Anyone who claims Java is just a toy language is unqualified to comment on it, because it just isn't true. I've been doing sizeable commercial apps with Java for a long time (longer than most, anyway), and it kicks serious butt over anything else in the following critical areas: 1) Portability (duh!) 2) Error handling (too easy with Java!) 3) Debugging (if you have a good tool and good technique. Command-line development is pathetically inefficient. I use Visual Age Enterprise, and long ago got my money back in increased productivity.) 4) Memory handling (the great flaws in C/C++ are lost memory and bad pointers) 5) It plays nicely with others. I've done programs linking C, assembly, C++, SQL,... with Java, and it always works 6) Threading for free (threads really suck in almost anything else!) 7) Excellent protection of variables (prevention of race conditions). Crucial for threaded programs, since it's almost impossible to catch in testing. Such occurences are probably the cause of many Windows crashes 8) Less customer support needed, since it's less likely to have uncaught bugs 9) Easier to reuse and replace modules. Reused code and free code are almost synonymous 10) Easy to have it upgrade itself 11) Most important of all: fast and easy to finish stable code. Sure, maybe its runtime is 10+% slower, but so what?! I typically cut coding time at least in half by using Java due to all of the above. It's impossible for a C version to be faster when it's several months from actually getting finished (unlike the Java version, which would already be done!). The old adage that time is money is so true! Spend a couple hundred dollars apiece on faster machines to make up the difference in speed, from the far more significant hundreds of thousands you saved in development costs and maintenance. Duh! Is doubling the cost really worth that (theoretical) improvement in performance? Outside of something like gaming, I don't think so! (and I'm still convinced that somebody's going to pull off writing hit games in Java, with assembly subroutines for some graphics handling)
Oh, yeah, we were talking about Sun. Cool machines, but their pres. is a weasel, and is no better than Gates. But since they turn out some cool _original_ technology (my favorite of which is, obviously, Java), I forgive them their sins (once they repent by handing everything over to Linux!).
I've been parking some domains (no, I'm not a squatter; launch date for the real sites is in two weeks!) for free at vservers.com (well, after the $70, anyway). No reason to pay.
You're right that it could get a bit lengthy. Perhaps what would be best is such a system as an alternate (an extension, almost) to the existing domain name system. Without a somewhat long path, you will _never_ be able to get past name collisions. Never say never? Well I say _NEVER_. My proposal is to make truly distinctive paths a standard, instead of making you wade through search sites and such in a weak attempt to find stuff. Of course, like in a computer file system, the paths would be relative, so if you're already in a category then you would only need to add the final company name to get to the target. Ideally being at any of the sublevels you would be given a list of its subtrees, somewhat of a standardized version of doing a Yahoo search (but without the outdated information, and not indexing just 13% or whatever of the sites out there). Something like this not only should happen, it eventually will. Right now for a company I'm launching we've been desperate coming up with appropriate domain names for its divisions which haven't already been taken, but of course that's now impossible (most of the appropriate names we've found are only reserved, not actually in use... [Gomer Pyle accent:] surprise, surprise!). It's almost equivalent to having to search every phone directory to make sure we don't conflict _anywhere_. Pretty pathetic. I'll repeat it one more time: domain names have become worthless.
I've said it before, I'll say it again: the current domain name system has become practically worthless. We need a replacement system which is more like a yellow pages, or better yet, like Yahoo, where you browse through multiple levels to get to what you wanted. With a properly designed structure, there would be more than one way to get to a company (e.g. a software company could be found under categories of programming, under software sales, etc.). Of course the category names would need to be kept short (an abbreviated version, plus a spelled out version in each language to make it easier to follow). The only real tricky part would be differentiating between companies who do about the same thing and have the same name (I'm in such a company; the owner of the name is in an unrelated industry). Maybe something that differentiates them by location in such cases? Needless to say, a critical part would be to make it prohibited to grab a name for resale, to take a trademarked name, to have a deceptive name, or to intentionally place something in an inappropriate category (make them sign a contract that has a _huge_ fine if they break the rules).
