I have not really tried the video streaming aspect, but my new DVD player, GoVideo D2730 is networked, and supports video streaming from a PC.
The PC component is a streaming server (runs on Windows) that can do MPEG, MP3, WMA, and JPEGs. No direct support for DVD, but you could certainly store the DVD files as MPEGs.
There are limits though, and I do not think you will get DVD quality (3Mb/sec max is what they advertize). Its low cost, I never said its the best.
Incidentally, when I bought it I thought it would be cool for the video streaming aspect, but the best so far has been that I can now access my entire MP3 collection with my TV remote in the lounge.
From the article:
This world of interpreted programming languages, to which also C# and Java belong, is changing
Thats a somewhat liberal intepretation of the word "interpreted", I would say.
I think they should just have left off the word "interpreted", or better yet, replaced it with "scripted". Mentioning Java and C# just confuses the issue.
I too find the idea silly. Computing languages are a way of communicating intent to a computer. Compared to a natural language, they are a very small subset in terms of functionality.
If I have a stupid servant who speaks very little english, and I want him to wash my car, it is easy enough for me to communicate that to him through hand signals and some commonly understood words. That is the same as what I do when I program a computer. It is primitive, but it works. It would not help in the least for me to learn Sanskrit.
Obviously there is a lot of room for improvement in computer languages, and it is natural for us to look under boulders. However, it seems unlikely to me that some mysterious higher order logic becomes obvious through knowledge of another language.
I use Vonage (VoIP) at home. Apparently my DirecTivo dials up to 2 different places - Tivo and DIrectTv. The Tivo calls go through fine, but the DirectTv ones do not connect, I suspect because they are insiting on 56K dialup, which will not work over Vonage.
Anyway, everything works fine. I can order PPV (and get charged for it), but I would need to connect up to a real phone line if I had multiple recievers, or was interested in some of the premium sports packages. Plus there is that annoying message every day telling me I have not dialed up for X days - don't underestimate how annoying that is.
You mention you have a cable modem - I do too, and if I had to do it again, I think I might choose a normal phone line and DSL, rather than having to keep paying the cable company for cable TV that I do not use (if I only want cable internet, they charge me a premium).
I bought this book, and it was really useful in the sense of basic training, but it does not tackle any of the difficult questions, such as mock objects, user interfaces, etc.
I am left still wanting a nice non-trivial working example to look at.
I have no idea what other office products can do, but I know of clients that have used the Word Basic macro language to great effect. Can you do this with other office products? Is there another word processor product that exposes a complete object based API to the user, so that even a non programmer can write very impressive macros?
Also, I have tried other products over the years, but have always found the competition to be slow and buggy. The last impressive competition I saw was WordPerfect, back on Windows 3.1.
If I look again now, will I continue to be disappointed? I think I will be.
That said, I think that MS Word competitors will always lose out if they try and compete on the same platform. They need to have a little vision, and create their own market. For example, Word's big downfall is that the document is tied to the formatting. A good competitor would create something which added value to the data by separating the two. (Newer versions of Office support "XML" documents, but I doubt this is what I am talking about).
And its version 0.1 beta 2, which makes it practically vaporware in my book.
Thats a little harsh of course... I am sure it will be available eventually (the screenshots look very promising) but at this stage it is only an interesting sidenote.
I thought that it had been decided - security by obscurity is bad! It creates a false sense of security, leading people to think they are safe when in fact they are not.
I am a current Vonage customer. Here are the pros and cons as they apply to me:
Pros: * Cheap - especially international calls, I cannot get a better rate except with a phone card. * Features - lots of features that I normally would not take (because they usually cost extra) are free, such as call forwarding, caller id. * Easy, detailed online account access. * Its cool * Voice quality actually improved over my previous service
Cons: * 56K dialup does not work. This can be a gotcha in unexpected ways, for example my DirectTV Tivo cannot dialup to DirectTv, which means that I could not have multiple recievers, or use their sport channels. * Reliability of Internet connection is not as good as phone lines. * If the power goes down, then so does my phone (have not tried using UPS yet) * 911 service is available according to Vonage, but how will I really know until I try? * The hardware is a bit iffy. I have the motorola unit, which I originally setup as they suggested, directly to my cable modem, with the rest of my network behind it. This was extremely unreliable, and I get much better results by putting it behind a NAT router (I had to forward some ports). * Broadband options are cut down - I cannot use DSL because I no longer have a land line, but I do not want to use cable (because I have satellite). So, I end up paying the cable company a "tax" of sorts because I am not interested in the cable, only the internet.
