I think it's safe to assume that defining a DTD was implied. It's simply easier to say "Use XML" than to say "Write a good DTD to use with XML"
I don't think it was implied. It was mentioned casually. But that wasn't my point. Choosing to use XML is like choose either a binary or text document format. Just saying "use XML" doesn't mean a whole lot. The format itself is really the DTD that's used. Whether or not writing a good DTD was implied, it is certainly a whole lot more complicated than the poster was making it out to be. XML is no magic wand.
How could it possibly be device-dependent? This is just text, we're talking about.
It's waaay too easy to make things device-dependant. For instance, think about printing a modern, full-featured HTML page. It is a device-dependant language; it's meant to work within a browser, of a certain size rage, with a certain colour depth, etc., etc.. It will look great in your browser, but it doesn't lend well to printing. So you have to choose your language/DTD carefully.
Easy rendering has nothing to do with the XML DTD or document, that's the responsibility of the XSL that would accompany it, or the application that parses the document.
Okay, sorry. So, if you want to use XML, you'll need a good DTD, *and* a good XSL(or a good application).:)
Easy editing is pretty straightforward. Just edit it. This goes along with comprehensive. A good DTD can be comprehensive, but it can also leave room for extension without breaking that document. It is, after all, the extensible markup language.
Now, I'm only going to argue semantics on this one. "Easy" is subjective. You're right, it's easy to look into the document and edit it, but that doesn't make editing easy. I can easily look into a MS Word document and edit it. That doesn't mean I'll do anything useful, nor does it mean it'll be fast.
I wouldn't say XML without a DTD is useless, but I will say XML without a DTD is silly. It's a simple, logical assumption that if you're writing XML documents, they should have a DTD, so you know what's allowed. Like I said before, it seems like this would be implied.
Well, you obviously know what you're talking about:) The reason why I replied to that post was that while it might be implied to you and me, it might not be implied to everything. The tone of that post struck me as, "Use XML - it's easy and simple," whereas using XML is not necessarily so simple nor easy. Lots of work to be done if you'll be writing your own DTD, and lots of learning to do if you don't.
Thanks for the reply, though:)
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
XML is nothing more than a concept - you store data and text within "tags". The tags can be of pretty much any name. The data can be anything. This isn't a standard, it's not even a format.
Basically, XML boils down to: store it in a text file, delimit data, fields, and content by tags. Sorry, that doesn't cut it. You have to do more.
No, if you want to think about using XML for this, you need to talk about the DTD, not XML itself.
So, the question becomes, which DTD? In order to compete with the competition(LaTeX, HTML, PostScript), it has to be: device-independant, easily rendered, easily edited, and extremelycomprehensive.
Don't shout "XML!!". XML, without a DTD, is almost useless, especially for this application. The DTD has to be all those things I mentioned, plus(for this application), it needs to be standard.
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Let's stop fighting, calling names, whatever. It's a great day, and let's be happy.
For someone who's supposedly advocating peace between the two projects, you've got a pretty negative attitude.
it ends up that this is actually KDE playing catch-up to GNOME
These developers are people, and that's really quite an insulting thing to say. I'm not going to say you're wrong - I don't know enough about it. But if you were to say, oh, "You're just playing catchup to Canadians" to an American, speaking about technology, you'd get a very negative reaction. Heck, if that particular American was big enough and patriotic enough(or if you said it in a place full of big, patriotic people), you'd probably get your ass kicked.
The KDE and GNOME projects get along fairly well, despite their obvious differences. Your attitude is what causes what problems exist - it's called arrogance.
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
That two grand I gave away really hurt, and I'm not kidding. If I had known exactly how badly I would have needed it, I probably wouldn't have given so much so often. That's just the way it is.
At least I know the various people who got it personally; I know they used the money well.
Bill Gates, on the other hand, would need to give up almost all of his wealth before it affected his life in any way.
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Nobody here is getting the point(not to pick on you specifically, keep that in mind).
Everyone is talking about charity and you'd be better off, etc., etc..
Digging a ditch takes a certain amount of work, a certain amount of effort. Whether the digger be a Doctor, a student, a small business owner or whatever, that work is worth a certain amount of money.
I'm not forgetting anything either; I know you also have to take into account things like reliability, personality, personal intelligence, etc., etc..
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
I know I am responding to flamebait, but I just can't help myself.:)
The bottom line in any employer-employee contract is that the employee is free to leave at any time.
