It seems to be true. I loaded the page up in lynx and it gives a short message before what seems to be a simple domain-parking page for the christmas-island domain.
Christmas Island Internet Administration Limited* (CIIA) is a community owned non-profit Christmas Island company.
The domain: "GOATSE.CX" has been suspended by the registry.
Generally this is due to a lapsed registration or violation of policies.
I think I can answer this very well. I just happen to have recently been looking around for lower-power embedded controllers, preferably running Linux. On linuxdevices.com go click on their "products" link at the top of their page. Those pages contain short blurbs from announcements. Just go looking for boards and don't overlook the little "more..." link at the bottom of the page. There's pages of announcements, but they're not all for boards.
I'm not sure what his problem was either. One small problem with USB drives is that the people making the interface chips seem to target only Windows and maybe MacOS. This results in a lot of unusual behaviour, as documented by the author of the linux usb-storage driver. Basically they're supposed to implement the SCSI-II mass storage command set, or at least a subset. But guess what, most designers have taken short cuts in implementing just enough to work with windows and maybe MacOS.
MySQL now seems to be living only on it's fast reputation that it had in the past, driven by people who've heard that it's good and it's fast, but don't know the details.
That seems to be the general gist. But my pet peeves are that people (journalists even!) that claim that 1) MySQL is the only/best Open Source RDBMS, or even worse 2) MySQL is comparable to the big commercial RDBMS's like Oracle or MS SQL Server. I guess we can always depend on clueless tech journos on a tight deadline to portay Open Source MySQL vs closed-source Oracle/MSSQL/etc as a cliched David and Goliath battle. yeesh
8k wasn't much of a limit until we started storing multi-media in databases. Prior to that it was rare to hit an 8k limit. Postgresql was a little late with their support here.
Yes, multimedia and blogs seem to be the applications people are thinking of when they whinge about the 8K row limit. Hell, Slashdot was probably one of the early big users of MySQL. What these people never seem to think about is whether it's all that important, useful, or even clever to store large pieces of data (be it binary or text) in a RDBMS. Are you going to perform a query on the column storing a jpeg photo? For text (blogs, etc), I can maybe see the use of being able to simply search through the text. But IMNSHO, an RDBMS shouldn't need to also be a text search engine. Just put the damn data in a file, store the filename in the DB, and if it's text then you can use a purpose-built search engine like Glimpse or Namazu.
Anybody who slams MySQL based on transactions doesn't know what they're talking about - it has them. Has for a while now, but they are optional, which is no bad thing in my book, because they DO slow things down and in 99% of cases you just do not need them.
Hmmm, just thinking about these optional transaction-capable table types. As you say, they are slowler than the default table type. And I wonder how this "option" has affected the development and the pursuit of speed/efficiency. In PostgreSQL, there is only one table "type" and it supports transactions, as does all other aspects of the RDBMS. So any effort to speed up pgsql must work with transactions, no short-cuts there. But with MySQL, transactions are an option. I wonder if this has produced a kind of laziness with the developers, who can say "if you want speed, don't use transactions" instead of actually doing something about it. I wonder if anyone has done any benchmarks of MySQL+InnoDB vs PostgreSQL to see how the different transaction-capable DB's stack up speed-wise. Just a thought.
I had a conversation with one of their licensing officers [...] Microsoft's fear is that a large camera or MP3 player manufacturer 'gets it wrong' and MS is blamed for things not working correctly. MS then has to invest in a work-around, handle patches, bad press etc..
May the moderators mod me down if this is going too far, but IMNSHO this is typical arrogant MS. They seem to think they're the only ones capable of implementing something correctly, despite all the evidence to the contrary. How many open standards (protocols, formats, etc) have they half-implemented (or just plain screwed up) and then claimed to have extended with their own half thought-out ideas? (Here's a tip MS: If you don't implement the whole standard in the first place, you're *branching* not extending, aren't you?). And how many times have closed-source competitors and open-source hackers re-implemented some format or protocol of MS's? And although I can't think of a good example off the top of my head, I seem to remember a number of times when the FLOSS implementation has been better and/or more flexible.
