Maybe you have 100GB of data, but use only 200MB of them at any given time. It's simple. You just need to transfer the data you need, and the rest on demand. This is naturally what operating systems do on either local disks or network mounted filesystems. Why do you want to transfer all 100GB when you're not likely to need them all?
On the cost to sustain such service for each user that store 100GB of data, I think it's fair to ask a user that demands that much space to pay an initial deposit that is roughly the size of a new hard drive of the size demanded, which will be refunded when you terminate the service. If you only need 1GB, then the initial deposit might be waived.
As to the service will cost money... of course all services do. And people hesitant to change their lifestyle? It happens all the times, but technology keeps progressing.
I remember seeing in the video for Personal Server an Internet Explorer window connected to one of those personal servers over http. In fact, accessing data over WebDAV, which is an extension to http, is very fesible. This will be your open, robust standard for the open-source community.
What I don't understand is the argument the researchers of Personal Server made that having to plug your device is cumbersome. I don't see why a 3.5in USB Hard Drive, or an iPod, won't do the job.
Unfortunately, VJs have a worker union, which will succeed in outlawing computer generated avatar. This worker union is already aware of the potential problem ever since they watched Toy Story (one).
Okay, I'm just being funny in my previous and this post. Funny in the sense that whenever you make a vision of the future, you have a choice. I just happened to picked a future that everything goes wrong, and tells it.
But my best guess is that we'll have about 1000 channels to watch very shortly, but the consequence of that is 20 channels will be showing you The Matrix at the same time, while other 150 or so cover most hollywood movies all day long; another 300 provide the same right wing news coverage. 50 will be music video channels with the dumb VJ's who don't know what they're talking about. Another 150 will be pure music channels that lets you watch some outdoor scenes or whatever over the music. 300 for sports such that, from time to time, 50 of them will be broadcasting the same game, just with different commentators. Maybe another 30 or so from colleges with a communication school to run their own TV station.
Of course, main-stream programs like Friends, Sex In The City, or The Simpsons can be watched from either the movie channels or the right wing news channels during news breaks. That's because nobody watches the news. Those who would have watched the news now turn to the cheesy reality TV shows. By that time, the reality TV shows become the source of real news, and news report becomes political propaganda for governments to justify their raising war against more poor middle eastern countries, and to persuade their people to boycott Chinese goods, influence, and the people (this hasn't happened yet, but the US is just about to start getting nervious about the developing China).
On the topic where memory management related security issue is blamed on reluctance to switch away from C...
Of course, most of our programming is still being done in C/C++--languages that force programmers to manually mate up a free() with each malloc(). I'm amazed that someone hasn't come up with the idea yet of making malloc() and free() stub-calls into a generic garbage-collected memory allocator and doing away with C memory management altogether.
This is not true. Cyclone does exactly that, and more. Cyclone is a dialect of C. In fact, a lot of C code can be ported to Cyclone with little to no modification. It has garbage collection for stub malloc/free code, and optionally region memory management where you can dictate when some collection of objects are deallocated all at once.
No-one suspected that when Microsoft means 5% to 20% higher training cost for Linux, they mean training people for Linux after they've been trained for Windows. They didn't state it, but it can be inferred from two facts from Julie Giera's Forrester report. First fact: second of the two reasons that companies report higher training cost is because "customers adopted a more conservative approach to training." Second fact: "Linux-only deployments are also less expensive... There was no legacy environment to migrate from and no requirements for multiple operating systems to support."
Fact one tells us that companies who train Linux administrators like to play safe with their current infrastructure, which is Windows. Of course, in order to do that, they must be trained for skills on both Windows and Linux. The second fact confirms that if you just train for Linux, then you can cut cost significantly.
Since according to the report, training for both Windows and Linux costs 15% more than training for only Windows, we can say that training for Linux only costs only 15% than training for Windows. This is a fact hidden in the report that Microsoft is not willing to point out.
That's pretty cool. I actually have two orthogonal approaches in my mind. One is to use the Str module (using emacs regexp) that comes with O'Caml with a syntax that remains fairly elegant. The other one is to use Pcre and a syntax that resembles more of Perl.
One of the difficulty with designing this syntactic sugar is actually deciding how much syntactic sugar you need. In the project you pointed out, he put type coersion into the syntactic sugar. I tend to disagree both with that design decision and the way he uses "adhoc rules" to carry it out.
