All that proves is that Open Source is not a panacea that prevents all abuses (something I would hope we all know by now). What we do know is that it does make it possible for a programmer of above average mastery (or perhaps lower, depending on the code) of the language to decipher the code's function. Depending on the code involved it may, however, require rigorous inspection to find a flaw, particularly of the kind involved in the contest you mentioned.
This is where I take exception to the Wikipedia article; the article claims the programs in the contest should pass rigorous inspection but the actual contest makes no such claim. The contest only requires that the code pass visual inspection. I went and looked at one of the special mention entries for the 2005 contest by Natori Shin (picked at random). I went and did a visual inspection of the code and found nothing obvious. Scanning the code I saw some for loops that I recognized as initialization blocks but one stood out because of an if statement (with no else/else if) inside of it. I don't know about you but that throws up red flags for further inspection for me. A trivial inspection then reveals that the very first iteration of the loops fails the conditional and thus matrix[0][0] remains uninitialized.
Now, I'm an average C programmer at best. I freely admit that given a day or even more I probably would not be able to determine whether the code was malicious or exactly what the error resulted in. I almost never have to code anything in C and thus the vagaries of the stack and the ins and outs of the stat() function (both of which the code exploits, per the spoiler) are mostly a mystery to me. However, were I reviewing a patch containing code like this, I would reject it flat out for failure to initialize a structure that was used a few lines later.
That's what I think is disingenuous about using various C contests as a rebuttal to the strengths of Open Source; the fact that the code is out in the open does make it possible to detect (or at least prevent, even accidentally) malicious code fragments, something that is virtual impossible with closed source. Even if the malicious nature of the code cannot be readily determined, even by an expert, it would probably be rejected for basic violations of coding practice. Part of the reason many open source projects have and enforce a strict coding style is to prevent exactly these kinds of errors, malicious or not.
These are just subtly evil things too. Show me some patch(es) that modifies an existing major open source project that phones home with private user data or does some of the other things that have been mentioned in the comments here. If that patch can pass the auditing standards of the project and still accomplish that, then perhaps you'll have a point. In the meantime, the various C contests will remain a provocative challenge for C programmers to display their ingenuity and serve as a learning tool for the rest of us.
Here's one way to look at it: The "good eyes" are only doing what is legal and encouraged. Open source software by definition allows people (both "good" and "bad" eyes) to view the source and encourage them to do so. Closed source software makes it illegal to do so, removing the "good eyes" from the pool of people looking at the code.
What you're left with is only "bad eyes" looking at the closed source software with no "good eyes" to counteract the negative influence. Contrast that with open source software which may have the same number of "bad eyes" looking at it but having even one pair of "good eyes" looking at it is already a better situation.
You're right that it's probably an exaggeration, and I'm sure that any honest Wine user will agree. I love it and use it often but I've had my fair share of getting Windows apps to work correctly, whereas I've had few problems getting things to run on my Vista PC at work.
However, I also think it's an exaggeration to say that "There is no way Wine is more compatible." In my experience, though unlikely, it is possible. More than once I've actually seen app run faster and with more stability in Wine than on the original platform. Remember, Wine is a re-implementation of the Win32 API so it's certainly within the realm of possibility that bugs and inefficient coding could reduce the performance and reliability of apps running on Vista/XP.
How about $2 Trillion to private financial companies in exchange for... what exactly?
Any argument about this is going to be wildly offtopic so I'll just say that one is to bailout some failing arrogant companies while the other is (or was) an investment in improving the infrastructure that is a major part of the economy.
Plus, your 1/100 figure is wrong by an order of magnitude (by population). Try doing the same extrapolation by land area with Canada.
Yeah? Maybe that should be a hint that I was referring to something other than population, say land area:
South Korea: 100,032 km^2
United States: 9,826,630 km^2
Ratio: 0.0101, or roughly 1/100
I can't really do an extrapolation with Canada because I have no data on such telecom investments in Canada. If you'd like to provide some, sure, I'll do the math for you. For reference though, Canada is actually a little bigger than the US with 1/10th of the population density.
IMHO, the telcos were waiting for the FCC to rule that they don't have to negotiate with every little town, district, and apartment building in an area. I can't even imagine how expensive and hard to manage that must be.
