I don't know what the costs are like in the US, but in Europe, the subscription costs for cellular telephones are astronomical.
Furthermore, cell phones are a must for your average adolescent/student. What this means is that young people with a limited budget are sinking all their funds into paying for their cell phones.
This means all that much money less for other discretionary spending. One of the easiest things to cut, given that you can either burn CDs on the cheap, or download mp3s even more cheaply, is music.
In France, the tv show Capital on M6 pointed out that there was a clear correlation between the rise of cell phones among young people and the decline in spending on music (in the form of CDs).
Which is to say it may not be Napster after all that is having this effect, but something completely different.
Gotta go now, have to see if my Autechre download is finished...
In a previous life, I worked at a place where we considered the Harlequin RIP, but declined to use it because it didn't grok our peculiar (non-ADSC) PostScript. We went with another proprietary solution (a bit too drunk right now to recall what). gs was never considered. We were driving a CTP imager, and if we had the slightest problem we had to be able to ring someone up and have them resolve the problem on the spot.
Which is in fact exactly the service we received. I don't expect, nor am I surprised, when I contact an author of an open source package about a bug to receive either no response or a response several weeks later. In a production environment that would be suicide.
So in answer to your question, people use Harlequin instead of gs because they are buying a service, not a program, and that service includes immediate problem resolution, and people that will speak to them there and now, not when they have the time to get around to the problem. It's not significantly faster (when it works) but it's significantly faster (when it doesn't work).
People will pay a lot for absence of grief. We did.
Sometimes, oftentimes, these days, I get the feeling that Slashdot ain't what it used to be. Too many American teenage jerks blowing off about liberty and communism and many other memes for which I feel they are particularly unqualified to comment on.
Then...
Every once in a while...
Comes along a thread that makes you realise that it's all worthwhile, that if you want to keep your finger on the pulse, you have to be reading here.
Heartfelt thanks to all the contributors with an inside angle who contributed to this thread.
Take a look some time with a threshold of 0. Some luser with a script uploaded his fortune file into the thread. There's nothing much interesting to read.
What I'd like to know is what story generated the most responses. Or maybe, what have been the ten most popular stories (according to the nomber of comments posted) that have been posted on/.
Who knows, perhaps by the 20000th, Rob will have learnt how to spell definitely. Hint: word stem finite.
The distributed computing project I'd most like to see get of the ground is The Tierra Project.
This project is exploring digital evolution. Start off with a bunch of organisms and breed them with genetic algorithms. See how they fare.
Then, and this is where it gets interesting, an organism can migrate from one host to another, possibly taking better advantage of the environement there. What kinds of digital ecologies will appear? What kinds of emergent behaviour will be encountered?
It's actually much more complex than that. If you're curious, I recommend reading the introduction.
a way to map all your data against say the position of all the stars in the milky way
Say, ever heard of the three-body problem?
Stars move in literally unpredictable ways. After a while, your mapping will produce gibberish. Even more ironic, you'll find that your key will be as large, if not larger than the information you are trying to record.
There is no excuse for having a purely database-driven website that does not appear to be straight HTML pages. If you have ?s everywhere then you're just lazy.
Firstly, even though you might pull everything out of a database, a large per cent of all such content is not really all that dynamic, which means you're probably better off precompiling the base down into static HTML, and recompile the page only when its content changes.
Secondly, if you have a script with a messy query string you can turn it into something that doesn't look like a script at all, e.g.,/cgi-bin/script.cgi?foo=bar&this=that could be presented as/snap/foo/bar/this/that.
With Apache, you would just define and pass it off to a handler, that would pick up the parameters in the PATH_INFO environment variable. If people tried URL surgery, you could just return a 404 if the args made no sense.
Search engines are your best (and probably only) hope of getting people in to visit your site. It's up to you to make sure your URIs are search-engine friendly. If they can't be bothered to index what looks like a CGI script, well that is your problem. There are more than enough pages elsewhere for them to crawl over and index without bothering with yours.