You must live in a different world than mine. In my world, people are only "free" in that they are allowed to make choices. That doesn't mean they can't be forced into doing something. It doesn't mean they can't be coerced. It doesn't mean that they can't be forced to do something really shitty because there's no other way.
If he does not, then he is not being 'abused' by the company for which he works.
Let's take a real-world example.
I'm a middle aged man, and have recently become homeless. I havn't eaten in two days, and it's been months since I've had anything other than garbage scraps. Someone offers me a job, saying, "I'll give you a shack to live in, and one square meal a day. It will keep you alive. In return, you must work for me twenty hours a day, digging trenches. You must remove an entire shovel full of dirt from the trench each second. You get one break for your meal."
How could you say that if I were in that position, I'm not being abused?
A person doesn't need to have a gun to their head in order to be forced - there are many other ways of doing it.
I know this is a different situation, and I agree with what you said about them being techies and programmers. But that doesn't make it RIGHT, damnit. It's still wrong to hire someone on a temporary basis, keep them around for YEARS because they think they'll eventually get hired full-time, and then dump them.
Just my two cents.
Dave
P.S.: I donated $2,000 to charity last year. I made $20,000 dollars last year(working full-time), so that's ten percent. I doubt Bill Gates regularily spends 10% of his income on charities. Not to mention the fact that the 10% I spent meant I couldn't have a car, whereas the 10% he would have spent would mean... well, he'd have less savings. It's not like he'd just drop that much money on a purchase.
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
The question was not how badly other vendors support their products - it was how to get support for Linux in enterprise environments.
Second:
You comment was based on an EULA, an "End-User License Agreement". Was the question about end users? No, it was about enterprise. Microsoft and other provide a LOT of support for enterprises(sure, it costs, but it's available).
This are very different when you're a big business, especially when you're buying in volume. Having worked for Ontario Hydro, I know that many vendors fall over themselves trying to help the big companies. Once there was a problem, and we called our support number(which no other company had - it was ours), and MS had a tech out in two hours. She arrived at three AM, and had the problem fixed by eight AM.
Go get a life.
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
I'm sure that the non-KDE crowd would very much appreciate your efforts were you to bring a fully-functional web browerser(statically linked, of course) to their desktops:)
Personally, I use Konqueror under GNOME, but it's a wee bit bloated/slow to respond for my tastes. I imagine a large part of that is the way it was compiled;)
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
I was working in a small business a while ago, and they had a Meridian phone system(don't know the exact name - fancy phones, though).
Anyways, being the boy wonder in the building, I was told to re-wire everything. Great fun:)
Anyways, to check to see if a line was live, I'd stick my tongue to it. No biggie, nice fuzzy buzzing feeling. These were the fancy-phone lines, so I figured they'd carre more juice than a regular phone line.
WRONG. I was up on some scaffolding playing around in the big box where all the wires came/went from/to, testing lines. Put two of them to my tongue and nearly flew off the scaffolding.
Yeah, that was the fax line - just a regular phone line(singled out because the fax machine needed a regular line).
Regular phone lines have enough juice to case muscle contractions. To someone with any number of medical conditions, that could be fatal.
Needless to say, I stopped testing the lines with my tongue.:) (okay, well I lie, I kept testing them with my tongue, but I was more careful)
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Well, I hate to say it, but the Olympics were doing just fine before billions of dollars were invested. I mean, honestly, other than a nice flat place, what do you need to run a race?
Sure, without a directive like this the Olympics would lose a lot of fundings, but big deal! A lot of people have lost sight of what the Olympics are supposed to be. Not a spectator event, but a way to bring nations together without war.
Where else can you get two countries that absolutely hate each other to fight without bloodshed?
The Olympics provide a much-needed form of release; instead of the people getting all riled up for war and building tanks, they get all riled up for sport and build stadiums.
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
You could also monitor the position and force of the tendons in the wrist; this is very doable with current technology. Maybe even cheap.
Some research would have to be done one exactly what tendon-positions make which key-press, and it might turn out that it's impossible to tell. There's also the problem with people who don't have tendons near enough to the skin to be able to detect properly. People with particularily muscular wrists, or people who have a lot of fat might pose problems.
Training would be incredibly easy. One could just wear the gloves, hook the keyboard into the gloves, hook the gloves into the computer, and whenever you press a key the gloves record the position of the tendons(and their force and such), and remember which key was pressed. This needs a fair bit of intelligence on the part of the gloves(I'm actually thinking more of wrist-bands, not gloves), but things are small enough today that it shouldn't pose a problem.