If you have some ideas and wanna help, let's keep in touch.
Most people don't have good enough sound setup to hear the true quality of an audio CD. Even if you have the perfect equipment, often times the surrounding gives you much more noise, especially if you live in the city. The demos they gave to introduce new formats often sound better simply because they use better speakers in a sound isolated room.
Tracks mixed for additional channels might sound better because the mix can more easily position sound than stereo. However, it's more complicated to setup a 5.1 speaker system for the correct sound image just because of the number of speakers involved, and furnitures and other obstacles in the sound-path.
What the consumer really needs is actually an intelligent sound system that would adapt its characteristics to the way it is setup at home. It would deliberately alter the sound it outputs to sound better in the given environment. I can already see a commercial headline, "make your traditional audio CD sound like DVD-Audio," which is ironic so to speak. While a very useful system indeed, I can see how audiophiles are going to shun from it for the desire of prestine sound.
I use O'Caml for about two years now, and I like it immensely. I also know Perl. When I compare the two, I'd say the problem with O'Caml for scripting is that it's more cumbersome to write regular expression matches in O'Caml than in Perl. And I have to say being able to write regular expression matching easily really is the key to many scripting tasks that I'm aware of (not necessarily what I do).
There is a remedy though. O'Caml comes with camlp4, a Pre-Processor-Pretty-Printer, which basically lets you customize the syntax of your program and add syntactic sugar. I imagine a variant of O'Caml language based on camlp4 that puts regular expression matching in syntactic sugar will make it very suitable for scripting.
In fact, I itch over this idea badly that I might do it. If I have the time.;-)
For the issue of libraries, O'Caml actually has an OpenGL binding before PHP does! Haha.
What they should design is not a room, but a self-contained machine "bed" that helps people sleep. The "bed" would have a sound-proof, single-body glass dome cover with electronic blinds--a coating on the glass that dims when an electric charge is applied. The bed would be equipped with filtered air-conditioner, and it automatically adjusts to the right humidity level. Then they may have a widescreen TV, stereo speakers, and massage machine inside the bed for whatever reason.
It's much easier to buy a "package" that has everything you need, rather than having to buy a "room." At least, this this kind of sleeping machine "bed" would find a very good application on airline flights. If you ever had a 18 hour flight, then I'm sure you'll appreciate this very much.
First of all, a little introduction to my environment. I primarily use Mac OS X (TiBook G4), and keep a Linux server running on the Internet somewhere. I use Solaris 2.6 at work (though it is now more or less a dumb-terminal for the Linux server).
What is unusual about me is that I actually grew up in the world of Microsoft. My first programming uses MASM (Microsoft Macro Assembler) 2.0. I hacked the internals of MS-DOS, hacked the internals of Windows 95 when it came out (for the record, I also hacked Windows 2000 a bit later on). The internals (things like how to override system interrupt tables) were secrets that you don't find in many places. I read books written by other people who reverse engineered, and followed their examples to reverse engineer a lot of stuff. However, doing so violates the EULA. But what did I know? I was only 16. A stupid age.
I didn't find out anything about Unix (other than the fact that MS-DOS filesystem somewhat resembles it) until much later. I started using Cygwin on Windows 2000 and gradually became more dependent on the command line tools. One time, I messed up the system so bad, but I did fix it without reformatting my hard drive. It was more hacks through the registry and C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32. But then I decided to switch to Linux for something different.
At first, I kept a dual boot, but I just never switched back. So I eventually reclaimed the disk space too.
Linux was a very pleasant surprise to me, because everything I want to know (not necessarily I need to know) is available to me. I think that's a great beauty of free software. It's all about freedom of knowledge. I've spent too much youth doing reverse engineering, and I'm sick and tired of it (*). Also, as a yongster, I spent too much time on Windows downloading warez. We didn't have KaZaa back in those days. On Linux, everything I use is perfectly legitimate. And it's good enough for me.
(*) Incidentally, nowadays you can find more developer documentation about Microsoft products on MSDN website, which I would have very much liked earlier.
