. All of these will (theoretically) talk to AOL users now, too. Just what is it that you're missing?
(Or do I not understand what "TSR" stands for?)
Why?
Honestly, if AOL is dying (as you say), I don't see why anyone should stop them...
Yes, the dialog system does look interesting... it is lacking an important feature, though.
Problem: Technically infeasible.
It's talking about wireless power and faster-than-light power/information control.
Doesn't make it less compelling of an idea, though. Singularity is the modern evolution of this concept. And there have been others.
I won't deny horrible hacks, but "server-client wall"?
I don't see how it would be either particularly difficult (there are plenty of good libraries out there now) or particularly hard to justify (Business Guy can now print his reports from ANYWHERE!)
Fine, but that's not "backup".
I have Internet access anyway. I'm on Slashdot, aren't I?
I also mean something with a 3.5 mm on one end and an RCA plug on the other end. In the case of cars, there's also FM adapters.
Well, that much is true. I don't think I'll ever use a laptop as a primary computer, so I always forget these things. (I can leave the laptop there and go use my desktop...)
That's one definition of God.
Another definition of God is the Universe, and the patterns that make up the Universe. Both of these exist and are observable. Therefore, God is a scientific fact.
Another definition of God is an omnipotent, omnipresent, omnibenevolent entity. Only two of these can be logically true. Therefore, God cannot exist.
Another definition of God is "that which created Man". Therefore, God exists as the physical laws and the pattern of natural selection.
Another definition of God is "what did all those miracles in the Bible." Therefore, God is a myth, and were he real, he'd be a bastard.
You cannot disprove God, because there is no consistent definition of God. Therefore, any such definition you adopt can be refuted simply by your target claiming not to believe in that definition, and instead, to believe in another -- very likely one that you can't refute.
In short, you, and everyone else, need to stop attacking the God issue as if it can be resolved logically, one way or another. Everyone has some arbitrary axioms, many of which they're not aware. This process will not convince anyone of anything they didn't already believe, except that you are an asshat.
Intelligent life-forms don't like their intelligence insulted.
And intelligent life-forms know how to use that tone, so that other life-forms, no matter how intelligent or not, have no excuse not to listen to the content.
Asperger's or not, you do have a goal here, right? I mean, beyond just ranting about how much you hate "primitive primates", you actually do want to change things, right?
Oh, and by the way: You didn't have much intelligent content, either.
Blech, didn't quite finished that. Meant to finish the "Can you call it Christianity" with "Can you call it Islam, or ANY of the major religions, if it asks people to kill themselves for it?"
In that case, let's talk about UI. Remember back when you said:
Ok, now I see the problem. You said "web", when what we both meant was REST.
You see, HDi is a script that runs off disc or persistent storage. It's Javascript and XML. It has an API which allows it to fetch things over HTTP, but it does NOT have a web browser. Thus, the only relevance of "web" here is as REST -- it's really just a form of restricted Internet access that has nothing directly to do with the Web.
("Restricted" because it does not allow protocols other than HTTP, or ports other than 80 (or 443 for SSL), etc etc)
So, anything BDJ can do, HDi can do. And right now, HDi can do it better.
Not only can I show active movies in the UI, I can download or stream them, too. Could watch the original movie, while streaming in a live director's commentary talking head...
Yes, there is, but it has nothing to do with XML or JavaScript.
Except HD-DVD markup is not HTML, though it resembles it. And HDi does not require availability of the network, so I could still fall back to your way if it was not available.
Let's talk about that after you understand how my example works.
Also not true. (Alright, technically it's Director, but it's the same tech.) And that's not counting downloading the flv file directly and watching from mplayer or VLC.
Or copy them from their friends, or download them from the Internet.
Than what?
No, she's a hand-me-down have-to-buy-it-for-her.
That's another debate altogether. I was replying to someone who claims that God has been disproven, which is nonsensical -- partly because religion is extremely talented at rewriting itself to be kinda-maybe-sorta possible.
You're absolutely right.
But here's a question: Can you call it Christianity if people aren't reading the Bible? Am I still a Jew if I work on Saturday?
If we were to put organized religion toe to toe against organized science, I kind of hope the science would stand on its own merits. Instead we've got asshats like the troll I was replying to, who would rather reduce it to an attempt to find the worst examples of each -- including things which are arguably outside the formal definition of whatever you are arguing against.
They have just as much to do with science as suicide bombings have to do with religion.
Maybe you've confused 'religion' with 'insanity'.
And why is the default position "get rid of it"?
Probably this. However, that doesn't seem at all to be what the GP was talking about -- they run a Linux laptop.
