Hell, I wouldn't compare an OEM Desktop (aside from perhaps alienware) to most enthusiast built desktops.
You can't really compare a P4 2.6Ghz whitebox to an Athlon XP 2600+ on an Asus AN78X board with Crucial RAM, ATA133 Drive at 7200RPM with 8MB Cache etc...
It doesn't happen. I take anyone's Dell Deal or Whitebox PC and strip 20% from whatever the manufacturer claims vs what I'd expect if I was to build a similar PC.
One, you can do prefetching without selling your soul to google. Allegrosurf is good at this.
Two, pipelining. All modern browsers use pipelining, which severely limits the amount of handshaking that needs to be done to a server.
Final comment, from what I've seen, the people who are using this program (at least with Opera) seem to see no improvement in the first hour or so of use. In fact, some are reporting slowdowns.
I maintain my reservations about this being able to offer a significant boost to browsing, especially when contrasted to the major privacy intrusion.
Yes, but have you tried the alternative where you run the caching proxy (like allegrosurf or squid) on your own PC or a local server?
Big benefits there IMHO. One, I don't care how fast google is, it's not going to be faster than hitting your memory cache or hard drive cache. It won't even be faster than hitting a LAN cache.
Second, buy controlling that cache yourself, you avoid the privacy invasion. Plus, you can tweak it yourself, perhaps telling it not to cache certain pages so you're not reloading forums all the time, or even tweaking prefetching if you want that.
I can't really see what google (or anyone for that matter) can really do to accelerate web content on broadband connections. As I've said elsewhere, it sounds like they are running a caching server for you. I would guess you could get very near the same effect without the privacy problems with something like squid or Allegrosurf.
The only thing they might do is some compression, but this assumes a number of things to make your connection faster:
1) the content isn't already compressed. Lots of sites already gzip html etc...
2)The google servers have a faster connection to the server than you do (they might have a faster general net connection, but the effective speed changes by the minute due to server load, net congestion etc...)
3) Your connection to the google servers is faster than your connection to the destination server. This is likely true right now, will it be with massively more load - IDK.
4) Your computer can decompress content and run the google background process faster than it can recieve textual information over a pretty fast line. This might be true, it depends on your PC, and it's load.
The only thing I haven't talked about is whether google is going to compress images. Personally I think it'd be kind of stupid becasue:
1) they'd have to do it lossy, and so now pics look like crap.
2) broadband is rather fast for most web pics now adays. Broadband is just tending to get faster. It doesn't really have the limitations dial-up does that make this attractive in any way.
There is no good reason to sign up for this. Unless you like feeding more info about yourself to a big company, or can't manage to get effective caching through cheap or OSS software on your PC.
Well, it could be my worldview as an atheist, but I always saw 1) as Kirk saying we see the individual sufficient. As in the personal third person one (like how in a research paper you might write "one finds that x is y" as opposed to "I find that x is y"), not referring to some third party really.
and
2) as the same kind of cheap shock value twist ending as in the episode where they find Yanks who are saying the pledge of allegiance at the end, with a tattered american flag.
I just never really got a religious vibe from the original Treks.
I think there needs to be a distinction between weak atheism, strong atheism and agnosticism.
I was agnostic for a long time till I realized what weak athesim was. Basically, as I've seen: Agnostic isn't sure if there is a god, and thinks about it.
Strong Atheist is sure there is NOT a god, and takes this on "Faith" if you will.
A Weak Atheist just lacks faith in a god. This is a subtle distinction. It's not anti-god like Strong Atheists are, it's not confused like agnostics are. There's just nothing there at all.
To clarify a little, you wouldn't expect it to be a matter of faith that there isn't an invisible pink elephant in your room. You just lack belief in it, it's not that you go around proclaiming to anyone that it doesn't exist, it's just there's no reason for you independantly to even think about the possibility.
Except us (humans) becoming extinct has nothing to do with the validity of evolution. The ID/GOD supporters have this feeling that Humans are 'special' somehow. For evolution, they aren't.
There's no reason, evolution wise that Humans HAD to be here at all. In fact, up till the comet 65 million years ago, it seemed far likelier that the "dominiant species" would forever be reptillian. The change in the environment lead to mamillian dominance, and so far, Homo Sapiens has been best adapted, and best able to adapt to the environment. As the neandertals show us, there could always be a mutation that would lead to the rise of a different dominant species.
And, though I know slashdot hates paying for anything, if you want more permanent DEA (disposable email addresses), with the ability to send from them - you might want to look into spamex.com.