Now came Mac OS X. It's a nice hybrid of what Windows and Linux have to offer, at the same time. It has a nice UI, and it has the power of command line tools. You can configure a personal site using Apache through point and click (default in localhost/~user), or you can customize/etc/httpd/httpd.conf using vim or emacs. You can configure or compile a program from the command line, or you can use Project Builder (now Xcode) for a nice integrated development environment.
Nowadays I tend to use a lot of remote services like ssh (with X forwarding) or web applications, particularly because I usually keep my machines online, and then I go from one place to another without bring any computers with me. And it's a nice thing (very convenient) that I can use my computers without bring them around. It's what I call ubiquitous computing. I can do that without signing up to some ad-supported and soon-to-be-bankrupt free online services. I can setup whatever service that suit my purpose, instead of what some company thinks I need. Linux does that. Mac OS X does that. Windows is not quite there.
Even if you can run Apache on Windows, you know it never runs as good as on Unix because Apache is not designed for Windows. Even if you can run sshd with Cygwin on Windows, too many things just can't be done because Windows is not designed for sshd. There is Terminal Service for Windows, but you need a Windows Server edition to run it. But hey, I still want to use my machine as a desktop when I get home!
So if you want a punch line... I use Mac OS X and Linux just because they work for me. I haven't used Windows for a good 3 years now, except where Windows machine is the only kind available to use, and I don't miss too much from it.
P.S., my friends are surprised when I'm able to remotely use my computer running Mac OS X or Linux from their Windows machine. I thank Microsoft and some third pa
If you read the arguments of Ken Brown, then read what Tanenbaum has to say, it's immediately clear to someone of average intelligence that Brown does have a consistent argument--with a condition, if you take the time away. In other words, he's trying hard to argue with anachronism.
Unfortunately, most things in the world change in time, so you must be careful what you argue about. For example, according to Tanenbaum, it used to be legal to use Lions' book to teach Unix internals, until AT&T decided to forbid it. Brown would assert that Lions' notes have always been an illegal distribution, and therefore an infringement on Intellectual Property. In fact, he uses this argument to show how Tanenbaum is unaware of IP issues. But this is not true. If you can't tell how events unfold themselves in time, you'll buy his argument.
Furthermore, even if there was Minix code at the beginning for testing purposes, it would be gone by now. It's meaningless trying to argue if there is a possibility that some reminiscent of Minix is still preset in Linux. The only way to find out if that is the case is by analyzing the code line by line. The person making the claim (Ken Brown) is supposed to do that. But he didn't.
Ken Brown is free to say whatever he wants, but this just hurts his own credibility.
I think what your professor wants is not a bitmapped copy of his handwritten notes or some vector curves that resembles such, but actually a typeset version of the lecture notes. If that is the case, assuming that his handwritten notes are sparse (and hopefully without diagrams, since it takes more time to mess around with them), you can definitely do a stack of 100 sheets in a week, or, as someone already suggested, hire some typists to help you out.
No matter what book you choose, the red book or the cactus (green) book, make sure you have a good foundation in Linear Algebra. Rendering geometry with OpenGL is no more than programming the API to do Linear Algebra for you.
for your information...
on
Beyond Megapixels
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· Score: 2, Interesting
At the end of each the articles in this series, I will comment on what I think camera developers have done right and wrong, and what I think is important to the photographer who wants to produce better photographs.
By the generality of this statement, the author doesn't seem to have much resource on reviewing digital cameras case by case, which is necessary to make any useful assessment at all. I recommend this site for getting camera reviews.
They provide full review of some cameras (mostly prosumer kinds), which would include ISO sensitivity comparison against similar cameras, color tone test, auto focus test, lens distortion/shading, and tons of others. My personal favorite is the resolution chart.
Finally, with the latest state of the art digital TV with innovative lip-sync technology, when you turn it on, you would see padding frames (due to lip-sync activation) that would appear as if the image oozes out from the center. And when you turn off the TV and deactive lip-sync, the image would ooze in to a circle and fade.
Believe me, the sooner we expose the RIAA for what it is (i.e. - a corporate protection agency) and for what it is not (artists' protection), the clearer this ludicrous debate will become.
There are two kinds of artists. Artists who are corporate properties (songwriters who don't sing their songs, and singers who don't write songs), and artists who are not corporate properties (but may still have contract with label for distribution). The former kind is what RIAA seeks to protect, since their artistic talents do not stand on their own but is exploited to make profit by a fragile, strategic combination with other talents.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if this is the method adopted by large educational institutions in the end. They won't be able to fight large corporates for very long with the limited funding they do have. It will only take a handful of large law suits to sway them towards censorship.
