but Visual Studio 2005 is without comparison. Eclipse is stone age compared to Visual Studio.
Whaat?? As a full time Visual Studio developer (no zealotry here), I find that 2005 is far superior to previous incarnations(*), and quite decent in its own right, but it doesn't hold a candle to Eclipse. Note that I'm talking about the "native" VS-C# vs Eclipse-Java development here, because obviously both (especially Eclipse) are capable of a lot more.
VS 2005 only just incorporated refactoring support, and it's still pretty limited. It also catches a lot fewer errors (helped by the fact that Eclipse background-compiles your code all the time), and doesn't have half as many smart code-completion features (yeah, it has plenty of "dumb" completions, but Eclipse sometimes feels like it can pretty much write all your code on its own while you just wish it into existence).
That said, I find two big advantages to VS2005: its learning curve is a lot less steep (remember the first time you actually tried to run your program in Eclipse?), and its GUI (WinForms) editor is very simple+powerful (as long as you don't want to dig too much inside the code it generates).
But seriously, I'm interested: What do you find is so much better in VS2005 than Eclipse?
(*) Note: VS2005 is pretty cool when it works. Aside from Windows ME, it has got to be one of the buggiest pieces of software ever to come out of Redmond. In the past 8 months I have bumped into innumerable problems all around: the IDE, C++ and C# compilers, libraries... you can tell they rushed it out the door. I had found plenty of bugs in MS development tools before, but never so many in such a short timespan. Also, it's bloated, but I guess when comparing it to Eclipse that doesn't count:)
Merging is only supported using the actual version numbers, not tags. Specifically, the merge command syntax requires the user to determine what version numbers are associated with what tags so as to perform the merge using the version numbers.
Not at all. You clearly have a lot of documentation reading to do, and it's pointless for me to reproduce it here, but let me at least say that you need not specify the version numbers at all, and that you haven't understood that there are SVN tags which, while simply represented by directories (Unix philosophy anyone?), are actually a snapshot of a certain revision and thus interchangeable with revision numbers. Go ahead and tag your every commit with whatever naming scheme you want if it makes you more comfortable, and use those instead.
The "copy" is referred to by SVN zealots as a "cheap copy" because it is an almost constant time operation
So making an objective observation about an O(1) copying operation makes one an SVN zealot? That's a pretty cheap shot. Are computer scientists "linked-list zealots" too when they point out that adding an entry to the beginning of those is usually O(1), and thus are objectively better at that than other data structures? I honestly don't get your aggressive tone against a technology which you don't seem to understand and has done no harm to you, yet serves many of us well. Seriously, have you even used it?
What the documentation says occurs is that links are made to the original repository area and the file deltas are recorded in the new tree. Conceptually this means that space consumption is very small being only a small growth in the size of some control files and creation of some directories. Realistically, there is a practical limit on the number of directory entries that can be made in a system. So for a very large repository containing many modules, tags and branches, then the growth rate in directory entry usage would be significant if not unsustainable.
Uh, no. Had you even once created an FSFS repository you would have noticed that in fact every transaction, no matter how large, adds exactly two (2) new files to your filesystem, one with the revision and one with the revision properties (usually just a few bytes). All the operations described in the documentation are done in the SVN virtual filesystem. When you commit changes, the revision file contains an aggregation of all the reverse deltas of the changes you made in that transaction. When you commit branches/tags, that file contains the difference in the virtual filesystem nodes described in the link. By my count, that file is usually a little over 600 bytes. I don't know the details about BDB but it's similar.
Convinced yet? No? Good! How about you try it?
The migration of a multiple-project CVS repository to SVN appears on the surface to be an unsustainable move. Ideally, the projects would be split into separate repositories if such a migration was to be performed.
The reasons to stay with CVS would be largely dictated by practical issues.
Finally, we agree. Pretty much the only meaningful reason to stay with CVS these days is backwards compatibility with tools & user training. And even those are fading, as SVN support is added to pretty much everything and it turns out it's not that different from the basic users' point of view (it is different for the more advanced users who need to tag, branch & merge, but those can learn it just as they did CVS; I'd argue that conceptually it's even simpler). Another big reason might be that they simply can't be
Your post is incredibly misleading, if not plain wrong. I will assume this is because you don't actually have any experience with Subversion, so let me address your points one by one.
