Many in the movie industry hope digital cinema will help revive theater attendance
Oh c'mon! Yes many of us our geeks and notice the occasional crack or 'crop circle' on our latest action sequence despite coming at us at 30-odd frames per second. Lets be realistic for a moment. IMAX movies aren't usually hits, and that's the extreme of digital quality to the point of looking 3D. Why do they possibly think that pixelating and upping the resolution of my movie may make me come to more of them?
It's a lame excuse to blame more on pirates and go for a CHEAPER distribution method on the long run (once the equipment is in place) versus distributing reels late the night before a movie opens at the last minute. It means they can pump more crap at you and if it fails in a week, then there's little cost in having it shown.
To a degree, Dolby, DTS and similar technologies will emmerse the watchers in the movie. But would you notice an additional two channels? Would you notice if that audio was done at 4KHz wider range? another 100Kbps? Probably not. In the same way, you won't notice the difference (at least in a positive direction) for digital projection versus analog film projection, which has already been enhanced so much already.
Censorship by citizens, censorship by the government is bad enough, but this could lead to a disaster.
Censorship in itself is considered bad in many ways. This is nothing new to anyone. On the other hand, we build a society based on tolerance. We base a society on right living, accepting different cultures, and fairness to everybody. Discrimination should not be tolerated.
To quote: "Section 319(1) [44] of the Criminal Code prohibits the communication of statements made in any public place which incite hatred where such incitements are likely to lead to a breach of the peace."- This is the law- criminal law in fact. Now the person who wrote it is guilty. Lets move on to the hosting provider...
Frankly, the ISP shouldn't have to do anything unless ordered to. And, if in doubt, they should have contacted the authorities
I'd agree with you. The ISP upon seeing objectionable content has a choice to make. That choice is "is this violating any laws within our province/country or the customer's province/country". Then the question is "does this violate our terms of service, acceptable use policy, and so on". If it's not against the law, and doesn't violate the terms (including the ISPs reserved choice to decide what content is on their network), then there is not a problem. If this violated a written law, then this is something that their lawyer should have told them.
This hosting provider runs a system located in Canada, and is distributing content from it, and is hence under Canadian law. Plain and simple, if they are distributing illegal materialKNOWINGLY then they are wrong, and should give this attention and remove/disable the material.
Well this is Vonage's argument. Vonage is suggesting indirectly that this they are degrading their service in order to bring up their own. If they're not doing that- if they are bringing up their own without providing any special treatment to anyone else, then there's nothing wrong with it. There's nothing wrong with having routers prioritize their traffic. there's nothing wrong with accepting QoS bits for their traffic. There is something wrong with purposefully degrading their competitors traffic in order to make their look better. Now this is all speculation of course.
If Vonage has just as much of a fair chance as MSN Messenger, Skype, and other services based on their 'normal' package, and if this QoS fee gives the user priority traffic to everywhere as needed (via QoS), then it is an enhancement to their network, and you pay a premium for it. This is even if their own service 'bundles' this QoS service. If they are throttling VoIP traffic specificly to make their own service more appealing, or cheaper when combined with the fees, that's when we have a problem.
they might just start degrading everybody's latency unilaterally, and only restore it back to normal if you pay the fee.
Technically there's nothing wrong with that. While it's shoddy business practice, that's no different than a cable provider packing more people onto their network, slowing your speed, shaping your traffic, and then offering a premium service... which is exactly what Rogers did (my area used to be so much faster, I used to get 6Mbit downstream for 20-odd bucks CDN a month, and I had no shaping).
Rogers (formerly a Shaw area) around here has Ultra-Lite, Lite, Express (3Mbit down), and Extreme (6Mbit down). Each provides a different maximum speed and level of service for customers who feel the need to save money and receive a service comparable to just over dialup, to extreme for users who want 6Mbit downstream. You get more capability and pay a premium for the ability to burst into higher speeds, despite most users sitting at idle for much of the time, and still having a total transfer cap.
What Vonage is claiming is that this is different than any other sort of service addition (and that this makes them priced higher than Ma Bell and hence can't compete, or can't compete with similar offerings in the area).
My argument is that they are saying "our service does not guarentee any latency, and we cater more to raw throughput, the traditional measure. We'll give you the possibility to have less latency, which is useful for real-time uses such as voice and video, but for a fee". How is this different than "we'll give you the possibility to have higher burst speeds useful for mass file transfers".
Users with specific uses that aren't a part of 'the masses' will get charged. I pay a few dollars a month extra on my phone line for touch-tone. I pay for the ability to use on-demand with Rogers. I pay a premium for GSM versus using EDGE/GPRS. This is life. You pay for what you use. When _everyone_ has a blackberry- then the standard rates will include it. Until then, the people who want e-mail will pay for it, so that those who don't won't have to.
This of course all assumes that they actually take these into account and that they do benefit their service. If it's a scam, then we have another story.
I should point out that ISP blocking makes these folks essentially useless, not to mention limiting upstream.
However, I hate that my ISP is packet filtering for things like torrents (Rogers), one has to wonder why they fail to filter for the things that uselessly waste their network rather than the people who actually use it.
Which comes first? The popular distro or the market share?
