Well the problem with C(++) is that it wasn't actually "designed", but just an ugly conglomeration of features which turned out to be easy to implement at the time of writing the compiler.
Just look at it. His standard book about C++ has 956 pages and even he himself tells the programmers to not use all those features.
The language itself is very chumbersome to use. Creating an object typically takes you a _lot_ of lines and concepts like copying objects create incredibly bloated code. (I have been writing commercial software for several years in Delphi and never had the desire to copy an object)
Some features are just halfway implemented. Look at operator overloading. It only works in some cases on some operators.
Of course, you can write efficient code in C(++), but it's hard. And most programmers don't work hard enough to actually write such code. That's why computers seem to not get faster since the mid 90s.
My point is, if you want to write in C(++) you need to learn how to do it. You need to learn what it does, even down close to the hardware. Then you can write in those languages. If you don't want to do that, then C(++) is not the language of your choice.
I don't know if this could work, but what if you would build a "lens" with integrated LEDs. Each LED would have a another lens in front of it, projecting it's light onto a small spot of your retina. When the lenses and the LEDs are small enough you wouldn't notice them when looking throught.
Well still packet priorisation also costs a lot of money. If you use simpler routers you can route a lot faster. Or you can use technologies which split your 10G fiber into 10 1G channels and route them with 10 cheaper routers. ATM can do that as well as ISDN. (But ISDN isn't avaliable at those speeds)
The point is, there is so much bandwidth left over there is no real need to prioize at an ISP level. The only bottleneck is right before your modem.
The problem is not giving certain packets a higher priority, the problem is who decides who gets higher priority and why.
But anyhow, it's pointless. The only bottleneck there is is the DSL uplink. Once your packet is at your local ISP it will only go through relatively empty lines. Bandwidth is incredibly cheap these days. A simple pair of optical fibers can easily handle 10 GBit or 40 GBit.
Anyhow, if you are really worried about it: Get off your A** and build your own network. Wireless meshed networks are really simple to build.
why don't they simply build a keypad with the standard 4x3 layout and make the keys seamless. Then you could push "between" the keys effectively pressing 2 or 4 keys at the same time. This would give you a lot more "virtual keys". If the keys are arranged in a sensible way (and not in the braindead current SMS-Way), you might get a great advance in typing speed.
The point is not to have a theoretically bulletproof system, but one which can be understood and checked by _everyone_.
Lets take a look at the "pen and paper" vote. The one who votes marks boxes on his paper, then folds it and puts it into a box. Then, after all people have voted. They take out those pieces of paper and count them. Then they compare that to how many people have voted. Then they count how many people have market a certain box, etc....
This is a process I could send anybody there to watch. It _has_ to be public, and it has to be understood by the public. And furthermore it is efficient enought. Despite the complex systems, Germany has official results the day after the election. It takes about an hour to count all the votes, so we are not talking about _that_ much work here.
BTW, there is another serious flaw in the US elections. It's not on a public holiday, so only people who can afford to take a day off can vote.
Firefox may not really be a good browser, I mean there are some programming errors in it, probably even lots of them and I don't know if there will ever be a error-free version of it, but look at the alternatives. (I do not claim this list is complete) There we have the Internet Explorer. It only runs on various versions of Windows. It has an unpatched security flaw since 1998 (http://www.ccc.de/activex/) which the vendor doesn't even think of closing. Then there's Opera, a nice standard conform browser. Unfortunately it doesn't come with it's source-code, so even if you buy it, you probably can just throw away your license when you buy a new computer. If you don't buy it, you'll get adware with all the consequences. Of course there are also other alternatives like Dillo. Small, _FAST_, but without any CSS support.
So essentially you need to choose your poison. Firefox just seems to be a moderately good browser, but they finally need to clean up the code.
Actually I think it's more like fixing software problems in Hardware. The situation in which this technology will improve access time is when you have to randomly seek on your harddrive. Unfortunately that is needed in Windows as there is little possibility to keep all your bootup files one after another in the order you need them. With Linux, however that is rather easily possible. You can create an initial ramdisk which the computer can load very quickly without much booting and then boot from it. Theoretically, if you have enough RAM, you can even load your complete system into it.