1. branching is woefully inefficient on the storage side
No idea what you mean here; on the contrary, branching is incredibly efficient. The fact that creating a branch means creating a copy of the whole trunk does not mean every file in the repo is physically copied; all copies are "virtual", and files are only copied when they are actually modified. What this means is you can branch a directory with 10 or 10000 files in exactly the same time and using exactly the same storage space (both close to zero). See the "Cheap Copies" sidebar.
2. merging is (practically) unsupported
Merging is supported just fine. Granted, merge tracking is not supported (yet; it's planned for a future version), which means you have to keep track of your merges yourself. However, with a bit of discipline (for instance, writing in your commit log messages which version you are merging in) this is not too hard at all for the vast majority of cases.
3. there is no rollback from a commit, because....
This is more of a philosophical decision; the designers chose to make it so that every transaction is recorded. You want to go back to transaction X? Fine, copy that version as the current version; nothing is lost. There are also (complex) ways to physically do it for the very, very few cases in which it might actually be a good idea; but many of us have found that version control systems which allow the undoing of transactions are a recipe for disaster (I can vouch for this).
4. it uses BerkeleyDB as the management system.. and that is bad because...
As I said before, the "no rollback" thing has nothing to do with the storage system since it was a design decision. Also, BerkeleyDB is only one of the available data stores. I'd argue that FSFS is a lot more popular these days. More will come in the future.
5. Oracle now own Sleepycat software (the makers of BDB)
As I just said, this is close to irrelevant with the existence of the more popular FSFS. Besides, AFAIK Oracle has not said they will discontinue BDB, and I believe it was open source, so if it really mattered I guess it could be forked.
I've always liked companies that paid every employee (mgmt included) the same, cost of living, salary and that awarded everyone stock based on their job position and how well they did their job
But if the janitor screws up in his job, it will probably result in dirty floors and unflushed toilets, whereas if the CEO screws up, it will likely cause the whole company, possibly involving billions of dollars and thousands of jobs, to go down. So you see, it also has to be related to how much responsibility one commits to when taking the job.
Also, what the other poster said re: different levels of training require being proportionally rewarded.
With the recent developments, especially C# 2.0 vs Java 5, and now the proposals for C# 3.0, I'd say it's going the other way around. I think generics and auto-boxing are perfect examples of features that, while not groundbreaking (they may have been JSRs before Microsoft even mentioned them, I don't know), Sun would've never gotten around to implementing unless they felt the pressure. Even if some things were IMHO half-assedly implemented like Java Generics.
Java has certainly reached something akin to maturity, but there is still plenty left to be done. I'm afraid if the enhancement process isn't somehow made more dynamic, especially now considering the new alternatives like Ruby and Python (which are proving useful in many more domains than one might've thought), it will stagnate and become an old, heavy dinosaur. Kinda like COBOL.
can anyone explain to me why Microsoft didn't include the.NET framework in Windows XP?
Because it wasn't done at the time XP was released (2001). Since it was released, they have, however, made it available as an optional component via Windows Update. They will of course be including it with every new operating system: the Compact Framework has already been included since Pocket PC 2003, it's in Server 2003 and it sure as hell will be in Vista.
As a developer of consumer software, I'm loath to burden my 6 MB download with the 20MB millstone of the.NET framework
Many of the smaller Java applications don't bundle the JVM either (although some include it as an option), and it's worked out just fine for them. If a user can download your software (if you're on a slow modem, 6MB is nothing to sneeze at), they sure as hell can download one (1) executable file and go through the painful process of double-clicking it to install the framework. I'm pretty sure if you can't walk your grandmother through that, you won't walk her through installing your software, either.
I was going to say "duh, of course not, 0^0 is undefined, everyone knows that", since that's what I remember being taught all through school and university. However, a Google search tells me apparently it's not necessarily black or white. So I guess you have to go with what's useful for you. Anyway, it seems not even all software agrees; for example, both the built-in Windows calculator and Maple 8 say it's 1, but the PowerToys PowerCalc shows an error.
that one Mexican drug lord who tried to create a new identity by getting plastic surgery and massive liposuction... and there were a few complications with the surgery. Truly a great loss to humanity.