Hmm, trying to think. Perhaps a good 2-3 weeks, maybe even a month. I found that link with a google.com.au search and limiting the results to within Australia. So it's been out on VHS/DVD a while. My family rented the DVD, I think, a month ago. If you want to make it special, get them the X-men 1.5+2 pack with something like 4 discs.
Ah thankyou for explaining that. Here in Australia we tend to use a mixture of the "proper" British english for mostly historical reasons, plus the perverted US english propogated by their gargantuan media machine. It can be terribly confusing sometimes when dealing with brits or yanks since we're somewhere in the middle.
For example, in school we used the terms "eraser" and "rubber" almost interchangeably. Only later did we learn the slang meaning of "rubber" to also refer to condoms. And only recently I saw a US stand-up comedian on TV talking about a trip to the UK and what these two words mean in each country. It turns out that "eraser" is the US term, while "rubber" means condom in the US but means eraser in the UK. Ah, you learn something new each day!
It's funny, but coming from Australia you'd think I'd feel right at home in both the UK and US, but there are lots of little things that make me feel slightly out of place in both countries.
One word: toilets. That was the first culture shock for me and my family when we travelled to the US in 1990. I was 12 at the time and my first reaction at seeing the hotel toilet was the bloody toilet's blocked up! And the toilets were different everywhere we went! All different flushing actions, with ducts and such at the bottom of the bowl to get rid of the waste as exepdiently as possible. And Americans seem to be embaressed of the word "toilet" so they camoflage it by using other terms: "washroom", "restroom", "little boy/girls room", etc. Very odd.
I haven't been to the UK, but I have been to Germany a few years ago. The toilets there were much more like our Aussie toilets. For me the things that stuck out in deutschland were the dual-axis swinging windows that seemed to be everywhere (at least around Augsburg), the "schwartz musik" ("black music" i.e rap, hip-hop, soul, etc) section in music stores. And in the underground parking lot of a restaurant we found a special parking spot that seemed to be reserved for women drivers, but that might have simply been due to the limited german-language skills of myself and my company at the time.
Radiosity isn't *the* solution to rendering either.
Just a nit-pick, but technically, radiosity isn't a rendering algorithm. It's an illumination algorithm. Once a scene has been run through a radiosity solver, the data can be used to drive a real-time interactive walk-through type application. Or it can be used to provide the ambient and diffuse terms in a ray-traced (or a good scanline) render. And the great thing about a radiosity solution is that it's view independent (i.e "global"). So, as long as the scene isn't meant to change, a whole bit of animation (maybe a walk-through again) can be rendered from one solution.
Radiosity is not without it's problems though. One of the biggies is that it fundamentally works on flat surfaces (polygons). I don't know if anyone has worked on extending radiosity to curved surfaces. That'd be tricky. Radiosity also gets bogged down in complex scenes because it has to find the contribution of potentially every element on every other element (i.e O(n^2)). But hierachical methods have been developed to help there. Radiosity normally only handles diffuse light but people have extended radiosity to include specular and reflective light as well. Not sure how well they've done. Anyway, if I talk much longer I'll be talking out of my butt, so I'll leave it there.
Ok, it all looks very pretty. But when the guy brought up the 3D "CD database", am I the only one that thought of the Interface Hall of Shame? They have three pages on interfaces that try to look like real things - The horrible QuickTime player, and IBM's RealPhone and RealCD applications. The underlying criticism is that interfaces that try to look and act like real things often don't work very well on a computer screen. Look at the apps on your computer desktop. Does your web browser look like some real applicance? Or your email reader? File manager? No, they probably don't. They have some similar widgets, like buttons or tabs. But other things like drop-down menus or scroll-bars don't have real-world cousins. It's a mish-mash that has evolved over the last 20-odd years of GUI design.