I don't know enough about alternative power sources, but this device would need much at all if it could harness a bit of the energy whenever your tendons move. This could be very tiring if too much force is required to power the device, but I don't think much would be needed.
Anyways, food for thought.
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Hehehe;) Good point, I will say C++. But hell, when they came out with that name it wasn't "cool" to use punctuation in a name - they honestly liked it, I suppose.
Microsoft chooses everything *VERY* carefully, including names. They chose C# not for some ancient myth that inspires their programmers. No, they chose it because it'll buzzword and they'll get some press out of it.
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Allright then. You are with a company that has a web page that gets hit two million times a day. Each hit requires a rather small program to be run.
What will you do, write the program in a relatively inefficient language, or one that will let you keep your job?:) Go ahead, try saying to your boss, "Yeah, can we spend another 200k to double our server capacity so that I can use the programming language I'm most comfortable with, and so that I don't need to get my hands dirty?"
Thought so.
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
I have not experienced Java's slowness as ever being a serious problem. If I'm doing number crunching, I use JNI. If I'm doing network stuff, then the interpreter is always faster than the networks ability.
Well, number crunching isn't going to be slower under nearly any language - math can be abstracted very closely to what the machine uses, no matter how high you go up. A single "a = 1 + 1" line is only four or five assembly instructions. Pretty much every programming language will use those four or five instructions in the same order, so you won't necessarily notice a big speed difference. This gets different once you get to more complex things, though, like string manipluation, database access, you name it. At that point, the use of the right language is essential for performance/efficiency.
As far as the interpreter being faster than the networks' abilities, you have to take in mind what most Linux developers do: they develop server software. In that case, your bandwidth is no longer the bottleneck, your processor is. If a language isn't sufficiently efficient, you'll be wasting a *lot* of hardware just to serve up a web site.
As far as end users are concerned, Java is Fast Enough(tm), but as far as most developers in the world are concerned, the ones who write real software, not the nice little shareware text editor, Java just doesn't cut the mustard when it comes to performance.
These are all maturity issues though; given time, Just-In-Time compiling could be faster than natively run code. Unfortunatly, Sun was *way* too greedy when it came to Java - they forced a major competitor, Microsoft, to develop an alternative. And C-Sharp(I refuse to use any type of punctuation in a name) looks like it might be very good.
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Re:Programmers Make Computers Slower Year by Year
on
Netscape 6 Vs. 4.7x
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· Score: 2
You're right. "user" could mean "manager", "client", "boss", "spouse", or even "user";)
But I think I got my idea across.
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Re:Programmers Make Computers Slower Year by Year
on
Netscape 6 Vs. 4.7x
·
· Score: 4
I understand what you mean, but you also don't understand a lot of things. I'll try to correct you a point for point basis.
programmers consistently work harder year after year to steal from the end user
I think we both know that developers arn't laughing maniacally, saying, "Haha! They'll never be able to run this!"
Note that I used to run SlackWare and Apache on a 100 MHz 486, serving up web pages (admittedly with a light load) while I used X at its console - and it worked fine. But when I loaded Windows 95 on it it was dog slow. There's no question of running Windows 98.
Don't compare apples to oranges. Windows 95/98 had a lot more things running that Slackware did, even if you didn't see them running. *You* may not have used them, but a lot of people would have.
Okay, anyways, I'm just going to skip ahead a bit. We all know that when you install the latest versions of software, it usually slows your computer down. Now on to the meat.
One thing is because programmers are lazy, and if their code runs slow they assume the user will just get a faster machine.
Well, are you a developer? If so, then you know what you say isn't true. If you arn't a developer, you must not know many of them. Users literally scream for new features, and the developer has to implement them, and FAST. It's not laziness as you should well know, it's priorities. Most users would rather a burgeoning web browser support cookies, rather than run 10% faster. Just go ahead and ask any user(who knows what cookies are), and they'll agree.
The fact is, that you're partially right. A hundred new features shouldn't significantly slow down a program if those features are not used. However, it WILL take up more space on your hard drive - there is absolutely no way around it, short of having a CD custom-made with the software compiled to exactly your specifications.
Now, unless you're going to go around to software projects and modularize their code(which was probably never meant to be modularized in the first place), I suggest you speak better of programmers. Especially Open Source/Free Software programmers who have graciously donated their time and effort to bring you, the ever so poor end user, a usable product.