That'd be Amado Carrillo, aka the "Lord of the Skies" ("El señor de los Cielos"). To this day, however, it remains kind of uncertain, surrounded by mysterious circumstances, and there are many who believe it was all staged to allow him to disappear.
Anyone know whatever happened to his plastic surgeon?
The other email is your personal email, never put that email anywhere on the net.
Right... except you don't need to. If you ever actually use your account to, well, email people, it means that address is out there somewhere. And it will get out as soon as your aunt sends you your next "FREE" birthday e-card, or some virus/worm takes over her computer and harvests her address book.
Note that this is not wild speculation, I have followed this same technique, and while it is undoubtedly one of the most effective ones available, I still have gotten a bunch of spam on addresses which were nowhere near "public". As a matter of fact, some messages I have sent only to close friends have ended up on random places around the web, with my address on them, because it got forwarded many many times by people who won't even bother to remove the headers.
And that's not to mention other possibilities, like your ISP's customer list getting stolen, their boxes getting hacked into, or simple dictionary attacks which can get you without you realizing or even moving a finger.
Based on my understanding of market economics, if there exists a demand for non-DRM products, then someone will supply non-DRM produts, most likely at a higher cost.
There are, however, known distortions in markets. Some of the biggest ones are monopolies. This is exactly that case (well, an oligopoly anyway): when very few conglomerates control both the product and the means or distribution (or at least an overwhelming percentage of them), they screw the market by leveraging that power into nearly impassable barriers to entry by potential competitors.
Of course, for many monopolies to succeed, another great power is needed: the backing of the State. Considering the current Intellectual Property laws in several parts of the world, and most notably the US (where a very significant percentage of the most popular entertainment media is produced), they also have that backing.
So, in the end, this is a problem that should be solved by well-functioning markets (although that is a hotly contested definition; many of us believe that markets need a certain amount of regulation to make them work "right"). However, the previous two distortions are creating artificial scarcities and screwing the many for the profit of a few.
Just an interesting tidbit, it has not rained in the Atacama desert for 100s of years.
As others have pointed out, it's only some parts of the Atacama that haven't had rain in hundreds of years. It stretches from the coast to the Andes, so it's big enough for some rain to occur.
In fact, a wonderful event happens every once in a while. Some seeds remain dormant in the sand, and when it rains, they are revived, and thousands of flowers suddenly blossom covering large patches of desert. We call it "desierto florido" (the flowering desert, look it up, here's an english link). It's really quite remarkable.
suppose a cipher compresses 512 bit blocks. If a putative ciphertex is not some multiple of 64 bytes, it didn't come from that cipher
That's an interesting idea, but it's very subject to the details of the implementation.
However, the biggest problem I can see is this: what about stream ciphers? For example, the way I understand it, RC4 simply XORs the plaintext at the byte-level with the keystream. So you could have arbitrary-length ciphertext.
There are actually some pretty good reasons to first teach programming in a language such as Scheme. For example, the fact that it's one of the languages with the simplest syntax and grammar (Whitespace notwithstanding). Parentheses are basically all you need. It may seem like dumbness to you, but when you're trying to introduce students to the real concepts behind programming (algorithms, flow control, etc.) having those keywords and syntactic constructs out of the way can keep them focused on the job at hand. If you've ever tried to teach freshmen you'd understand the pain of getting them to learn that variables in C can only be declared at the start of a block, and don't forget your semicolons, and scanf requires an ampersand when reading integer parameters, oh but not for strings (and you'll have to take my word for it until you learn that screwed-up pointer syntax); boolean equality, AND, OR require 2-character operators (==, &&, ||); etc.
Not that you can keep people from learning these things forever. In fact, those that go on to being more involved in programming definitely will have to be taught something in the procedural/OO C family. But sometimes, the formal aspects of something can end up concealing the more general lessons students need to extract.
Disclaimer: I have never written a single line of Scheme; I have only read a few brief introductions (and found it quite understandable). I have, however, been a TA for many freshmen and there are more horror stories caused by the language than you might think.
why is it that network and modem speeds are measured in bits per second but hard disk space and ISP download limits are in BYTES?