Properly managed, it shouldn't be that hard. Not an insurmountable challenge at any stretch. I suspect they already have managers that handle regions, to areas, and to cities and number of subscribers dictate. If it's too much to ask to deal with cities/towns individually, group them by area. Invite one or two representatives from each town and negotiate with them as a whole. You might find that this helps eliminate those nagging, trivial issues that have more to do with politics and egos than with real physical problems with the network deployment. I somehow doubt there would need to be much negotiation in the first place though. Are communities really going to start complaining if Verizon makes them competitive in the broadband service sector at no cost?
Not to mention time... you'd have to wait for exclusive contracts to expire.
This most likely applies to the cable running to the buildings, which the municipality likely owns. These contracts usually are in the form of "we own the copper but we recognize your contribution and efforts to get it there so you have the exclusive right to sell services on it." In any case it's irrelevant since we're talking about fiber, not cable.
And to pour salt on the wounds, the cable companies were allowed to offer VOIP phone service, but Verizon couldn't bring in fiber to compete with cable.
While this reads a bit to me like "oh those poor monopolizing telcos, not being allowed to make $15 billion instead of $12 billion," I agree that this clusterfuck of a situation is not entirely the fault of the industry. It's the combination of corruption, bizarre legislation, and blind greed that has lead to the current state.
Well you're correct that currently most home users have no need for a gigabit connection as they don't use anywhere near that amount of bandwidth. Of course, they can't anyway because it's not available to them. It's the chicken and the egg problem.
That said, you're probably right that with current usage patterns the average home user is not going to saturate a 1 Gbps pipe. I absolutely can see a family of four saturating a 100 Mbps pipe. That's 25 each and with filesharing and streaming HD video that 25 Mbps will go fast.
More to the point is the ability to handle traffic spikes. Even in the previous scenario, each member of the family is probably not using 25 Mbps constantly. However, what happens when there is a major spike and all of a sudden total demand goes over 100Mbps? Service degradation.
If the both the provider and home networks can theoretically handle 1 Gbps, the negative effects of traffic spikes should be significantly, if not completely, reduced.
Didn't Clinton already give the telcoms billions in "tax cuts" so we'd have bad high width now?
Yes, the last sentence of my post you quoted is a reference to the so-called $200 billion broadband scandal. If you browse through my comment history you'll see that I've been calling the whole "area too large" argument bogus since the beginning, but I too would be thrilled to hear we could get 100Mbps connections in major cities. I would then even understand if they couldn't quite justify rolling out tens of thousands of dollars worth of fiber to every farmhouse in America.
Anyway, I agree with you wholeheartedly. We're supposedly the strongest and wealthiest nation in the world and supposedly the leader in information technology and yet our communications network is just downright embarrassing when you compare it with other nations that have fewer resources and less of a head-start on the technologies involved.
Yes, you are absolutely correct. Symmetric as in same bandwidth upstream and down. Both words start with "sy," are infrequently used, and I've had synchronization on my mind all morning. Always proofread.:)
That's like saying that internet connectivity is better now than it was before the start of the current Iraq war so clearly we've seen a return on our investment there! The $200 billion was supposed to get 45Mbps bidirectional internet connections to many millions of subscribers by 2006. Verizon didn't even begin rolling out its FiOS service until September of 2005 and had on the order of 10,000 customers by 2006. As of April, 2008 there weren't even 2 million FiOS subscribers. Oh and it's still not 45Mbps synchronous.
So even if we actually have seen some sort of progress and it's not exactly 0%, it's damn close. If you're actually arguing that far less than 1% of subscribers receiving 40% of the promised bandwidth is acceptable progress, perhaps it is not me that is making intellectually dishonest arguments?
Oh and RE your sig, "Randall nailed you privacy nerds", I dare say you might be missing the point. The security of a system is only as good as its weakest link, which almost invariably is the human element. In this case the encryption is sufficient to make the computer portion of information security too difficult of a target, making the soft human target much more efficient and practical. Of course, all this is assuming you can even base an argument on a web comic whose purpose is much more likely to make us nerds laugh and not "nail" an argument one way or the other.
In case the point was missed, I was referring to this. I saw this article and was amused to see how closely the numbers fit to our friend the broadband scandal.
With respect to your comment, I can only point out that you completely missed the point. Of course it wouldn't work out quite like that (which is why I said "based on size only"). My point was that after investing money into such a project, even assuming 90% losses through inefficiency and corruption (which is ridiculous to begin with), one should then hope to have an increase of 10% of the proposed expansion. However, as we have seen, even investing twice the amount the Korean government is, we get exactly... 0% return. You don't see a problem with that?