The problem I have with their 3D desktop is I bet they'll try to "reinvent" the interface by imitating real-life appliances and devices. And guess what, it's different using a real-life device with your hands from operating a virtual device with a mouse and 1, 2, or 3 buttons. Things like thumb-wheels aren't so easy to use with a mouse (forgetting the actual wheel on modern mice), just look at the QuickTime player example. And it's not always obvious what is a widget, and what is simply decoration.
Or they might do it correct from the start, what do I know. In the video the guy talks about a community of some sort. So maybe they'll rely on third-party programmers more.
correct... v. 1 Make correct. 2 Mark errors in. 3 Reprove. reproofn. Expression of condemnation for a fault or offence.
IMNSHO, Linus was definitely marking an error in Darl's letter. He was perhaps also reproving him as well. Ironically enough, when correcting someone you don't necessarily need to be correct yourself.
Go the J's! (Re:God I hope not!!!)
on
Who Needs Radio?
·
· Score: 1
IMNSHO, Triple J (the J's) is easily the best radio station in Australia. Being a part of the ABC, it's government funded. So the only 'ads' are promos for their own stuff and are nowhere near as frequent as commercial stations anyway. Their presenters are unique and entertaining, not your usual annoying radio dickheads. (btw, Wil Andersons 'bio' is always a hoot). Their schedule has enough variety to keep most people happy, with lots of Aussie and independant artists. The only time I hear trash from the likes of Britney Spears, Christina Scraguleara, or any of the unlimited boy/girl groups nowadays is on commercial TV.
More importantly, Unearthed discovers fresh new bands each year and gives them air play and (I think) a record deal. The annual Triple J Hottest 100 "competition" gives everyone a chance to vote for their favourite songs of the year. The Hottest 100 CD's are great because the music "lasts longer" than most other artificial (or biased) compilations. Honestly, who wants to listen to Britneys' old "I can sing and dance and I'm blonde!" garbage two years from now? The oldest copy of the Hottest 100 I have is from 1997 (#5) and the music on that is still playable. Not great or new, but still certainly playable.
Well, I hope I've provided enough links there to keep everyone happy. You can catch it online in RealAudio or WMA streaming formats.
This Zealot term is more applicable to people who can't see beyond the start button and comerical software than it is to people who have quit paying the Microsoft tax. ... I do, however, mind being shouted down when I offer my place of work or clients a free solution to their problems.
Exactly. From our (Linux users and FLOSS advocate) point of view the world is chock full of MS zealots. How many times have we heard of companies having a "no free software" policy? How many places accept only Word documents? Employers and recruiting agencies always want your resume in Word.DOC format, rejecting everything else. Here in Australia the tax office (ATO) has an electronic system for submitting tax returns, but the software is only available for Windows.
I recently had trouble at the University I'm now studying at. They have a system for submitting assignments online, but it effectively only takes Word format (RTF doesn't count). When I submitted a PDF I gummed up the works a little, even though the file was available to my remote lecturer. When I brought the issue up in the online forum, I was treated like some freak. The responses from the lecturer and other students bordered on hostile. It was obvious that they didn't care for my "situation" and they certainly didn't understand it. To them, I'm sure, it was my problem for using Linux, not the University's for having such a restrictive system in place.
There are hundreds of times more MS zealots than Linux/FLOSS zealots, only they form the mainstream so they see themselves as "normal" and us as freaks and weirdos.
Why didn't the story mention that this is the fool Enderle?
Good question. This guy seems to have an extreme dislike of everything Open Source. He claims he's trying to build an open-source-free computer room in his house, or somesuch. This guy is a grade-A FUD expert.
For more of this guys excreta, check out LinuxTodays listing for both Rob and Robert Enderle. This guy's amazing, in a terrifying sense.
I would imagine that most of the drawing requests are translated to much simpler commands before they ever hit the driver. Not "Draw this text, using this typeface, at this location, in this color", but "Draw this pixel in this color."