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
The P3 1.13 GHz recall affected only 200 parts (i.e. less than this Transmeta recall), but that doesn't stop AMD and TMTA stock-holding slashbots from bringing it up on a daily basis.
Of course it's brought up on a day-to-day basis. It was STUPID. Listen, Transmeta has a flaw in a few hundred chips. The *FIRST* chips Transmeta has mass-marketed. What, they get no slack? They're not doing too bad, considering they've come up with a chip that is competitive(on some grounds) with the likes of Intel. The Giant. That's nothing to sneeze at; they're doing a good job.
Now, the reason why everyone got sooo pissed at Intel is that they reached too far. They just COULDN'T stand having a slower-clocked processor than their rival, AMD. So, they did absolutely everything they could to make sure they had the highest clock.
These things included:
- Increasing voltage, a common overclocker's trick - not something chip companies should have to do on a regular basis.
- Disabling those parts of the PIII that didn't work at a high voltage(which parts escape me).
- "releasing" a processor, even though they could, at MOST, deliver a few hundred at press-time. I mean, this is the worst of it. They couldn't beat AMD on a clock-speed basis, so they rounded up a few hundred PIIIs that with a lot of work(and luck) were supposed to run at 1.13GHz, just so they could say "yeah, we're faster, go suck a pole".
Arg.
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
I'm afraid that I have neither the time nor the bandwidth to explain. Go to Ace's Hardware, and read up on all the processor/architecture reviews. That's a good starting point.
Fact is, Intel and AMD abandoned x86 to get real work done a long time ago. x86 is emulated on a modern processor, but at the hardware level. The core of the processor itself uses a different instruction set and format.
And like most things, x86 is just behind the times. Like all technology, tradeoffs had to be made. x86 was introduced way back when with the 386. It was designed to solve a specific set of problems in a certain way. Today we have a different set of problems, that also need to be solved in a different way. It's not that x86 was never good - it was very good at the time, and as evidenced by its long use, it had quite a bit of life in it.
Unfortunatly, the great strides that all the major chip manufacturer go through to pander to the x86 instruction set really cuts down on performance:(
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Troll alert! First of all, different Linux distributions use the SAME kernel and for the most part the same libraries, and yet there is often binary incompatibility.
At least one of the BSDs is capable of running binaries compiled for the Linux kernel. And you're telling me that BSD has zero cross-BSD binary compatibility?
Dolt.
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Of course they read Slashdot - but do they actually listen to what the people here have to say, seriously? Maybe, but not as seriously as someone making a point to find a Intel engineer and then saying, "x86 sucks. Drop it, and make a real consumer-grade, non-x86 CPU. And I don't mean the Itanium, either."
In the first case, it'll go into the statistics - 300,000 people for a new architecture, 460,000 against. In the second case, it'll be, "Well, I met this guy and he was really pissed off that we're still using x86. He seemed to know what he was talking about, and he understood the difficulties involved. However, he really thinks that the sacrifices would be worth it."
Now, which will hold more weight?
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Well, I'll take your word on it. I've never had a rectal surgeon get his head stuck up my ass(or have his head in my ass, even without it getting stuck). Thank you for sharing your experience, such that I might know exactly how much to avoid it in the future.:)
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
That's exactly my point, I don't recall it has ever been so apparent. SSE2 obviously improves performance tremendously, and I hope people realize that if we drop "x86" all together, we could have a nice little leap in performance:)
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
First of all, I'd like to congratulate the author of Flask(the MPEG4 encoder used in the benchmark). You can't buy publicity like this, and I bet your app just got a whole lot better;)
I also think we should take note of something. *THIS* is the promise of moving to a new architecture, beyond x86. A program compiled to be backwards-compatible right down to the 386 will NOT be able to use SSE2 instructions, nor any other fancy bells and whistles(like 3Dnow! and plain 'ol SSE). At least, as far as I can tell(I think pgcc can use more advanced instructions and still run on older CPUs).
In essence, Intel is moving away from x86, albeit slowly and painfully. SSE2 is obviously a good technology, but an incompatible one. Programs using SSE2 instructions will need those instructions available when they run, elsewise bad things happen. But what a gain!
If ever you get the chance to talk to anyone from Intel, say that you'd like to see more of this.
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Slashdot Mirror
Did XML kidnap your cat?
:)
:) The reason why I replied to that post was that while it might be implied to you and me, it might not be implied to everything. The tone of that post struck me as, "Use XML - it's easy and simple," whereas using XML is not necessarily so simple nor easy. Lots of work to be done if you'll be writing your own DTD, and lots of learning to do if you don't.