Think if Dell offered Linux to the average consumer and worked with the Vendor to provide support it'd give them the market share? Of course. Dell would make colourful foldout instructions for whatever Distro they choose. Dell would make drivers specificly for the distro they choose. Just like they did with RedHat on the server OSs (try getting OpenManage to run on other distros... hell in a handbasket).
So I'd say this again- if Dell were to pick one, that'd see a big boom in popularity and familiarity with users.
Obvious exaggeration, but I'm glad you managed to get [or failed to get] the joke. Microsoft obviously tests their software considerably, but either doesn't catch countless bugs or fails to deem them as important. On something as important as an operating system, that should really be tested to the point of being next to bug free. Think of the countless bugs in the past- worms that can infect through obvious oversights in networking code, registry corruption, etc- all crucial to the system's operation.
I guess the point is- As opposed to improving the core operating system in Windows 98 and Windows ME for example, or 2000 through XP, they add new visual features that are shown to the user to make them think the world is a better place. I'd rather have them leave out the games section, media player, etc, and actually pay attention to what matters.
How much did you pay for your car? Now, how much did you pay for all the software that you're currently using? Do you need me to go on?
How many units of my car are sold? How much R&D, testing, certification, and of course parts go into my car? Now, how many units of software are produced at next to no cost to the developer?
My argument is somewhat weakened by the fact that paying more for software doesn't actually seem to achieve a higher level of quality
You'd think higher price means fewer consumer customers and more corporate customers. Corporate customers leads to feature bloat. Corporate customers SHOULDN'T accept failure, but do as they seem to be able to afford it a lot more than say, a kid who just lost his university paper.
If you really paid $30k for your complete computer system, it bloody well ought to be reliable, secure and accurate.
Not really. MS Access better be robust if it's going to get my data. MySQL better be robust if it's going to get my data. Oracle better be robust if it's going to get my data. Data loss (as this example) is still data loss. Whether I (or a company) paid nothing, $700, or $70,000 for my database software, it needs to work reliably. I'd be just as annoyed if crackers broke into my linux servers than my windows servers. So why would it be any different? [note- multiple contributors creates a difficulty to blame in many open source projects- lets assume one developer or group of developers here].
... marginal cost...
In one sense, I'd agree with you, because one can't deny that effect. On the other hand though, who cares what the marginal cost or marginal revenue are? All the company cares about is the TOTAL cost and TOTAL revenue (with the time value of money and cash flow in there). The software giant determines a good estimate of how many units they're going to sell and at what price, and has an idea of revenue (determine two and you have the third). They have a good idea of cost from experience as well.
So the question becomes, at what point have they invested enough and are ready to reap the benefits and let the gravy train roll in. At what point do they sit back and say that it's "good enough" despite not being done.
I commend what PS3 is doing compared to XBox360. They could have easily said, knowing the XBox360 date, that they are going to rush out development. They didn't. Microsoft's strategy was to get established. Get the games, get the early adopters to purchase despite a high price tag. But no- PS3 is holding it's ground with a vague timeframe as to when it might be ready (with no precise dates). It'll be ready when it is ready. No production flaws wiht power supplies and faulty drives. They're putting technical superiority above short term profit, and creating a better system as a result of it... rather than rehashing the XBox with a faster processor and better graphics board.
Non-free software is sold, but most of the extant copies are generally pirated (this is for the stuff we use - it's different for big corporate software).
Which came first- the chicken or the egg? Shareware was immensely popular for the longest time until developers got greedy. Microsoft Office used to be just over $100 and come on a series of 30-odd floppy discs for Windows 3.1. Why is it worth $750-$1000 for the near same set of features? Because they know people need it. Remember what I said before about picking two of the three. They set the revenue (probably based on the estimated cost), set the price, and that determines the number of units. If they want to sell more, the price is going to have to slip down.
I guess what I"m saying is that if, like an XBox game, if Office was worth $40, who wouldn't buy it? But these days Windows + Office > $1000 wh
assembler is still better because it's a human readable form of EXACTLY what the computer is doing
Yes, but one has to keep in mind that at one point everything was assembly. These days even [most of the] kernels are mostly written in C. Why? Even some of the best assembly programmers can't match the optimisations performed by a good compiler on complex jobs. Anything complex could really benefit from a good compiler with its optimizations.
Looking at C, C++, and Java I don't know what the instructions REALLY do.
Decompile the libraries, or since you already have the C source, just compile to the assembly stage:
gcc -O2 -S -c inputfile.c
This will create inputfile.s
If you want to see both the C code and assembly code mixed together (as comments)
gcc -c -g -Wa,-a,-ad inputfile.c > inputfile.lst
Just because your profs don't know what it's doing in the underlying layer, doesn't mean you shouldn't. Install binutils/gcc and download the source to the glibc of your choosing and see what the assembler output is. Try and follow it.
That kind of lack of control really irks me
You're complaining about the _lack_ of control with C? C being probably the language that gives you the most control over all of them (less asm of course)? C being the language of choice for operating system kernels? C being the one that lets you screw up as much as you want, just going ahead and overwriting memory and not doing this stuff for you like some languages that will remain nameless? C doesn't offer you enough control? Then you must be hardcore.
If I got a car that failed to start 5 mornings of the year, I'd be pretty pissed off. If I got a TV that wasn't compatible with channel three or seven, I'd be rather annoyed. If my car's doors unlocked randomly on the third Tuesday of the month, I'd be frustrated. If I got a VCR that couldn't timer record at 58 minutes after the hour, I'd be pretty pissed off too!