So now you essentially have to spend a lot of money (Flash and Patents!) on a technology which will, at most, give you an decrease in boot-times and will be obsolete once the power management of the drivers support Suspend to Disk or Suspend to RAM. Just look at Linux or MacOS 8 on an old clamshell iBook. You just close it and it's "Off", you open it again, and after very few seconds it's completely back again.
Many embedded systems for studios already run Linux. Just think of satellite recievers. Many of the professional ones run Linux.
Of course playback is a different topic. What you can do, if you want to build something yourself, is to use n computers running a relatively simple programm just listening to commands they get via the network. (piping commands through ssh should work well enought) Then you run the output of those computers through a video-switch which you also controll (they typically have ARC-Net sockets as well as RS-232 an other standards). Then you write a little programm which can a) issue certain commands automatically at certain times b) issue commands manually and perhaps c) react to "error" conditions from your equipment.
Just setting up one computer that does everything will probably be hard. The hardest part will probably be to find a graphics card that can output genlocked video and runs with Linux. If you don't find any, get some cheap external VGA-TV converters and a consumer style video mixer. The small loss in quality should be acceptable.
Well such scanner cameras aren't new. Many years ago, back when consumer digital cameras only stored 320x240 16 greyscale monocrome pictures, I have heared of one of those taking about a minute to take a high resolution picture.
What is rather amazing, however, is the speed of that camera. It can actually scan the whole picture in a single second. That's almoust like a real camera.
Well sure, drivers can crash a system, almoust any system in fact. (Unless you have some more exotic ones like Hurd which can have drivers in userspace) But the point is, most crashes didn't occur because of driver problems, they occured because of a single buffer overflow used to spread worms.
Of course drivers are a problem. But the signature on them won't fix the problem. In fact the only thing that could actually help would be called something named "Communications". If I wanted to write a Windows driver, the only thing I would get is a template. There is no free support, no way I as a developer could tell Microsoft that they have a bug, no way Microsoft could tell me that I have a bug.
This is different in the open source world. There the developers can openly talk to eachother and even help eachother. Plus, there is something named an update. Let me give you one example where it really would have made a difference. I think it was Eudora which had an installer which had a call-back function which actually looked at undefined stack elements. The problem was, those elements changed thus Eudora (or whatever mailer it was) wouldn't install on Windows 95. The solution was to artificially change the stack layout for it. The good solution would have been to just tell the vendor of the programm that they have a problem, and either ship a patch for the programm with the Windows 95 CD or use Windows update to install newer versions of broken programs.
This is not a question of quality and usability, it's a question of feelings.
As my niece put it, the disadvantage of MP3-Players is that nothing movies. In deed where are you looking at when you listen to a record or casette. You look at the part that moves and turns. (unless you have something better to look at) Such players always had some sort of window or transparent cover (on records that has been invented by the german company Braun, BTW) to make you able to look at the turning parts.
Records or casettes are also real "hardware" you can touch and care for. And handling them good is rewarded by better sound quality. (better sound than badly handled media) You can polish your LaserDisk and it'll look better you can clean your record and it'll sound better. You also have something real in your hands. On a CD you just buy some bits which you don't notice them beeing copied. It's just there. A tape cassette has to be copied in a slow process which requires care. You can see and feel the process you are envolved in it.
There are lots of device drivers in other languages.
Just think of the many DOS 3D-graphics libraries written in Pascal. Those directly accessed your hardware.
Or think of (real) Macintoshes (not those Intel thingies). Their whole firmware is written in Forth. In fact all firmware device drivers of Macs and IBM P-Series as well as Sun computers are written in Forth, it's the "Open Firmware" standard. In fact, the first Forth system was a computer designed to controll a telescope. The Forth programm directly accessed the hardware, probably via an internal layer of sub-routines.
Then of course, if you have watched TV during the 80s you have probably seen 3D graphics going through a system entirely written in LISP, the LISP-machine.
So, why does nobody use any other language than C for that? Well first of all, Unix was written in C. In fact it was even the reason why C was invented, to have a platform-independant "assembler" with some very limited high-level functionality. The same language was also chosen for Windows, as well as Linux. Now the point is, if you write a device driver for those modern OSes, you will find template programms or tutorials you just fill in your code. Those templates typically are in the language of the OS, which is now typically C. The problem goes even further. I have seen university students studying informatics, and they don't even know a single language outside the Algol block. (=C, Pascal, C++, Java, VB...) They don't even know Forth or Lisp, let along Prolog. Some of those people have never considered looking out of their boxes into what's beyond Algol.