:)
Nope, just trying to clear up some issues.
I think it's safe to assume that defining a DTD was implied. It's simply easier to say "Use XML" than to say "Write a good DTD to use with XML"
I don't think it was implied. It was mentioned casually. But that wasn't my point. Choosing to use XML is like choose either a binary or text document format. Just saying "use XML" doesn't mean a whole lot. The format itself is really the DTD that's used. Whether or not writing a good DTD was implied, it is certainly a whole lot more complicated than the poster was making it out to be. XML is no magic wand.
How could it possibly be device-dependent? This is just text, we're talking about.
It's waaay too easy to make things device-dependant. For instance, think about printing a modern, full-featured HTML page. It is a device-dependant language; it's meant to work within a browser, of a certain size rage, with a certain colour depth, etc., etc.. It will look great in your browser, but it doesn't lend well to printing. So you have to choose your language/DTD carefully.
Easy rendering has nothing to do with the XML DTD or document, that's the responsibility of the XSL that would accompany it, or the application that parses the document.
Okay, sorry. So, if you want to use XML, you'll need a good DTD, *and* a good XSL(or a good application).
Easy editing is pretty straightforward. Just edit it. This goes along with comprehensive. A good DTD can be comprehensive, but it can also leave room for extension without breaking that document. It is, after all, the extensible markup language.
Now, I'm only going to argue semantics on this one. "Easy" is subjective. You're right, it's easy to look into the document and edit it, but that doesn't make editing easy. I can easily look into a MS Word document and edit it. That doesn't mean I'll do anything useful, nor does it mean it'll be fast.
I wouldn't say XML without a DTD is useless, but I will say XML without a DTD is silly. It's a simple, logical assumption that if you're writing XML documents, they should have a DTD, so you know what's allowed. Like I said before, it seems like this would be implied.
Well, you obviously know what you're talking about
Thanks for the reply, though
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
I'm sorry, but I have to disagree with you.
XML is nothing more than a concept - you store data and text within "tags". The tags can be of pretty much any name. The data can be anything. This isn't a standard, it's not even a format.
Basically, XML boils down to: store it in a text file, delimit data, fields, and content by tags. Sorry, that doesn't cut it. You have to do more.
No, if you want to think about using XML for this, you need to talk about the DTD, not XML itself.
So, the question becomes, which DTD? In order to compete with the competition(LaTeX, HTML, PostScript), it has to be: device-independant, easily rendered, easily edited, and extremelycomprehensive.
Don't shout "XML!!". XML, without a DTD, is almost useless, especially for this application. The DTD has to be all those things I mentioned, plus(for this application), it needs to be standard.
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Let's stop fighting, calling names, whatever. It's a great day, and let's be happy.
For someone who's supposedly advocating peace between the two projects, you've got a pretty negative attitude.
it ends up that this is actually KDE playing catch-up to GNOME
These developers are people, and that's really quite an insulting thing to say. I'm not going to say you're wrong - I don't know enough about it. But if you were to say, oh, "You're just playing catchup to Canadians" to an American, speaking about technology, you'd get a very negative reaction. Heck, if that particular American was big enough and patriotic enough(or if you said it in a place full of big, patriotic people), you'd probably get your ass kicked.
The KDE and GNOME projects get along fairly well, despite their obvious differences. Your attitude is what causes what problems exist - it's called arrogance.
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
That's like saying only a government can have an army and go out and raid people.
Sure, that's what it's supposed to be like, but something like that has to be enforced.
If someone is censoring someone else, it's still censoring, even if they're not the government.
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
No, I was replying to a comment :)
The poster I replied to basically said, "No matter what happens, if you do something, it's your fault and nobody else is wrong."
What I'm saying is that there are many ways to take advantage of someone.
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Thank you for seeing what I meant :)
That two grand I gave away really hurt, and I'm not kidding. If I had known exactly how badly I would have needed it, I probably wouldn't have given so much so often. That's just the way it is.
At least I know the various people who got it personally; I know they used the money well.
Bill Gates, on the other hand, would need to give up almost all of his wealth before it affected his life in any way.
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Nobody here is getting the point(not to pick on you specifically, keep that in mind).
Everyone is talking about charity and you'd be better off, etc., etc..
Digging a ditch takes a certain amount of work, a certain amount of effort. Whether the digger be a Doctor, a student, a small business owner or whatever, that work is worth a certain amount of money.