So why do we let our computer programs have these problems? Why do programs need to be killed or the computer restarted at random (freezing during startup isn't as common since win2k). Why do we accept a computer program that doesn't seem to handle the formats established at the time with ease (think Windows XP destroying exif information on jpgs)? Why do we accept holes in our software that lets crooks in along with their bots, spyware, and adware? Why Why why?!?
I've always been a fan of a certain car maker (and still am), but when I got a 2004 sport sedan and a few weeks later had my dash light up brighter than a christmas tree, the dealer tells me that their software/flash upgrade to the car should fix the issue. Sure enough, it did, and by the forums, it wasn't an uncommon problem with early production of the model. But this is stemming into other areas. An audio system I got in 2000 couldn't read any CD-Rs- obviously it didn't spend enough time in testing, as this should have come up. My car had bugs! The EPROM on my new furnace needed to be replaced. This is getting silly!
Sure bugs are bound to get through, but it is the programmer's responsibility to properly test their program. I'd rather Windows 2000 be released today and have it stable as anything and a solid performer. This isn't how things work. Microsoft spends more time making Spider Solitaire for Vista then they do testing the OS itself.
Updates aren't always better. Sometimes they add functionality, like additional CD Recorder capability, updated roster information for a sports game, security fixes, etc. Other times they add bloat and problems.
Anyone remember ICQ 99b and the 98's? Memory footprint of about 1MB, fast as anything, fixed the data corruption issues of previous versions. Good upgrade. Then recall late 99 versions and 2000+, where the memory footprint was about 80MB, the thing took a good minute to start up. It was buggy, and an ad-city. Then they wonder why it died a horrible death to the favour of MSN? Pack hundreds of features in there and make it slow as anything and nobody will go back. Wait... That's a good description of Windows.
There's actually money to be made based on the perception that there's not. A friend who lived near me was in his early 20's and started squeegeeing in Toronto (before it was banned). It was enough (and more fun) than his lovely job at a law office.
I'm not saying all, or even most, people are doing well for themselves, because by golly, I'd hope many would find help. There are facilities available to people- we have shelters with lots of room all over Toronto, and yet people stay on the street- be it due to pride, information, or more. Police go around during 'cold spells' and bring them in. Many of those on the street don't want to be helped, or they'd seek the help offered to them.
Now- squeegeeing: 4 washers (can rotate with helper for a break) 1 helper (gets water, supplies, food, etc)
** assuming an equal cut for everyone
Timing of light: 45 seconds, 0.75 minutes Cars serviced per light per side: 4 (2 people) Cars serviced total: 8 (4 people) Average revenue per car: $1.50 Average revenue per light: $12.00 Light changes per hour: 80
Revenue per hour: $960 Hours per day: 8 Revenue per day: $7,680 Equal cut per person: $1,536 Days per week working: 6 Per person, per week: $9,216 weeks worked per year: 50 (2 weeks vacation) per person, per year: $460,800 TAX FREE
Expenses: 5 buckets, public bathroom for water (maybe arrangement with local business to supply), squeegee, bag for money- lets say $250/yr
That's some pretty good profit- $460,000+ * 5 people = $2.3Million
We provide e-mail to a few thousand domains and know this feeling very well. The question becomes when is too much too much?
At one point, POP was king and there was no other way. Dialup connections were the norm for most home users and some business, yet alone 8k ISDN lines for other business. Someone sending an e-mail of more than a megabyte was unusual, as it would take 10 minutes of transfer in order to send to the server. Files often went out on discs and a few MB was thousands of e-mails most commonly. Digital photography also barely existed.
Flash forward to today- most cable connections can easily do 50KB/s upstream and 350KB/s downstream. More offices are dumping expensive T1s in favour of DSL and Cable 'business' offerings. Sending pictures of your vacation at 8MegPixels without any resizing isn't uncommon... to your entire address book.
The war for 'more space' by Webmail providers have left users _expecting_ gigabytes. Hotmail went from 2MB to 10MB and all the way to 1GB in a couple years. GMail came in at 1GB. Yahoo is now up around 1GB as well... and that's all for free. Just imagine how much space you could use otherwise?
People don't want mail on their computer's anymore. Tons of our personal and small business users are simply heading to webmail systems like Horde and not leaving them. They're becoming DHTML applications rather than simple 'on the go' web frontends for basic functionality. People expect their mail to be everywhere and work from anywhere.
So now onto topic- We have some users that use POP accounts and have a few MB in their inbox at any time. We have users who use webmail/imap and clean up regularly, archiving only a few mail messages. Finally we have people who are storing gigabytes on mail systems with 15KRPM discs with every attachment they've ever recieved.
I regularly get calls complaining that our 25MB message size limit is too low and people are reaching it. I have customers sending CAD drawings and engineering programs across the world creating huge spikes in any transfer graph (which at 95th percentile... well anyway).
So who are you to say 'too much'? It's whatever the business need justifies. I store archives of customer requests for some time, as I often reference them. Who's to say that people need or don't need what they have? It's based on their business and their mail habbits.
Common strategies for forcing positive behaviour:
- regularly (monthly) strip attachments off of old (>a few years) e-mail
- remove old sent items for a few years back or archive them into another system that could be a lower priority restore.