Not true. The universities tend to comply in a case by case basis (when some computer on the network is subpoenaed) than to restrict general access. Furthermore, there is no need to fight for anyone.
There are other problems created by peer to peer file trading, namely the increase in network utilization. In my school, they decided to charge students rather than restricting file sharing access. They began doing this in Fall 2003.
I imagine most schools would never take the restricted access approach.
Odd as it seems, the new technology that gets introduced every 3 years is your best friend. 6 years ago, we had CD-R. 3 years ago, we had DVD-R. Now we're going to have Blu-ray (or DVD-HD soon). Everytime a new format comes out, density of the media also increases. You can use this opportunity to transfer all your data on the old media to the new one.
The benefit is that you get to reduce the number of media you need to keep (since you can cram more to a disc in the new media format), and you maintain "freshness" of the media as well, everytime you "transburn" your data.
I don't have anything intellectual to say about what Linux is great for and what it lacks. Most people know it well enough. But... when you read that article that says nothing but FUD, and see that guy's photo with an evil smile on a face that says it all--don't you just want to punch him in the face?
Seriously, he claims that Linux usenet users told him to downgrade his hardware. He is falsely exagerrating on the unfounded stereotype that Linux may not support state of the art hardware. I use Linux for a few years now. Unlike him, I never rushed to ask questions, so I end up searching for answers on questions people already asked. I never ran into an answer that tells someone to downgrade their hardware.
A while ago, I had to help someone reinstall Windows XP on a brand new laptop (since we didn't like the way it was preinstalled). Even Windows XP didn't come with functional video (it stuck in VGA mode), ethernet, wireless ethernet, sound, and modem drivers for the laptop, and I had to install all these from manufacturer's driver CD. Now, you ask, wouldn't it be nice if hardware vendors could start providing user-installable drivers on Linux?
Thank you for pointing out my unqualified use of the term, "high level."
I don't think the fact that there exists a machine that executes a language more or less directly means the language is low level. If you want to, you could have designed a Java machine as well. There actually existed such a project, JavaOS on a Java Machine.
I would like to define a high-level language as a language that is capable of expressing closely what you mean to program. If you adopt this definition, then Lisp certainly is a high-level language. The fact that you can translate Lisp directly to Lisp machine is a very nice property of the language.
Let's drop this discussion. This is getting off topic.
There is some area of research about proof carrying code, which is used to type check the bytecode before it is executed. I'm not aware if it is used in practice at all, since the research is still quite primitive. If you're naively doing checksum, then a clever hacker can generate valid checksum as well. If you're doing signed applet approach, then you revert the problem to whether you want to accept code from trusted entity, instead of whether you want to trust the code based on if its semantics are malicious.
Java, among other high level languages (lisp/scheme, Objective CAML, Standard ML, Haskell, etc), are memory safe because they hide the issue of memory management under the carpet by using a garbage collector. Since the language itself does not have the expressive power to deal with memory directly (some has strong type checking that guarantees even stronger memory safety properties), they're considered "safe." However, a clever hacker might handcraft in bytecode, thus bypassing the type system entirely. The runtime system of the language (which you may consider as the operating system in a board sense) still needs to perform dynamic security policy checking.
On the other hand, the critism on Java or any other high level languages as an interpreted language is ill-founded, as those languages can be compiled to run as native executable.
In theory, to use gold as currency, one equates the amount of gold in market with the value of the rest of the goods and services in the market. If both gold mining and resource development are going at the same rate, the value of gold stays approximately the same. However, since there is only a fixed amount of gold on earth, the mining yield would exhaust one day, possibly before other goods and services are exhausted so, especially considering that one can associate value with services as well, not just goods. Goods are constrainted to the amount of natural resources, but services can be provided as long as people will do so.
The implication in using gold as currency is that the value of goods and services will actually deflate in terms of gold as more goods and services are provided! This would bother some people, especially the government, who often uses inflation as a form of taxation.
Has anyone thought of the idea that the universe is really shaped like a Klein Bottle? The interesting idea (if you believe this) is that the Universe would have zero volume and infinite surface area, since its boundary would wrap around like a mobius strip.