Shit, not if you want the driver and GPU to be able to accelerate anything. You're going a little too far with your example, but I think I understand what you're getting at. i.e The GDI isn't the driver interface, there's some other slightly simpler interface.
Haven't you ever heard of graphics cards/drivers keeping a font cache in unused off-screen memory? Just blit glyphs instead of re-rendering them. That trick's been around since the VLB days and I think it had to be done in the driver. Mind you, that was also the win 3.0/3.1 days, so maybe the graphics driver model has changed since then.
Then after the Compaq aquisition most of the Alpha devleopment team went to Intel.
I was under the impression that a lot of the Alpha people went to AMD, not Intel. They were apparently largely responsible for the superiority of the Athlon.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems to be true. I loaded the page up in lynx and it gives a short message before what seems to be a simple domain-parking page for the christmas-island domain.
Hurray!
I think I can answer this very well. I just happen to have recently been looking around for lower-power embedded controllers, preferably running Linux. On linuxdevices.com go click on their "products" link at the top of their page. Those pages contain short blurbs from announcements. Just go looking for boards and don't overlook the little "more..." link at the bottom of the page. There's pages of announcements, but they're not all for boards.
Here's some boards that have piqued my interest:
I'm not sure what his problem was either. One small problem with USB drives is that the people making the interface chips seem to target only Windows and maybe MacOS. This results in a lot of unusual behaviour, as documented by the author of the linux usb-storage driver. Basically they're supposed to implement the SCSI-II mass storage command set, or at least a subset. But guess what, most designers have taken short cuts in implementing just enough to work with windows and maybe MacOS.
Hi Mr McBride, welcome to Slashdot :)
That seems to be the general gist. But my pet peeves are that people (journalists even!) that claim that 1) MySQL is the only/best Open Source RDBMS, or even worse 2) MySQL is comparable to the big commercial RDBMS's like Oracle or MS SQL Server. I guess we can always depend on clueless tech journos on a tight deadline to portay Open Source MySQL vs closed-source Oracle/MSSQL/etc as a cliched David and Goliath battle. yeesh
Ha! You almost had me there. You're right though, MS does have quite a reputation ;)
Yes, multimedia and blogs seem to be the applications people are thinking of when they whinge about the 8K row limit. Hell, Slashdot was probably one of the early big users of MySQL. What these people never seem to think about is whether it's all that important, useful, or even clever to store large pieces of data (be it binary or text) in a RDBMS. Are you going to perform a query on the column storing a jpeg photo? For text (blogs, etc), I can maybe see the use of being able to simply search through the text. But IMNSHO, an RDBMS shouldn't need to also be a text search engine. Just put the damn data in a file, store the filename in the DB, and if it's text then you can use a purpose-built search engine like Glimpse or Namazu.
Hmmm, just thinking about these optional transaction-capable table types. As you say, they are slowler than the default table type. And I wonder how this "option" has affected the development and the pursuit of speed/efficiency. In PostgreSQL, there is only one table "type" and it supports transactions, as does all other aspects of the RDBMS. So any effort to speed up pgsql must work with transactions, no short-cuts there. But with MySQL, transactions are an option. I wonder if this has produced a kind of laziness with the developers, who can say "if you want speed, don't use transactions" instead of actually doing something about it. I wonder if anyone has done any benchmarks of MySQL+InnoDB vs PostgreSQL to see how the different transaction-capable DB's stack up speed-wise. Just a thought.
May the moderators mod me down if this is going too far, but IMNSHO this is typical arrogant MS. They seem to think they're the only ones capable of implementing something correctly, despite all the evidence to the contrary. How many open standards (protocols, formats, etc) have they half-implemented (or just plain screwed up) and then claimed to have extended with their own half thought-out ideas? (Here's a tip MS: If you don't implement the whole standard in the first place, you're *branching* not extending, aren't you?). And how many times have closed-source competitors and open-source hackers re-implemented some format or protocol of MS's? And although I can't think of a good example off the top of my head, I seem to remember a number of times when the FLOSS implementation has been better and/or more flexible.
