"As we all know Oracle is not the biggest friend to the Open Source Community."
This is a bit weasely. We all don't know any such thing. For example, Oracle was in the top ten of organisations that contributed code to Linux last year: http://www.linuxfoundation.org/news-media/announcements/2012/04/linux-foundation-releases-annual-linux-development-report
Since then it has been very public with Oracle Linux, and made several large contributions from that front.
Shucks, it's even got its own OSS portal: https://oss.oracle.com/
I'm happy to agree it's a big bad corporate beast and does a lot of wrong in the world, but if you're going to criticize it, at least be factual.
For example: I can't hijack or redirect every mistyped domain to my ad server e.g. (yaho.com or yaahoo.com). I have to register each misspelling.
You could if you owned/managed the recursive outward-facing DNS server in your organisation or ISP, at least for those clients using your server. Verisign controls the authoritative iterative zone authoritative for the.com and.net TLDs, so their benefit is that the buck stops with them for all failed (i.e. non-existant).com and.net domain queries, whereas your company or ISP DNS server only handles the up-channel from clients to the root servers (along with maybe the internal zone).
The point is that it would break the expected IETF standard behaviour for DNS, and that's the upsetting part.
Bah. If this was the Real World (read 'international political arena'), the minority power-abuser holding a monopoly on the resource in question(read 'arbitrary powerful government with lots of weapons') would simply stomp on the independent standards-setting body (read 'international concensus organisation with global mandate'), and take the power away from them! None of this wishy-washy "international standards body" slapping the wrist of a powerful money-making authority!
Irony warning: the above may differ slightly from your perceived moral standpoint. Chuckle with care
If Verisign wants to continue this practice then Verisign should have to pay to register each mis-typed domain.
Ahem, they manage the registry, so paying to register each domain involves nothing more than allocating the server space and writing code to automate such registries. There would be an uproar (more than there is now) about monopoly and resource exploitation, and they'd be seriously whipped into shape. Fun, eh? Maybe it IS an idea...
In common with the majority of internet protocols, DNS is not a best-guess system, it is a technically accurate way of transferring information, with correct failover mechanisms. From the article:
As a lookup system, the DNS is designed to provide authoritative answers to queries.
And later...
The DNS is not a search service, and presenting speculative mappings based on HTTP inputs is not the service that the registry is expected to provide.
And later still...
To restore the data integrity and predictability of the DNS infrastructure, the IAB believes it would be best to return the.com and.net TLD servers to the behavior specified by the DNS protocols.
That seems to wrap it up really. I doubt any further studies will find differently, unless Verisign follows the apparently accepted way of paying for a biassed study......
Re:skip the registering, here is the piece
on
RIAA Bits
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· Score: 2, Funny
Illegally copying a copyrighted article about illegally copying copyrighted articles.
I know - I work in education, both at the consumer/training level, and at the academic university level. The contrast in management styles is amazing - the priorities are completely dipolar. On one side, you have "the almighty buck", we teach whatever you'll pay us to stand there and waffle about, on the other you have "the almighty word", we teach whatever we as bastions of the community agree you need to know in order to develop your foundation skills in your chosen discipline.
The issue is one of management, but it's also one of expectation. The world is getting more global, more capitalist, more liberal. One of the libertarian ideas is "if you don't like it, get a different one". In order for educational institutions to survive in a liberal market, they need to be attractive to the best candidates, in order to turn out as many overacheivers as possible, in order to attract the best candidates, etc. Market forces exist even at the idealogical pillars of society.
And what's the best way to facilitate such attraction? You got it, funding. And how do you improve funding? Either attract private funding (graduates, important donors who like/need the press), or hire a business-savvy funding manager. And what's the best way for a business-savvy funding manager to raise funds? Sell product.