I would guess historical reasons. The amounts of data transferred over networks have always been several orders of magnitude less than the data you could store. So a 300bps modem made a lot more sense than 37.5 bytes/sec. Also, when you think of network links, you usually think a lot closer to the physical layer, in terms of how data is signalled, and stuff there is always considered at the bit level. For storage systems, which deal with much larger amounts, this doesn't really matter all that much.
I want to know at 10Gbps, how many Meg per hour is that?
Wadiwood, meet Calculator. 1 Byte (B) = 8 bits (b), so 10Gbps = 10/8 GBps = 1.250GBps = 1250MBps. An hour has 60 minutes, each with 60 seconds, so 1 hour = 60*60 = 3600 seconds. We just calculated how much we could transfer in a second, so in an hour we could transfer 1250*3600 = 4500000 MB = 4500 GB (note that this is a rough approximation, since it is not exactly true that 1GB = 1000MB, but it'll do for now). So that would be maybe about 1000 (single-sided, single-layered) DVDs per hour.
One think you really have to take into account is that these are maximum theoretical speeds, which are hardly ever 100% achievable (depends on the medium, distance, and devices involved, to name a few). Also important is that this doesn't consider protocol overhead; it is the raw number of bits that would go through the pipe, but there is Ethernet and (probably) TCP/IP control information to consider there. There are some figures on how much is lost on average to these (can't remember; maybe 20%?)
How long would it take to blow my ISP download limit (4GB) or fill up the hard disk (120GB)?
Well, since we just got 1.25GBps (still in the theoretical 100%-performance realm), that would be 4/1.25 = 3.2 seconds for your ISP's download limit (you really have to lose that ISP man), and 120/1.25 = 96 seconds, or a bit over one and a half minutes to fill up your hard disk. Another hint: it ain't gonna happen; all the other components in your computer involved in the filling of your hard disk (speed of the drive itself, the bus, the CPU, the filesystem overhead) will probably become a bottleneck much much sooner.
Well, I think that's all the calculating I'll do for tonight, I'm sure you can continue yourself. BTW I'm somewhat tired right now so feel free to correct me if my numbers are off (hopefully not by too much).
as for that, how much longer can it be until we have nearly universal wifi coverage matching our current cell phone coverage?
Well, how about instead of Wi-Fi we used the already-existing cell phone coverage? Granted, new technology definitely needs to be added, but some pretty decent speeds are being achieved already with technologies such as EDGE and EV-DO. And the future looks extremely promising indeed.
Next he'll be solving problems that are NP-Complete. We'll have to re-write all our textbooks!
Not to spoil your joke or anything, but actually, AFAIK, NP-complete problems are perfectly solvable. The problem is how long it takes to solve them in general (a certain instance of a problem could prove easy). They cannot be solved deterministically in polynomial time (i.e., quickly).
why not (if the proposal is to specify outgoing nameservers in the same way as we currently specify incoming nameservers) simply have an MO (Outbound:-) tag with virtually the same semantics as an MX tag
If I understood correctly, from the overview presented in the beginning of the IETF draft, it's because they want it to be as backward-compatible and quick to implement as possible. Adding a new tag would probably require supporting it in every nameserver and DNS client library, which would slow down and further complicate the adoption process. Using the pre-existing tag, only the relevant applications (MTAs, etc) need to be changed to use it.
(Disclaimer: I am not giving an opinion on this design choice, I am merely clarifying with respect to what I understood from TFA).
Does anyone else find it amusing that most of the book covers on that page feature all sorts of cutesy, cartoonish characters? Why is that? Do editors think that all computer-related books are so boring that they need a little eye-candy to get them to sell?
Note for example, that even though he ruled in favor of Verizon, he thinks their argument makes for bad policy: (...)
So, he's telling congress to close that loophole.
Note, however, that in the paragraph you're quoting, they say "the trial judge wrote...". I believe they're talking about the district judge who tried the original case (before it was taken to the Court of Appeals). Else they would've referred to "the three-judge panel" or somesuch.
My personal mail is still 100% spam-free after three years without any filtering. I'd like to keep it that way, hence using my hotmail account for all the give-us-your-email web forms and such.
I know you probably already know this, but just in case, the solution many of us use for that exact same problem is a combination of Mailinator and Spamgourmet. Maybe you can still use your Hotmail account in combination with those, but you'll have to check it less and less, so it'd become less of an annoyance...