If someone speculates that Universe shapes like a horn, it could very well be a piece of the Klein Bottle.
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Maybe you have 100GB of data, but use only 200MB of them at any given time. It's simple. You just need to transfer the data you need, and the rest on demand. This is naturally what operating systems do on either local disks or network mounted filesystems. Why do you want to transfer all 100GB when you're not likely to need them all?
On the cost to sustain such service for each user that store 100GB of data, I think it's fair to ask a user that demands that much space to pay an initial deposit that is roughly the size of a new hard drive of the size demanded, which will be refunded when you terminate the service. If you only need 1GB, then the initial deposit might be waived.
As to the service will cost money ... of course all services do. And people hesitant to change their lifestyle? It happens all the times, but technology keeps progressing.
I remember seeing in the video for Personal Server an Internet Explorer window connected to one of those personal servers over http. In fact, accessing data over WebDAV, which is an extension to http, is very fesible. This will be your open, robust standard for the open-source community.
What I don't understand is the argument the researchers of Personal Server made that having to plug your device is cumbersome. I don't see why a 3.5in USB Hard Drive, or an iPod, won't do the job.
Unfortunately, VJs have a worker union, which will succeed in outlawing computer generated avatar. This worker union is already aware of the potential problem ever since they watched Toy Story (one).
Okay, I'm just being funny in my previous and this post. Funny in the sense that whenever you make a vision of the future, you have a choice. I just happened to picked a future that everything goes wrong, and tells it.
But my best guess is that we'll have about 1000 channels to watch very shortly, but the consequence of that is 20 channels will be showing you The Matrix at the same time, while other 150 or so cover most hollywood movies all day long; another 300 provide the same right wing news coverage. 50 will be music video channels with the dumb VJ's who don't know what they're talking about. Another 150 will be pure music channels that lets you watch some outdoor scenes or whatever over the music. 300 for sports such that, from time to time, 50 of them will be broadcasting the same game, just with different commentators. Maybe another 30 or so from colleges with a communication school to run their own TV station.
Of course, main-stream programs like Friends, Sex In The City, or The Simpsons can be watched from either the movie channels or the right wing news channels during news breaks. That's because nobody watches the news. Those who would have watched the news now turn to the cheesy reality TV shows. By that time, the reality TV shows become the source of real news, and news report becomes political propaganda for governments to justify their raising war against more poor middle eastern countries, and to persuade their people to boycott Chinese goods, influence, and the people (this hasn't happened yet, but the US is just about to start getting nervious about the developing China).
On the topic where memory management related security issue is blamed on reluctance to switch away from C...
This is not true. Cyclone does exactly that, and more. Cyclone is a dialect of C. In fact, a lot of C code can be ported to Cyclone with little to no modification. It has garbage collection for stub malloc/free code, and optionally region memory management where you can dictate when some collection of objects are deallocated all at once.
No-one suspected that when Microsoft means 5% to 20% higher training cost for Linux, they mean training people for Linux after they've been trained for Windows. They didn't state it, but it can be inferred from two facts from Julie Giera's Forrester report. First fact: second of the two reasons that companies report higher training cost is because "customers adopted a more conservative approach to training." Second fact: "Linux-only deployments are also less expensive ... There was no legacy environment to migrate from and no requirements for multiple operating systems to support."
Fact one tells us that companies who train Linux administrators like to play safe with their current infrastructure, which is Windows. Of course, in order to do that, they must be trained for skills on both Windows and Linux. The second fact confirms that if you just train for Linux, then you can cut cost significantly.
Since according to the report, training for both Windows and Linux costs 15% more than training for only Windows, we can say that training for Linux only costs only 15% than training for Windows. This is a fact hidden in the report that Microsoft is not willing to point out.
That's pretty cool. I actually have two orthogonal approaches in my mind. One is to use the Str module (using emacs regexp) that comes with O'Caml with a syntax that remains fairly elegant. The other one is to use Pcre and a syntax that resembles more of Perl.
One of the difficulty with designing this syntactic sugar is actually deciding how much syntactic sugar you need. In the project you pointed out, he put type coersion into the syntactic sugar. I tend to disagree both with that design decision and the way he uses "adhoc rules" to carry it out.