The only product (other than education) that a university can sell is technology. Innovation. Knowledge-creation. And the reason it is attractive to sell it is because of our bizarre legal idea that anything I thought of patenting can be patented, which means anyone with an idea (even if fairly common) can patent it. Now, if the whole world of industry is already doing it, and making silly money in a high-profile way, then OF COURSE a fund-raising manager is going to see it as an early opportunity! It's selling knowledge creation! It's freely available on campus! It won't detract slightly from the research of the PhD students, and will likely attract more as students see the $$$.
Of course this doesn't even broach the sticky subject of market forces at the student level, i.e. do I as a student choose a project with industrial value, something patentable? or do I choose something worthwhile to society, and knowledge in general? Alas, that's a question for another day...
The move toward more public education, including underfunding,
and
The drive towards EVERYTHING being patented in the software world
It's no coincidence that we in the/. community are here sharing opinion and working with open source, and are also interested in education. We share a thirst for knowledge and philosophy. But in this day where software is such big money, education costs are spiralling, funding is staying constant or dropping, it makes sense to the managers of these institutions to get back something from industry by patenting and licensing technologies they develop. Like the PARC and IBM labs have been doing for a while. Yes, it feels like college to work there, but now the commercial aspect is pervasive.
Perhaps, when governments figure out that not all software patents are sensible, then we'll see a return to a more sharing, less "grabby" attitude in the knowledgemakers.
If you think C# is at nearly the same level as C, you're very mistaken. It has much in common with Java, which is only related to C about as much as mice are to elephants.
C# and C share a letter and an ancestry, but have a completely different raison d'être, philosophy and implementation.
And and the controversy over the last while over whether our buddy Miguel et al are aiding and abetting the Redmond Ragtags, or opening the use of C#, quite likely one of the best all-round OOP RAD-able languages available, to the rest of the world outside those who don't mind being "locked in", as you say.
If nothing else, it will be yet another choice, and let's face it: if Linux allows for nothing else, it's choice. Choice in WMs, xterms, Desktop Environments, GUI toolkits, distros, package managers, and now choice in top-end populist OOP languages.
I have heard good things about C# - it's apparently got all the good bits of Java, with some nice additions that would have made sense the first time:-) There are some dodgys, but they have more to do with the platform than the language.
There are a number of ways to approach this, but I've found the following useful:
if you're relating to physical objects e.g. sensors, displays, etc., then create an object
Algorithms, problem-solving functions, and procedures such as you're talking about, can then be added as methods to the objects you've created, or you can create new "virtual" or "calculator" objects to fit between the ins and outs, that expose your algorithms and procedures as methods before outputting them.
It's more a matter of thinking in terms of telling your processes to do stuff than creating a road for them to walk down. If you know what I mean;-)
Seems to me that as the ceiling is only about 100 times as powerful as the average desktop (according to article - ~2100 MTOPS), beowulf or other clusters would relatively easily approximate the power of one of the top-end machines here.
Certainly a number of above-average workstations or servers clustered together effectively would by far supercede the most powerful machine currently exportable.
And I don't see any limit on telecommunications or gigabit/optical switches that would otherwise limit the ability of such a cluster to be effective.
Is this finally an example of US legislation where a little ignorance actually HELPS the international tech community?
I have an idea about what I need to know for real work, and I'm not getting it, and neither are 95% of undergrads in CS or CE around the nation. Why is academia intent on not producing "applied programmers" rather than engineers?
Ah, this old chestnut. Training Vs. Education. I work for a training company, and we deliver "applied programming courses", which can be completed in 3 - 5 days depending on the level and the background of the participant.
Note: "background".
Education is a very different thing to Training. "Applied" courses tend to point the participant in a particular direction so they can hit the ground running, whereas academia builds up a deeper knowledge.
One way I've thought of it in the past (and has been made more relevant by recent events) is like this: If all technology in the world was destroyed, who will be more useful in the short/medium term? Those with applied skills, i.e. competent VB or Java coders? or those with algorithm skills, compiler skills, system-level understanding, theoretical and short-term useless (currently), but a hell of a lot more useful if all you have is an abacus and a few pebbles, or shortly thereafter some logic circuits made of vacuum tubes or basic transistors.