Slashdot Mirror
What exactly is an achievement, anyway?
Whaat?? As a full time Visual Studio developer (no zealotry here), I find that 2005 is far superior to previous incarnations(*), and quite decent in its own right, but it doesn't hold a candle to Eclipse. Note that I'm talking about the "native" VS-C# vs Eclipse-Java development here, because obviously both (especially Eclipse) are capable of a lot more.
VS 2005 only just incorporated refactoring support, and it's still pretty limited. It also catches a lot fewer errors (helped by the fact that Eclipse background-compiles your code all the time), and doesn't have half as many smart code-completion features (yeah, it has plenty of "dumb" completions, but Eclipse sometimes feels like it can pretty much write all your code on its own while you just wish it into existence).
That said, I find two big advantages to VS2005: its learning curve is a lot less steep (remember the first time you actually tried to run your program in Eclipse?), and its GUI (WinForms) editor is very simple+powerful (as long as you don't want to dig too much inside the code it generates).
But seriously, I'm interested: What do you find is so much better in VS2005 than Eclipse?
(*) Note: VS2005 is pretty cool when it works. Aside from Windows ME, it has got to be one of the buggiest pieces of software ever to come out of Redmond. In the past 8 months I have bumped into innumerable problems all around: the IDE, C++ and C# compilers, libraries... you can tell they rushed it out the door. I had found plenty of bugs in MS development tools before, but never so many in such a short timespan. Also, it's bloated, but I guess when comparing it to Eclipse that doesn't count :)
(OK, so there's nothing exactly hot about them, but other than that it's close enough).
Not at all. You clearly have a lot of documentation reading to do, and it's pointless for me to reproduce it here, but let me at least say that you need not specify the version numbers at all, and that you haven't understood that there are SVN tags which, while simply represented by directories (Unix philosophy anyone?), are actually a snapshot of a certain revision and thus interchangeable with revision numbers. Go ahead and tag your every commit with whatever naming scheme you want if it makes you more comfortable, and use those instead.
So making an objective observation about an O(1) copying operation makes one an SVN zealot? That's a pretty cheap shot. Are computer scientists "linked-list zealots" too when they point out that adding an entry to the beginning of those is usually O(1), and thus are objectively better at that than other data structures? I honestly don't get your aggressive tone against a technology which you don't seem to understand and has done no harm to you, yet serves many of us well. Seriously, have you even used it?
Uh, no. Had you even once created an FSFS repository you would have noticed that in fact every transaction, no matter how large, adds exactly two (2) new files to your filesystem, one with the revision and one with the revision properties (usually just a few bytes). All the operations described in the documentation are done in the SVN virtual filesystem. When you commit changes, the revision file contains an aggregation of all the reverse deltas of the changes you made in that transaction. When you commit branches/tags, that file contains the difference in the virtual filesystem nodes described in the link. By my count, that file is usually a little over 600 bytes. I don't know the details about BDB but it's similar.
Convinced yet? No? Good! How about you try it?
Really? You should tell these guys (have a look at their repo). Or them. Or them.
Finally, we agree. Pretty much the only meaningful reason to stay with CVS these days is backwards compatibility with tools & user training. And even those are fading, as SVN support is added to pretty much everything and it turns out it's not that different from the basic users' point of view (it is different for the more advanced users who need to tag, branch & merge, but those can learn it just as they did CVS; I'd argue that conceptually it's even simpler). Another big reason might be that they simply can't be
- PeeCee
FATALITY!
But if the janitor screws up in his job, it will probably result in dirty floors and unflushed toilets, whereas if the CEO screws up, it will likely cause the whole company, possibly involving billions of dollars and thousands of jobs, to go down. So you see, it also has to be related to how much responsibility one commits to when taking the job.
Also, what the other poster said re: different levels of training require being proportionally rewarded.
With the recent developments, especially C# 2.0 vs Java 5, and now the proposals for C# 3.0, I'd say it's going the other way around. I think generics and auto-boxing are perfect examples of features that, while not groundbreaking (they may have been JSRs before Microsoft even mentioned them, I don't know), Sun would've never gotten around to implementing unless they felt the pressure. Even if some things were IMHO half-assedly implemented like Java Generics.