I'm not forgetting anything either; I know you also have to take into account things like reliability, personality, personal intelligence, etc., etc..
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
I know I am responding to flamebait, but I just can't help myself. :)
... well, he'd have less savings. It's not like he'd just drop that much money on a purchase.
The bottom line in any employer-employee contract is that the employee is free to leave at any time.
You must live in a different world than mine. In my world, people are only "free" in that they are allowed to make choices. That doesn't mean they can't be forced into doing something. It doesn't mean they can't be coerced. It doesn't mean that they can't be forced to do something really shitty because there's no other way.
If he does not, then he is not being 'abused' by the company for which he works.
Let's take a real-world example.
I'm a middle aged man, and have recently become homeless. I havn't eaten in two days, and it's been months since I've had anything other than garbage scraps. Someone offers me a job, saying, "I'll give you a shack to live in, and one square meal a day. It will keep you alive. In return, you must work for me twenty hours a day, digging trenches. You must remove an entire shovel full of dirt from the trench each second. You get one break for your meal."
How could you say that if I were in that position, I'm not being abused?
A person doesn't need to have a gun to their head in order to be forced - there are many other ways of doing it.
I know this is a different situation, and I agree with what you said about them being techies and programmers. But that doesn't make it RIGHT, damnit. It's still wrong to hire someone on a temporary basis, keep them around for YEARS because they think they'll eventually get hired full-time, and then dump them.
Just my two cents.
Dave
P.S.: I donated $2,000 to charity last year. I made $20,000 dollars last year(working full-time), so that's ten percent. I doubt Bill Gates regularily spends 10% of his income on charities. Not to mention the fact that the 10% I spent meant I couldn't have a car, whereas the 10% he would have spent would mean
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
First:
The question was not how badly other vendors support their products - it was how to get support for Linux in enterprise environments.
Second:
You comment was based on an EULA, an "End-User License Agreement". Was the question about end users? No, it was about enterprise. Microsoft and other provide a LOT of support for enterprises(sure, it costs, but it's available).
This are very different when you're a big business, especially when you're buying in volume. Having worked for Ontario Hydro, I know that many vendors fall over themselves trying to help the big companies. Once there was a problem, and we called our support number(which no other company had - it was ours), and MS had a tech out in two hours. She arrived at three AM, and had the problem fixed by eight AM.
Go get a life.
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Hey, that's pretty cool :)
;)
:)
;)
Thanks for the effort
I'm sure that the non-KDE crowd would very much appreciate your efforts were you to bring a fully-functional web browerser(statically linked, of course) to their desktops
Personally, I use Konqueror under GNOME, but it's a wee bit bloated/slow to respond for my tastes. I imagine a large part of that is the way it was compiled
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
I was working in a small business a while ago, and they had a Meridian phone system(don't know the exact name - fancy phones, though).
:)
:) (okay, well I lie, I kept testing them with my tongue, but I was more careful)
Anyways, being the boy wonder in the building, I was told to re-wire everything. Great fun
Anyways, to check to see if a line was live, I'd stick my tongue to it. No biggie, nice fuzzy buzzing feeling. These were the fancy-phone lines, so I figured they'd carre more juice than a regular phone line.
WRONG. I was up on some scaffolding playing around in the big box where all the wires came/went from/to, testing lines. Put two of them to my tongue and nearly flew off the scaffolding.
Yeah, that was the fax line - just a regular phone line(singled out because the fax machine needed a regular line).
Regular phone lines have enough juice to case muscle contractions. To someone with any number of medical conditions, that could be fatal.
Needless to say, I stopped testing the lines with my tongue.
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Well, I hate to say it, but the Olympics were doing just fine before billions of dollars were invested. I mean, honestly, other than a nice flat place, what do you need to run a race?
Sure, without a directive like this the Olympics would lose a lot of fundings, but big deal! A lot of people have lost sight of what the Olympics are supposed to be. Not a spectator event, but a way to bring nations together without war.
Where else can you get two countries that absolutely hate each other to fight without bloodshed?
The Olympics provide a much-needed form of release; instead of the people getting all riled up for war and building tanks, they get all riled up for sport and build stadiums.
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
You could also monitor the position and force of the tendons in the wrist; this is very doable with current technology. Maybe even cheap.