Your're right. There's something missing in the latter series, I didn't notice it until now.
For the earlier series, you could ask - what's the famous character interaction?
You had the Kirk,Spock, McCoy trio.
You had the ongoing Q vs ship. The Georidi/Data friendship.
You had the Odo - Quark and Bashier - O'Brien things.
Voyager had. . . well, I'm sure there was something, but I can't really remember.
Enterprise tried with the Trip - T'Pol romance, but that was pretty... lame. Soap Opera.
The characters were more memorable in the other series.
I'm really not sure what Archer stands for. I'm not sure the characer is sure. And they really don't seem to stand for any of the ideals that made earlier Treks so popular.
If Trekkers wanted gritty realism, I'd guess they'd be watching CSI, or NYPD Blue, or even something darker like Battlestar Galactica. The whole premise of Star Trek was that humanity could be better in the future.
Have you ever looked at maps24.com? I find that to be the most technically impressive (and supports the most countries) map service that I've seen so far, but also, less reliable.
I don't know. I wish they had kept Enterprise for the full 7 years. It's finally getting interesting in my opinion. Now, many people have claimed that it shouldn't have taken 3 years for it to get good, but I want to point out that TNG was rather lame till the borg episodes IMHO.
DS9 became great for a lot of fans around the 4 year mark (when they got defiant IIRC).
Voyager just sucked the whole time, true.
And, for me at least, TOS's best "episodes" were actually the novels and the Movies.
That's not to say there weren't problems with Enterprise. There were plenty. But as they started focusing on things that *actually tied in with* the known timeline, it was pretty cool.
And, while pointless, I did enjoy the Mirror universe episodes - even though they broke with cannon, I got a kick out of TOS ship.
The only problem is a lot of services like VOD aren't available in a lot of places. And I somehow doubt they'd let you just buy VOD and say screw cable.
Or even VOD + Broadband, but they always want to force cable on you. And I really think many younger people would have a difficult time caring less about cable now adays - crap on it, and interrupted by commercials that you get to *pay* for? Sign me up lol.
I've used netflix quite a bit (in fact every time I have a full time job - currently in college though). Their prices aren't bad - especially given where I live there is no cable anyway.
So, for the price of basic cable I can get DVDs right to my doorstep, usually with no more than a day lag time. I can hold on to those movies, with no penalties. They have a selection that puts the "local" (30 mile one way trip) blockbuster to shame.
I think services like NetFilx will be able to find a niche if they want to - specifically with rural america (which is pretty big IIRC from the last election etc...).
With gas costs rising, do you want to drive 20+ miles to get to blockbuster, and then drive back, and then be locked into driving them back within a week (or 2 now?) or else fees? Gas is somewhere around $2.20 a gallon most places in the US.
I think the average gas mileage is 25MPG or so. So figure on average 3 gallons per trip out to blockbuster for many rural americans. That's 6 gallons once you return the movie. So, it cost you around $13 just for travel, not counting wear and tear on the vehicle or time. That one trip to blockbuster just about paid for a standard NetFlix monthly package, before you rent one video. And this assumes your time is worthless.
Of course, we try to make our blockbuster trip coincide with other shopping and such, but that's not always feasible, though the new extended time (I think, I haven't really looked at whatever the "end of late fees" became) it's a lot easier compared to the 2 day turn around time on new releases previously.
With more TV shows coming out on DVD a year later, and with our situation in the country, when the analog TV goes dark, we'll just up our NetFlix subscription. Better quality, better choice(4 analog tv stations on a good day), and no commercials.
So, I think NetFlix can do very well if they don't mind catering to the rural market.
I maintain that if you want an journey style game, you're still going to have to go PnP. At some point all videogames are limited by what can be programmed in, in a certain amount of time.
The best game that's open ended and very PnP like is NWN. I think the people who love that game are like me, people who would prefer PnP, but just can't make that happen in their schedule anymore.
Those who hate it, or didn't like the OC are likely the ones who prefer FF style games, that have a pretty strong storyline.
PDF is a godsend whenever you are dealing with print documents. Really. Say one person has Visio but someone else needs to see the diagram? PDF solves that nicely for person 2 if they can't afford Visio for one project.
What about if you want to see drafts of the document the design house is working on in InDesign? Well, many users aren't going to have InDesign, but Acrobat reader is free.