It might look like, for a bad example: "com.soft.os.intel-compatible.microsoft" (root at the top to differentiate from the current system)
Hopefully _somebody_ in a position to pull it off (standards org?) is preparing for something like this.
If people want to buy Linux PPC boxes, there's no reason Apple itself couldn't cater to their tastes, selling machines with Linux (and, better yet, maybe both OS's preinstalled).
If they want to focus on making everything based on MacOS, they could sell versions of their OS which run on machines built by other companies (again), plus, since MacOS is based on Next, doing a port to Intel isn't at all an unrealistic goal. Diversification is the key.
How much useful new technology has ever come out of M$? None. How much of the useful technology they have (in NT kernel, and many other areas) is from reverse engineering of Unix, VMS, Mac OS, and others? Probably all of it. Word knows how to handle Wordperfect files. Thus Office is illegal under the proposed law. Windows is full of "borrowed" code from other OS's, thus illegal. I remember a few years back when M$ lost a court case about stealing disk compression technology (Stacker), and another (I believe it was Intel) where Apple source code (Quicktime) had been blatantly stolen. The big fight right now between AOL and M$ is that M$ isn't able to keep up with the reverse engineering on instant messaging. Now they'll go to jail if they even try. Maybe this law (especially if it's retroactive!) will be the key to take M$ down. By my understanding, if someone finds a derivative of their code in a M$ product, they would be legally justified to take down and erase every copy of it even at M$'s own site. Cool.
Heck, I live in the States but I own a vacation house in Acapulco. Maybe a bunch of us could set up shop down there to get around the law, while we watch the big US corporations squirm as they're destroyed by their own creation.
(Question: could this law really even affect free software? It's hard to demand a percentage from derived software's price when that price is zero.)
I'm in a company that's about to launch yet another ISP and hosting service, and the decision made from day 1 is that we _only_ accept automatic payment through credit cards, because it's a joke to have to try to hunt everybody down.
A solution I suggest for machines which are outdated is that we need to make VNC and similar applications more common. If you haven't tried VNC, it's very cool: it lets you do remote control of another machine, it's compatible (any OS to any OS or hardware), it's fairly fast (tolerable on a 28K modem, as long as you're not talking video games and such), it's small (~173K on client), and it's free. If we made more decent servers which are multiuser available, it would let people use VNC to remotely run applications that their 486 would never be able to do natively. I'm sure that's where much of software is headed, anyway. Somewhat a terminal on steroids. I would rather pay a monthly subscription to occasionally use specialized apps and such than have the hassle of installing them on my machines, anyway.
I attend a Spanish-speaking church (my wife is from Mexico, and I'm also fluent though I'm a gringo), and I would love to take your 486's off your hands to distribute there if I thought I had the time to administrate them. I wouldn't throw them away too fast; I'm sure such a group could use them, if you find a way to give them a basic install of Linux with word processors and such so they are useful to them. I especially like the idea of setting them up in a large room, all set up to remotely run their apps on at least one decent machine at the site. That seems like a great way to make old machines almost new again. At my university they managed to almost double the size of an important lab by adding a bunch of cheap terminals in such a way (there were only two good machines for a ton of terminals, and it was just fine).
To be honest, if you told them it's Windows and installed Linux, they probably wouldn't ever notice the difference, other than the fact that it actually works and never crashes.
I've wanted such a thing to happen for a long time. My second daughter was born just two days ago (by pure coincidence, I also live in Salt Lake, where we have a higher birth rate than rabbits, so we know first-hand more about the issues of raising children than almost anybody;-) Let me know how I can help.
On a related issue, I've been working for a while on writing some software which auto-generates websites for use by family organizations, schools, religions, etc., tracking announcements, calendars, and such (I'm writing it for my own family and my local church, but it will work for anybody; non-profit sites only, of course!). It's not done yet, but of course I've been doing it alone in my spare time. It's not complex, so I could finish it fairly quickly if I see any interest in it. I hope more people will become interested in giving something back to these community groups who never seem to get much of anything from the software community.