I'm not saying C is bad per se. What I am saying is that C may be mathematically universal, you can do everything with it in theory, but for any given slightly more complex task it's just not suitable. If you are not convinced, write a little "derivation"-Programm in C where I can enter something like x^2 and out comes 2*x. Then look into the book "Programming in Prolog" and look at the examples, you will find one the deriving programm there has just a few lines. Maze-solving programms consist of about a handfull of lines plus a pine for every connections. Now look at C. C seems to be so broken, that not even the compilation process itself is written in C. Look at makefiles. That's a non-algol language only designed to compile C Programms. Isn't that sick?
C is good for number-crunching, but definitely not for anything touching strings.
The problem is greater than that. It's probably not a single instance of wireless drivers that has such a bug, but in fact an extremely widespread problem.
I am slowly convinced, that any larger piece of C(++)-Code which handles strings, has in fact at least one Buffer overflow.
So, what will happen. The card-manufacturer might fix the bug, nobody updates, and 20 new bugs in other drivers are found, perhaps 10 of them beeing the same bug.
What's really nice about it is that Intel recently claimed, that something like this was not probable.
So, what's the solution?
1. Educate your programmers about the programmers about the language they are using. Most people who write in C(++) don't know anything about how the language works. A C(++) Programmer without firm knownledge of assember on that plattform should never be allowed to write production-grade C(++)-Code.
2. If you cannot educate your programmers, switch your language. There are plenty of Alternatives avaliable. I mean people switched to Java for no appearent reasons. If you switch to, for example, Scheme you will get a clean object oriented language without any large speed penality.
3. Build compatible devices. Make one standard like the old soundblaster one, or the AC97 so all WLAN-cards of a certain class are buildt equal. Then you could even build WLAN functionality into the BIOS. The code would only have to be written once and therefore would be less buggy.
I mean at least Java is only partly object oriented. Both languages have the problem that they are awfully slow, but aren't that great. Essentially what you get with C# and Java are the disadvantages of an interpreted language with the disadvantages of a compiled language.
Learn Ruby or Smalltalk, those will be _real_ object oriented languages. There you can also learn what it means to have an objects. Essentially there you don't call objects, but you only send messages to objects which themselves execute their methods.
Why don't you get a small SoHo switch. Those are avaliable for about $200 and you can have up to 3 internal S0-buses which will talk Euro-ISDN. Typical companies are Siemens or Telebau. A Telnet Willy 4ab from Telebau should be sufficient and somewhat cheaper than even the cheapest simulator.
I doubt any of those software-packages could stand a chance against VDR. It's an open source PVR application specialicing on digital satellite television (it can do other media, too).
Essentially in the normal solution you have at least one $150 full featured DVB-S card which has an input going to your dish and an output going to your TV. The card contains a fully contained satellite reciever. Because of this you don't need to have a fast computer all it needs to do is getting the datastream (about 4 MegaBits/sec) from the card. Things like timeshifting work. With special plugins you can have things like PiP. Of course is also features an EPG bug that's standard in europe as it's delivered with the signal. With one card you can record up to about 5 channels at the same time (they need to be on the same transponder), but you can use several cards. There are users having up to 5 cards in their computer. Those extra cards can be cheaper $60 cards without buildt-in MPEG2-decoder. There are plans to make it run completely without the expensive cards.
Best of all, you don't need to have an extra computer like with the Windows solutions. You just plug in your card, install the software and there you go. You won't even notice that the PVR is running unless you look at your TV.
HDTV is in the work, currently only software decoding works there. (That's early considering there is virtually no digital HDTV in europe except for tests. It almoust looks like HDTV is going to fail yet again as it already did in the 90s.)
Of course there is no commercial pressure behind this project so it has no features removed, no fees no nothing. However it does support PayTV with some variants of those cards. (of course you need to have your own CAM and smartcard)
well you should see the 1963 catalog. There they had a really cool device. Your own television tape recorder, the VR1500. It even was just only $30000.
Well OK, the german company Loewe Opta introduced it's consumer VRs in 1961.
> Unless the CD-ROMs etc. our grandchildren will find in our attics are *physically* > deteriorated to the point of being unreadable, I don't think that we'll have to worry > about them not being able to read them anymore.
