Digital *watches* may be better for accuracy, but I think I prefer analogue *clocks*, as they can be read from greater distances to give a "good-enough" first-order analysis of how late I am to a particular meeting. Usually, if there are a multitude of suits attending, the number will be quite high:-)
plus, pure-mechanical analogue watches with clear bezels are more interesting, IMO, than the circuit-board design of a digital one. Seriously, I wear the watch almost exclusively for the "oooh, a shiny thing" effect. Otherwise, the NTP-synch'ed clock on my puter, along with an appointment scheduler interrupting my train of thought, does better for me as it frees me from having to glance every 5 seconds nervously for the time to change. --
I really don't care that it's made by Microsoft, 'cause it's actually a *GOOD* product!
That remark kind of takes me back to 1995, when the Microsoft Natural Keyboard[0] saved my wrists, but my laptop ran Slackware 2.0 Linux. My (geek) friends would come to my dorm and would leave with their heads shaking sideways. M$ seemed (at the time) to at least be able to make decent hardware, but not necessarily in the OS department[1]. Anyone else find that ironic?
[0] Which, mind you, is still in use and is credited with saving my wrists from CTS.
[1]Bugger the original Win 95, not to mention the Win 3.1x. They were all pretty horrid, except for DOS[2]
[2]DOS 6.22 worked nicely on the laptop. It was just a matter of getting the bloody thing to recognise the PCMCIA 3Com ethernet card that was a PITA[3]
[3]Which, mind you, the Linux distro did nicely when I installed it. I think the sequence on Linux was: boot, install, reboot, ping, be amazed.
Damn, I wish I was in the position to recommend the systems. All I got to do was to pick a technology or two (and using Java only got me the position; it wasn't my first choice for this).
Speaking through an NDA, I get to hack together support for an application server that's
been bought out by another major player
not being supported by the said player (of course)
and as a consequence, needs Java support hacked together
I probably would've gone with Sun boxen (pre-existing hardware, and something I know), BEA Tuxedo (this is a large enough shop to warrant something like this), Oracle (ditto), and let the front-end programmers worry about the presentation layer *grin*
Though I agree with you that such a system is possibly a requirement for even the home user, the book's emphasis is on the vast systems used for information retrieval, combining not only the fixed-format information traditinally placed within the databases, but also a free-form multimedia information, such as video clips, images, text documents with formatting, etc., and querying for content.
As an example from the book, the author lists a database designed to assist the police in apprehending a suspect, by feeding it a recent video of a drug-run into the system, and not only positively identifying the person, but also showing who the suspect's associates are.
That kind of system is almost a possibility with today's technologies (and it is naive to think that institutions such as the FBI and the ATF do not have systems similar in capabilities as this), but is non-trivial in both the computational requirements and in storage space.
There's an interesting book called Pricinciples of Multimedia Database Systems (ISBN: 1558604669). This is one of the books used for one of my undergraduate course in the same topic.
Of course, something like this would be completely overkill for the home user, but with something like a large archive of videos and such, it would be invaluable.
With latest versions of Informix, building datablades for supporting this is possible, but such an undertaking is obviously nontrivial.
(or more stuff at the application level to prevent this sort of thing)
You also mentioned locking the tables. *ugh*. You're right, you will need to do so, as (afaik) row-level locking is not possible with MySQL. Of course, that alone will negatively impact the overall db performance, measured not in the milliseconds it takes to service a query, but in number of "transactions" per second.
I just remember back in '97 or thereabouts, I used to work for a firm who had their labs wide-open to the world, including the Network Appliances box. Through a 28.8kbps ppp modem connection, I nfs-mounted one of the volumes. With the kernel version 1.2.x (or maybe 2.0.x, don't remember), doing a simple ls on the nfs-mounted volume made the bloody thing *hang*.
Of course, that was all my fault, but hey, it had to be done in the name of silliness:-). Although, it also gave me a good glimpse of how much network overhead nfs has.