Plus, we all know how not all browsers show stuff the same way, nor do all versions of MS word. If you are dealing with print, you want everyone to literally be "on the same page". Not on page 3 with IE5, Page 2 with Mozilla, page 4 with Opera.
Also, there are often documents that you don't want the other person changing. PDF is good for that too. They can read it, but they aren't going to mess it up trying to print it.
Plus, free PDF readers and writers are here now. I personally don't see a downside to PDF if you're using it for the right things.
It's just that a lot of people out there use the wrong tool for the job quite a bit.
I'm assuming the company could buy the code under a different license by negotiating with any contributers for said alternate license.
In this case, it sounds like there was one developer, who sold the code under a different license to this company.
Remember, even if you license your code initially under the GPL, no one can prevent you from *also* licensing that code under different terms, ones that don't require opening changes to the code.
Now, I'm not a heavy programmer. I've only had 3 or so straight up programming classes in college, so I likely don't get it.
If you want something to happen when a certain thing occurs, wouldn't you just call a function or a method when that whatever occurs? Why would you want a goto style statement there?
Heck, us poor CIS majors get similar things. Why people would think my classes in OS and Server administration or Network design would give me any insight as to why their cellphone doesn't work is beyond me. Especially after being an aquaintence of mine for about a year, and never seeing me with a cellphone.
I get the feeling that if you have a degree in anything related to computers, people assume you have in depth knowledge of, and can fix, anything that plugs into a wall socket or takes a battery.
I've also gotten to the point where I tell people that I have never taken a class on "fixing windows". If it's broke, reinstall it. I have (sadly) recently been subjected to "fancy formatting" in Excel though. Actually useful knowledge as it helps with my current accounting class - but nothing that needed a college class for IMHO.
Also, for all these "in the know" slashdotters, if MS is really pusing things, currently Opera does have 200 full time devs themselves. So they also have some decent manpower.
Major downside is the cost users have to pay (buy the browser) to actually support those devs.
Slashdot Mirror
Hell, I wouldn't compare an OEM Desktop (aside from perhaps alienware) to most enthusiast built desktops.
You can't really compare a P4 2.6Ghz whitebox to an Athlon XP 2600+ on an Asus AN78X board with Crucial RAM, ATA133 Drive at 7200RPM with 8MB Cache etc...
It doesn't happen. I take anyone's Dell Deal or Whitebox PC and strip 20% from whatever the manufacturer claims vs what I'd expect if I was to build a similar PC.
Isn't this the point of coral though? And you don't need any special plugin or extra program.
All that is great, except for 2 things.
One, you can do prefetching without selling your soul to google. Allegrosurf is good at this.
Two, pipelining. All modern browsers use pipelining, which severely limits the amount of handshaking that needs to be done to a server.
Final comment, from what I've seen, the people who are using this program (at least with Opera) seem to see no improvement in the first hour or so of use. In fact, some are reporting slowdowns.
I maintain my reservations about this being able to offer a significant boost to browsing, especially when contrasted to the major privacy intrusion.
Great, but there's already software out there that will do all this without reporting back to google. Like allegrosurf.
I've also seen many people claim that prefetching doesn't help anyway, and hurts servers by hammering them for info that many users will never see.
Yes, but have you tried the alternative where you run the caching proxy (like allegrosurf or squid) on your own PC or a local server?
Big benefits there IMHO. One, I don't care how fast google is, it's not going to be faster than hitting your memory cache or hard drive cache. It won't even be faster than hitting a LAN cache.
Second, buy controlling that cache yourself, you avoid the privacy invasion. Plus, you can tweak it yourself, perhaps telling it not to cache certain pages so you're not reloading forums all the time, or even tweaking prefetching if you want that.
I can't really see what google (or anyone for that matter) can really do to accelerate web content on broadband connections. As I've said elsewhere, it sounds like they are running a caching server for you. I would guess you could get very near the same effect without the privacy problems with something like squid or Allegrosurf.
The only thing they might do is some compression, but this assumes a number of things to make your connection faster:
1) the content isn't already compressed. Lots of sites already gzip html etc...
2)The google servers have a faster connection to the server than you do (they might have a faster general net connection, but the effective speed changes by the minute due to server load, net congestion etc...)
3) Your connection to the google servers is faster than your connection to the destination server. This is likely true right now, will it be with massively more load - IDK.
4) Your computer can decompress content and run the google background process faster than it can recieve textual information over a pretty fast line. This might be true, it depends on your PC, and it's load.