Some research would have to be done one exactly what tendon-positions make which key-press, and it might turn out that it's impossible to tell. There's also the problem with people who don't have tendons near enough to the skin to be able to detect properly. People with particularily muscular wrists, or people who have a lot of fat might pose problems.
Training would be incredibly easy. One could just wear the gloves, hook the keyboard into the gloves, hook the gloves into the computer, and whenever you press a key the gloves record the position of the tendons(and their force and such), and remember which key was pressed. This needs a fair bit of intelligence on the part of the gloves(I'm actually thinking more of wrist-bands, not gloves), but things are small enough today that it shouldn't pose a problem.
I don't know enough about alternative power sources, but this device would need much at all if it could harness a bit of the energy whenever your tendons move. This could be very tiring if too much force is required to power the device, but I don't think much would be needed.
Anyways, food for thought.
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Hehehe ;) Good point, I will say C++. But hell, when they came out with that name it wasn't "cool" to use punctuation in a name - they honestly liked it, I suppose.
Microsoft chooses everything *VERY* carefully, including names. They chose C# not for some ancient myth that inspires their programmers. No, they chose it because it'll buzzword and they'll get some press out of it.
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Allright then. You are with a company that has a web page that gets hit two million times a day. Each hit requires a rather small program to be run.
:) Go ahead, try saying to your boss, "Yeah, can we spend another 200k to double our server capacity so that I can use the programming language I'm most comfortable with, and so that I don't need to get my hands dirty?"
What will you do, write the program in a relatively inefficient language, or one that will let you keep your job?
Thought so.
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
I have not experienced Java's slowness as ever being a serious problem. If I'm doing number crunching, I use JNI. If I'm doing network stuff, then the interpreter is always faster than the networks ability.
Well, number crunching isn't going to be slower under nearly any language - math can be abstracted very closely to what the machine uses, no matter how high you go up. A single "a = 1 + 1" line is only four or five assembly instructions. Pretty much every programming language will use those four or five instructions in the same order, so you won't necessarily notice a big speed difference. This gets different once you get to more complex things, though, like string manipluation, database access, you name it. At that point, the use of the right language is essential for performance/efficiency.
As far as the interpreter being faster than the networks' abilities, you have to take in mind what most Linux developers do: they develop server software. In that case, your bandwidth is no longer the bottleneck, your processor is. If a language isn't sufficiently efficient, you'll be wasting a *lot* of hardware just to serve up a web site.
As far as end users are concerned, Java is Fast Enough(tm), but as far as most developers in the world are concerned, the ones who write real software, not the nice little shareware text editor, Java just doesn't cut the mustard when it comes to performance.
These are all maturity issues though; given time, Just-In-Time compiling could be faster than natively run code. Unfortunatly, Sun was *way* too greedy when it came to Java - they forced a major competitor, Microsoft, to develop an alternative. And C-Sharp(I refuse to use any type of punctuation in a name) looks like it might be very good.
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
You're right. "user" could mean "manager", "client", "boss", "spouse", or even "user" ;)
But I think I got my idea across.
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
I understand what you mean, but you also don't understand a lot of things. I'll try to correct you a point for point basis.
programmers consistently work harder year after year to steal from the end user
I think we both know that developers arn't laughing maniacally, saying, "Haha! They'll never be able to run this!"
Note that I used to run SlackWare and Apache on a 100 MHz 486, serving up web pages (admittedly with a light load) while I used X at its console - and it worked fine. But when I loaded Windows 95 on it it was dog slow. There's no question of running Windows 98.
Don't compare apples to oranges. Windows 95/98 had a lot more things running that Slackware did, even if you didn't see them running. *You* may not have used them, but a lot of people would have.
Okay, anyways, I'm just going to skip ahead a bit. We all know that when you install the latest versions of software, it usually slows your computer down. Now on to the meat.
One thing is because programmers are lazy, and if their code runs slow they assume the user will just get a faster machine.
Well, are you a developer? If so, then you know what you say isn't true. If you arn't a developer, you must not know many of them. Users literally scream for new features, and the developer has to implement them, and FAST. It's not laziness as you should well know, it's priorities. Most users would rather a burgeoning web browser support cookies, rather than run 10% faster. Just go ahead and ask any user(who knows what cookies are), and they'll agree.
The fact is, that you're partially right. A hundred new features shouldn't significantly slow down a program if those features are not used. However, it WILL take up more space on your hard drive - there is absolutely no way around it, short of having a CD custom-made with the software compiled to exactly your specifications.