Yet another related issue: I do a lot of commercial work in XML, and would like to donate time towards creating an XML standard for what could be called a "metasite", which would allow third-party trusted sites to wrapper (XML-based) a bunch of other sites. So maybe one metasite could specialize in defining all of the educational sites, while another would be computer utilities, etc. (they would also have a structure which organizes pointers to the other sites, making them all work together). It would be a type of Consumer Reports which defines web sites (but free, of course). We really need something like that which lets you look for stuff and not have things pop up which you don't want. A standardized file (and trusted host for that definition!) would allow a third party to say exactly what a site has and does and so on, making web searches actually useful for a change. It would be a great way to protect children (and everybody!) from the garbage on the net, and anybody who wants to could easily donate time to make it work. I've seen a non-profit web site which is almost a clone of Yahoo which somewhat attempts to do a better search site (what's the site name? I can't ever remember it), but it isn't really defining sites thoroghly, it's just putting them in general categories. What we really need is an XML format which really says what's in a site. If you do a search on such metadata and say it shouldn't turn up porno sites, it really would work for a change (of course if you wanted that, that's what you'd get). It wouldn't be flawless, but it would actually work. Any thoughts?
1a) More than one CPU on same chip (now IBM did it)
1b) CPU's and really good 3d (e.g. TNT2-style)graphics engine on same chip
1c) Reconfigurable computing (Transmeta?)
2) More than one reconfigurable CPU on same chip
3) Large reconfigurable CPU which can divide itself in a way that it becomes several independent CPU's of arbitrary size according to use at the moment.
4) Large reconfigurable CPU with the #4 stuff, but in a 3D design (a cube), once somebody figures out how to layer it and cool it.
Just a couple of weeks ago at the newest NASA mission control center (in Utah, where we depend on hydroelectric power, not nukes... yeah!), I laughed as the guy who designed and built the whole thing told of when CNN and other major news agencies sent huge crews to see what would happen to this military base as they did a test rollover to 2000 (the reporters were hoping for nuclear meltdown or something like that), and absolutely _nothing_ happened. I think it's going to largely be like that when we hit 2000. It'll be like when the Jehovah's Witnesses claimed many years back a particular day and time for the end of the world (despite the fact that even the Bible says nobody can know when it is), and they all gathered together and waited, and waited, and waited... Needless to say, they don't mention that when they're out knocking doors. Year 2000 will probably be the same.
The only real nightmare on the year 2000 is that thousands of people are trying to have their children born on new years, and there will surely be several times more births than room/staff for them at the hospitals. Anyone stupid enough to try to have a baby in those circumstances should have been neutered years ago to improve the human race.
There's a pretty substantial portion of Antarctica which has never become a territory of any nation. They can have it. In fact, let's deport _any_ undesirable there, to improve the gene pool locally.
I'm not in the military, but I work with them fairly regularly. There's actually some pretty impressive programming going on in the military (they have lots of civilian on-site hackers). The sad thing is the tools they use: much is completely proprietary, and they use a fair amount of NT (with Visual Studio, etc.). The scariest example I've seen lately is an important database hosted on SQL Server, which is going to soon be several exabytes huge (yes, exabytes, not terabytes). I'm just glad they're keeping it fairly SQL-based (thus somewhat retargettable), because M$ products just don't scale that far, regardless of what they may say. Since Oracle and IBM are doing their databases for Linux now, at least there are better options.
Personally, I do my programming using IBM's VisualAge for Java (NT version (boo!) because the fancy version isn't available for Linux yet). But the code I turn out is portable to _anything_, especially Linux and freeware databases (mSQL, MySQL, etc.) and such (truly amazing for portability). Too bad more companies don't recognize the great flaw of the M$ (and many Borland/Inprise) tools, that even though the tool itself is good, you can't run it's target code on something better than the development platform. Code is only as good as its runtime machine.