"The referenced story "Linux cyber-battle turns nasty" is nothing more than idle speculation, without a shread of facts to back it up.
It is irresponsible journalism, because it spreads more of the FUD (Fear Uncertainty and Doubt) that is the hallmark of SCO's attacks, which have real impacts on real business decisions. How about a nice factual article about how a technology company without a future changed its core business to litigation?
There is a war going on between open source and some aspects of commercial software, and there are generals on both sides. SCO and its likes play dirty, which is plain for anyone who cares to look. There is no evidence to suggest that the generals on the open-source side would support the DOS attacks on SCO - in fact, by all accounts it would be against their nature.
How about looking at more likely suspects, like spammers linked to organized crime. How about some real journalism, backed up with facts and investigation.
I am not a Linux zealot; I do not even have Linux running on any of my PCs - but I am tired of seeing SCO manipulate the media, and I am disappointed that such an important journalistic organization should be so easily influenced."
I know a great deal about software design; it is what I do for a living. Management likes to think like you do, because it simplifies their view of things - they do not understand software development, so they feel the need to equate it to something that they think they understand. Then they make decisions based on a flawed world view.
Which is not to say that programmers cannot learn some things from other industries - see here for an interesting discussion of this.
Silly troll, you make the classic mistake of likening programming to manufacturing. There is *no* similarity, because each programming project is different. No manufacturing plant in the world makes each item different.
Artists and craftsmen make unique items, and so do programmers (yes, even in Java). It is an inescapeable fact.
Outsourcing has a chance at working, not because it is the same as manufacturing, but simply because it appears to be cheaper than doing it locally.
Speaking for my wife, she is really happy with the combo of IE and Google toolbar. She fills out a bunch of forms, and enjoys the popup blocker. 3000 popups blocked and counting:-O
I do not know of any Mozilla addins that are as nice as the Google one.
I tried to get her to switch a while ago, but she resisted because * some pages did not render as expected (built for IE) * Firebird is slower to start up than IE
Actually, copper cable theft is a huge problem in some developing countries (South Africa for instance). It is stolen and melted down again for resale. The 2nd-hand market for mass quantities of fiber is not quite as simple.
Sorry to break this to you, but there is a good web debugger. ASP.NET has a great debugging tool (Visual Studio.NET). There are probably others too. Of course, they only debug the server-side stuff, but all is not lost.
I can write forms in.NET with JavaScript validation, without every writing a line of JavaScript code. This is because of specialized web controls that contain pre-debugged JavaScript, customized for the particular browser agent. Anyone can create these controls - I myself have not though, because I am not interested in doing the low-down technical details. I can buy something for less money than it will cost my employer to pay me to build it.
Even when not using ASP.NET, I have almost never written any JavaScript from scratch. Why do it, when I can spend a few minutes browsing and find a script that does what I want? So, my advice would be to take a step back and consider not re-inventing the wheel unless you have to. Or unless it is your job to manufacture wheels.
It seems to me that if multiple cheaper, smaller telescopes could work together, they could do the work of a single gigantic telescope. I mean, if you combine how ever many small telescopes it takes to get the same input area as the 100m monster, then you could probably get similar power.
In IT we have known about the power of doing distributed processing for some time, perhaps we should let the astronomers in on the secret?
Someone, please, educate me on why bigger is better...(please limit your comments to the subject matter at hand).
Canada, USA, Australia, New Zealand, UK are the classic emigration destinations for English speakers.
Canada is much nicer (and more respectful) to the immigrant than the USA. Once you are qualified (based on a simple points system), and in the country, you are a permanent resident (equivalent to green card), unlike the USA where there is no simple way for a random well-qualified non-citizen to become a permanent resident (besides a lottery or *lots* of cash).
The UK is also hard to emigrate to, unless you have family (parents/grandparents). Australia has a similar structure to Canada, I think. Not sure about New Zealand.
Slashdot Mirror
My favorite quote from the article:
Mono compilation happens so fast it could almost be done in real time.
I have not really tried the video streaming aspect, but my new DVD player, GoVideo D2730 is networked, and supports video streaming from a PC.
The PC component is a streaming server (runs on Windows) that can do MPEG, MP3, WMA, and JPEGs. No direct support for DVD, but you could certainly store the DVD files as MPEGs.
There are limits though, and I do not think you will get DVD quality (3Mb/sec max is what they advertize). Its low cost, I never said its the best.
Incidentally, when I bought it I thought it would be cool for the video streaming aspect, but the best so far has been that I can now access my entire MP3 collection with my TV remote in the lounge.