If you have some ideas and wanna help, let's keep in touch.
Most people don't have good enough sound setup to hear the true quality of an audio CD. Even if you have the perfect equipment, often times the surrounding gives you much more noise, especially if you live in the city. The demos they gave to introduce new formats often sound better simply because they use better speakers in a sound isolated room.
Tracks mixed for additional channels might sound better because the mix can more easily position sound than stereo. However, it's more complicated to setup a 5.1 speaker system for the correct sound image just because of the number of speakers involved, and furnitures and other obstacles in the sound-path.
What the consumer really needs is actually an intelligent sound system that would adapt its characteristics to the way it is setup at home. It would deliberately alter the sound it outputs to sound better in the given environment. I can already see a commercial headline, "make your traditional audio CD sound like DVD-Audio," which is ironic so to speak. While a very useful system indeed, I can see how audiophiles are going to shun from it for the desire of prestine sound.
I use O'Caml for about two years now, and I like it immensely. I also know Perl. When I compare the two, I'd say the problem with O'Caml for scripting is that it's more cumbersome to write regular expression matches in O'Caml than in Perl. And I have to say being able to write regular expression matching easily really is the key to many scripting tasks that I'm aware of (not necessarily what I do).
There is a remedy though. O'Caml comes with camlp4, a Pre-Processor-Pretty-Printer, which basically lets you customize the syntax of your program and add syntactic sugar. I imagine a variant of O'Caml language based on camlp4 that puts regular expression matching in syntactic sugar will make it very suitable for scripting.
In fact, I itch over this idea badly that I might do it. If I have the time. ;-)
For the issue of libraries, O'Caml actually has an OpenGL binding before PHP does! Haha.
What they should design is not a room, but a self-contained machine "bed" that helps people sleep. The "bed" would have a sound-proof, single-body glass dome cover with electronic blinds--a coating on the glass that dims when an electric charge is applied. The bed would be equipped with filtered air-conditioner, and it automatically adjusts to the right humidity level. Then they may have a widescreen TV, stereo speakers, and massage machine inside the bed for whatever reason.
It's much easier to buy a "package" that has everything you need, rather than having to buy a "room." At least, this this kind of sleeping machine "bed" would find a very good application on airline flights. If you ever had a 18 hour flight, then I'm sure you'll appreciate this very much.
First of all, a little introduction to my environment. I primarily use Mac OS X (TiBook G4), and keep a Linux server running on the Internet somewhere. I use Solaris 2.6 at work (though it is now more or less a dumb-terminal for the Linux server).
What is unusual about me is that I actually grew up in the world of Microsoft. My first programming uses MASM (Microsoft Macro Assembler) 2.0. I hacked the internals of MS-DOS, hacked the internals of Windows 95 when it came out (for the record, I also hacked Windows 2000 a bit later on). The internals (things like how to override system interrupt tables) were secrets that you don't find in many places. I read books written by other people who reverse engineered, and followed their examples to reverse engineer a lot of stuff. However, doing so violates the EULA. But what did I know? I was only 16. A stupid age.
I didn't find out anything about Unix (other than the fact that MS-DOS filesystem somewhat resembles it) until much later. I started using Cygwin on Windows 2000 and gradually became more dependent on the command line tools. One time, I messed up the system so bad, but I did fix it without reformatting my hard drive. It was more hacks through the registry and C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32. But then I decided to switch to Linux for something different.
At first, I kept a dual boot, but I just never switched back. So I eventually reclaimed the disk space too.
Linux was a very pleasant surprise to me, because everything I want to know (not necessarily I need to know) is available to me. I think that's a great beauty of free software. It's all about freedom of knowledge. I've spent too much youth doing reverse engineering, and I'm sick and tired of it (*). Also, as a yongster, I spent too much time on Windows downloading warez. We didn't have KaZaa back in those days. On Linux, everything I use is perfectly legitimate. And it's good enough for me.
(*) Incidentally, nowadays you can find more developer documentation about Microsoft products on MSDN website, which I would have very much liked earlier.
Now came Mac OS X. It's a nice hybrid of what Windows and Linux have to offer, at the same time. It has a nice UI, and it has the power of command line tools. You can configure a personal site using Apache through point and click (default in localhost/~user), or you can customize /etc/httpd/httpd.conf using vim or emacs. You can configure or compile a program from the command line, or you can use Project Builder (now Xcode) for a nice integrated development environment.