This is actually the biggest problem probably. Recordable CDs don't really work that well. It's extremely simple to destroy them by accident and they probably wouldn't survive laying on an attic for more than 5 years.
However there's a bit of chance. Theoretically you could store the image in an uncompressed 8-Bit greyscale per pixel format where you only actually use very few of those greyscales.
If you then try to read it later, you might not be able to read every single bit correctly. In fact you might even have lots of biterrors. But if your file only has 4 possible "characters/colours" it should be simple to determine the correct one. In fact it's even a bit simpler as CD-Roms encode bytes with 10 bits. So you basically read 10 bits and have to find out which of the 4 posible combinations is closest to them.
If you use an uncompressed format it's even better as single defective bytes, or even a few defective bytes in a row won't really make your file unreadable.
The problem in the future will most likely be reading the media. The formats should be possible to decode somehow, unless of course people use stuff like Word or DRM.
I mean why is it that they are claimed to be made for RAIDs? The article claims some speciall error correction without explaining it. OK, you might think that the target audience might be to advanced for that. On the other side he reviews hardware under only one OS where much of the performance is actually limited by the drivers. (There are many popular commercial OSes where gigabit Ethernet cards run at only a fraction of the speed of other OSes) IMHO that's a very unprofessional way to evaluate something like that.
As long as there's still ActiveX support in IE it _will_ be the less secure browser. ActivX is, and will always be the most critical hole in IE. It's insane to execute binary code from the internet with just a few clicks.
When Microsoft turns off ActiveX by default, we can start comparing browsers.
Ohh c't, they occationally have good articles, but the quality of most computer magazines has gone down rapidly. The only magazine I'm subscribed to is "Die Datenschleuder".
Well at least in germany there's worse. There's a magazine named "Computer Bild" which is B-Movie grade bad.
I've seen a bit of that magazine some years ago, they had little pronounciation tips. The nice thing about them was that the tips were completely ununderstandable. They even wrote words everybody knew, phonetically. This results in nice words like "Preimäri" or "Mänädscha". (primary, manager)
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Well the problem with C(++) is that it wasn't actually "designed", but just an ugly conglomeration of features which turned out to be easy to implement at the time of writing the compiler.
Just look at it. His standard book about C++ has 956 pages and even he himself tells the programmers to not use all those features.
The language itself is very chumbersome to use. Creating an object typically takes you a _lot_ of lines and concepts like copying objects create incredibly bloated code. (I have been writing commercial software for several years in Delphi and never had the desire to copy an object)
Some features are just halfway implemented. Look at operator overloading. It only works in some cases on some operators.
Of course, you can write efficient code in C(++), but it's hard. And most programmers don't work hard enough to actually write such code. That's why computers seem to not get faster since the mid 90s.
My point is, if you want to write in C(++) you need to learn how to do it. You need to learn what it does, even down close to the hardware. Then you can write in those languages. If you don't want to do that, then C(++) is not the language of your choice.
I don't know if this could work, but what if you would build a "lens" with integrated LEDs. Each LED would have a another lens in front of it, projecting it's light onto a small spot of your retina. When the lenses and the LEDs are small enough you wouldn't notice them when looking throught.
Well still packet priorisation also costs a lot of money. If you use simpler routers you can route a lot faster.
Or you can use technologies which split your 10G fiber into 10 1G channels and route them with 10 cheaper routers. ATM can do that as well as ISDN. (But ISDN isn't avaliable at those speeds)
The point is, there is so much bandwidth left over there is no real need to prioize at an ISP level. The only bottleneck is right before your modem.
The problem is not giving certain packets a higher priority, the problem is who decides who gets higher priority and why.
But anyhow, it's pointless. The only bottleneck there is is the DSL uplink.
Once your packet is at your local ISP it will only go through relatively empty lines. Bandwidth is incredibly cheap these days. A simple pair of optical fibers can easily handle 10 GBit or 40 GBit.
Anyhow, if you are really worried about it: Get off your A** and build your own network. Wireless meshed networks are really simple to build.
Servus,
why don't they simply build a keypad with the standard 4x3 layout and make the keys seamless. Then you could push "between" the keys effectively pressing 2 or 4 keys at the same time. This would give you a lot more "virtual keys". If the keys are arranged in a sensible way (and not in the braindead current SMS-Way), you might get a great advance in typing speed.