Around here, based on the going rate for a *junior* unix programmer/analyst (boils down to a guy who's read Stevens and played with the file io chapter), the book pays for itself in less than two hours' work. I dunno, I don't think it's pricy.
Yes, it does. It is a term applied to gold obtained through tyranny, by depriving communists, Jews, and other political dessenters of their life and liberty. Of course, we cannot apply American laws here in juding the Nazi rule, but at the same time, these are things that should (and for a good reason) be objected by anyone.
In fact, many Germans didn't find out about the Concentration camps until after the war ended.
For a very good reason. Had they known, they would've attempted to remove the government from power, like they did to end WWI.
You also meantion that money was "[redistributed] in part, [from] the very wealthy Jewish business oweners (sic)". Money was also redistributed from the communists, the labor unionists, and anyone else they saw fit.
No, the German people of 1920's and 1930's are not blaimless either; in Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler very clearly states his agenda, and the book almost reads like a play-by-play of what he will do in the decades to come. Had these people read his work, Adolf Hitler would probably not have been elected, and have ended his life as a minor political functionary.
There was a lot of poverty all over during the Great Depression
Of course, if the bloody Weimar Republic didn't make themselves impotent, then Adolf Hitler wouldn't've had the power to do what he did. A bloodless coup d' etat is still that: an overthrow of an exisiting government.
Yes, under Hitler, many socialist programs were introduced, and that he revitalized the German economy of the 1930's, but at what cost? Completely ignoring his Holocaust (which, mind you, is an enormous thing to ignore), and concentrating on the pre-WWII Germany, he *still* created issues for the non-Germans.
The German economic recovery of the 1930's was created on the backs of not only the German workers, but also on the backs of the workers of the countries he annexed. These countries provided a cheap, non-German workforce that can be easily exploited by the German countries, and also created a forced sheltered export market for the German products that did not migrate there.
All this, of course, ignores the fact that he, along with the Japanese and the Italians, started WWII, and the atrocities that followed the war.
The BBC article The BBC article says "It is a win for science". This is a very naive attitude. It is a win for
astronomy, nothing more. Surely science would benefit more if governments were to fund their scientists properly - astronomy is just a very small branch of science, and is a branch of science which does little to address the world's problems. This is just a token attempt by the governments of the world to try to show their commitment to science.
Interesting. In supporting your views, allocating the spectrum range cost these governments virtually nothing, whereas fuding for building an atom-smasher would cost on the order of millions, at the very least. The first is a very inexpensive show of support, the other can potentially run afoul with the constituents.
However, if this action sets a precedent for funding other realms of research, then it was good for science, nost just for radioastronomy. Our Mileage will vary, of course.
Launch a thousand small craft with a solar sails(sic) towards the most promising targets
Grand idea, but a solar sail, to be effective, must be made of materials that're currently unavailable or unfeasible to use in large quantities; the solar sails must be extremely light (less mass, and thus less energy required to accelerate them) and strong (otherwise, the light waves/ionic waves will merely distort them). Otherwise, the acceleration gained from them will be less than effective.
Of course, some of the stuff they do in CERN is to understand what goes on within a supernova. What "looking up" also allows us to do is to see the state of the Universe as it was eons ago.
Radioastronomy isn't *just* about looking for ET; it's also about looking at the fundamantal structure of matter itself. There are many phenomenons in space (like the supernova) that're either difficult or simply impossible, with today's technology, to recreate. Studying these will give us valuable "basic science" that may, one day, become usable technology.
Which means that at some point they'll start changing the definition of XML to close out competitors. They've always taken this approach, why do you think they won't this time?
MS already does this, with HTML^H^H^H^Hrubbish that gets spat out from Word2k, when you do a "save as html". It's rather frightening, actually, to see the actual code.