Who said DVD recorder? They have these amazing inventions called "hard drives" now...
I get most of those through Steam. But consider that GP uses Linux -- I haven't seen a proprietary Linux game that requires the game disc be kept in the drive. It's perfectly reasonable to use an external drive that you leave behind, or another computer entirely, to get stuff off the original DVDs.
Or buy a $10 cable to connect your iPod to that home sterio. I think a CD recorder, and the media, would cost a bit more.
I just checked, and yes, it looks like this thing has TV out (S-video and DVI). So, again, for far less than a DVD recorder, you can plug it into a home theater.
That said, for most purposes, I'd rather just get an EEE PC. Sorry, but Apple came to the ultraportable party late (as usual), with a big pile of Microsoftian bullshit about Innovation (it's got multitouch, and that's it), and it's more than three times the price of the most expensive EEE PC I can buy.
Debatable. Remember, the thing sold like hotcakes, no matter how much we thought it was crap.
Well, there's a problem right there. No one person knows all the intended uses of a zone transfer. I learned a new one today from a sibling post -- actually migrating DNS information to a new host, when switching service providers.
*chokes on breakfast* ...what?
I've been using it for almost a year now, for dynamic DNS. It means I get to configure and run a real DNS server, and set it up exactly the way I like, and then, when I need to update the records on my real DNS servers (at zoneedit.com, dyndns.com, etc), I only have to change one setting -- the master host. This means that, for example, if I want to switch to another system, I don't have to learn a new API (or write one to crawl their website) that's much more complicated than a single POST request, updating which master server they should update from.
(Just been reading that zoneedit.com sucks, so I'm considering switching to dyndns.com, which honestly is pretty cheap, and their service which does zone transfers is cheaper than their service which has a web interface.)
That is to say: I operate the primary server, and the secondary and tertiary servers are operated by a third party, even if these secondary and tertiary servers are listed in my domain as primary and secondary servers. This is hardly unique to dynamic DNS -- it's also used in cases where there is a static IP, but you only want to maintain one server, and you (obviously) can't guarantee five nines of uptime on that server. So you pay someone to run a secondary DNS server.
That's reasonable, but answer this: If I were to use the "host" command -- just "host", by itself, looking up MX records and such -- should I be worried about it being illegal? What about "whois" and such? There are plenty of times when it's reasonable to expect that a third party should run diagnostics -- such as when the first party is completely clueless, and needs to be told so.
Some other poster put it very clearly -- geeks generally believe that if you make a service public, it is public. It's certainly possible to limit zone transfers to the IP address of the secondary DNS server. This would not be an absolute protection, but it would at least show what the intent was.
This has been debated fairly often with respect to open wireless access points. What you have here is, according to the machine protocols involved, a machine shouting "Look at me! My name is LINKSYS, and I'm open! Just connect if you want to get online!" It is trivially easy, in most cases, to have it instead broadcast "My name is LINKSYS, and you'll need a password to connect!" Or, alternatively, to not brodcast at all -- to just sit in a corner until someone says, "Hey, LINKSYS! Let me connect!"
It's not quite that bad, but it's similar. "Hey, ns1.example.com! Would you mind telling me what all the subdomains of example.com are?" (There are legitimate reasons for doing this, too -- maybe I'm a spider, and I want to find web pages which aren't specifically linked to by www.example.com.) At this point, if ns1.example.com says "Sure! There's mail.example.com, and www.example.com, and, oh yeah, super.secret.stuff.example.com"... how is this your fault? If super.secret.stuff was really that secret, ns1.example.com could've left it out, or could've said "No, sorry, I'm not going to tell you."
The reason geeks w
And for exactly those reasons, him using such a strong tone does more harm than good. Doesn't help that he's blatantly wrong on a few points, either.
Go watch this video. Listen especially to the comments on language.
I'm still confused. What is not "rich" about REST?
And unless you at least include web support, I don't see how it's the same level of customizability.
Again, I'll direct you to HTTP -- a simple file-sharing protocol, with far fewer features than FTP, which is now being used to deliver applications, for RPC between applications...
Or, take Javascript. It was built to validate form submissions, and to do the things that CSS does now. And Javascript is now being used to develop applications.
Was built and is targeted have little impact on the reality of what it can do, or even on what it might be a good idea to make it do.
What does that have to do with anything?
I was replying to your estimate that only 20% of BD players will be connected to the Internet.
No, it's not. And that was also "at worst".
Oh, thanks! I didn't know that.
I guess I'll go tell that to Apple. This iPod thing was a failure after all.