The point is not to have a theoretically bulletproof system, but one which can be understood and checked by _everyone_.
Lets take a look at the "pen and paper" vote. The one who votes marks boxes on his paper, then folds it and puts it into a box. Then, after all people have voted. They take out those pieces of paper and count them. Then they compare that to how many people have voted. Then they count how many people have market a certain box, etc....
This is a process I could send anybody there to watch. It _has_ to be public, and it has to be understood by the public. And furthermore it is efficient enought. Despite the complex systems, Germany has official results the day after the election. It takes about an hour to count all the votes, so we are not talking about _that_ much work here.
BTW, there is another serious flaw in the US elections. It's not on a public holiday, so only people who can afford to take a day off can vote.
Ohh, I didn't know that. Thanks for the info.
Firefox may not really be a good browser, I mean there are some programming errors in it, probably even lots of them and I don't know if there will ever be a error-free version of it, but look at the alternatives. (I do not claim this list is complete)
There we have the Internet Explorer. It only runs on various versions of Windows. It has an unpatched security flaw since 1998 (http://www.ccc.de/activex/) which the vendor doesn't even think of closing.
Then there's Opera, a nice standard conform browser. Unfortunately it doesn't come with it's source-code, so even if you buy it, you probably can just throw away your license when you buy a new computer. If you don't buy it, you'll get adware with all the consequences.
Of course there are also other alternatives like Dillo. Small, _FAST_, but without any CSS support.
So essentially you need to choose your poison. Firefox just seems to be a moderately good browser, but they finally need to clean up the code.
Actually I think it's more like fixing software problems in Hardware. The situation in which this technology will improve access time is when you have to randomly seek on your harddrive. Unfortunately that is needed in Windows as there is little possibility to keep all your bootup files one after another in the order you need them. With Linux, however that is rather easily possible. You can create an initial ramdisk which the computer can load very quickly without much booting and then boot from it. Theoretically, if you have enough RAM, you can even load your complete system into it.
So now you essentially have to spend a lot of money (Flash and Patents!) on a technology which will, at most, give you an decrease in boot-times and will be obsolete once the power management of the drivers support Suspend to Disk or Suspend to RAM. Just look at Linux or MacOS 8 on an old clamshell iBook. You just close it and it's "Off", you open it again, and after very few seconds it's completely back again.
Many embedded systems for studios already run Linux. Just think of satellite recievers. Many of the professional ones run Linux.
Of course playback is a different topic. What you can do, if you want to build something yourself, is to use n computers running a relatively simple programm just listening to commands they get via the network. (piping commands through ssh should work well enought) Then you run the output of those computers through a video-switch which you also controll (they typically have ARC-Net sockets as well as RS-232 an other standards). Then you write a little programm which can a) issue certain commands automatically at certain times b) issue commands manually and perhaps c) react to "error" conditions from your equipment.
Just setting up one computer that does everything will probably be hard. The hardest part will probably be to find a graphics card that can output genlocked video and runs with Linux. If you don't find any, get some cheap external VGA-TV converters and a consumer style video mixer. The small loss in quality should be acceptable.
Well such scanner cameras aren't new. Many years ago, back when consumer digital cameras only stored 320x240 16 greyscale monocrome pictures, I have heared of one of those taking about a minute to take a high resolution picture.
What is rather amazing, however, is the speed of that camera. It can actually scan the whole picture in a single second. That's almoust like a real camera.
Well sure, drivers can crash a system, almoust any system in fact. (Unless you have some more exotic ones like Hurd which can have drivers in userspace)
But the point is, most crashes didn't occur because of driver problems, they occured because of a single buffer overflow used to spread worms.
Of course drivers are a problem. But the signature on them won't fix the problem. In fact the only thing that could actually help would be called something named "Communications". If I wanted to write a Windows driver, the only thing I would get is a template. There is no free support, no way I as a developer could tell Microsoft that they have a bug, no way Microsoft could tell me that I have a bug.
This is different in the open source world. There the developers can openly talk to eachother and even help eachother. Plus, there is something named an update. Let me give you one example where it really would have made a difference. I think it was Eudora which had an installer which had a call-back function which actually looked at undefined stack elements. The problem was, those elements changed thus Eudora (or whatever mailer it was) wouldn't install on Windows 95. The solution was to artificially change the stack layout for it. The good solution would have been to just tell the vendor of the programm that they have a problem, and either ship a patch for the programm with the Windows 95 CD or use Windows update to install newer versions of broken programs.