In theory, an output from one vendor's fully-compliant HTML/CSS user agent should be identical to another vendor's. In practice, if they did that, then MS won't be able to make any money =P
Sorry for the obligatory MS bashing, but <rant> Have you seen the crap they call html that gets barfed out by Word 2k?</rant>
Seriously, I've done some SPARC assembly work, a little less MIPS, and a lot less x86. Coming from the RISC world, what really got to me about x86 was the absolute dearth of registers. Of course, others who have done x86 asm would tell me that it's just a different way of thinking, but after getting used to load/store, the x86ian way of thinking seemed rather alien to me, especially when in SPARC, you have no less than 32 registers, and in x86, I think it was something like 8.
Re:I don't understand the fuss
on
Linux BIOS
·
· Score: 1
Plus, your Linux box should require *far less* rebooting than WinNT or 2k.
Besides, isn't it curious that they'd push CDR over Minidisc?
Well, there may have been several reasons for this. First, almost all computers sold have CD-ROM drives in them. I haven't seen a single puter with a minidisc-rom (MD-ROM?) drive. Second, if there's no data spec for the MD's, and no real way to implement it--i.e. no "data type field"--then they shouldn't put data on there.
Of course, my main concern for these things is the CD-R's susceptibility to vibration, and latency for the bloody things. Digital Photography Review had a review of the latest Mavica, and they reported a latency of 15 seconds, per picture after the exposure for the bloody things, when using a flash card. Granted, it's much better while using a floppy, but still, a floppy drive or a CD-R drive aren't the fastest of media these days. That's fine and dandy for portraits and other stills, but for anything else, it makes it kind of obnoxious, if not downright useless, relegating it to the "toys" section.
Nah... who needs battery life?
Reminds me of an old joke about a Russian gentleman with a suitcase, talking to an American tourist. The gist of the joke was that though it was a nice watch, it needed a battery the size of a suitcase. A Lithium-Ion battery is probably a requirement for these beasties, and by the time you have a charger, why not make it a cradle?
Erm, I thought slashdot were funding the development of transaction support for MySQL?
Well, uhm, I completely forgot about that, but my point is, slurping up a user's comment *probably* doesn't require as much rigor from the db as an online auction system.
Oracle!
Exactly =] Seriously, when I do development on my own, I find the Oracle license costs to be prohibitive, so I tend to use PostgreSQL. It may not be nearly as fast, but it has *almost* everything I need.
Slashdot Mirror
Digital *watches* may be better for accuracy, but I think I prefer analogue *clocks*, as they can be read from greater distances to give a "good-enough" first-order analysis of how late I am to a particular meeting. Usually, if there are a multitude of suits attending, the number will be quite high :-)
plus, pure-mechanical analogue watches with clear bezels are more interesting, IMO, than the circuit-board design of a digital one. Seriously, I wear the watch almost exclusively for the "oooh, a shiny thing" effect. Otherwise, the NTP-synch'ed clock on my puter, along with an appointment scheduler interrupting my train of thought, does better for me as it frees me from having to glance every 5 seconds nervously for the time to change.
--
I really don't care that it's made by Microsoft, 'cause it's actually a *GOOD* product!
That remark kind of takes me back to 1995, when the Microsoft Natural Keyboard[0] saved my wrists, but my laptop ran Slackware 2.0 Linux. My (geek) friends would come to my dorm and would leave with their heads shaking sideways. M$ seemed (at the time) to at least be able to make decent hardware, but not necessarily in the OS department[1]. Anyone else find that ironic?
[0] Which, mind you, is still in use and is credited with saving my wrists from CTS.
[1]Bugger the original Win 95, not to mention the Win 3.1x. They were all pretty horrid, except for DOS[2]
[2]DOS 6.22 worked nicely on the laptop. It was just a matter of getting the bloody thing to recognise the PCMCIA 3Com ethernet card that was a PITA[3]
[3]Which, mind you, the Linux distro did nicely when I installed it. I think the sequence on Linux was: boot, install, reboot, ping, be amazed.