Nowadays I tend to use a lot of remote services like ssh (with X forwarding) or web applications, particularly because I usually keep my machines online, and then I go from one place to another without bring any computers with me. And it's a nice thing (very convenient) that I can use my computers without bring them around. It's what I call ubiquitous computing. I can do that without signing up to some ad-supported and soon-to-be-bankrupt free online services. I can setup whatever service that suit my purpose, instead of what some company thinks I need. Linux does that. Mac OS X does that. Windows is not quite there.
Even if you can run Apache on Windows, you know it never runs as good as on Unix because Apache is not designed for Windows. Even if you can run sshd with Cygwin on Windows, too many things just can't be done because Windows is not designed for sshd. There is Terminal Service for Windows, but you need a Windows Server edition to run it. But hey, I still want to use my machine as a desktop when I get home!
So if you want a punch line ... I use Mac OS X and Linux just because they work for me. I haven't used Windows for a good 3 years now, except where Windows machine is the only kind available to use, and I don't miss too much from it.
P.S., my friends are surprised when I'm able to remotely use my computer running Mac OS X or Linux from their Windows machine. I thank Microsoft and some third pa
If you read the arguments of Ken Brown, then read what Tanenbaum has to say, it's immediately clear to someone of average intelligence that Brown does have a consistent argument--with a condition, if you take the time away. In other words, he's trying hard to argue with anachronism.
Unfortunately, most things in the world change in time, so you must be careful what you argue about. For example, according to Tanenbaum, it used to be legal to use Lions' book to teach Unix internals, until AT&T decided to forbid it. Brown would assert that Lions' notes have always been an illegal distribution, and therefore an infringement on Intellectual Property. In fact, he uses this argument to show how Tanenbaum is unaware of IP issues. But this is not true. If you can't tell how events unfold themselves in time, you'll buy his argument.
Furthermore, even if there was Minix code at the beginning for testing purposes, it would be gone by now. It's meaningless trying to argue if there is a possibility that some reminiscent of Minix is still preset in Linux. The only way to find out if that is the case is by analyzing the code line by line. The person making the claim (Ken Brown) is supposed to do that. But he didn't.
Ken Brown is free to say whatever he wants, but this just hurts his own credibility.
I think what your professor wants is not a bitmapped copy of his handwritten notes or some vector curves that resembles such, but actually a typeset version of the lecture notes. If that is the case, assuming that his handwritten notes are sparse (and hopefully without diagrams, since it takes more time to mess around with them), you can definitely do a stack of 100 sheets in a week, or, as someone already suggested, hire some typists to help you out.
No matter what book you choose, the red book or the cactus (green) book, make sure you have a good foundation in Linear Algebra. Rendering geometry with OpenGL is no more than programming the API to do Linear Algebra for you.
At the end of each the articles in this series, I will comment on what I think camera developers have done right and wrong, and what I think is important to the photographer who wants to produce better photographs.
By the generality of this statement, the author doesn't seem to have much resource on reviewing digital cameras case by case, which is necessary to make any useful assessment at all. I recommend this site for getting camera reviews.
They provide full review of some cameras (mostly prosumer kinds), which would include ISO sensitivity comparison against similar cameras, color tone test, auto focus test, lens distortion/shading, and tons of others. My personal favorite is the resolution chart.
Finally, with the latest state of the art digital TV with innovative lip-sync technology, when you turn it on, you would see padding frames (due to lip-sync activation) that would appear as if the image oozes out from the center. And when you turn off the TV and deactive lip-sync, the image would ooze in to a circle and fade.
I love nostalgia.
Believe me, the sooner we expose the RIAA for what it is (i.e. - a corporate protection agency) and for what it is not (artists' protection), the clearer this ludicrous debate will become.
There are two kinds of artists. Artists who are corporate properties (songwriters who don't sing their songs, and singers who don't write songs), and artists who are not corporate properties (but may still have contract with label for distribution). The former kind is what RIAA seeks to protect, since their artistic talents do not stand on their own but is exploited to make profit by a fragile, strategic combination with other talents.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if this is the method adopted by large educational institutions in the end. They won't be able to fight large corporates for very long with the limited funding they do have. It will only take a handful of large law suits to sway them towards censorship.