Java has certainly reached something akin to maturity, but there is still plenty left to be done. I'm afraid if the enhancement process isn't somehow made more dynamic, especially now considering the new alternatives like Ruby and Python (which are proving useful in many more domains than one might've thought), it will stagnate and become an old, heavy dinosaur. Kinda like COBOL.
Because it wasn't done at the time XP was released (2001). Since it was released, they have, however, made it available as an optional component via Windows Update. They will of course be including it with every new operating system: the Compact Framework has already been included since Pocket PC 2003, it's in Server 2003 and it sure as hell will be in Vista.
As a developer of consumer software, I'm loath to burden my 6 MB download with the 20MB millstone of the .NET framework
Many of the smaller Java applications don't bundle the JVM either (although some include it as an option), and it's worked out just fine for them. If a user can download your software (if you're on a slow modem, 6MB is nothing to sneeze at), they sure as hell can download one (1) executable file and go through the painful process of double-clicking it to install the framework. I'm pretty sure if you can't walk your grandmother through that, you won't walk her through installing your software, either.
I was going to say "duh, of course not, 0^0 is undefined, everyone knows that", since that's what I remember being taught all through school and university. However, a Google search tells me apparently it's not necessarily black or white. So I guess you have to go with what's useful for you. Anyway, it seems not even all software agrees; for example, both the built-in Windows calculator and Maple 8 say it's 1, but the PowerToys PowerCalc shows an error.
That'd be Amado Carrillo, aka the "Lord of the Skies" ("El señor de los Cielos"). To this day, however, it remains kind of uncertain, surrounded by mysterious circumstances, and there are many who believe it was all staged to allow him to disappear.
Anyone know whatever happened to his plastic surgeon?
Hollywood and conspiracy fans rejoice: they were found dead along a highway, stuffed in oil drums.
Oh, I know someone who does. Well, at times, anyway. They seem to suffer from some serious versioning schizophrenia.
Right... except you don't need to. If you ever actually use your account to, well, email people, it means that address is out there somewhere. And it will get out as soon as your aunt sends you your next "FREE" birthday e-card, or some virus/worm takes over her computer and harvests her address book.
Note that this is not wild speculation, I have followed this same technique, and while it is undoubtedly one of the most effective ones available, I still have gotten a bunch of spam on addresses which were nowhere near "public". As a matter of fact, some messages I have sent only to close friends have ended up on random places around the web, with my address on them, because it got forwarded many many times by people who won't even bother to remove the headers.
And that's not to mention other possibilities, like your ISP's customer list getting stolen, their boxes getting hacked into, or simple dictionary attacks which can get you without you realizing or even moving a finger.
- PeeCee
There are, however, known distortions in markets. Some of the biggest ones are monopolies. This is exactly that case (well, an oligopoly anyway): when very few conglomerates control both the product and the means or distribution (or at least an overwhelming percentage of them), they screw the market by leveraging that power into nearly impassable barriers to entry by potential competitors.
Of course, for many monopolies to succeed, another great power is needed: the backing of the State. Considering the current Intellectual Property laws in several parts of the world, and most notably the US (where a very significant percentage of the most popular entertainment media is produced), they also have that backing.
So, in the end, this is a problem that should be solved by well-functioning markets (although that is a hotly contested definition; many of us believe that markets need a certain amount of regulation to make them work "right"). However, the previous two distortions are creating artificial scarcities and screwing the many for the profit of a few.
As others have pointed out, it's only some parts of the Atacama that haven't had rain in hundreds of years. It stretches from the coast to the Andes, so it's big enough for some rain to occur.
In fact, a wonderful event happens every once in a while. Some seeds remain dormant in the sand, and when it rains, they are revived, and thousands of flowers suddenly blossom covering large patches of desert. We call it "desierto florido" (the flowering desert, look it up, here's an english link). It's really quite remarkable.
- PeeCee
That's an interesting idea, but it's very subject to the details of the implementation. However, the biggest problem I can see is this: what about stream ciphers? For example, the way I understand it, RC4 simply XORs the plaintext at the byte-level with the keystream. So you could have arbitrary-length ciphertext.
- PeeCee
Here. But it says they were considering dropping the WMV format... who knows what'll happen in the end.