You're going to live forever? How??
So why haven't they bought Netflix?
I don't mean that literally. I mean, if Netflix is actually as successful or moreso than a model of buy-to-own, it's the studios' fault for not cashing in on it.
...right. Because my own buying habits being an aberration make my arguments flawed.
Guessing you didn't major in statistics.
Try this one: Calculate the odds that one or more studio CEOs will suddenly go batshit insane and back HD-DVD. Compare those with the odds that the sun goes poof.
Probably not many. Possibly enough.
In any case, all it takes is a particular subset of the functionality that works on the PS3, but blows up Grandma's first-gen standalone player.
Right up there with Duke Nukem Forever. Real Soon Now (TM).
No, I have a day job, and right now, I do that day job with Ruby.
If by "Python programmers" you mean the people writing it, then sure.
Python users, I would think, would rather have some sort of scaling other than IPC. Otherwise, you're asking a 50% performance hit (or more) to use Python in the first place (instead of C), and another 50% performance hit by being completely unable to scale.
Regardless, all of this is offtopic -- I call the GIL "stupid" because I wish Python didn't have it, and because I find it strange and frustrating that it was created in the first place. But the only reason I mentioned it at all was to prevent anyone from claiming that Python had a native threading solution -- effectively, it doesn't. Python's ability to use native threads (instead of green threads) is simply not useful.
And using indentation is a lousy way of defining scope.
It's a matter of taste, but ultimately, this is a limiting choice. Were there no GIL, users would be free to implement any kind of threading they wanted, including libraries to provide share-nothing architectures (Erlang-esque). Except that copying data structures around within the same address space is a lot cheaper than serializing, sending through a socket, and parsing, so you still lose.
I just skimmed it, so tell me if I'm missing something, but did they just not know about functional languages?
A purely functional language can, indeed, thread as much as you care to. A function without side effects can't really have any contention issues with any other functions, right?
In fact, I think that is the main distinction -- ever play with make? Did you notice that it's a declarative language? Check out the "-j" option -- unless you've done something clever, your Makefile will already scale to as many cores as you have, and if you wrap gcc (with distcc and such), it will scale to quite a few machines, too.
Or just take any purely functional language like Haskell, and you find similar features, where it's basically a matter of tuning performance settings -- much like tweaking the cache values on a MySQL database.
Now, they are correct in that it's very unlikely that you'll find an auto-parallelizing C compiler anytime soon. Or C#, or Java, or any imperative language, which is a shame -- I know I think and program much more quickly in an imperative language than in a functional one.
And they are also correct in that language constructs can make the job a lot easier, even in imperative languages. Erlang is mostly functional, but not quite purely functional -- functions can have side effects (though they generally don't), and functions are guaranteed to be executed in order. But Erlang also has lightweight green threads (it calls them "processes"), and extremely powerful language constructs, to the point where I've heard it called "Concurrency-Oriented Programming" -- your entire program is already built around message passing. And while multicore isn't automatic, it does become trivial to modify your code to run on multiple cores or computers (it has its own built-in RPC), and the sockets library is good enough that you can do it the old-fashioned way, too.
And, of course, there's Python's continuations and other neat toys.
They had thread level parallelism in that they had a certain number of CPUs, real or virtual, visible to the user, and that this number was greater than 1, and greater than or equal to the number of CPUs.
I'm suggesting dropping the pipelines entirely, see how much money that saves you in terms of actual silicon and complexity, see if it justifies, say, adding another core or two for the same price. But that does require that people be able to scale with thread-level parallelism.
I should stress again that I don't really know what I'm talking about here. I'm not much of a hardware guy.
Well, there are other problems with Erlang. Serious, pervasive problems, like how closely it's tied to text, and how the text is defined as Latin1. Unicode support, if it exists at all, is tacked on as helper functions.
But something like Erlang or Haskell would make sense. I suggest Haskell, because it will compile to binary, and because you can set an arbitrary number of threads at runtime -- Erlang, you have to explicitly create and destroy "processes" (green threads), and if you're going to distribute them to more than one core (or a network), you have to do so explicitly. But, it is a lot easier to distribute things to a network than it is in Haskell.
This is hardly the first indication that gamers are not all 13-year-old pimple-faced kids. PAX comes to mind.
Which also contradicts his position that the debate about "content protection" is not a debate about fair use. If I can't even watch a DVD I bought without cracking the DRM, that would suggest that you cannot imply anything about fair use from the ability to copy and manipulate data. Therefore, anything which restricts my ability to copy and manipulate data may also be restricting my fair use, depending on the context.