Not true. The universities tend to comply in a case by case basis (when some computer on the network is subpoenaed) than to restrict general access. Furthermore, there is no need to fight for anyone.
There are other problems created by peer to peer file trading, namely the increase in network utilization. In my school, they decided to charge students rather than restricting file sharing access. They began doing this in Fall 2003.
I imagine most schools would never take the restricted access approach.
Odd as it seems, the new technology that gets introduced every 3 years is your best friend. 6 years ago, we had CD-R. 3 years ago, we had DVD-R. Now we're going to have Blu-ray (or DVD-HD soon). Everytime a new format comes out, density of the media also increases. You can use this opportunity to transfer all your data on the old media to the new one.
The benefit is that you get to reduce the number of media you need to keep (since you can cram more to a disc in the new media format), and you maintain "freshness" of the media as well, everytime you "transburn" your data.
I don't have anything intellectual to say about what Linux is great for and what it lacks. Most people know it well enough. But ... when you read that article that says nothing but FUD, and see that guy's photo with an evil smile on a face that says it all--don't you just want to punch him in the face?
Seriously, he claims that Linux usenet users told him to downgrade his hardware. He is falsely exagerrating on the unfounded stereotype that Linux may not support state of the art hardware. I use Linux for a few years now. Unlike him, I never rushed to ask questions, so I end up searching for answers on questions people already asked. I never ran into an answer that tells someone to downgrade their hardware.
A while ago, I had to help someone reinstall Windows XP on a brand new laptop (since we didn't like the way it was preinstalled). Even Windows XP didn't come with functional video (it stuck in VGA mode), ethernet, wireless ethernet, sound, and modem drivers for the laptop, and I had to install all these from manufacturer's driver CD. Now, you ask, wouldn't it be nice if hardware vendors could start providing user-installable drivers on Linux?
Thank you for pointing out my unqualified use of the term, "high level."
I don't think the fact that there exists a machine that executes a language more or less directly means the language is low level. If you want to, you could have designed a Java machine as well. There actually existed such a project, JavaOS on a Java Machine.
I would like to define a high-level language as a language that is capable of expressing closely what you mean to program. If you adopt this definition, then Lisp certainly is a high-level language. The fact that you can translate Lisp directly to Lisp machine is a very nice property of the language.
Let's drop this discussion. This is getting off topic.
There is some area of research about proof carrying code, which is used to type check the bytecode before it is executed. I'm not aware if it is used in practice at all, since the research is still quite primitive. If you're naively doing checksum, then a clever hacker can generate valid checksum as well. If you're doing signed applet approach, then you revert the problem to whether you want to accept code from trusted entity, instead of whether you want to trust the code based on if its semantics are malicious.
Java, among other high level languages (lisp/scheme, Objective CAML, Standard ML, Haskell, etc), are memory safe because they hide the issue of memory management under the carpet by using a garbage collector. Since the language itself does not have the expressive power to deal with memory directly (some has strong type checking that guarantees even stronger memory safety properties), they're considered "safe." However, a clever hacker might handcraft in bytecode, thus bypassing the type system entirely. The runtime system of the language (which you may consider as the operating system in a board sense) still needs to perform dynamic security policy checking.
On the other hand, the critism on Java or any other high level languages as an interpreted language is ill-founded, as those languages can be compiled to run as native executable.
In theory, to use gold as currency, one equates the amount of gold in market with the value of the rest of the goods and services in the market. If both gold mining and resource development are going at the same rate, the value of gold stays approximately the same. However, since there is only a fixed amount of gold on earth, the mining yield would exhaust one day, possibly before other goods and services are exhausted so, especially considering that one can associate value with services as well, not just goods. Goods are constrainted to the amount of natural resources, but services can be provided as long as people will do so.
The implication in using gold as currency is that the value of goods and services will actually deflate in terms of gold as more goods and services are provided! This would bother some people, especially the government, who often uses inflation as a form of taxation.
Has anyone thought of the idea that the universe is really shaped like a Klein Bottle? The interesting idea (if you believe this) is that the Universe would have zero volume and infinite surface area, since its boundary would wrap around like a mobius strip.
If someone speculates that Universe shapes like a horn, it could very well be a piece of the Klein Bottle.