The only thing I haven't talked about is whether google is going to compress images. Personally I think it'd be kind of stupid becasue:
1) they'd have to do it lossy, and so now pics look like crap.
2) broadband is rather fast for most web pics now adays. Broadband is just tending to get faster. It doesn't really have the limitations dial-up does that make this attractive in any way.
There is no good reason to sign up for this. Unless you like feeding more info about yourself to a big company, or can't manage to get effective caching through cheap or OSS software on your PC.
Well, it could be my worldview as an atheist, but I always saw
1) as Kirk saying we see the individual sufficient. As in the personal third person one (like how in a research paper you might write "one finds that x is y" as opposed to "I find that x is y"), not referring to some third party really.
and
2) as the same kind of cheap shock value twist ending as in the episode where they find Yanks who are saying the pledge of allegiance at the end, with a tattered american flag.
I just never really got a religious vibe from the original Treks.
I think there needs to be a distinction between weak atheism, strong atheism and agnosticism.
I was agnostic for a long time till I realized what weak athesim was. Basically, as I've seen:
Agnostic isn't sure if there is a god, and thinks about it.
Strong Atheist is sure there is NOT a god, and takes this on "Faith" if you will.
A Weak Atheist just lacks faith in a god. This is a subtle distinction. It's not anti-god like Strong Atheists are, it's not confused like agnostics are. There's just nothing there at all.
To clarify a little, you wouldn't expect it to be a matter of faith that there isn't an invisible pink elephant in your room. You just lack belief in it, it's not that you go around proclaiming to anyone that it doesn't exist, it's just there's no reason for you independantly to even think about the possibility.
Except us (humans) becoming extinct has nothing to do with the validity of evolution. The ID/GOD supporters have this feeling that Humans are 'special' somehow. For evolution, they aren't.
There's no reason, evolution wise that Humans HAD to be here at all. In fact, up till the comet 65 million years ago, it seemed far likelier that the "dominiant species" would forever be reptillian. The change in the environment lead to mamillian dominance, and so far, Homo Sapiens has been best adapted, and best able to adapt to the environment. As the neandertals show us, there could always be a mutation that would lead to the rise of a different dominant species.
And, though I know slashdot hates paying for anything, if you want more permanent DEA (disposable email addresses), with the ability to send from them - you might want to look into spamex.com.
$9.99/year well spent for me.
Your're right. There's something missing in the latter series, I didn't notice it until now.
... lame. Soap Opera.
For the earlier series, you could ask - what's the famous character interaction?
You had the Kirk,Spock, McCoy trio.
You had the ongoing Q vs ship. The Georidi/Data friendship.
You had the Odo - Quark and Bashier - O'Brien things.
Voyager had. . . well, I'm sure there was something, but I can't really remember.
Enterprise tried with the Trip - T'Pol romance, but that was pretty
The characters were more memorable in the other series.
I'm really not sure what Archer stands for. I'm not sure the characer is sure. And they really don't seem to stand for any of the ideals that made earlier Treks so popular.
If Trekkers wanted gritty realism, I'd guess they'd be watching CSI, or NYPD Blue, or even something darker like Battlestar Galactica. The whole premise of Star Trek was that humanity could be better in the future.
Have you ever looked at maps24.com? I find that to be the most technically impressive (and supports the most countries) map service that I've seen so far, but also, less reliable.
I don't know. I wish they had kept Enterprise for the full 7 years. It's finally getting interesting in my opinion. Now, many people have claimed that it shouldn't have taken 3 years for it to get good, but I want to point out that TNG was rather lame till the borg episodes IMHO.
DS9 became great for a lot of fans around the 4 year mark (when they got defiant IIRC).
Voyager just sucked the whole time, true.
And, for me at least, TOS's best "episodes" were actually the novels and the Movies.
That's not to say there weren't problems with Enterprise. There were plenty. But as they started focusing on things that *actually tied in with* the known timeline, it was pretty cool.
And, while pointless, I did enjoy the Mirror universe episodes - even though they broke with cannon, I got a kick out of TOS ship.
The only problem is a lot of services like VOD aren't available in a lot of places. And I somehow doubt they'd let you just buy VOD and say screw cable.
Or even VOD + Broadband, but they always want to force cable on you. And I really think many younger people would have a difficult time caring less about cable now adays - crap on it, and interrupted by commercials that you get to *pay* for? Sign me up lol.
I've used netflix quite a bit (in fact every time I have a full time job - currently in college though). Their prices aren't bad - especially given where I live there is no cable anyway.