I think I might have been more impressed with their PCI (/AGP) development and testing platform. If it's as good as it sounds, I may even want to buy one for myself for a couple of projects I'm working on (where I'd much rather do high-level programming than embedded coding until it's really ready to become a chip). I don't know how this will compare to the next TNT chip, but I bet (if it ever gets done) it will kick 3dfx's butt (3dfx always skimps on way too many features).
I totally agree. Too many of the people on the list are famous or notorious, not important. Of those on the list, I personally think that the only ones who made significant contributions to the good or bad of the world are: Rabin, Hitler, Einstein, M.L.King, Gandhi, H.Ford(to a lesser degree; somebody else would have standardized the assembly line if he hadn't), Churchill, and Hussein. Many other important figures are completely missing. While Elvis was a good entertainer, I don't think "Blue Suede Shoes" will be included on deep-space probes to represent our planet. The contributions of those I mentioned will forever change the course of humanity. Something very important which is being left out of the list is the media; I'm not sure of a person to single out, but the media as a whole has had a far more profound effect on our planet than anyone on this list, with the possible exception of Hitler, and its effect will surely become ever more prominent in the future.
Of course Hollywood will now turn out some high-budget films which try to look like $30K films (and largely succeed at that part), but they will surely be even worse than the typical slashfest films.
I saw a documentary the other day on the Sundance channel which showed everything people went through trying to finish their independent films and get them seen. Wow, it's hard! Something that became fairly clear is that truly good films are typically done by really good writers who happen to be really good at directing as well. Directors who attempt to write (e.g. Lucas: Phantom Menace) are not usually so good. Directors who maybe aren't such good writers but who are really good at adapting a story to film can turn out really good stuff also. Then there's Hollywood. They typically hand their $100 million budgets over to directors who are absolutely clueless at writing/adapting materials. Why? Insanity, surely. Just look at the Fifth Element. Absolutely pathetic story, which the director then turned into an even worse movie (same guy? I don't remember. A pox on him and his heirs!). We will surely see high-budget crapfests imitating the Blair Witch Project now.
I've ordered several times from X10 recently (camera, firecracker, wireless video, etc.), and all orders have arrived almost immediately. You just weren't lucky.
Sorry about my incomplete post! (I was in a hurry) That's actually what I meant. At my work we've been doing some stuff for low-cost high-bandwidth transmissions in the under-1000 ft. range, which, since it's specific to streaming data (in my case, sound) with a guaranteed bandwidth, would, with proper real-time compression, work (once you're outside the building it would need something else, but it could be done. Where there's a will there's a way). That's why this idea came to mind. I may want to have one of these microservers (the $15 all-on-a-chip kind, probably) as part of the system for my work, to improve it's adjustability on the fly. (I'd tell you what my work project is for, but my nondisclosure agreements at work would then require me to kill you or something)
You wear eyeglasses with a camera in the middle (pricy, but available and very discreet), and have the world's smallest server and a good wireless transmitter hidden in your clothing/pockets. You then broadcast the premiere (or better yet one of the early test showings!) of the next Star Wars and other movies through video streaming in real time from the theater, which is then extended through repeaters througout the world (sit really still, and don't comment!). I'm sure Lucas would be thrilled about that one!
To up the ante, I offer a $250 prize to the first person who can prove they pull it off (but I assume no liability for their actions!). And here's my email (remove the !'s) to prove I mean it: !rickyray!@!patrickhayes!.!com!
For a large commercial site I'm creating, we've decided to do a mix of secure and open content. Anything generic will be open to the public, including for outside linking. Anything we derive revenues from (online services, etc.) will be strictly accessible with a login or by local reference (else there would be no point in the site). Is there not one person at Universal who can figure this out?!
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Exactly!