In short: education helps you understand, and teaches you to learn. Training helps you do a particular job.
As technologists, we appreciate the international scope of the Internet, and its constituent components, e.g. Linux was originally developed by a European, Mandrake and SuSE are both produced outside the US. The communities that have built up around these technologies are non-geographic, as is the readership of Slashdot.
How is this factored in to legislative decisions which will undoubtedly affect this international culture? I'm speaking specifically about matters of encryption, privacy (currently with Echelon and Carnivore the US is in violation of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, at least Article 12), censorship, online trade, free speech, and the recent Voyeur Dorm case in Florida.
has anyone accounted for this consideration when discussing the upcoming Matrix sequels?
The author to this obviously hasn't read the article.
Yes, they have factored it in. According to the article, the artists and operatives have been in situ since pre-WTC, and due to the wonders of modern technology (using triple DES encryption and PGP, no less, allegedly enought to stump even Neo;-) they can wire the day's production over at the end of each day, in a similar way to how George Lucas does it.
Interesting to note that this technology also makes the world of music that much smaller - since the early days of ISDN mass-acceptance, musicians on both sides of the Atlantic/Pacific have worked together on recordings, simultaneously. The bandwidth of a single ISDN bearer channel exceeds the bandwidth necessary for a single CD-Quality channel.
The matrix guys are likely using many many times that limited pipe, as the article says Hollywood can view their images in real time. Mmmm.
The difference here is that when the govt wants to read an email and sees that the official backdoors aren't working this will be a reasonable indication that the contents of the email are illegal.
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
So if I, as a law-abiding European citizen, use Encryption as a means of supporting my human rights according to the United Nations, and in direct response to a recommendation by my extended government (in the EU), the US government can assume I am a criminal?
It has been said here before, and I'll say it again. Many US citizens need to take their heads out of the sand and realise that there is a whole other (civilised!) world out there that doesn't "pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America."
See, the fun thing here is the fact that the public doesn't give a damn about the benchmarks. They'll walk into local computer store "foo" and demand the highest speed they can get
This is almost a contradiction in terms. Processor speed and benchmarks are often held closely together in marketing materials. Having worked alongside the marketing department of one of the top 5 home PC companies, I've seen all manner of spin put on "Why YOU should buy our latest and greatest!".
However, I'm not so sure that Mom and Pop are all for buying the one with the biggest number anymore. This is no longer the age of the uneducated computer buyer led along by the sales person. Sure, that happens every day, but much of the target market is now on their second or third PC, and are looking for reasons to upgrade that they can relate to - this system has a USB port that will work with that camera, that system has 80 GB hard disk that won't fill up so quickly with Sonny's Paintbrush pictures. More and more families regularly buy PC magazines, and so would realise that Intel isn't the only player. The astute would know about benchmarks too.
"Oh no, we don't want ANYTHING other than Intel," says the mommy or daddy "We KNOW how important reliability is, and we KNOW that the 2 g-H-z (pronounced by letters) is MUCH faster than the A-M-D AthAlon you got there". Not necessarily the case - buyers are more and more clueful in recent years. Having said that, Intel have always been the largest advertiser of all the i86 manufacturers. The famous maxim "No-one ever got fired for buying IBM" may continue to hold for Intel.
to nuke, you have to be the 'email owner' and that means they send a confirmation to the from: addr and you reply back saying you agree with the nuke request.
The problem being, for example, that email addresses might not still be around. I was using an academic account in the early to mid '90s which either no longer exists, or has been recycled.
True. I have a total of something like 20 email addresses, some of which I check weekly, some of which I get pinged as soon as the server gets a mail. Some I check when I feel like it, monthly, whatever, and then there are those that are dormant. As the previous poster mentioned, University emails are now defunct. Emails of previous jobs I've held are now defunct.
What's the alternative? (P)GP(G) signatures[delete whichever is applicable]? further clogging up the sig trail... or how about an international database, the key of which is an email address, the value is country and social security number. That way I can register each of my email addresses to me, and can deal with repudiation issues such as that mentioned above.