- expire old messages and be sure to purge/pack regularly... those PST files will always keep growing, maintaining history and archive information.
Essentially, the admin usually can't say "this is too much" unless they know the user need to it. Some customers, for legal reasons, need the request and attachment for 1MM widgets just in case...
To quote the Wendy's commercial, "Where's the Beef?".
No seriously! Where's this article? I'd imagine three years and 1.25 million dollars would produce a hefty article. I'd love to give it a read! "US Department of Homeland Security has released a report on open source quality"- so where's the release?
It cites one or two figures, and throws around lots of buzz-words, but there's no comparison? No information? No study of reliability? Nothing at all.
PS: As a side-note, if they 'studied' 15 million lines of code over three years, and were able to identify defects, shouldn't we be seeing a nice patchset coming from Coverity sometime soon... Think about it. It's easy to tell someone else to fix it, but a good part of OSS is giving back.
I know Slashdot doesn't really have curse filters, but I don't want to be the one to find out when it does... No to mention that it just seems like an unnecessary cuss for Slashdot. I also like fsck instead of the usual four-letter f-word.
Lets be realistic for a second- with the exception of some big projects (kernel, KDE, GNU-sponsored projects) and corporate projects (such as Inter7's vpopmail funded by its own customers, or uw-imap being funded by a university), most of the smaller or lesser-known open source developers are doing something that they enjoy and gaining experience. They're adding a line on the resume, and fulfilling a need which they have (I need a program that does ____) or that someone they know has.
Given that, this is experience. It's a way to make a name for yourself, perfect your skills, and give back to the community. That doesn't mean these people are against closed source, but they feel that their product will get more exposure if it's open and freely available.
Most developers aren't in the "it has to be OSS" mentaility, but rather in the "this project could be bigger if more people contributed", and of course that project is their baby- their time, their effort.
Again not to say that this is all of the cases, but without direct benefits, there's always something- be it credit, fame, or experience.
Now some bigger projects doing it is what this article is speaking of, but the general statement on open source is bogus! Open source simply says "this could be of value to someone else, and admitedly, they could probably reproduce it anyway by starting from scratch".
Obviously NTP's strategy was to drag this out as long as possible
Of course. The issue is simple, and deemed a problem with the legal system in question. There have already been numerous rulings for either party, as well as disputes on the patents. The patents have been evaluated and thrown out, then accepted then ruled invalid again. The court cases had rulings and then they end up right back in court becuase one party (duh) is unhappy with the result. This could go on for eternity really.
So NTP will keep trying till they win. RIM will do the same. Nobody will be happy. Meanwhile there's uncertainty as to what the final result is. It's bad press. It's bad accounting (they essentially need to make sure that should they have to pay something out for damages, that they have that allocated in a reserve on their books). It's a poor use of time. Essentially they will never win, because there's never a clear answer in these cases.
Judge Spencer didn't like RIM for whatever reason
How about the booming Canadian company taking away the business of companies like Palm and local cell makers? Please- no matter how you look at it, this was a bold statement saying "you're playing by our rules... bi7ch". And of course he's wrong- not one person on Slashdot has said "Oh- that NTP company... good things... good things" and people here probably know more of the issue than the ones deciding the case.
Who do you think is paying for Bush to download his music? I'm sure it's on his work computer with a good white-house credit card number.
Just be happy that iTunes is easy to use- could you imagine how many hours (and how much less would get done around here) if Bush had to download torrents in order to get the latest bee-bop hit?
The pen, a lovely analog device, is horribly inacurate, requires calibration, and requires two hands. That was one thing when Palm was competing with writing in a notebook and wanted things familar, but in this day and world where people love the mouse and a few buttons, the pen is just a hassle. The ability to do anything on a BlackBerry with just one hand makes it rather ideal for many cases (this being calendaring and looking up addresses, entry of course is another story), not to mention having a keyboard (newer Palms of course do).
It's just sloppy to use the stylus, and requires too much attention from whatever else it is that you're doing (driving, on the can, etc).
Tablets haven't taken on because they're about 15" diag because of the screen, about 1" thick, have a turning radius for converting it to a tablet/pc in some cases where they convert, create heat, noise, and suck back power in a matter of a few hours.
They're very capable for situations where they are needed (I most often see them in doctors offices to bring a patient a diagram 3D model of a proceedure), but when they're too big and too incapable of doing what a handheld needs to do.
That's like me getting a portable TV for the car and you carrying around a 13" CRT television and a power inverter... I'd imagine mine will be much more useful.
Why'd they even leave MP3? I'm tired of these new formats. MP3, OGG, WMA, RealAudio. Please. RealAudio is a joke- horrible player, poor licensing, awful quality, etc. OGG will never be taken up by corporate america (just look at the slow take to MP3 players, which is being phased out these days). WMA is just too proprietary and lacks that easy compatibility with older devices, plus it requires some good licensing from MS.
I know people say there are quality advantages over Mp3 (however small), but it's completely not worth it. A 192kbit MP3 will do quite enough to make some damn good CD quality audio. All the other formats just go and make up for it with adding SRS/WOW and other filters, destroying the quality anyway.
I see this linked to Microsoft's Origami Project. The iPod/cell phone/video player/messenging and all the other speculation may be getting some sort of e-mail.