This is not a question of quality and usability, it's a question of feelings.
As my niece put it, the disadvantage of MP3-Players is that nothing movies.
In deed where are you looking at when you listen to a record or casette. You look at the part that moves and turns. (unless you have something better to look at) Such players always had some sort of window or transparent cover (on records that has been invented by the german company Braun, BTW) to make you able to look at the turning parts.
Records or casettes are also real "hardware" you can touch and care for. And handling them good is rewarded by better sound quality. (better sound than badly handled media) You can polish your LaserDisk and it'll look better you can clean your record and it'll sound better.
You also have something real in your hands. On a CD you just buy some bits which you don't notice them beeing copied. It's just there. A tape cassette has to be copied in a slow process which requires care. You can see and feel the process you are envolved in it.
There are lots of device drivers in other languages.
Just think of the many DOS 3D-graphics libraries written in Pascal. Those directly accessed your hardware.
Or think of (real) Macintoshes (not those Intel thingies). Their whole firmware is written in Forth. In fact all firmware device drivers of Macs and IBM P-Series as well as Sun computers are written in Forth, it's the "Open Firmware" standard.
In fact, the first Forth system was a computer designed to controll a telescope. The Forth programm directly accessed the hardware, probably via an internal layer of sub-routines.
Then of course, if you have watched TV during the 80s you have probably seen 3D graphics going through a system entirely written in LISP, the LISP-machine.
So, why does nobody use any other language than C for that?
Well first of all, Unix was written in C. In fact it was even the reason why C was invented, to have a platform-independant "assembler" with some very limited high-level functionality.
The same language was also chosen for Windows, as well as Linux.
Now the point is, if you write a device driver for those modern OSes, you will find template programms or tutorials you just fill in your code. Those templates typically are in the language of the OS, which is now typically C.
The problem goes even further. I have seen university students studying informatics, and they don't even know a single language outside the Algol block. (=C, Pascal, C++, Java, VB...) They don't even know Forth or Lisp, let along Prolog. Some of those people have never considered looking out of their boxes into what's beyond Algol.
I'm not saying C is bad per se. What I am saying is that C may be mathematically universal, you can do everything with it in theory, but for any given slightly more complex task it's just not suitable.
If you are not convinced, write a little "derivation"-Programm in C where I can enter something like x^2 and out comes 2*x. Then look into the book "Programming in Prolog" and look at the examples, you will find one the deriving programm there has just a few lines. Maze-solving programms consist of about a handfull of lines plus a pine for every connections.
Now look at C. C seems to be so broken, that not even the compilation process itself is written in C. Look at makefiles. That's a non-algol language only designed to compile C Programms. Isn't that sick?
C is good for number-crunching, but definitely not for anything touching strings.
The problem is greater than that. It's probably not a single instance of wireless drivers that has such a bug, but in fact an extremely widespread problem.
I am slowly convinced, that any larger piece of C(++)-Code which handles strings, has in fact at least one Buffer overflow.
So, what will happen. The card-manufacturer might fix the bug, nobody updates, and 20 new bugs in other drivers are found, perhaps 10 of them beeing the same bug.
What's really nice about it is that Intel recently claimed, that something like this was not probable.
So, what's the solution?
1. Educate your programmers about the programmers about the language they are using. Most people who write in C(++) don't know anything about how the language works. A C(++) Programmer without firm knownledge of assember on that plattform should never be allowed to write production-grade C(++)-Code.
2. If you cannot educate your programmers, switch your language. There are plenty of Alternatives avaliable. I mean people switched to Java for no appearent reasons. If you switch to, for example, Scheme you will get a clean object oriented language without any large speed penality.
3. Build compatible devices. Make one standard like the old soundblaster one, or the AC97 so all WLAN-cards of a certain class are buildt equal. Then you could even build WLAN functionality into the BIOS. The code would only have to be written once and therefore would be less buggy.
Why don't you use true object oriented languages?
I mean at least Java is only partly object oriented. Both languages have the problem that they are awfully slow, but aren't that great. Essentially what you get with C# and Java are the disadvantages of an interpreted language with the disadvantages of a compiled language.
Learn Ruby or Smalltalk, those will be _real_ object oriented languages. There you can also learn what it means to have an objects. Essentially there you don't call objects, but you only send messages to objects which themselves execute their methods.