Ah, but wait - what of anonymity? I don't want all my usenet posts, hell, even my slashdot posts, to contain my real info. Who would access this database? Would they be guaranteed not to stalk, harass, spam, abuse, or otherwise reduce my gross flerbage?
I think I'll be happy with the status quo. Anonymity when it suits, my name in lights when that suits, damn the consequences, and damn those employers not mature enough to realise I was a different person when young, angry, and radical in university.
/prak
Re:Again, Linux's issue is software
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DeMuDi Linux
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· Score: 2
but the MIDI spec is pretty daunting looking to me....
The MIDI spec isn't daunting at all... when I was younger and more innocent I wrote a couple of MIDI file processors that stripped various bits out, have to see if I can find them... the most difficult bit if I remember was delta-time - the length of time in between events. Let me explain:
In MIDI, you have pretty much two major types of data: Status bytes, and data bytes. Status bytes always have an MSB of 1, and data bytes have an MSB of 0. Status bytes begin with an ID nybble, the second nybble specifies the channel (yes, there are 16 channels, and 16 types of status event). Having specified the channel, the data goes on to do whatever it has to do - for a note on event, you must specify the key (in the range 1 - 127, well encompassing an 88 note keyboard), and the velocity, again within a 0 - 127 range.
Things get complicated when you include system exclusive messages - they are proprietary to each manufacturer and model - and continuous controllers. There are 127 possible controllers, some of which are reserved, e.g. volume is 7, expression is 11, modulation is 1, pan is 10, etc. Reverb and Chorus are included in there somewhere, as are certain other parameters depending on the midi module.
MIDI files can also contain messages such as lyrics, copyright, etc. Good clean fun.
For more information, there are many resources available online.
Check here for an overview of how the chunks work.
I am absolutely amazed that employers do not use the power of their idle PCs THEMSELVES!
There are so many applications out there already - SETI@home being one, others include a few at distributed.net, FightAids@Home.org, and there are others cropping up, supporting cancer research, some commercial projects, code-cracking. Many many popular (in a geeky or tear-jerky way) projects that interest us enough to donate our unused cycles.
Now, a company such as TVA - that would rather its employees does NOT use their cycles for such tasks - would do well to provide some other diversion to occupy the screens of its employees. Hey, they could even license the software from SETI, Entropia, or some other vendor of distributed computing solutions, tart it up to look nice with their logo, and plug in some of their own research models. I'm sure their scientists have some energy calculations that could benefit from massively parallel computing.
And what of the rest of the world's processors? In a large customer service department in any medium-large sized company - even one with no real scientific research needs - there will be many PCs available for many hours. It would be a simple matter for such a company to rent out its spare cycles, again using the same software, with suitable logos. Except this time it would be managed internally, with no risk of external network corruption. The information server could be housed safely with the rest of the company's servers, making a quiet buck in the background, with everyone happy.
Ah, but that would be too sensible, wouldn't it?
/prak -- We may be human, but we're still animals.
When I give you a copy of free software that I've written, I lost nothing. Nobody takes anything from me, and parasites do not damage or weaken the host in any way.
I disagree.
In the world of Art, you are right. If all software was art, you would still be right. However, in a world of high technology, where being the first to market is enough to give you an edge (or enough attention to be bought out by Microsoft:-), the single most important reason software houses maintain a religious vigil over their code is to avoid competitive coups.
The first thing that comes to my mind Transmeta's Crusoe launch was the utter secrecy and hyped cloistering that went on, almost overclouding the product, but highlighting their "first to market" status.
Also relevant (although even more hardware related) is the fact that Intel released their 8086 six months before Motorola's slicker more pleasant 68000. If they had been released at the same time, my money would have been on the Motorola.
Time has proven that first-to-market works... and in the hotter faster climate of software, with a much smaller design-to-product rollout time, first-to-market is a force to be reckoned with.