... with Java, and it always works
Anyone who claims Java is just a toy language is unqualified to comment on it, because it just isn't true. I've been doing sizeable commercial apps with Java for a long time (longer than most, anyway), and it kicks serious butt over anything else in the following critical areas:
1) Portability (duh!)
2) Error handling (too easy with Java!)
3) Debugging (if you have a good tool and good technique. Command-line development is pathetically inefficient. I use Visual Age Enterprise, and long ago got my money back in increased productivity.)
4) Memory handling (the great flaws in C/C++ are lost memory and bad pointers)
5) It plays nicely with others. I've done programs linking C, assembly, C++, SQL,
6) Threading for free (threads really suck in almost anything else!)
7) Excellent protection of variables (prevention of race conditions). Crucial for threaded programs, since it's almost impossible to catch in testing. Such occurences are probably the cause of many Windows crashes
8) Less customer support needed, since it's less likely to have uncaught bugs
9) Easier to reuse and replace modules. Reused code and free code are almost synonymous
10) Easy to have it upgrade itself
11) Most important of all: fast and easy to finish stable code. Sure, maybe its runtime is 10+% slower, but so what?! I typically cut coding time at least in half by using Java due to all of the above. It's impossible for a C version to be faster when it's several months from actually getting finished (unlike the Java version, which would already be done!). The old adage that time is money is so true! Spend a couple hundred dollars apiece on faster machines to make up the difference in speed, from the far more significant hundreds of thousands you saved in development costs and maintenance. Duh! Is doubling the cost really worth that (theoretical) improvement in performance? Outside of something like gaming, I don't think so! (and I'm still convinced that somebody's going to pull off writing hit games in Java, with assembly subroutines for some graphics handling)
Oh, yeah, we were talking about Sun. Cool machines, but their pres. is a weasel, and is no better than Gates. But since they turn out some cool _original_ technology (my favorite of which is, obviously, Java), I forgive them their sins (once they repent by handing everything over to Linux!).
Does that mean that my submissions for trademarks for "." and "com" and "net" and "org" might not go through? Dang it!
I've been parking some domains (no, I'm not a squatter; launch date for the real sites is in two weeks!) for free at vservers.com (well, after the $70, anyway). No reason to pay.
You're right that it could get a bit lengthy. Perhaps what would be best is such a system as an alternate (an extension, almost) to the existing domain name system. Without a somewhat long path, you will _never_ be able to get past name collisions. Never say never? Well I say _NEVER_. My proposal is to make truly distinctive paths a standard, instead of making you wade through search sites and such in a weak attempt to find stuff. Of course, like in a computer file system, the paths would be relative, so if you're already in a category then you would only need to add the final company name to get to the target. Ideally being at any of the sublevels you would be given a list of its subtrees, somewhat of a standardized version of doing a Yahoo search (but without the outdated information, and not indexing just 13% or whatever of the sites out there). Something like this not only should happen, it eventually will. Right now for a company I'm launching we've been desperate coming up with appropriate domain names for its divisions which haven't already been taken, but of course that's now impossible (most of the appropriate names we've found are only reserved, not actually in use... [Gomer Pyle accent:] surprise, surprise!). It's almost equivalent to having to search every phone directory to make sure we don't conflict _anywhere_. Pretty pathetic. I'll repeat it one more time: domain names have become worthless.
I've said it before, I'll say it again: the current domain name system has become practically worthless. We need a replacement system which is more like a yellow pages, or better yet, like Yahoo, where you browse through multiple levels to get to what you wanted. With a properly designed structure, there would be more than one way to get to a company (e.g. a software company could be found under categories of programming, under software sales, etc.). Of course the category names would need to be kept short (an abbreviated version, plus a spelled out version in each language to make it easier to follow). The only real tricky part would be differentiating between companies who do about the same thing and have the same name (I'm in such a company; the owner of the name is in an unrelated industry). Maybe something that differentiates them by location in such cases?
Needless to say, a critical part would be to make it prohibited to grab a name for resale, to take a trademarked name, to have a deceptive name, or to intentionally place something in an inappropriate category (make them sign a contract that has a _huge_ fine if they break the rules).