If you think it's a matter of "people learning a new system" than you've been sitting in an educational institution too long and need your tenure revoked so you get out and see the real world. Converting to the metric system isn't just a matter of teaching a bunch of schoolchildren a bunch of happy new units.
Oh really, is that what you think? Funnily enough, that's exactly what we did in Australia in 1972.
People still talk about being six foot two, or the temperature in summer reaching the century, but apart from various linguistic idioms like that, metric is firmly in place. Hell, people still talk about two bob, a synonym for shillings, and Australian currency went decimal in 1966.
It just takes a little willingness on behalf of the population... something we are led to belive that the US apparently lacks.
The combined population of Western and Central Europe is much greater that the US. They're all in metric. If you want to deal with those markets you're going to have to stop with this Imperial shit and use metric, otherwise your infrastructure is going to gather rust as it deals with an increasingly small proportion of the world market that is the US domestic market.
Let's see, your country would have pulled itself out of its horrible economic slump no matter what he did. Economic behaviour is cyclic.
He did succede in getting tax cuts through. The rich were very pleased with this. The poor just got poorer: he created a huge transfer of capital from the poor to the rich.
While he maybe helped end the cold war, much of the credit must of course lie with Mikhael Gorbatchev.
So/. was acquired by somebody else. Hooray for Rob & co.
I just want to know... how does andover.net expect to make money? Banner ads? Don't make me laugh./.ers are the audience most likely to use banner-blockers. What will happen if/. is a financial drain to andover?
What happens if Slashdot doesn't turn in a profit?
Here's a memo I sent to SETI. I can't get the Linux client to run. Anyone have an idea? ---- Here's your account info: Email address: [xxx] OK to show email address? no Name: grinder OK to show name? yes Country: France Postal code: 75003 Computer location: Work
Everything correct? (y/n) y gethostbyname: Success Server host unknown
A mod_perl process can get pretty huge, because it contains the apache server code, a perl interpreter, which, as any perl monger will tell you, consumes memory prolifligately. A single int consumes about eighteen bytes, IIRC. Not to mention all the Perl modules that may be loaded.
The problem is compounded by the fact that perl code looks like data to the virtual memory system, which means that children sharing pages rapidly start to dirty them and thus get their own copies.
In the mean time, the mod_perl process processes the actual request very quickly. The trouble is it then spends precious time dribbling bytes back to the client browser. Valuable time that could otherwise be spent creating dynamic content. And so more and more mod_perl processes are spawned, trying to deal with the load, when at any given time most of them are twiddling their thumbs.
Enter a proxy, such as a Squid cache. The mod_perl emits the dynamic page at bus speed, and the proxy picks it up. The mod_perl process is then free to handle another client request. The proxy then doles out the page as fast (or as slow) as the client can accept it. Such processes can be built to have an extremely small footprint, due in part to a strong propensity to share VM pages.
It is therefore not uncommon to see one mod_perl process doing the grunt work that is shipped out by ten or so lightweight caching processes. In any case, far fewer heavy mod_perl processes are required, thus much less memory is consumed by IO-blocked processes. People have reported dramatic savings on the mod_perl list using this approach. (Like, the difference between having to build a server farm or not).
But then, we've been promised PNG for years, and it too contains many excellent ideas. But for the entire park of current technology browsers to shrink down to 5% of all browsers in use, we shall have to wait an awfully long time. Especially as less and less people (proportionally) care about using the latest versions. Things will only get worse.
So it's a fair bet to say that this new format will never amount to anything much on the Web. I hope I'm proven wrong, but the way things are going, the current Web standards are slowly but surely congealing into a qwertyuiop-like mass of immovable standards. People are happy enough with GIF and JPEG, and as line speeds get upgraded, people don't really care any more about an image that takes.02 secs to transfer rather than.12 secs. It just doesn't matter any more.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know what the costs are like in the US, but in Europe, the subscription costs for cellular telephones are astronomical.
Furthermore, cell phones are a must for your average adolescent/student. What this means is that young people with a limited budget are sinking all their funds into paying for their cell phones.