Why don't you get a small SoHo switch. Those are avaliable for about $200 and you can have up to 3 internal S0-buses which will talk Euro-ISDN.
Typical companies are Siemens or Telebau. A Telnet Willy 4ab from Telebau should be sufficient and somewhat cheaper than even the cheapest simulator.
Absolutely, it's also one of the few sci-fi movies showing videocasettes.
I doubt any of those software-packages could stand a chance against VDR. It's an open source PVR application specialicing on digital satellite television (it can do other media, too).
Essentially in the normal solution you have at least one $150 full featured DVB-S card which has an input going to your dish and an output going to your TV. The card contains a fully contained satellite reciever. Because of this you don't need to have a fast computer all it needs to do is getting the datastream (about 4 MegaBits/sec) from the card. Things like timeshifting work. With special plugins you can have things like PiP. Of course is also features an EPG bug that's standard in europe as it's delivered with the signal.
With one card you can record up to about 5 channels at the same time (they need to be on the same transponder), but you can use several cards. There are users having up to 5 cards in their computer. Those extra cards can be cheaper $60 cards without buildt-in MPEG2-decoder. There are plans to make it run completely without the expensive cards.
Best of all, you don't need to have an extra computer like with the Windows solutions. You just plug in your card, install the software and there you go. You won't even notice that the PVR is running unless you look at your TV.
HDTV is in the work, currently only software decoding works there. (That's early considering there is virtually no digital HDTV in europe except for tests. It almoust looks like HDTV is going to fail yet again as it already did in the 90s.)
Of course there is no commercial pressure behind this project so it has no features removed, no fees no nothing. However it does support PayTV with some variants of those cards. (of course you need to have your own CAM and smartcard)
http://www.vdrportal.de/board/portal.php?langid=1
Servus,
well you should see the 1963 catalog. There they had a really cool device. Your own television tape recorder, the VR1500. It even was just only $30000.
Well OK, the german company Loewe Opta introduced it's consumer VRs in 1961.
> Unless the CD-ROMs etc. our grandchildren will find in our attics are *physically*
> deteriorated to the point of being unreadable, I don't think that we'll have to worry
> about them not being able to read them anymore.
This is actually the biggest problem probably. Recordable CDs don't really work that well. It's extremely simple to destroy them by accident and they probably wouldn't survive laying on an attic for more than 5 years.
However there's a bit of chance. Theoretically you could store the image in an uncompressed 8-Bit greyscale per pixel format where you only actually use very few of those greyscales.
If you then try to read it later, you might not be able to read every single bit correctly. In fact you might even have lots of biterrors. But if your file only has 4 possible "characters/colours" it should be simple to determine the correct one. In fact it's even a bit simpler as CD-Roms encode bytes with 10 bits. So you basically read 10 bits and have to find out which of the 4 posible combinations is closest to them.
If you use an uncompressed format it's even better as single defective bytes, or even a few defective bytes in a row won't really make your file unreadable.
The problem in the future will most likely be reading the media. The formats should be possible to decode somehow, unless of course people use stuff like Word or DRM.
_Why_ are they "made for RAID use"?
I mean why is it that they are claimed to be made for RAIDs? The article claims some speciall error correction without explaining it. OK, you might think that the target audience might be to advanced for that.
On the other side he reviews hardware under only one OS where much of the performance is actually limited by the drivers. (There are many popular commercial OSes where gigabit Ethernet cards run at only a fraction of the speed of other OSes) IMHO that's a very unprofessional way to evaluate something like that.
As long as there's still ActiveX support in IE it _will_ be the less secure browser. ActivX is, and will always be the most critical hole in IE.
It's insane to execute binary code from the internet with just a few clicks.
When Microsoft turns off ActiveX by default, we can start comparing browsers.
Ohh c't, they occationally have good articles, but the quality of most computer magazines has gone down rapidly. The only magazine I'm subscribed to is "Die Datenschleuder".
Well at least in germany there's worse. There's a magazine named "Computer Bild" which is B-Movie grade bad.
I've seen a bit of that magazine some years ago, they had little pronounciation tips. The nice thing about them was that the tips were completely ununderstandable. They even wrote words everybody knew, phonetically. This results in nice words like "Preimäri" or "Mänädscha". (primary, manager)