So, for the price of basic cable I can get DVDs right to my doorstep, usually with no more than a day lag time. I can hold on to those movies, with no penalties. They have a selection that puts the "local" (30 mile one way trip) blockbuster to shame.
I think services like NetFilx will be able to find a niche if they want to - specifically with rural america (which is pretty big IIRC from the last election etc...).
With gas costs rising, do you want to drive 20+ miles to get to blockbuster, and then drive back, and then be locked into driving them back within a week (or 2 now?) or else fees? Gas is somewhere around $2.20 a gallon most places in the US.
I think the average gas mileage is 25MPG or so. So figure on average 3 gallons per trip out to blockbuster for many rural americans. That's 6 gallons once you return the movie. So, it cost you around $13 just for travel, not counting wear and tear on the vehicle or time. That one trip to blockbuster just about paid for a standard NetFlix monthly package, before you rent one video. And this assumes your time is worthless.
Of course, we try to make our blockbuster trip coincide with other shopping and such, but that's not always feasible, though the new extended time (I think, I haven't really looked at whatever the "end of late fees" became) it's a lot easier compared to the 2 day turn around time on new releases previously.
With more TV shows coming out on DVD a year later, and with our situation in the country, when the analog TV goes dark, we'll just up our NetFlix subscription. Better quality, better choice(4 analog tv stations on a good day), and no commercials.
So, I think NetFlix can do very well if they don't mind catering to the rural market.
I maintain that if you want an journey style game, you're still going to have to go PnP. At some point all videogames are limited by what can be programmed in, in a certain amount of time.
The best game that's open ended and very PnP like is NWN. I think the people who love that game are like me, people who would prefer PnP, but just can't make that happen in their schedule anymore.
Those who hate it, or didn't like the OC are likely the ones who prefer FF style games, that have a pretty strong storyline.
Wouldn't something like nLite or possibly just a Drive Image fix this?
PDF is a godsend whenever you are dealing with print documents. Really. Say one person has Visio but someone else needs to see the diagram? PDF solves that nicely for person 2 if they can't afford Visio for one project.
What about if you want to see drafts of the document the design house is working on in InDesign? Well, many users aren't going to have InDesign, but Acrobat reader is free.
Plus, we all know how not all browsers show stuff the same way, nor do all versions of MS word. If you are dealing with print, you want everyone to literally be "on the same page". Not on page 3 with IE5, Page 2 with Mozilla, page 4 with Opera.
Also, there are often documents that you don't want the other person changing. PDF is good for that too. They can read it, but they aren't going to mess it up trying to print it.
Plus, free PDF readers and writers are here now. I personally don't see a downside to PDF if you're using it for the right things.
It's just that a lot of people out there use the wrong tool for the job quite a bit.
I'm assuming the company could buy the code under a different license by negotiating with any contributers for said alternate license.
In this case, it sounds like there was one developer, who sold the code under a different license to this company.
Remember, even if you license your code initially under the GPL, no one can prevent you from *also* licensing that code under different terms, ones that don't require opening changes to the code.
Now, I'm not a heavy programmer. I've only had 3 or so straight up programming classes in college, so I likely don't get it.
If you want something to happen when a certain thing occurs, wouldn't you just call a function or a method when that whatever occurs? Why would you want a goto style statement there?
Heck, us poor CIS majors get similar things. Why people would think my classes in OS and Server administration or Network design would give me any insight as to why their cellphone doesn't work is beyond me. Especially after being an aquaintence of mine for about a year, and never seeing me with a cellphone.
I get the feeling that if you have a degree in anything related to computers, people assume you have in depth knowledge of, and can fix, anything that plugs into a wall socket or takes a battery.
I've also gotten to the point where I tell people that I have never taken a class on "fixing windows". If it's broke, reinstall it. I have (sadly) recently been subjected to "fancy formatting" in Excel though. Actually useful knowledge as it helps with my current accounting class - but nothing that needed a college class for IMHO.
Ok. I misunderstood your original post. I thought you meant that IE didn't have an extension system, which as you see is not true.
Also, for all these "in the know" slashdotters, if MS is really pusing things, currently Opera does have 200 full time devs themselves. So they also have some decent manpower.
Major downside is the cost users have to pay (buy the browser) to actually support those devs.
Isn't that basically what Opera *is*, aside from ActiveX?
Excuse me, but just what do you think BHOs are exactly? An extension system, that allows hooks into the OS and IE at about any level AFAICT.