I really see people in the streets jumping in order to delete their mail, snapping to open it, touching their finger to their nose to create a new message...
oh and tossing their Microsoft Origami across the room:)
Slashdot Mirror
Oh c'mon! Yes many of us our geeks and notice the occasional crack or 'crop circle' on our latest action sequence despite coming at us at 30-odd frames per second. Lets be realistic for a moment. IMAX movies aren't usually hits, and that's the extreme of digital quality to the point of looking 3D. Why do they possibly think that pixelating and upping the resolution of my movie may make me come to more of them?
It's a lame excuse to blame more on pirates and go for a CHEAPER distribution method on the long run (once the equipment is in place) versus distributing reels late the night before a movie opens at the last minute. It means they can pump more crap at you and if it fails in a week, then there's little cost in having it shown.
To a degree, Dolby, DTS and similar technologies will emmerse the watchers in the movie. But would you notice an additional two channels? Would you notice if that audio was done at 4KHz wider range? another 100Kbps? Probably not. In the same way, you won't notice the difference (at least in a positive direction) for digital projection versus analog film projection, which has already been enhanced so much already.
-M
Censorship in itself is considered bad in many ways. This is nothing new to anyone. On the other hand, we build a society based on tolerance. We base a society on right living, accepting different cultures, and fairness to everybody. Discrimination should not be tolerated.
Start with http://www.media-awareness.ca/english/resources/a
To quote: "Section 319(1) [44] of the Criminal Code prohibits the communication of statements made in any public place which incite hatred where such incitements are likely to lead to a breach of the peace."- This is the law- criminal law in fact. Now the person who wrote it is guilty. Lets move on to the hosting provider...
I'd agree with you. The ISP upon seeing objectionable content has a choice to make. That choice is "is this violating any laws within our province/country or the customer's province/country". Then the question is "does this violate our terms of service, acceptable use policy, and so on". If it's not against the law, and doesn't violate the terms (including the ISPs reserved choice to decide what content is on their network), then there is not a problem. If this violated a written law, then this is something that their lawyer should have told them.
This hosting provider runs a system located in Canada, and is distributing content from it, and is hence under Canadian law. Plain and simple, if they are distributing illegal material KNOWINGLY then they are wrong, and should give this attention and remove/disable the material.
-M
Well this is Vonage's argument. Vonage is suggesting indirectly that this they are degrading their service in order to bring up their own. If they're not doing that- if they are bringing up their own without providing any special treatment to anyone else, then there's nothing wrong with it. There's nothing wrong with having routers prioritize their traffic. there's nothing wrong with accepting QoS bits for their traffic. There is something wrong with purposefully degrading their competitors traffic in order to make their look better. Now this is all speculation of course.
If Vonage has just as much of a fair chance as MSN Messenger, Skype, and other services based on their 'normal' package, and if this QoS fee gives the user priority traffic to everywhere as needed (via QoS), then it is an enhancement to their network, and you pay a premium for it. This is even if their own service 'bundles' this QoS service. If they are throttling VoIP traffic specificly to make their own service more appealing, or cheaper when combined with the fees, that's when we have a problem.
-M
Technically there's nothing wrong with that. While it's shoddy business practice, that's no different than a cable provider packing more people onto their network, slowing your speed, shaping your traffic, and then offering a premium service... which is exactly what Rogers did (my area used to be so much faster, I used to get 6Mbit downstream for 20-odd bucks CDN a month, and I had no shaping).
-M
Rogers (formerly a Shaw area) around here has Ultra-Lite, Lite, Express (3Mbit down), and Extreme (6Mbit down). Each provides a different maximum speed and level of service for customers who feel the need to save money and receive a service comparable to just over dialup, to extreme for users who want 6Mbit downstream. You get more capability and pay a premium for the ability to burst into higher speeds, despite most users sitting at idle for much of the time, and still having a total transfer cap.
What Vonage is claiming is that this is different than any other sort of service addition (and that this makes them priced higher than Ma Bell and hence can't compete, or can't compete with similar offerings in the area).
My argument is that they are saying "our service does not guarentee any latency, and we cater more to raw throughput, the traditional measure. We'll give you the possibility to have less latency, which is useful for real-time uses such as voice and video, but for a fee". How is this different than "we'll give you the possibility to have higher burst speeds useful for mass file transfers".
Users with specific uses that aren't a part of 'the masses' will get charged. I pay a few dollars a month extra on my phone line for touch-tone. I pay for the ability to use on-demand with Rogers. I pay a premium for GSM versus using EDGE/GPRS. This is life. You pay for what you use. When _everyone_ has a blackberry- then the standard rates will include it. Until then, the people who want e-mail will pay for it, so that those who don't won't have to.
This of course all assumes that they actually take these into account and that they do benefit their service. If it's a scam, then we have another story.
I should point out that ISP blocking makes these folks essentially useless, not to mention limiting upstream.
However, I hate that my ISP is packet filtering for things like torrents (Rogers), one has to wonder why they fail to filter for the things that uselessly waste their network rather than the people who actually use it.
-M
Next up, global warming is at an all-time high and ice caps are melting. We won't tell you which until the news at 6!
-M
PORN porn porn XXX xxx xxx TITTIES titties tittes NAKED naked naked SLUTS sluts sluts
Wow- this workd count filter rocks!