Now, unless you're going to go around to software projects and modularize their code(which was probably never meant to be modularized in the first place), I suggest you speak better of programmers. Especially Open Source/Free Software programmers who have graciously donated their time and effort to bring you, the ever so poor end user, a usable product.
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
The P3 1.13 GHz recall affected only 200 parts (i.e. less than this Transmeta recall), but that doesn't stop AMD and TMTA stock-holding slashbots from bringing it up on a daily basis.
Of course it's brought up on a day-to-day basis. It was STUPID. Listen, Transmeta has a flaw in a few hundred chips. The *FIRST* chips Transmeta has mass-marketed. What, they get no slack? They're not doing too bad, considering they've come up with a chip that is competitive(on some grounds) with the likes of Intel. The Giant. That's nothing to sneeze at; they're doing a good job.
Now, the reason why everyone got sooo pissed at Intel is that they reached too far. They just COULDN'T stand having a slower-clocked processor than their rival, AMD. So, they did absolutely everything they could to make sure they had the highest clock.
These things included:
- Increasing voltage, a common overclocker's trick - not something chip companies should have to do on a regular basis.
- Disabling those parts of the PIII that didn't work at a high voltage(which parts escape me).
- "releasing" a processor, even though they could, at MOST, deliver a few hundred at press-time. I mean, this is the worst of it. They couldn't beat AMD on a clock-speed basis, so they rounded up a few hundred PIIIs that with a lot of work(and luck) were supposed to run at 1.13GHz, just so they could say "yeah, we're faster, go suck a pole".
Arg.
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
I'm afraid that I have neither the time nor the bandwidth to explain. Go to Ace's Hardware, and read up on all the processor/architecture reviews. That's a good starting point.
:(
Fact is, Intel and AMD abandoned x86 to get real work done a long time ago. x86 is emulated on a modern processor, but at the hardware level. The core of the processor itself uses a different instruction set and format.
And like most things, x86 is just behind the times. Like all technology, tradeoffs had to be made. x86 was introduced way back when with the 386. It was designed to solve a specific set of problems in a certain way. Today we have a different set of problems, that also need to be solved in a different way. It's not that x86 was never good - it was very good at the time, and as evidenced by its long use, it had quite a bit of life in it.
Unfortunatly, the great strides that all the major chip manufacturer go through to pander to the x86 instruction set really cuts down on performance
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Troll alert! First of all, different Linux distributions use the SAME kernel and for the most part the same libraries, and yet there is often binary incompatibility.
At least one of the BSDs is capable of running binaries compiled for the Linux kernel. And you're telling me that BSD has zero cross-BSD binary compatibility?
Dolt.
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Of course they read Slashdot - but do they actually listen to what the people here have to say, seriously? Maybe, but not as seriously as someone making a point to find a Intel engineer and then saying, "x86 sucks. Drop it, and make a real consumer-grade, non-x86 CPU. And I don't mean the Itanium, either."
In the first case, it'll go into the statistics - 300,000 people for a new architecture, 460,000 against. In the second case, it'll be, "Well, I met this guy and he was really pissed off that we're still using x86. He seemed to know what he was talking about, and he understood the difficulties involved. However, he really thinks that the sacrifices would be worth it."
Now, which will hold more weight?
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Well, I'll take your word on it. I've never had a rectal surgeon get his head stuck up my ass(or have his head in my ass, even without it getting stuck). Thank you for sharing your experience, such that I might know exactly how much to avoid it in the future. :)
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
That's exactly my point, I don't recall it has ever been so apparent. SSE2 obviously improves performance tremendously, and I hope people realize that if we drop "x86" all together, we could have a nice little leap in performance :)
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
First of all, I'd like to congratulate the author of Flask(the MPEG4 encoder used in the benchmark). You can't buy publicity like this, and I bet your app just got a whole lot better ;)
I also think we should take note of something. *THIS* is the promise of moving to a new architecture, beyond x86. A program compiled to be backwards-compatible right down to the 386 will NOT be able to use SSE2 instructions, nor any other fancy bells and whistles(like 3Dnow! and plain 'ol SSE). At least, as far as I can tell(I think pgcc can use more advanced instructions and still run on older CPUs).
In essence, Intel is moving away from x86, albeit slowly and painfully. SSE2 is obviously a good technology, but an incompatible one. Programs using SSE2 instructions will need those instructions available when they run, elsewise bad things happen. But what a gain!
If ever you get the chance to talk to anyone from Intel, say that you'd like to see more of this.
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)