This world of interpreted programming languages, to which also C# and Java belong, is changing
Thats a somewhat liberal intepretation of the word "interpreted", I would say.
I think they should just have left off the word "interpreted", or better yet, replaced it with "scripted". Mentioning Java and C# just confuses the issue.
I too find the idea silly. Computing languages are a way of communicating intent to a computer. Compared to a natural language, they are a very small subset in terms of functionality.
If I have a stupid servant who speaks very little english, and I want him to wash my car, it is easy enough for me to communicate that to him through hand signals and some commonly understood words. That is the same as what I do when I program a computer. It is primitive, but it works. It would not help in the least for me to learn Sanskrit.
Obviously there is a lot of room for improvement in computer languages, and it is natural for us to look under boulders. However, it seems unlikely to me that some mysterious higher order logic becomes obvious through knowledge of another language.
I use Vonage (VoIP) at home. Apparently my DirecTivo dials up to 2 different places - Tivo and DIrectTv. The Tivo calls go through fine, but the DirectTv ones do not connect, I suspect because they are insiting on 56K dialup, which will not work over Vonage.
Anyway, everything works fine. I can order PPV (and get charged for it), but I would need to connect up to a real phone line if I had multiple recievers, or was interested in some of the premium sports packages. Plus there is that annoying message every day telling me I have not dialed up for X days - don't underestimate how annoying that is.
You mention you have a cable modem - I do too, and if I had to do it again, I think I might choose a normal phone line and DSL, rather than having to keep paying the cable company for cable TV that I do not use (if I only want cable internet, they charge me a premium).
I bought this book, and it was really useful in the sense of basic training, but it does not tackle any of the difficult questions, such as mock objects, user interfaces, etc.
I am left still wanting a nice non-trivial working example to look at.
I have no idea what other office products can do, but I know of clients that have used the Word Basic macro language to great effect. Can you do this with other office products? Is there another word processor product that exposes a complete object based API to the user, so that even a non programmer can write very impressive macros?
Also, I have tried other products over the years, but have always found the competition to be slow and buggy. The last impressive competition I saw was WordPerfect, back on Windows 3.1.
If I look again now, will I continue to be disappointed? I think I will be.
That said, I think that MS Word competitors will always lose out if they try and compete on the same platform. They need to have a little vision, and create their own market. For example, Word's big downfall is that the document is tied to the formatting. A good competitor would create something which added value to the data by separating the two. (Newer versions of Office support "XML" documents, but I doubt this is what I am talking about).
And its version 0.1 beta 2, which makes it practically vaporware in my book.
Thats a little harsh of course... I am sure it will be available eventually (the screenshots look very promising) but at this stage it is only an interesting sidenote.
Its not so hard, and the sanitizing/encoding cpu cycles are well worth the trouble - far better than trying to second guess how much you trust data.
From the article "...can occur when:
1. A Web server does not take adequate steps to ensure that the properly encoded pages are generated.
2. An input is not suitably validated."
So, validate/sanitize your inputs, and properly encode your outputs. Its not rocket science.
ah, but thats why those in the know say it "w-w-w" (sort of a stuttered w).
Of course, most people look at me a bit strange for the second or two it takes them to comprehend. And then there are those that never get it.
</modrequest>
I thought that it had been decided - security by obscurity is bad! It creates a false sense of security, leading people to think they are safe when in fact they are not.
Someone pls clue me in why this is any different.
I am a current Vonage customer. Here are the pros and cons as they apply to me:
Pros:
* Cheap - especially international calls, I cannot get a better rate except with a phone card.
* Features - lots of features that I normally would not take (because they usually cost extra) are free, such as call forwarding, caller id.
* Easy, detailed online account access.
* Its cool
* Voice quality actually improved over my previous service
Cons:
* 56K dialup does not work. This can be a gotcha in unexpected ways, for example my DirectTV Tivo cannot dialup to DirectTv, which means that I could not have multiple recievers, or use their sport channels.
* Reliability of Internet connection is not as good as phone lines.
* If the power goes down, then so does my phone (have not tried using UPS yet)
* 911 service is available according to Vonage, but how will I really know until I try?
* The hardware is a bit iffy. I have the motorola unit, which I originally setup as they suggested, directly to my cable modem, with the rest of my network behind it. This was extremely unreliable, and I get much better results by putting it behind a NAT router (I had to forward some ports).