It might look like, for a bad example: "com.soft.os.intel-compatible.microsoft" (root at the top to differentiate from the current system)
Hopefully _somebody_ in a position to pull it off (standards org?) is preparing for something like this.
Apple can always diversify how they make money.
If people want to buy Linux PPC boxes, there's no reason Apple itself couldn't cater to their tastes, selling machines with Linux (and, better yet, maybe both OS's preinstalled).
If they want to focus on making everything based on MacOS, they could sell versions of their OS which run on machines built by other companies (again), plus, since MacOS is based on Next, doing a port to Intel isn't at all an unrealistic goal. Diversification is the key.
How much useful new technology has ever come out of M$? None. How much of the useful technology they have (in NT kernel, and many other areas) is from reverse engineering of Unix, VMS, Mac OS, and others? Probably all of it. Word knows how to handle Wordperfect files. Thus Office is illegal under the proposed law. Windows is full of "borrowed" code from other OS's, thus illegal. I remember a few years back when M$ lost a court case about stealing disk compression technology (Stacker), and another (I believe it was Intel) where Apple source code (Quicktime) had been blatantly stolen. The big fight right now between AOL and M$ is that M$ isn't able to keep up with the reverse engineering on instant messaging. Now they'll go to jail if they even try. Maybe this law (especially if it's retroactive!) will be the key to take M$ down. By my understanding, if someone finds a derivative of their code in a M$ product, they would be legally justified to take down and erase every copy of it even at M$'s own site. Cool.
Heck, I live in the States but I own a vacation house in Acapulco. Maybe a bunch of us could set up shop down there to get around the law, while we watch the big US corporations squirm as they're destroyed by their own creation.
(Question: could this law really even affect free software? It's hard to demand a percentage from derived software's price when that price is zero.)
I'm in a company that's about to launch yet another ISP and hosting service, and the decision made from day 1 is that we _only_ accept automatic payment through credit cards, because it's a joke to have to try to hunt everybody down.
A solution I suggest for machines which are outdated is that we need to make VNC and similar applications more common. If you haven't tried VNC, it's very cool: it lets you do remote control of another machine, it's compatible (any OS to any OS or hardware), it's fairly fast (tolerable on a 28K modem, as long as you're not talking video games and such), it's small (~173K on client), and it's free. If we made more decent servers which are multiuser available, it would let people use VNC to remotely run applications that their 486 would never be able to do natively. I'm sure that's where much of software is headed, anyway. Somewhat a terminal on steroids. I would rather pay a monthly subscription to occasionally use specialized apps and such than have the hassle of installing them on my machines, anyway.
I attend a Spanish-speaking church (my wife is from Mexico, and I'm also fluent though I'm a gringo), and I would love to take your 486's off your hands to distribute there if I thought I had the time to administrate them. I wouldn't throw them away too fast; I'm sure such a group could use them, if you find a way to give them a basic install of Linux with word processors and such so they are useful to them. I especially like the idea of setting them up in a large room, all set up to remotely run their apps on at least one decent machine at the site. That seems like a great way to make old machines almost new again.
At my university they managed to almost double the size of an important lab by adding a bunch of cheap terminals in such a way (there were only two good machines for a ton of terminals, and it was just fine).
To be honest, if you told them it's Windows and installed Linux, they probably wouldn't ever notice the difference, other than the fact that it actually works and never crashes.
I've wanted such a thing to happen for a long time. My second daughter was born just two days ago (by pure coincidence, I also live in Salt Lake, where we have a higher birth rate than rabbits, so we know first-hand more about the issues of raising children than almost anybody ;-)
Let me know how I can help.
On a related issue, I've been working for a while on writing some software which auto-generates websites for use by family organizations, schools, religions, etc., tracking announcements, calendars, and such (I'm writing it for my own family and my local church, but it will work for anybody; non-profit sites only, of course!). It's not done yet, but of course I've been doing it alone in my spare time. It's not complex, so I could finish it fairly quickly if I see any interest in it. I hope more people will become interested in giving something back to these community groups who never seem to get much of anything from the software community.