I qualify this by saying I come from a telecoms background, where competition is tight at the front-end of emerging technologies, and Free software (despite some huge efforts) has a way to go before touching the feature-set of current technology. I know the leading edge of other niches is just as competition-ridden.
The important thing to realise about this article is that the author rightly says:
"The GPL will eventually dominate Open Source"
NOT that the GPL will dominate software production in general. Until proprietary software is overwhelmed entirely by Open Source - which I am sure will happen - it will still have the decided advantage of being "first to market" with many technologies, and thus stay very much in the sights (and budgets!) of early adopters and news reports everywhere.
Now all we need to do is convince the biggies to tear up all of their NDAs and encourage cross-fertilisation with Open Source;-)
/prak
-- We may be human, but we're still animals.
Slashdot Mirror
"As we all know Oracle is not the biggest friend to the Open Source Community." This is a bit weasely. We all don't know any such thing. For example, Oracle was in the top ten of organisations that contributed code to Linux last year: http://www.linuxfoundation.org/news-media/announcements/2012/04/linux-foundation-releases-annual-linux-development-report Since then it has been very public with Oracle Linux, and made several large contributions from that front. Shucks, it's even got its own OSS portal: https://oss.oracle.com/ I'm happy to agree it's a big bad corporate beast and does a lot of wrong in the world, but if you're going to criticize it, at least be factual.
For example: I can't hijack or redirect every mistyped domain to my ad server e.g. (yaho.com or yaahoo.com). I have to register each misspelling.
You could if you owned/managed the recursive outward-facing DNS server in your organisation or ISP, at least for those clients using your server. Verisign controls the authoritative iterative zone authoritative for the .com and .net TLDs, so their benefit is that the buck stops with them for all failed (i.e. non-existant) .com and .net domain queries, whereas your company or ISP DNS server only handles the up-channel from clients to the root servers (along with maybe the internal zone).
The point is that it would break the expected IETF standard behaviour for DNS, and that's the upsetting part.
Take the power away [from Verisign] is my vote.
Bah. If this was the Real World (read 'international political arena'), the minority power-abuser holding a monopoly on the resource in question(read 'arbitrary powerful government with lots of weapons') would simply stomp on the independent standards-setting body (read 'international concensus organisation with global mandate'), and take the power away from them! None of this wishy-washy "international standards body" slapping the wrist of a powerful money-making authority!
Irony warning: the above may differ slightly from your perceived moral standpoint. Chuckle with care
If Verisign wants to continue this practice then Verisign should have to pay to register each mis-typed domain.
Ahem, they manage the registry, so paying to register each domain involves nothing more than allocating the server space and writing code to automate such registries. There would be an uproar (more than there is now) about monopoly and resource exploitation, and they'd be seriously whipped into shape. Fun, eh? Maybe it IS an idea...
In common with the majority of internet protocols, DNS is not a best-guess system, it is a technically accurate way of transferring information, with correct failover mechanisms. From the article:
As a lookup system, the DNS is designed to provide authoritative answers to queries.
And later...
The DNS is not a search service, and presenting speculative mappings based on HTTP inputs is not the service that the registry is expected to provide.
And later still...
To restore the data integrity and predictability of the DNS infrastructure, the IAB believes it would be best to return the .com and .net TLD servers to the behavior specified by the DNS protocols.
That seems to wrap it up really. I doubt any further studies will find differently, unless Verisign follows the apparently accepted way of paying for a biassed study......
Illegally copying a copyrighted article about illegally copying copyrighted articles.
Oh, the irony.
The issue is one of management, but it's also one of expectation. The world is getting more global, more capitalist, more liberal. One of the libertarian ideas is "if you don't like it, get a different one". In order for educational institutions to survive in a liberal market, they need to be attractive to the best candidates, in order to turn out as many overacheivers as possible, in order to attract the best candidates, etc. Market forces exist even at the idealogical pillars of society.
And what's the best way to facilitate such attraction? You got it, funding. And how do you improve funding? Either attract private funding (graduates, important donors who like/need the press), or hire a business-savvy funding manager. And what's the best way for a business-savvy funding manager to raise funds? Sell product.