Not that you can keep people from learning these things forever. In fact, those that go on to being more involved in programming definitely will have to be taught something in the procedural/OO C family. But sometimes, the formal aspects of something can end up concealing the more general lessons students need to extract.
Disclaimer: I have never written a single line of Scheme; I have only read a few brief introductions (and found it quite understandable). I have, however, been a TA for many freshmen and there are more horror stories caused by the language than you might think.
- PeeCee
I would guess historical reasons. The amounts of data transferred over networks have always been several orders of magnitude less than the data you could store. So a 300bps modem made a lot more sense than 37.5 bytes/sec. Also, when you think of network links, you usually think a lot closer to the physical layer, in terms of how data is signalled, and stuff there is always considered at the bit level. For storage systems, which deal with much larger amounts, this doesn't really matter all that much.
I want to know at 10Gbps, how many Meg per hour is that?
Wadiwood, meet Calculator. 1 Byte (B) = 8 bits (b), so 10Gbps = 10/8 GBps = 1.250GBps = 1250MBps. An hour has 60 minutes, each with 60 seconds, so 1 hour = 60*60 = 3600 seconds. We just calculated how much we could transfer in a second, so in an hour we could transfer 1250*3600 = 4500000 MB = 4500 GB (note that this is a rough approximation, since it is not exactly true that 1GB = 1000MB, but it'll do for now). So that would be maybe about 1000 (single-sided, single-layered) DVDs per hour.
One think you really have to take into account is that these are maximum theoretical speeds, which are hardly ever 100% achievable (depends on the medium, distance, and devices involved, to name a few). Also important is that this doesn't consider protocol overhead; it is the raw number of bits that would go through the pipe, but there is Ethernet and (probably) TCP/IP control information to consider there. There are some figures on how much is lost on average to these (can't remember; maybe 20%?)
How long would it take to blow my ISP download limit (4GB) or fill up the hard disk (120GB)?
Well, since we just got 1.25GBps (still in the theoretical 100%-performance realm), that would be 4/1.25 = 3.2 seconds for your ISP's download limit (you really have to lose that ISP man), and 120/1.25 = 96 seconds, or a bit over one and a half minutes to fill up your hard disk. Another hint: it ain't gonna happen; all the other components in your computer involved in the filling of your hard disk (speed of the drive itself, the bus, the CPU, the filesystem overhead) will probably become a bottleneck much much sooner.
Well, I think that's all the calculating I'll do for tonight, I'm sure you can continue yourself. BTW I'm somewhat tired right now so feel free to correct me if my numbers are off (hopefully not by too much).
- PeeCee
Well, how about instead of Wi-Fi we used the already-existing cell phone coverage? Granted, new technology definitely needs to be added, but some pretty decent speeds are being achieved already with technologies such as EDGE and EV-DO. And the future looks extremely promising indeed.
Not to spoil your joke or anything, but actually, AFAIK, NP-complete problems are perfectly solvable. The problem is how long it takes to solve them in general (a certain instance of a problem could prove easy). They cannot be solved deterministically in polynomial time (i.e., quickly).
If I understood correctly, from the overview presented in the beginning of the IETF draft, it's because they want it to be as backward-compatible and quick to implement as possible. Adding a new tag would probably require supporting it in every nameserver and DNS client library, which would slow down and further complicate the adoption process. Using the pre-existing tag, only the relevant applications (MTAs, etc) need to be changed to use it. (Disclaimer: I am not giving an opinion on this design choice, I am merely clarifying with respect to what I understood from TFA).
Does anyone else find it amusing that most of the book covers on that page feature all sorts of cutesy, cartoonish characters? Why is that? Do editors think that all computer-related books are so boring that they need a little eye-candy to get them to sell?
So, he's telling congress to close that loophole.
Note, however, that in the paragraph you're quoting, they say "the trial judge wrote...". I believe they're talking about the district judge who tried the original case (before it was taken to the Court of Appeals). Else they would've referred to "the three-judge panel" or somesuch.
I know you probably already know this, but just in case, the solution many of us use for that exact same problem is a combination of Mailinator and Spamgourmet. Maybe you can still use your Hotmail account in combination with those, but you'll have to check it less and less, so it'd become less of an annoyance...