* Broadband options are cut down - I cannot use DSL because I no longer have a land line, but I do not want to use cable (because I have satellite). So, I end up paying the cable company a "tax" of sorts because I am not interested in the cable, only the internet.
Here is my feedback, posted to BBC...
"The referenced story "Linux cyber-battle turns nasty" is nothing more than idle speculation, without a shread of facts to back it up.
It is irresponsible journalism, because it spreads more of the FUD (Fear Uncertainty and Doubt) that is the hallmark of SCO's attacks, which have real impacts on real business decisions. How about a nice factual article about how a technology company without a future changed its core business to litigation?
There is a war going on between open source and some aspects of commercial software, and there are generals on both sides. SCO and its likes play dirty, which is plain for anyone who cares to look. There is no evidence to suggest that the generals on the open-source side would support the DOS attacks on SCO - in fact, by all accounts it would be against their nature.
How about looking at more likely suspects, like spammers linked to organized crime. How about some real journalism, backed up with facts and investigation.
I am not a Linux zealot; I do not even have Linux running on any of my PCs - but I am tired of seeing SCO manipulate the media, and I am disappointed that such an important journalistic organization should be so easily influenced."
I know a great deal about software design; it is what I do for a living. Management likes to think like you do, because it simplifies their view of things - they do not understand software development, so they feel the need to equate it to something that they think they understand. Then they make decisions based on a flawed world view.
Which is not to say that programmers cannot learn some things from other industries - see here for an interesting discussion of this.
Silly troll, you make the classic mistake of likening programming to manufacturing. There is *no* similarity, because each programming project is different. No manufacturing plant in the world makes each item different.
Artists and craftsmen make unique items, and so do programmers (yes, even in Java). It is an inescapeable fact.
Outsourcing has a chance at working, not because it is the same as manufacturing, but simply because it appears to be cheaper than doing it locally.
Go on, you know you want to!
Tx!
Speaking for my wife, she is really happy with the combo of IE and Google toolbar. She fills out a bunch of forms, and enjoys the popup blocker. 3000 popups blocked and counting :-O
I do not know of any Mozilla addins that are as nice as the Google one.
I tried to get her to switch a while ago, but she resisted because
* some pages did not render as expected (built for IE)
* Firebird is slower to start up than IE
If only. My mother does not even know the term "web browser" - to her, IE *is* the Internet! Good job, Microsoft!
Of course it is possible to fix it properly. All other browsers do it just fine.
And of course it is a bug. It is a bug, because it is not the behavior that the programmers expected when they wrote the browser software.
Actually, copper cable theft is a huge problem in some developing countries (South Africa for instance). It is stolen and melted down again for resale. The 2nd-hand market for mass quantities of fiber is not quite as simple.
Sorry to break this to you, but there is a good web debugger. ASP.NET has a great debugging tool (Visual Studio .NET). There are probably others too. Of course, they only debug the server-side stuff, but all is not lost.
.NET with JavaScript validation, without every writing a line of JavaScript code. This is because of specialized web controls that contain pre-debugged JavaScript, customized for the particular browser agent. Anyone can create these controls - I myself have not though, because I am not interested in doing the low-down technical details. I can buy something for less money than it will cost my employer to pay me to build it.
I can write forms in
Even when not using ASP.NET, I have almost never written any JavaScript from scratch. Why do it, when I can spend a few minutes browsing and find a script that does what I want? So, my advice would be to take a step back and consider not re-inventing the wheel unless you have to. Or unless it is your job to manufacture wheels.
It seems to me that if multiple cheaper, smaller telescopes could work together, they could do the work of a single gigantic telescope. I mean, if you combine how ever many small telescopes it takes to get the same input area as the 100m monster, then you could probably get similar power.
In IT we have known about the power of doing distributed processing for some time, perhaps we should let the astronomers in on the secret?
Someone, please, educate me on why bigger is better...(please limit your comments to the subject matter at hand).
Canada, USA, Australia, New Zealand, UK are the classic emigration destinations for English speakers.
Canada is much nicer (and more respectful) to the immigrant than the USA. Once you are qualified (based on a simple points system), and in the country, you are a permanent resident (equivalent to green card), unlike the USA where there is no simple way for a random well-qualified non-citizen to become a permanent resident (besides a lottery or *lots* of cash).
The UK is also hard to emigrate to, unless you have family (parents/grandparents). Australia has a similar structure to Canada, I think. Not sure about New Zealand.
Did anyone else think that "tip-jar" was some sort of Java file? It was all very confusing, what with the coffee (java) shop and all.
Its probably just me. I need to get out more.