The only product (other than education) that a university can sell is technology. Innovation. Knowledge-creation. And the reason it is attractive to sell it is because of our bizarre legal idea that anything I thought of patenting can be patented, which means anyone with an idea (even if fairly common) can patent it. Now, if the whole world of industry is already doing it, and making silly money in a high-profile way, then OF COURSE a fund-raising manager is going to see it as an early opportunity! It's selling knowledge creation! It's freely available on campus! It won't detract slightly from the research of the PhD students, and will likely attract more as students see the $$$.
Of course this doesn't even broach the sticky subject of market forces at the student level, i.e. do I as a student choose a project with industrial value, something patentable? or do I choose something worthwhile to society, and knowledge in general? Alas, that's a question for another day...
and
It's no coincidence that we in the
Perhaps, when governments figure out that not all software patents are sensible, then we'll see a return to a more sharing, less "grabby" attitude in the knowledgemakers.
C# and C share a letter and an ancestry, but have a completely different raison d'être, philosophy and implementation.
And and the controversy over the last while over whether our buddy Miguel et al are aiding and abetting the Redmond Ragtags, or opening the use of C#, quite likely one of the best all-round OOP RAD-able languages available, to the rest of the world outside those who don't mind being "locked in", as you say.
If nothing else, it will be yet another choice, and let's face it: if Linux allows for nothing else, it's choice. Choice in WMs, xterms, Desktop Environments, GUI toolkits, distros, package managers, and now choice in top-end populist OOP languages.
I have heard good things about C# - it's apparently got all the good bits of Java, with some nice additions that would have made sense the first time :-)
There are some dodgys, but they have more to do with the platform than the language.
There are a number of ways to approach this, but I've found the following useful:
It's more a matter of thinking in terms of telling your processes to do stuff than creating a road for them to walk down. If you know what I mean
All your Qaeda are belong to US
Be Original: Avoid being redundant and just repeating what has already been said.
(incidentally, note how I stated it was a quote ;-)
Apologies for being offtopic - it's on-topic for this comment!
It was in the article linked from the front page, therefore should really have been modded redundant rather than interesting/informative :-S
Certainly a number of above-average workstations or servers clustered together effectively would by far supercede the most powerful machine currently exportable.
And I don't see any limit on telecommunications or gigabit/optical switches that would otherwise limit the ability of such a cluster to be effective.
Is this finally an example of US legislation where a little ignorance actually HELPS the international tech community?
Ah, this old chestnut. Training Vs. Education. I work for a training company, and we deliver "applied programming courses", which can be completed in 3 - 5 days depending on the level and the background of the participant.
Note: "background".
Education is a very different thing to Training. "Applied" courses tend to point the participant in a particular direction so they can hit the ground running, whereas academia builds up a deeper knowledge.
One way I've thought of it in the past (and has been made more relevant by recent events) is like this: If all technology in the world was destroyed, who will be more useful in the short/medium term? Those with applied skills, i.e. competent VB or Java coders? or those with algorithm skills, compiler skills, system-level understanding, theoretical and short-term useless (currently), but a hell of a lot more useful if all you have is an abacus and a few pebbles, or shortly thereafter some logic circuits made of vacuum tubes or basic transistors.
In short: education helps you understand, and teaches you to learn. Training helps you do a particular job.
*just realising I've undersold my company*
As technologists, we appreciate the international scope of the Internet, and its constituent components, e.g. Linux was originally developed by a European, Mandrake and SuSE are both produced outside the US. The communities that have built up around these technologies are non-geographic, as is the readership of Slashdot.
How is this factored in to legislative decisions which will undoubtedly affect this international culture? I'm speaking specifically about matters of encryption, privacy (currently with Echelon and Carnivore the US is in violation of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, at least Article 12), censorship, online trade, free speech, and the recent Voyeur Dorm case in Florida.
has anyone accounted for this consideration when discussing the upcoming Matrix sequels?