Another way to look at it is that is only 100 times larger than South Korea and has an economy over 10 times as strong and yet can't seem to distribute even 1/100th of the bandwidth.
I totally agree with you. The whole "we're too spread out" thing has been bogus from the beginning. One only has to look at countries like Sweden which have lower population densities than the US but still have very high speed synchronous connections for less than we pay for a fraction of the service level here.
I might even buy into the spread out argument if it applied to truly rural areas. I could understand a telco not running $20,000 in fiber to one farmhouse. I can't understand why densely populated cities, especially newer growth cities, are still stuck with slow DSL and cable connections.
Korea is roughly 1/100th the size of the US. If we estimate a similar plan in the US based on size only, it would cost $2.46 trillion USD. The Korean government is paying 1.3 trillion of the 34.1 total (or roughly 4%). If the US government did something similar, it would be about $100 billion USD. If they were generous they might give 8% which would be about $200 billion USD. I wonder what might happen if the US gave its private telecom companies $200 billion to execute such a plan...
"Still just a theory?" Please revisit middle school science for the definition of theory in the context of science. Hint: theory != hypothetical.
Some reading to get you started:
In science, the word theory is used as a plausible general principle or body of principles offered to explain a phenomenon.[3]. For example, it is a fact that an apple dropped on earth has been observed to fall towards the center of the planet but we invoke theories of gravity to explain this occurrence. However, even inside the sciences the word theory picks out several different concepts dependent on the context. In casual speech scientists don't use the term theory in a particularly precise fashion, allowing historical accidents to determine whether a given body of scientific work is called a theory, law, principle or something else. For instance Einstein's relativity is usually called "the theory of relativity" while Newton's theory of gravity often is called "the law of gravity." In this kind of casual use by scientists the word theory can be used flexibly to refer to whatever kind of explanation or prediction is being examined. It is for this instance that a scientific theory is a claim based on a body of evidence.
Furthermore, it is my understanding that so-called "microevolution" has been conclusively demonstrated repeatedly. It doesn't take much of a leap of faith to extrapolate and say that enough "micro" evolutions will eventually yield a "macro" evolution.
That's what really stands out to me here. If this Microsoft extension was really above-the-board, they should have just gone to Mozilla and said: "Hey guys, look we've this extension here and we'd like to include it with Firefox because we think it will help websites be more compatible with Firefox." (assuming that's what it's for)
Covertly installing updates/modifications to another party's software is very bad form. I'd be just as pissed if a Firefox update installed some mysterious IE plugin or a game update installed some add-on to my IM software. When I download and install an update for a piece of software, I expect it to only update that program. Personally, I don't think it should even come with updates/add-ons for other software but if it does it damn well better ask me before installing it.
At least on Windows, it doesn't - it draws and handles all widgets itself, it merely does that in such a way that they're almost pixel-perfect matching the native widgets (but there are still ways to detect Qt when using the app).
No, although this used to be true. Newer versions of Qt use the native platform APIs to draw widgets instead of using emulation.
Why is this modded up? The parent is the one making revisionist history (though I must commend him for having the balls to post a link to the information contradicting his statement).
From the 4.0 announcement (emphasis added):
For those interested in getting packages to test and contribute, several distributions have notified us that they will have KDE 4.0 packages available at or soon after the release.
What part of the release being intended for people to test and contribute is unclear there? The statement was not "For those interested in getting packages to install and replace their existing desktop environment." In that same section, there is a list of distributions that had/have packages for the 4.0 release and many have "alpha" or "experimental" in the description.
Neither the WayBack Machine nor the kubuntu.org site have complete records around that time, but this shows that at least 4.0RC2 was also being released as a test "If you want to test KDE 4...".
While KDE 4.1 aims at being the first release suitable for early adopting users, some features you are used to in KDE 3.5 are not implemented yet. The KDE team is working on those and strives to make them available in one of the next releases. While there is no guarantee that every single feature from KDE 3.5 will be implemented, KDE 4.1 already provides a powerful and feature-rich working environment.
Note that some options in the UI have moved to a place in the context of the data they manipulate, so make sure you have a closer look before you report anything missing in action.
KDE 4.1 is a huge step forward in the KDE4 series and hopefully sets the pace for future development. KDE 4.2 can be expected in January 2009.