--
Did this just shoot C|Net's Credibility down a few (or more than a few) notches? Oops.
No client is brain-damaged enough that it will accept code (vbs or otherwise) from its nearest node without asking for it
Of course, MS Outhouse is braindamaged enough to actually run the bloody things without user intervention. Enjoy.
Damn, I wish I was in the position to recommend the systems. All I got to do was to pick a technology or two (and using Java only got me the position; it wasn't my first choice for this).
Speaking through an NDA, I get to hack together support for an application server that's
I probably would've gone with Sun boxen (pre-existing hardware, and something I know), BEA Tuxedo (this is a large enough shop to warrant something like this), Oracle (ditto), and let the front-end programmers worry about the presentation layer *grin*
*sigh* back to reality.
As an example from the book, the author lists a database designed to assist the police in apprehending a suspect, by feeding it a recent video of a drug-run into the system, and not only positively identifying the person, but also showing who the suspect's associates are.
That kind of system is almost a possibility with today's technologies (and it is naive to think that institutions such as the FBI and the ATF do not have systems similar in capabilities as this), but is non-trivial in both the computational requirements and in storage space.
There's an interesting book called Pricinciples of Multimedia Database Systems (ISBN: 1558604669). This is one of the books used for one of my undergraduate course in the same topic.
Of course, something like this would be completely overkill for the home user, but with something like a large archive of videos and such, it would be invaluable.
With latest versions of Informix, building datablades for supporting this is possible, but such an undertaking is obviously nontrivial.
(or more stuff at the application level to prevent this sort of thing)
You also mentioned locking the tables. *ugh*. You're right, you will need to do so, as (afaik) row-level locking is not possible with MySQL. Of course, that alone will negatively impact the overall db performance, measured not in the milliseconds it takes to service a query, but in number of "transactions" per second.
Of course, that was all my fault, but hey, it had to be done in the name of silliness :-). Although, it also gave me a good glimpse of how much network overhead nfs has.
It's pricey
Around here, based on the going rate for a *junior* unix programmer/analyst (boils down to a guy who's read Stevens and played with the file io chapter), the book pays for itself in less than two hours' work. I dunno, I don't think it's pricy.
Thank you, sir, for so elegantly expressing my feelings.
Does the term "Nazi-gold" seem familiar
Yes, it does. It is a term applied to gold obtained through tyranny, by depriving communists, Jews, and other political dessenters of their life and liberty. Of course, we cannot apply American laws here in juding the Nazi rule, but at the same time, these are things that should (and for a good reason) be objected by anyone.
In fact, many Germans didn't find out about the Concentration camps until after the war ended.
For a very good reason. Had they known, they would've attempted to remove the government from power, like they did to end WWI.
You also meantion that money was "[redistributed] in part, [from] the very wealthy Jewish business oweners (sic)". Money was also redistributed from the communists, the labor unionists, and anyone else they saw fit.
No, the German people of 1920's and 1930's are not blaimless either; in Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler very clearly states his agenda, and the book almost reads like a play-by-play of what he will do in the decades to come. Had these people read his work, Adolf Hitler would probably not have been elected, and have ended his life as a minor political functionary.
There was a lot of poverty all over during the Great Depression
Of course, if the bloody Weimar Republic didn't make themselves impotent, then Adolf Hitler wouldn't've had the power to do what he did. A bloodless coup d' etat is still that: an overthrow of an exisiting government.
Ok, I'll bite the obvious trollbait.
Yes, under Hitler, many socialist programs were introduced, and that he revitalized the German economy of the 1930's, but at what cost? Completely ignoring his Holocaust (which, mind you, is an enormous thing to ignore), and concentrating on the pre-WWII Germany, he *still* created issues for the non-Germans.