Yet another related issue: I do a lot of commercial work in XML, and would like to donate time towards creating an XML standard for what could be called a "metasite", which would allow third-party trusted sites to wrapper (XML-based) a bunch of other sites. So maybe one metasite could specialize in defining all of the educational sites, while another would be computer utilities, etc. (they would also have a structure which organizes pointers to the other sites, making them all work together). It would be a type of Consumer Reports which defines web sites (but free, of course). We really need something like that which lets you look for stuff and not have things pop up which you don't want. A standardized file (and trusted host for that definition!) would allow a third party to say exactly what a site has and does and so on, making web searches actually useful for a change. It would be a great way to protect children (and everybody!) from the garbage on the net, and anybody who wants to could easily donate time to make it work. I've seen a non-profit web site which is almost a clone of Yahoo which somewhat attempts to do a better search site (what's the site name? I can't ever remember it), but it isn't really defining sites thoroghly, it's just putting them in general categories. What we really need is an XML format which really says what's in a site. If you do a search on such metadata and say it shouldn't turn up porno sites, it really would work for a change (of course if you wanted that, that's what you'd get). It wouldn't be flawless, but it would actually work. Any thoughts?
My guess on how CPU's could/should progress:
1a) More than one CPU on same chip (now IBM did it)
1b) CPU's and really good 3d (e.g. TNT2-style)graphics engine on same chip
1c) Reconfigurable computing (Transmeta?)
2) More than one reconfigurable CPU on same chip
3) Large reconfigurable CPU which can divide itself in a way that it becomes several independent CPU's of arbitrary size according to use at the moment.
4) Large reconfigurable CPU with the #4 stuff, but in a 3D design (a cube), once somebody figures out how to layer it and cool it.
Anyway, just some ideas.
Just a couple of weeks ago at the newest NASA mission control center (in Utah, where we depend on hydroelectric power, not nukes... yeah!), I laughed as the guy who designed and built the whole thing told of when CNN and other major news agencies sent huge crews to see what would happen to this military base as they did a test rollover to 2000 (the reporters were hoping for nuclear meltdown or something like that), and absolutely _nothing_ happened. I think it's going to largely be like that when we hit 2000. It'll be like when the Jehovah's Witnesses claimed many years back a particular day and time for the end of the world (despite the fact that even the Bible says nobody can know when it is), and they all gathered together and waited, and waited, and waited... Needless to say, they don't mention that when they're out knocking doors. Year 2000 will probably be the same.
The only real nightmare on the year 2000 is that thousands of people are trying to have their children born on new years, and there will surely be several times more births than room/staff for them at the hospitals. Anyone stupid enough to try to have a baby in those circumstances should have been neutered years ago to improve the human race.
There's a pretty substantial portion of Antarctica which has never become a territory of any nation. They can have it. In fact, let's deport _any_ undesirable there, to improve the gene pool locally.
I'm not in the military, but I work with them fairly regularly. There's actually some pretty impressive programming going on in the military (they have lots of civilian on-site hackers). The sad thing is the tools they use: much is completely proprietary, and they use a fair amount of NT (with Visual Studio, etc.). The scariest example I've seen lately is an important database hosted on SQL Server, which is going to soon be several exabytes huge (yes, exabytes, not terabytes). I'm just glad they're keeping it fairly SQL-based (thus somewhat retargettable), because M$ products just don't scale that far, regardless of what they may say. Since Oracle and IBM are doing their databases for Linux now, at least there are better options.
Personally, I do my programming using IBM's VisualAge for Java (NT version (boo!) because the fancy version isn't available for Linux yet). But the code I turn out is portable to _anything_, especially Linux and freeware databases (mSQL, MySQL, etc.) and such (truly amazing for portability). Too bad more companies don't recognize the great flaw of the M$ (and many Borland/Inprise) tools, that even though the tool itself is good, you can't run it's target code on something better than the development platform. Code is only as good as its runtime machine.