This means all that much money less for other discretionary spending. One of the easiest things to cut, given that you can either burn CDs on the cheap, or download mp3s even more cheaply, is music.
In France, the tv show Capital on M6 pointed out that there was a clear correlation between the rise of cell phones among young people and the decline in spending on music (in the form of CDs).
Which is to say it may not be Napster after all that is having this effect, but something completely different.
Gotta go now, have to see if my Autechre download is finished...
Which is in fact exactly the service we received. I don't expect, nor am I surprised, when I contact an author of an open source package about a bug to receive either no response or a response several weeks later. In a production environment that would be suicide.
So in answer to your question, people use Harlequin instead of gs because they are buying a service, not a program, and that service includes immediate problem resolution, and people that will speak to them there and now, not when they have the time to get around to the problem. It's not significantly faster (when it works) but it's significantly faster (when it doesn't work).
People will pay a lot for absence of grief. We did.
Sometimes, oftentimes, these days, I get the feeling that Slashdot ain't what it used to be. Too many American teenage jerks blowing off about liberty and communism and many other memes for which I feel they are particularly unqualified to comment on.
Then...
Every once in a while...
Comes along a thread that makes you realise that it's all worthwhile, that if you want to keep your finger on the pulse, you have to be reading here.
Heartfelt thanks to all the contributors with an inside angle who contributed to this thread.
What on earth is it with you people calling it ``Legos''? It's Lego, it's a collective noun.
It's like saying you build a house out of woods, steels and cements.
Take a look some time with a threshold of 0. Some luser with a script uploaded his fortune file into the thread. There's nothing much interesting to read.
What I'd like to know is what story generated the most responses. Or maybe, what have been the ten most popular stories (according to the nomber of comments posted) that have been posted on /.
Who knows, perhaps by the 20000th, Rob will have learnt how to spell definitely. Hint: word stem finite.
The distributed computing project I'd most like to see get of the ground is The Tierra Project.
This project is exploring digital evolution. Start off with a bunch of organisms and breed them with genetic algorithms. See how they fare.
Then, and this is where it gets interesting, an organism can migrate from one host to another, possibly taking better advantage of the environement there. What kinds of digital ecologies will appear? What kinds of emergent behaviour will be encountered?
It's actually much more complex than that. If you're curious, I recommend reading the introduction.
Say, ever heard of the three-body problem?
Stars move in literally unpredictable ways. After a while, your mapping will produce gibberish. Even more ironic, you'll find that your key will be as large, if not larger than the information you are trying to record.
Claude Shannon will not be denied.
There is no excuse for having a purely database-driven website that does not appear to be straight HTML pages. If you have ?s everywhere then you're just lazy.
Firstly, even though you might pull everything out of a database, a large per cent of all such content is not really all that dynamic, which means you're probably better off precompiling the base down into static HTML, and recompile the page only when its content changes.
Secondly, if you have a script with a messy query string you can turn it into something that doesn't look like a script at all, e.g., /cgi-bin/script.cgi?foo=bar&this=that could be presented as /snap/foo/bar/this/that.
With Apache, you would just define and pass it off to a handler, that would pick up the parameters in the PATH_INFO environment variable. If people tried URL surgery, you could just return a 404 if the args made no sense.
Search engines are your best (and probably only) hope of getting people in to visit your site. It's up to you to make sure your URIs are search-engine friendly. If they can't be bothered to index what looks like a CGI script, well that is your problem. There are more than enough pages elsewhere for them to crawl over and index without bothering with yours.
Oh really, is that what you think? Funnily enough, that's exactly what we did in Australia in 1972.
People still talk about being six foot two, or the temperature in summer reaching the century, but apart from various linguistic idioms like that, metric is firmly in place. Hell, people still talk about two bob, a synonym for shillings, and Australian currency went decimal in 1966.
It just takes a little willingness on behalf of the population... something we are led to belive that the US apparently lacks.
The combined population of Western and Central Europe is much greater that the US. They're all in metric. If you want to deal with those markets you're going to have to stop with this Imperial shit and use metric, otherwise your infrastructure is going to gather rust as it deals with an increasingly small proportion of the world market that is the US domestic market.