The author to this obviously hasn't read the article.
Yes, they have factored it in. According to the article, the artists and operatives have been in situ since pre-WTC, and due to the wonders of modern technology (using triple DES encryption and PGP, no less, allegedly enought to stump even Neo ;-) they can wire the day's production over at the end of each day, in a similar way to how George Lucas does it.
Interesting to note that this technology also makes the world of music that much smaller - since the early days of ISDN mass-acceptance, musicians on both sides of the Atlantic/Pacific have worked together on recordings, simultaneously. The bandwidth of a single ISDN bearer channel exceeds the bandwidth necessary for a single CD-Quality channel.
The matrix guys are likely using many many times that limited pipe, as the article says Hollywood can view their images in real time. Mmmm.
The difference here is that when the govt wants to read an email and sees that the official backdoors aren't working this will be a reasonable indication that the contents of the email are illegal.
I fail to see how this holds - The European Parliament issued a report (see this Irish Times article for a discussion) in response to Echelon encouraging citizens to use Encryption. Remember, we are not all US citizens. Some of us in the "western world" still adhere to Article 12 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights which I reproduce here:
So if I, as a law-abiding European citizen, use Encryption as a means of supporting my human rights according to the United Nations, and in direct response to a recommendation by my extended government (in the EU), the US government can assume I am a criminal?
It has been said here before, and I'll say it again. Many US citizens need to take their heads out of the sand and realise that there is a whole other (civilised!) world out there that doesn't "pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America."
I just wrote this yesterday - it's quite appropriate to this thread.
Privacy and Encryption, Lose one, lose 'em all
This is almost a contradiction in terms. Processor speed and benchmarks are often held closely together in marketing materials. Having worked alongside the marketing department of one of the top 5 home PC companies, I've seen all manner of spin put on "Why YOU should buy our latest and greatest!".
However, I'm not so sure that Mom and Pop are all for buying the one with the biggest number anymore. This is no longer the age of the uneducated computer buyer led along by the sales person. Sure, that happens every day, but much of the target market is now on their second or third PC, and are looking for reasons to upgrade that they can relate to - this system has a USB port that will work with that camera, that system has 80 GB hard disk that won't fill up so quickly with Sonny's Paintbrush pictures. More and more families regularly buy PC magazines, and so would realise that Intel isn't the only player. The astute would know about benchmarks too.
"Oh no, we don't want ANYTHING other than Intel," says the mommy or daddy "We KNOW how important reliability is, and we KNOW that the 2 g-H-z (pronounced by letters) is MUCH faster than the A-M-D AthAlon you got there".
Not necessarily the case - buyers are more and more clueful in recent years. Having said that, Intel have always been the largest advertiser of all the i86 manufacturers. The famous maxim "No-one ever got fired for buying IBM" may continue to hold for Intel.
/prak
*warm and fuzzy with the news of 2-g-h-z*
The problem being, for example, that email addresses might not still be around. I was using an academic account in the early to mid '90s which either no longer exists, or has been recycled.
True. I have a total of something like 20 email addresses, some of which I check weekly, some of which I get pinged as soon as the server gets a mail. Some I check when I feel like it, monthly, whatever, and then there are those that are dormant. As the previous poster mentioned, University emails are now defunct. Emails of previous jobs I've held are now defunct.
What's the alternative? (P)GP(G) signatures[delete whichever is applicable]? further clogging up the sig trail... or how about an international database, the key of which is an email address, the value is country and social security number. That way I can register each of my email addresses to me, and can deal with repudiation issues such as that mentioned above.
Ah, but wait - what of anonymity? I don't want all my usenet posts, hell, even my slashdot posts, to contain my real info. Who would access this database? Would they be guaranteed not to stalk, harass, spam, abuse, or otherwise reduce my gross flerbage?
I think I'll be happy with the status quo. Anonymity when it suits, my name in lights when that suits, damn the consequences, and damn those employers not mature enough to realise I was a different person when young, angry, and radical in university.