</rant>
Hmm, trying to think. Perhaps a good 2-3 weeks, maybe even a month. I found that link with a google.com.au search and limiting the results to within Australia. So it's been out on VHS/DVD a while. My family rented the DVD, I think, a month ago. If you want to make it special, get them the X-men 1.5+2 pack with something like 4 discs.
Oh yes it is! The damn thing is even out of stock.
Ah thankyou for explaining that. Here in Australia we tend to use a mixture of the "proper" British english for mostly historical reasons, plus the perverted US english propogated by their gargantuan media machine. It can be terribly confusing sometimes when dealing with brits or yanks since we're somewhere in the middle.
For example, in school we used the terms "eraser" and "rubber" almost interchangeably. Only later did we learn the slang meaning of "rubber" to also refer to condoms. And only recently I saw a US stand-up comedian on TV talking about a trip to the UK and what these two words mean in each country. It turns out that "eraser" is the US term, while "rubber" means condom in the US but means eraser in the UK. Ah, you learn something new each day!
One word: toilets. That was the first culture shock for me and my family when we travelled to the US in 1990. I was 12 at the time and my first reaction at seeing the hotel toilet was the bloody toilet's blocked up! And the toilets were different everywhere we went! All different flushing actions, with ducts and such at the bottom of the bowl to get rid of the waste as exepdiently as possible. And Americans seem to be embaressed of the word "toilet" so they camoflage it by using other terms: "washroom", "restroom", "little boy/girls room", etc. Very odd.
I haven't been to the UK, but I have been to Germany a few years ago. The toilets there were much more like our Aussie toilets. For me the things that stuck out in deutschland were the dual-axis swinging windows that seemed to be everywhere (at least around Augsburg), the "schwartz musik" ("black music" i.e rap, hip-hop, soul, etc) section in music stores. And in the underground parking lot of a restaurant we found a special parking spot that seemed to be reserved for women drivers, but that might have simply been due to the limited german-language skills of myself and my company at the time.
Just a nit-pick, but technically, radiosity isn't a rendering algorithm. It's an illumination algorithm. Once a scene has been run through a radiosity solver, the data can be used to drive a real-time interactive walk-through type application. Or it can be used to provide the ambient and diffuse terms in a ray-traced (or a good scanline) render. And the great thing about a radiosity solution is that it's view independent (i.e "global"). So, as long as the scene isn't meant to change, a whole bit of animation (maybe a walk-through again) can be rendered from one solution.
Radiosity is not without it's problems though. One of the biggies is that it fundamentally works on flat surfaces (polygons). I don't know if anyone has worked on extending radiosity to curved surfaces. That'd be tricky. Radiosity also gets bogged down in complex scenes because it has to find the contribution of potentially every element on every other element (i.e O(n^2)). But hierachical methods have been developed to help there. Radiosity normally only handles diffuse light but people have extended radiosity to include specular and reflective light as well. Not sure how well they've done. Anyway, if I talk much longer I'll be talking out of my butt, so I'll leave it there.
Are you sure you're not confusing patents with copyright?
Ok, it all looks very pretty. But when the guy brought up the 3D "CD database", am I the only one that thought of the Interface Hall of Shame? They have three pages on interfaces that try to look like real things - The horrible QuickTime player, and IBM's RealPhone and RealCD applications. The underlying criticism is that interfaces that try to look and act like real things often don't work very well on a computer screen. Look at the apps on your computer desktop. Does your web browser look like some real applicance? Or your email reader? File manager? No, they probably don't. They have some similar widgets, like buttons or tabs. But other things like drop-down menus or scroll-bars don't have real-world cousins. It's a mish-mash that has evolved over the last 20-odd years of GUI design.
The problem I have with their 3D desktop is I bet they'll try to "reinvent" the interface by imitating real-life appliances and devices. And guess what, it's different using a real-life device with your hands from operating a virtual device with a mouse and 1, 2, or 3 buttons. Things like thumb-wheels aren't so easy to use with a mouse (forgetting the actual wheel on modern mice), just look at the QuickTime player example. And it's not always obvious what is a widget, and what is simply decoration.