The German economic recovery of the 1930's was created on the backs of not only the German workers, but also on the backs of the workers of the countries he annexed. These countries provided a cheap, non-German workforce that can be easily exploited by the German countries, and also created a forced sheltered export market for the German products that did not migrate there.
All this, of course, ignores the fact that he, along with the Japanese and the Italians, started WWII, and the atrocities that followed the war.
Interesting. In supporting your views, allocating the spectrum range cost these governments virtually nothing, whereas fuding for building an atom-smasher would cost on the order of millions, at the very least. The first is a very inexpensive show of support, the other can potentially run afoul with the constituents.
However, if this action sets a precedent for funding other realms of research, then it was good for science, nost just for radioastronomy. Our Mileage will vary, of course.
Launch a thousand small craft with a solar sails(sic) towards the most promising targets
Grand idea, but a solar sail, to be effective, must be made of materials that're currently unavailable or unfeasible to use in large quantities; the solar sails must be extremely light (less mass, and thus less energy required to accelerate them) and strong (otherwise, the light waves/ionic waves will merely distort them). Otherwise, the acceleration gained from them will be less than effective.
Of course, some of the stuff they do in CERN is to understand what goes on within a supernova. What "looking up" also allows us to do is to see the state of the Universe as it was eons ago.
I wonder what the point of looking for ET is
Radioastronomy isn't *just* about looking for ET; it's also about looking at the fundamantal structure of matter itself. There are many phenomenons in space (like the supernova) that're either difficult or simply impossible, with today's technology, to recreate. Studying these will give us valuable "basic science" that may, one day, become usable technology.
MS already does this, with HTML^H^H^H^Hrubbish that gets spat out from Word2k, when you do a "save as html". It's rather frightening, actually, to see the actual code.
Sorry for the obligatory MS bashing, but <rant> Have you seen the crap they call html that gets barfed out by Word 2k?</rant>
Just one comment: mmmm. SPARC.
Seriously, I've done some SPARC assembly work, a little less MIPS, and a lot less x86. Coming from the RISC world, what really got to me about x86 was the absolute dearth of registers. Of course, others who have done x86 asm would tell me that it's just a different way of thinking, but after getting used to load/store, the x86ian way of thinking seemed rather alien to me, especially when in SPARC, you have no less than 32 registers, and in x86, I think it was something like 8.
Plus, your Linux box should require *far less* rebooting than WinNT or 2k.
Well, there may have been several reasons for this. First, almost all computers sold have CD-ROM drives in them. I haven't seen a single puter with a minidisc-rom (MD-ROM?) drive. Second, if there's no data spec for the MD's, and no real way to implement it--i.e. no "data type field"--then they shouldn't put data on there.
Of course, my main concern for these things is the CD-R's susceptibility to vibration, and latency for the bloody things. Digital Photography Review had a review of the latest Mavica, and they reported a latency of 15 seconds, per picture after the exposure for the bloody things, when using a flash card. Granted, it's much better while using a floppy, but still, a floppy drive or a CD-R drive aren't the fastest of media these days. That's fine and dandy for portraits and other stills, but for anything else, it makes it kind of obnoxious, if not downright useless, relegating it to the "toys" section.
Nah... who needs battery life?
Reminds me of an old joke about a Russian gentleman with a suitcase, talking to an American tourist. The gist of the joke was that though it was a nice watch, it needed a battery the size of a suitcase. A Lithium-Ion battery is probably a requirement for these beasties, and by the time you have a charger, why not make it a cradle?
Well, uhm, I completely forgot about that, but my point is, slurping up a user's comment *probably* doesn't require as much rigor from the db as an online auction system.
Oracle!
Exactly =] Seriously, when I do development on my own, I find the Oracle license costs to be prohibitive, so I tend to use PostgreSQL. It may not be nearly as fast, but it has *almost* everything I need.
Is it better than the Natalie Portman/Hot Grits/Trolls/"First Post" Posts on Slashdot? If not, then the makers of the film deserve to be spanked =P