/prak
The MIDI spec isn't daunting at all... when I was younger and more innocent I wrote a couple of MIDI file processors that stripped various bits out, have to see if I can find them... the most difficult bit if I remember was delta-time - the length of time in between events. Let me explain:
In MIDI, you have pretty much two major types of data: Status bytes, and data bytes. Status bytes always have an MSB of 1, and data bytes have an MSB of 0. Status bytes begin with an ID nybble, the second nybble specifies the channel (yes, there are 16 channels, and 16 types of status event).
Having specified the channel, the data goes on to do whatever it has to do - for a note on event, you must specify the key (in the range 1 - 127, well encompassing an 88 note keyboard), and the velocity, again within a 0 - 127 range.
Things get complicated when you include system exclusive messages - they are proprietary to each manufacturer and model - and continuous controllers. There are 127 possible controllers, some of which are reserved, e.g. volume is 7, expression is 11, modulation is 1, pan is 10, etc. Reverb and Chorus are included in there somewhere, as are certain other parameters depending on the midi module.
MIDI files can also contain messages such as lyrics, copyright, etc. Good clean fun.
For more information, there are many resources available online.
Check here for an overview of how the chunks work.
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We may be human, but we're still animals.
I am absolutely amazed that employers do not use the power of their idle PCs THEMSELVES!
There are so many applications out there already - SETI@home being one, others include a few at distributed.net, FightAids@Home.org, and there are others cropping up, supporting cancer research, some commercial projects, code-cracking. Many many popular (in a geeky or tear-jerky way) projects that interest us enough to donate our unused cycles.
Now, a company such as TVA - that would rather its employees does NOT use their cycles for such tasks - would do well to provide some other diversion to occupy the screens of its employees. Hey, they could even license the software from SETI, Entropia, or some other vendor of distributed computing solutions, tart it up to look nice with their logo, and plug in some of their own research models. I'm sure their scientists have some energy calculations that could benefit from massively parallel computing.
And what of the rest of the world's processors? In a large customer service department in any medium-large sized company - even one with no real scientific research needs - there will be many PCs available for many hours. It would be a simple matter for such a company to rent out its spare cycles, again using the same software, with suitable logos. Except this time it would be managed internally, with no risk of external network corruption. The information server could be housed safely with the rest of the company's servers, making a quiet buck in the background, with everyone happy.
Ah, but that would be too sensible, wouldn't it?
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We may be human, but we're still animals.
I disagree.
:-), the single most important reason software houses maintain a religious vigil over their code is to avoid competitive coups.
In the world of Art, you are right. If all software was art, you would still be right.
However, in a world of high technology, where being the first to market is enough to give you an edge (or enough attention to be bought out by Microsoft
The first thing that comes to my mind Transmeta's Crusoe launch was the utter secrecy and hyped cloistering that went on, almost overclouding the product, but highlighting their "first to market" status.
Also relevant (although even more hardware related) is the fact that Intel released their 8086 six months before Motorola's slicker more pleasant 68000. If they had been released at the same time, my money would have been on the Motorola.
Time has proven that first-to-market works... and in the hotter faster climate of software, with a much smaller design-to-product rollout time, first-to-market is a force to be reckoned with.
I qualify this by saying I come from a telecoms background, where competition is tight at the front-end of emerging technologies, and Free software (despite some huge efforts) has a way to go before touching the feature-set of current technology. I know the leading edge of other niches is just as competition-ridden.
The important thing to realise about this article is that the author rightly says:
"The GPL will eventually dominate Open Source"
NOT that the GPL will dominate software production in general. Until proprietary software is overwhelmed entirely by Open Source - which I am sure will happen - it will still have the decided advantage of being "first to market" with many technologies, and thus stay very much in the sights (and budgets!) of early adopters and news reports everywhere.
Now all we need to do is convince the biggies to tear up all of their NDAs and encourage cross-fertilisation with Open Source
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We may be human, but we're still animals.