That's also pretty clear that 4.1 is not intended for the average end-user. As if declaring it is the firstKDE4 release intended for even early adopters wasn't enough, the tone of the announcement is still one of "Get it, run it, test it."
Contrast that with the 4.2 announcement that "the KDE Community is now confident we have a compelling offering for the majority of end users." The tone of the 4.2 announcement is much more install it and "Spread the Word."
So maybe the KDE devs didn't plaster the site in blink tags with spinning siren gifs and bold red text saying "OMFG DON'T USE THIS, IT IS BROKEN AND WILL EAT YOUR COMPUTER. IN FACT, IF YOU EVEN ARE THINKING ABOUT USING THIS YOU ARE RETARDED AND SHOULD BE STERILIZED." That doesn't excuse you from ignoring what they stated in the announcement. Of course they mentioned the new technology and features they were developing into the new platform. The point is to get people excited about it so that they will test and contribute. Do end-users test and contribute? No, not really.
We're all tired of hearing people like you dismiss the "broadband scandal." If you actually presented the TRUTH, the fact is that digitization of telephone exchanges mostly finished in the 1980s. The 1996 Telecommunications Act and the "broadband scandal" are two separate things (although somewhat related).
The telcos were promising fiber and/or broadband (which at the time was defined as 45Mbps bidirectional) to millions of homes by 1995 if they got the tax incentives. They started one-uping each other and it became a plan to rewire most of America by 2006 if the payment was large enough. Meanwhile, the telco lobbyists had been trying to get a honeypot of a bill (the 1996 Act) written. Turns out, with all the merging and games going on, the bill mostly let them off the hook and only required that they be able to provide DSL service. DSL service that was already available on their networks given that they had been converted to digital already. Now there is evidence that they were blowing smoke up our skirts to begin with and that they didn't really have the technology available to deploy fiber all over the country. So which is it, fraud in then sense that they promised to deploy their technology and then didn't, or fraud in that they promised a technology that didn't exist?
Quite frankly, I don't give a fuck. Either way what they did is an absolute scandal and they ripped off the American people in such a way that it's shocking that it's not more shocking to more people.
Good point, but don't be too quick to compare Japan and the US, the US is huge, with a population spread out very far. Japan does not face these same problems
Can we put this myth to bed already? Population density should not (and largely does not) factor in to availability of high-speed broadband. Both Canada and Sweden (just as two examples) have lower population density than the US and both have higher availability of broadband services.
Even if the vast expanses of the US were a significant factor in the deployment of broadband, why then is it still a problem in large cities? Why then does New York City, with a population density almost twice that of Tokyo, not have access to 1Gbps symmetric connections?
Not necessarily. The reason they charge more to insurance companies is for the shenanigans that they pull on the doctors. Think about all the paperwork, time, and effort that is spent getting the insurance companies to cough up the money owed to the doctors. That's not free. Apparently it's probably an extra 10% in cost and the extra 5% is incentive for more people to pay directly.
I haven't seen much websites run pure python to generate web pages.
I've found that this is because Python stays out of the way so that you don't notice it as much. A Python-powered web page is not likely to have monstrosities like "index.php?sid=123456789&f=viewTopic&tid=123&cid=321&r=index.php...etc" in the URL. Perhaps it's simply the current developer community, but Python apps also seem to be less likely to have coding errors pop up in production (i.e. errors/exceptions are properly caught and handled). Anyway, the point is that there actually are quite a few sites that use Python (such as any site using a Python framework or CMS like Django or Plone [NASA, eBay, etc]). These sites might have some legacy PHP pages, but the fact that they are using Python should illustrate it's usefulness as a web programming language.
I personally hate Python because of it's lack of brackets (so it's difficult to read and doesn't allow code folding in developer tools that have no Python support)
Well, it's of course a subjective opinion, but I have to strongly disagree on the readability comment. In a C-like language:
if (x == 1) { // do something } else { // do something else }
In Python:
if x == 1: // do something else: // do something else
The only difference is there is less noise from the brackets. The blocks are still indented the same. (Of course everyone likes to bring up the fact that you can write everything on one line with almost no spaces in C, but if you are actually doing this in code, I hate you and your code. Seriously.)
With respect to IDE support and code folding, I've found code folding to be mostly a "oh neat" factor rather than a truly useful productivity feature. Maybe it's just my coding style or I haven't been shown the wonder of folding but there it is. And complaining that Python is not a good language choice because your IDE of choice doesn't support it for code folding is, no offense, stupid. That's like saying C is a horrible systems programming language because Notepad won't auto-indent, brace-match, and fold the code. Get an IDE that supports your language or use a real code editor like Vim or Emacs that has easily configured code helpers.