Or they might do it correct from the start, what do I know. In the video the guy talks about a community of some sort. So maybe they'll rely on third-party programmers more.
Well lets see what my dictionary has to say...
correctreproof n. Expression of condemnation for a fault or offence.
IMNSHO, Linus was definitely marking an error in Darl's letter. He was perhaps also reproving him as well. Ironically enough, when correcting someone you don't necessarily need to be correct yourself.
Now why doesn't that surprise me in the least?
Yeah, how innovative. I mean, heaven forbid they actually use a tree of real directories and folders on disk to store an inherently hierachical data structure.
IMNSHO, Triple J (the J's) is easily the best radio station in Australia. Being a part of the ABC, it's government funded. So the only 'ads' are promos for their own stuff and are nowhere near as frequent as commercial stations anyway. Their presenters are unique and entertaining, not your usual annoying radio dickheads. (btw, Wil Andersons 'bio' is always a hoot). Their schedule has enough variety to keep most people happy, with lots of Aussie and independant artists. The only time I hear trash from the likes of Britney Spears, Christina Scraguleara, or any of the unlimited boy/girl groups nowadays is on commercial TV.
More importantly, Unearthed discovers fresh new bands each year and gives them air play and (I think) a record deal. The annual Triple J Hottest 100 "competition" gives everyone a chance to vote for their favourite songs of the year. The Hottest 100 CD's are great because the music "lasts longer" than most other artificial (or biased) compilations. Honestly, who wants to listen to Britneys' old "I can sing and dance and I'm blonde!" garbage two years from now? The oldest copy of the Hottest 100 I have is from 1997 (#5) and the music on that is still playable. Not great or new, but still certainly playable.
Well, I hope I've provided enough links there to keep everyone happy. You can catch it online in RealAudio or WMA streaming formats.
Exactly. From our (Linux users and FLOSS advocate) point of view the world is chock full of MS zealots. How many times have we heard of companies having a "no free software" policy? How many places accept only Word documents? Employers and recruiting agencies always want your resume in Word .DOC format, rejecting everything else. Here in Australia the tax office (ATO) has an electronic system for submitting tax returns, but the software is only available for Windows.
I recently had trouble at the University I'm now studying at. They have a system for submitting assignments online, but it effectively only takes Word format (RTF doesn't count). When I submitted a PDF I gummed up the works a little, even though the file was available to my remote lecturer. When I brought the issue up in the online forum, I was treated like some freak. The responses from the lecturer and other students bordered on hostile. It was obvious that they didn't care for my "situation" and they certainly didn't understand it. To them, I'm sure, it was my problem for using Linux, not the University's for having such a restrictive system in place.
There are hundreds of times more MS zealots than Linux/FLOSS zealots, only they form the mainstream so they see themselves as "normal" and us as freaks and weirdos.
Good question. This guy seems to have an extreme dislike of everything Open Source. He claims he's trying to build an open-source-free computer room in his house, or somesuch. This guy is a grade-A FUD expert.
For more of this guys excreta, check out LinuxTodays listing for both Rob and Robert Enderle. This guy's amazing, in a terrifying sense.
Shit, not if you want the driver and GPU to be able to accelerate anything. You're going a little too far with your example, but I think I understand what you're getting at. i.e The GDI isn't the driver interface, there's some other slightly simpler interface.
Haven't you ever heard of graphics cards/drivers keeping a font cache in unused off-screen memory? Just blit glyphs instead of re-rendering them. That trick's been around since the VLB days and I think it had to be done in the driver. Mind you, that was also the win 3.0/3.1 days, so maybe the graphics driver model has changed since then.
RTFA, he gives directions to CVS'ing his source at the end.
I was under the impression that a lot of the Alpha people went to AMD, not Intel. They were apparently largely responsible for the superiority of the Athlon.