Which comes first? The popular distro or the market share?
Think if Dell offered Linux to the average consumer and worked with the Vendor to provide support it'd give them the market share? Of course. Dell would make colourful foldout instructions for whatever Distro they choose. Dell would make drivers specificly for the distro they choose. Just like they did with RedHat on the server OSs (try getting OpenManage to run on other distros... hell in a handbasket).
So I'd say this again- if Dell were to pick one, that'd see a big boom in popularity and familiarity with users.
-M
Obvious exaggeration, but I'm glad you managed to get [or failed to get] the joke. Microsoft obviously tests their software considerably, but either doesn't catch countless bugs or fails to deem them as important. On something as important as an operating system, that should really be tested to the point of being next to bug free. Think of the countless bugs in the past- worms that can infect through obvious oversights in networking code, registry corruption, etc- all crucial to the system's operation.
I guess the point is- As opposed to improving the core operating system in Windows 98 and Windows ME for example, or 2000 through XP, they add new visual features that are shown to the user to make them think the world is a better place. I'd rather have them leave out the games section, media player, etc, and actually pay attention to what matters.
-M
How many units of my car are sold? How much R&D, testing, certification, and of course parts go into my car? Now, how many units of software are produced at next to no cost to the developer?
You'd think higher price means fewer consumer customers and more corporate customers. Corporate customers leads to feature bloat. Corporate customers SHOULDN'T accept failure, but do as they seem to be able to afford it a lot more than say, a kid who just lost his university paper.
Not really. MS Access better be robust if it's going to get my data. MySQL better be robust if it's going to get my data. Oracle better be robust if it's going to get my data. Data loss (as this example) is still data loss. Whether I (or a company) paid nothing, $700, or $70,000 for my database software, it needs to work reliably. I'd be just as annoyed if crackers broke into my linux servers than my windows servers. So why would it be any different? [note- multiple contributors creates a difficulty to blame in many open source projects- lets assume one developer or group of developers here].
In one sense, I'd agree with you, because one can't deny that effect. On the other hand though, who cares what the marginal cost or marginal revenue are? All the company cares about is the TOTAL cost and TOTAL revenue (with the time value of money and cash flow in there). The software giant determines a good estimate of how many units they're going to sell and at what price, and has an idea of revenue (determine two and you have the third). They have a good idea of cost from experience as well.
So the question becomes, at what point have they invested enough and are ready to reap the benefits and let the gravy train roll in. At what point do they sit back and say that it's "good enough" despite not being done.
I commend what PS3 is doing compared to XBox360. They could have easily said, knowing the XBox360 date, that they are going to rush out development. They didn't. Microsoft's strategy was to get established. Get the games, get the early adopters to purchase despite a high price tag. But no- PS3 is holding it's ground with a vague timeframe as to when it might be ready (with no precise dates). It'll be ready when it is ready. No production flaws wiht power supplies and faulty drives. They're putting technical superiority above short term profit, and creating a better system as a result of it... rather than rehashing the XBox with a faster processor and better graphics board.
Which came first- the chicken or the egg? Shareware was immensely popular for the longest time until developers got greedy. Microsoft Office used to be just over $100 and come on a series of 30-odd floppy discs for Windows 3.1. Why is it worth $750-$1000 for the near same set of features? Because they know people need it. Remember what I said before about picking two of the three. They set the revenue (probably based on the estimated cost), set the price, and that determines the number of units. If they want to sell more, the price is going to have to slip down.
I guess what I"m saying is that if, like an XBox game, if Office was worth $40, who wouldn't buy it? But these days Windows + Office > $1000 wh
Yes, but one has to keep in mind that at one point everything was assembly. These days even [most of the] kernels are mostly written in C. Why? Even some of the best assembly programmers can't match the optimisations performed by a good compiler on complex jobs. Anything complex could really benefit from a good compiler with its optimizations.
Decompile the libraries, or since you already have the C source, just compile to the assembly stage:
gcc -O2 -S -c inputfile.c
This will create inputfile.s
If you want to see both the C code and assembly code mixed together (as comments)
gcc -c -g -Wa,-a,-ad inputfile.c > inputfile.lst
Just because your profs don't know what it's doing in the underlying layer, doesn't mean you shouldn't. Install binutils/gcc and download the source to the glibc of your choosing and see what the assembler output is. Try and follow it.
You're complaining about the _lack_ of control with C? C being probably the language that gives you the most control over all of them (less asm of course)? C being the language of choice for operating system kernels? C being the one that lets you screw up as much as you want, just going ahead and overwriting memory and not doing this stuff for you like some languages that will remain nameless? C doesn't offer you enough control? Then you must be hardcore.
-M
Please don't associate those Java users with us C++ (and C for the procedural of us) users.
*shudders* I feel so dirty.
Why do you accept that? That'd be my question!
If I got a car that failed to start 5 mornings of the year, I'd be pretty pissed off. If I got a TV that wasn't compatible with channel three or seven, I'd be rather annoyed. If my car's doors unlocked randomly on the third Tuesday of the month, I'd be frustrated. If I got a VCR that couldn't timer record at 58 minutes after the hour, I'd be pretty pissed off too!