I think I might have been more impressed with their PCI (/AGP) development and testing platform. If it's as good as it sounds, I may even want to buy one for myself for a couple of projects I'm working on (where I'd much rather do high-level programming than embedded coding until it's really ready to become a chip). I don't know how this will compare to the next TNT chip, but I bet (if it ever gets done) it will kick 3dfx's butt (3dfx always skimps on way too many features).
I totally agree. Too many of the people on the list are famous or notorious, not important. Of
those on the list, I personally think that the only ones who made significant contributions to the good or bad of the world are: Rabin, Hitler, Einstein, M.L.King, Gandhi, H.Ford(to a lesser degree; somebody else would have standardized the assembly line if he hadn't), Churchill, and Hussein. Many other important figures are completely missing. While Elvis was a good entertainer, I don't think "Blue Suede Shoes" will be included on deep-space probes to represent our planet. The contributions of those I mentioned will forever change the course of humanity. Something very important which is being left out of the list is the media; I'm not sure of a person to single out, but the media as a whole has had a far more profound effect on our planet than anyone on this list, with the possible exception of Hitler, and its effect will surely become ever more prominent in the future.
Of course Hollywood will now turn out some high-budget films which try to look like $30K films (and largely succeed at that part), but they will surely be even worse than the typical slashfest films.
I saw a documentary the other day on the Sundance channel which showed everything people went through trying to finish their independent films and get them seen. Wow, it's hard! Something that became fairly clear is that truly good films are typically done by really good writers who happen to be really good at directing as well. Directors who attempt to write (e.g. Lucas: Phantom Menace) are not usually so good. Directors who maybe aren't such good writers but who are really good at adapting a story to film can turn out really good stuff also. Then there's Hollywood. They typically hand their $100 million budgets over to directors who are absolutely clueless at writing/adapting materials. Why? Insanity, surely. Just look at the Fifth Element. Absolutely pathetic story, which the director then turned into an even worse movie (same guy? I don't remember. A pox on him and his heirs!). We will surely see high-budget crapfests imitating the Blair Witch Project now.
I've ordered several times from X10 recently (camera, firecracker, wireless video, etc.), and all orders have arrived almost immediately. You just weren't lucky.
Sorry about my incomplete post! (I was in a hurry) That's actually what I meant. At my work we've been doing some stuff for low-cost high-bandwidth transmissions in the under-1000 ft. range, which, since it's specific to streaming data (in my case, sound) with a guaranteed bandwidth, would, with proper real-time compression, work (once you're outside the building it would need something else, but it could be done. Where there's a will there's a way). That's why this idea came to mind. I may want to have one of these microservers (the $15 all-on-a-chip kind, probably) as part of the system for my work, to improve it's adjustability on the fly. (I'd tell you what my work project is for, but my nondisclosure agreements at work would then require me to kill you or something)
I came up with a use for it: (stretching a bit)
You wear eyeglasses with a camera in the middle (pricy, but available and very discreet), and have the world's smallest server and a good wireless transmitter hidden in your clothing/pockets. You then broadcast the premiere (or better yet one of the early test showings!) of the next Star Wars and other movies through video streaming in real time from the theater, which is then extended through repeaters througout the world (sit really still, and don't comment!). I'm sure Lucas would be thrilled about that one!
To up the ante, I offer a $250 prize to the first person who can prove they pull it off (but I assume no liability for their actions!). And here's my email (remove the !'s) to prove I mean it:
!rickyray!@!patrickhayes!.!com!
For a large commercial site I'm creating, we've decided to do a mix of secure and open content. Anything generic will be open to the public, including for outside linking. Anything we derive revenues from (online services, etc.) will be strictly accessible with a login or by local reference (else there would be no point in the site). Is there not one person at Universal who can figure this out?!