Don't sweat it. You get what you pay for.
People gripe when the same article is posted twice a week apart. A year apart can be forgiven, and, after all, it's not the same URL
Katz forgot to use the Demoroniser, the premier tool for correcting moronic Micros~1 HTML.
Let's see, your country would have pulled itself out of its horrible economic slump no matter what he did. Economic behaviour is cyclic.
He did succede in getting tax cuts through. The rich were very pleased with this. The poor just got poorer: he created a huge transfer of capital from the poor to the rich.
While he maybe helped end the cold war, much of the credit must of course lie with Mikhael Gorbatchev.
Ask what the Nicaraguans think of Reagan.
See also http://www.dumblists.com/list-reag anairport.html and also "American conservatives love to take credit for the 'fall of Communism". (Scroll down to the bottom).
So /. was acquired by somebody else. Hooray for Rob & co.
I just want to know... how does andover.net expect to make money? Banner ads? Don't make me laugh. /.ers are the audience most likely to use banner-blockers. What will happen if /. is a financial drain to andover?
What happens if Slashdot doesn't turn in a profit?
Here's a memo I sent to SETI. I can't get the Linux client to run. Anyone have an idea?
----
Here's your account info:
Email address: [xxx]
OK to show email address? no
Name: grinder
OK to show name? yes
Country: France
Postal code: 75003
Computer location: Work
Everything correct? (y/n) y
gethostbyname: Success
Server host unknown
This is the version information:
Platform: i386-pc-linux-gnulibc1-static
Version: 1.2
I have tried all three Linux ports with no luck.
i386-pc-linux-gnu-gnulibc2.1 (dumps core)
i386-pc-linux-gnulibc1 (gethostbyname fails)
i386-pc-linux-gnulibc1-static (see above output)
Curiously enough, nslookup knows about setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu:
Non-authoritative answer:
Name: milkyway.SSL.Berkeley.EDU
Address: 128.32.18.165
Aliases: setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu
I am lost. Please give me a clue.
David
----
A mod_perl process can get pretty huge, because it contains the apache server code, a perl interpreter, which, as any perl monger will tell you, consumes memory prolifligately. A single int consumes about eighteen bytes, IIRC. Not to mention all the Perl modules that may be loaded.
The problem is compounded by the fact that perl code looks like data to the virtual memory system, which means that children sharing pages rapidly start to dirty them and thus get their own copies.
In the mean time, the mod_perl process processes the actual request very quickly. The trouble is it then spends precious time dribbling bytes back to the client browser. Valuable time that could otherwise be spent creating dynamic content. And so more and more mod_perl processes are spawned, trying to deal with the load, when at any given time most of them are twiddling their thumbs.
Enter a proxy, such as a Squid cache. The mod_perl emits the dynamic page at bus speed, and the proxy picks it up. The mod_perl process is then free to handle another client request. The proxy then doles out the page as fast (or as slow) as the client can accept it. Such processes can be built to have an extremely small footprint, due in part to a strong propensity to share VM pages.
It is therefore not uncommon to see one mod_perl process doing the grunt work that is shipped out by ten or so lightweight caching processes. In any case, far fewer heavy mod_perl processes are required, thus much less memory is consumed by IO-blocked processes. People have reported dramatic savings on the mod_perl list using this approach. (Like, the difference between having to build a server farm or not).
Wavelet theory is cool.
But then, we've been promised PNG for years, and it too contains many excellent ideas. But for the entire park of current technology browsers to shrink down to 5% of all browsers in use, we shall have to wait an awfully long time. Especially as less and less people (proportionally) care about using the latest versions. Things will only get worse.
So it's a fair bet to say that this new format will never amount to anything much on the Web. I hope I'm proven wrong, but the way things are going, the current Web standards are slowly but surely congealing into a qwertyuiop-like mass of immovable standards. People are happy enough with GIF and JPEG, and as line speeds get upgraded, people don't really care any more about an image that takes .02 secs to transfer rather than .12 secs. It just doesn't matter any more.