So why do we let our computer programs have these problems? Why do programs need to be killed or the computer restarted at random (freezing during startup isn't as common since win2k). Why do we accept a computer program that doesn't seem to handle the formats established at the time with ease (think Windows XP destroying exif information on jpgs)? Why do we accept holes in our software that lets crooks in along with their bots, spyware, and adware? Why Why why?!?
I've always been a fan of a certain car maker (and still am), but when I got a 2004 sport sedan and a few weeks later had my dash light up brighter than a christmas tree, the dealer tells me that their software/flash upgrade to the car should fix the issue. Sure enough, it did, and by the forums, it wasn't an uncommon problem with early production of the model. But this is stemming into other areas. An audio system I got in 2000 couldn't read any CD-Rs- obviously it didn't spend enough time in testing, as this should have come up. My car had bugs! The EPROM on my new furnace needed to be replaced. This is getting silly!
Sure bugs are bound to get through, but it is the programmer's responsibility to properly test their program. I'd rather Windows 2000 be released today and have it stable as anything and a solid performer. This isn't how things work. Microsoft spends more time making Spider Solitaire for Vista then they do testing the OS itself.
Updates aren't always better. Sometimes they add functionality, like additional CD Recorder capability, updated roster information for a sports game, security fixes, etc. Other times they add bloat and problems.
Anyone remember ICQ 99b and the 98's? Memory footprint of about 1MB, fast as anything, fixed the data corruption issues of previous versions. Good upgrade. Then recall late 99 versions and 2000+, where the memory footprint was about 80MB, the thing took a good minute to start up. It was buggy, and an ad-city. Then they wonder why it died a horrible death to the favour of MSN? Pack hundreds of features in there and make it slow as anything and nobody will go back. Wait... That's a good description of Windows.
-M
There's actually money to be made based on the perception that there's not. A friend who lived near me was in his early 20's and started squeegeeing in Toronto (before it was banned). It was enough (and more fun) than his lovely job at a law office.
I'm not saying all, or even most, people are doing well for themselves, because by golly, I'd hope many would find help. There are facilities available to people- we have shelters with lots of room all over Toronto, and yet people stay on the street- be it due to pride, information, or more. Police go around during 'cold spells' and bring them in. Many of those on the street don't want to be helped, or they'd seek the help offered to them.
Now- squeegeeing:
4 washers (can rotate with helper for a break)
1 helper (gets water, supplies, food, etc)
** assuming an equal cut for everyone
Timing of light: 45 seconds, 0.75 minutes
Cars serviced per light per side: 4 (2 people)
Cars serviced total: 8 (4 people)
Average revenue per car: $1.50
Average revenue per light: $12.00
Light changes per hour: 80
Revenue per hour: $960
Hours per day: 8
Revenue per day: $7,680
Equal cut per person: $1,536
Days per week working: 6
Per person, per week: $9,216
weeks worked per year: 50 (2 weeks vacation)
per person, per year: $460,800
TAX FREE
Expenses:
5 buckets, public bathroom for water (maybe arrangement with local business to supply), squeegee, bag for money- lets say $250/yr
That's some pretty good profit- $460,000+ * 5 people = $2.3Million
We provide e-mail to a few thousand domains and know this feeling very well. The question becomes when is too much too much?
At one point, POP was king and there was no other way. Dialup connections were the norm for most home users and some business, yet alone 8k ISDN lines for other business. Someone sending an e-mail of more than a megabyte was unusual, as it would take 10 minutes of transfer in order to send to the server. Files often went out on discs and a few MB was thousands of e-mails most commonly. Digital photography also barely existed.
Flash forward to today- most cable connections can easily do 50KB/s upstream and 350KB/s downstream. More offices are dumping expensive T1s in favour of DSL and Cable 'business' offerings. Sending pictures of your vacation at 8MegPixels without any resizing isn't uncommon... to your entire address book.
The war for 'more space' by Webmail providers have left users _expecting_ gigabytes. Hotmail went from 2MB to 10MB and all the way to 1GB in a couple years. GMail came in at 1GB. Yahoo is now up around 1GB as well... and that's all for free. Just imagine how much space you could use otherwise?
People don't want mail on their computer's anymore. Tons of our personal and small business users are simply heading to webmail systems like Horde and not leaving them. They're becoming DHTML applications rather than simple 'on the go' web frontends for basic functionality. People expect their mail to be everywhere and work from anywhere.
So now onto topic- We have some users that use POP accounts and have a few MB in their inbox at any time. We have users who use webmail/imap and clean up regularly, archiving only a few mail messages. Finally we have people who are storing gigabytes on mail systems with 15KRPM discs with every attachment they've ever recieved.
I regularly get calls complaining that our 25MB message size limit is too low and people are reaching it. I have customers sending CAD drawings and engineering programs across the world creating huge spikes in any transfer graph (which at 95th percentile... well anyway).
So who are you to say 'too much'? It's whatever the business need justifies. I store archives of customer requests for some time, as I often reference them. Who's to say that people need or don't need what they have? It's based on their business and their mail habbits.
Common strategies for forcing positive behaviour:
- regularly (monthly) strip attachments off of old (>a few years) e-mail
- remove old sent items for a few years back or archive them into another system that could be a lower priority restore.
- expire old messages and be sure to purge/pack regularly... those PST files will always keep growing, maintaining history and archive information.
Essentially, the admin usually can't say "this is too much" unless they know the user need to it. Some customers, for legal reasons, need the request and attachment for 1MM widgets just in case...
You never know.
To quote the Wendy's commercial, "Where's the Beef?".
No seriously! Where's this article? I'd imagine three years and 1.25 million dollars would produce a hefty article. I'd love to give it a read! "US Department of Homeland Security has released a report on open source quality"- so where's the release?
It cites one or two figures, and throws around lots of buzz-words, but there's no comparison? No information? No study of reliability? Nothing at all.
PS: As a side-note, if they 'studied' 15 million lines of code over three years, and were able to identify defects, shouldn't we be seeing a nice patchset coming from Coverity sometime soon... Think about it. It's easy to tell someone else to fix it, but a good part of OSS is giving back.
I know Slashdot doesn't really have curse filters, but I don't want to be the one to find out when it does... No to mention that it just seems like an unnecessary cuss for Slashdot. I also like fsck instead of the usual four-letter f-word.
-M
Lets be realistic for a second- with the exception of some big projects (kernel, KDE, GNU-sponsored projects) and corporate projects (such as Inter7's vpopmail funded by its own customers, or uw-imap being funded by a university), most of the smaller or lesser-known open source developers are doing something that they enjoy and gaining experience. They're adding a line on the resume, and fulfilling a need which they have (I need a program that does ____) or that someone they know has.
Given that, this is experience. It's a way to make a name for yourself, perfect your skills, and give back to the community. That doesn't mean these people are against closed source, but they feel that their product will get more exposure if it's open and freely available.
Most developers aren't in the "it has to be OSS" mentaility, but rather in the "this project could be bigger if more people contributed", and of course that project is their baby- their time, their effort.
Again not to say that this is all of the cases, but without direct benefits, there's always something- be it credit, fame, or experience.
Now some bigger projects doing it is what this article is speaking of, but the general statement on open source is bogus! Open source simply says "this could be of value to someone else, and admitedly, they could probably reproduce it anyway by starting from scratch".
-M
Of course. The issue is simple, and deemed a problem with the legal system in question. There have already been numerous rulings for either party, as well as disputes on the patents. The patents have been evaluated and thrown out, then accepted then ruled invalid again. The court cases had rulings and then they end up right back in court becuase one party (duh) is unhappy with the result. This could go on for eternity really.
So NTP will keep trying till they win. RIM will do the same. Nobody will be happy. Meanwhile there's uncertainty as to what the final result is. It's bad press. It's bad accounting (they essentially need to make sure that should they have to pay something out for damages, that they have that allocated in a reserve on their books). It's a poor use of time. Essentially they will never win, because there's never a clear answer in these cases.
How about the booming Canadian company taking away the business of companies like Palm and local cell makers? Please- no matter how you look at it, this was a bold statement saying "you're playing by our rules... bi7ch". And of course he's wrong- not one person on Slashdot has said "Oh- that NTP company... good things... good things" and people here probably know more of the issue than the ones deciding the case.
-M
Who do you think is paying for Bush to download his music? I'm sure it's on his work computer with a good white-house credit card number.
Just be happy that iTunes is easy to use- could you imagine how many hours (and how much less would get done around here) if Bush had to download torrents in order to get the latest bee-bop hit?
-M
The pen, a lovely analog device, is horribly inacurate, requires calibration, and requires two hands. That was one thing when Palm was competing with writing in a notebook and wanted things familar, but in this day and world where people love the mouse and a few buttons, the pen is just a hassle. The ability to do anything on a BlackBerry with just one hand makes it rather ideal for many cases (this being calendaring and looking up addresses, entry of course is another story), not to mention having a keyboard (newer Palms of course do).
It's just sloppy to use the stylus, and requires too much attention from whatever else it is that you're doing (driving, on the can, etc).
Tablets haven't taken on because they're about 15" diag because of the screen, about 1" thick, have a turning radius for converting it to a tablet/pc in some cases where they convert, create heat, noise, and suck back power in a matter of a few hours.
They're very capable for situations where they are needed (I most often see them in doctors offices to bring a patient a diagram 3D model of a proceedure), but when they're too big and too incapable of doing what a handheld needs to do.
That's like me getting a portable TV for the car and you carrying around a 13" CRT television and a power inverter... I'd imagine mine will be much more useful.
-M
Why'd they even leave MP3? I'm tired of these new formats. MP3, OGG, WMA, RealAudio. Please. RealAudio is a joke- horrible player, poor licensing, awful quality, etc. OGG will never be taken up by corporate america (just look at the slow take to MP3 players, which is being phased out these days). WMA is just too proprietary and lacks that easy compatibility with older devices, plus it requires some good licensing from MS.
I know people say there are quality advantages over Mp3 (however small), but it's completely not worth it. A 192kbit MP3 will do quite enough to make some damn good CD quality audio. All the other formats just go and make up for it with adding SRS/WOW and other filters, destroying the quality anyway.
-M
I see this linked to Microsoft's Origami Project. The iPod/cell phone/video player/messenging and all the other speculation may be getting some sort of e-mail.
:)
I really see people in the streets jumping in order to delete their mail, snapping to open it, touching their finger to their nose to create a new message...
oh and tossing their Microsoft Origami across the room
-M
You're so one of those people that leaves their iPod on during sex aren't you?
-M