This has turned into more of a flame than I intended. I just had to comment because I used to be a C and PHP junkie. C was the first language I learned and even today my first language of choice for a cross-platform application would be C++ with a good cross-platform library like Qt. PHP was my first experience with web programming and I fell right into it due to the similarities with other C-like languages. My first experience with Python was for a project at university (research a language, present it) and I thought it was neat but didn't really look much into it, primarily because I also thought the lack of brackets was stupid and forcing me to indent grated on my independent side. Eventually I realized that a low opinion of a language simply for not being C recreated was silly, and I religiously indent my code anyway so what's the big deal about the required block indentation? So, at the urging of a friend, I gave a real shot with a personal website using Django. An hour or so later you could say I was a convert. It really is easy to use and makes it a joy to program (even for the web, which has always been a real pain in the ass for me).
So, my point is, if you don't like Python, fine. No language is right for everyone or every situation, but don't snub a beautiful and easy to use language simply because it isn't C with dollar signs in front of variables. Give it a real shot and you might just find you like it. A lot.
His swipe at Google also highlights the difference between Wikipedia and Britannica. From the article:
"If I were to be the CEO of Google or the founders of Google I would be very [displeased] that the best search engine in the world continues to provide as a first link, Wikipedia," he said."Is this the best they can do? Is this the best that [their] algorithm can do?"
The algorithm does not care one bit about which link is more elite, classy, or respected, only about it's relation to other pages on the web. The fact that Wikipedia comes up as the number one result simply illustrates just how popular it is. Ironically, if Jorge read Wikipedia, he might know that.
It's interesting to see that while Britannica lacks a search result for PageRank, Wikipedia has a full article containing mathematical formulas and informative history and commentary about the algorithm. It also cites 16 references and an additional 6 in further reading. Which encyclopedia is inferior, again?
Now, certainly, Wikipedia should not be used as an authoritative source, but its PageRank alone demonstrates just how effective it has been at bringing knowledge to the masses. Wikipedia is almost always my first stop for a search because it often has a full article for a topic that I might otherwise spend minutes searching for on Google and will have many links to related topics and sources for the article if I want to dig deeper. Most of the time though, I'm not looking for a fully researched, academic quality paper, just a quick overview of the subject. I have a feeling that most people use it for the same reason.
Slashdot Mirror
So I guess this was never passed?
All that proves is that Open Source is not a panacea that prevents all abuses (something I would hope we all know by now). What we do know is that it does make it possible for a programmer of above average mastery (or perhaps lower, depending on the code) of the language to decipher the code's function. Depending on the code involved it may, however, require rigorous inspection to find a flaw, particularly of the kind involved in the contest you mentioned.
This is where I take exception to the Wikipedia article; the article claims the programs in the contest should pass rigorous inspection but the actual contest makes no such claim. The contest only requires that the code pass visual inspection. I went and looked at one of the special mention entries for the 2005 contest by Natori Shin (picked at random). I went and did a visual inspection of the code and found nothing obvious. Scanning the code I saw some for loops that I recognized as initialization blocks but one stood out because of an if statement (with no else/else if) inside of it. I don't know about you but that throws up red flags for further inspection for me. A trivial inspection then reveals that the very first iteration of the loops fails the conditional and thus matrix[0][0] remains uninitialized.
Now, I'm an average C programmer at best. I freely admit that given a day or even more I probably would not be able to determine whether the code was malicious or exactly what the error resulted in. I almost never have to code anything in C and thus the vagaries of the stack and the ins and outs of the stat() function (both of which the code exploits, per the spoiler) are mostly a mystery to me. However, were I reviewing a patch containing code like this, I would reject it flat out for failure to initialize a structure that was used a few lines later.
That's what I think is disingenuous about using various C contests as a rebuttal to the strengths of Open Source; the fact that the code is out in the open does make it possible to detect (or at least prevent, even accidentally) malicious code fragments, something that is virtual impossible with closed source. Even if the malicious nature of the code cannot be readily determined, even by an expert, it would probably be rejected for basic violations of coding practice. Part of the reason many open source projects have and enforce a strict coding style is to prevent exactly these kinds of errors, malicious or not.
These are just subtly evil things too. Show me some patch(es) that modifies an existing major open source project that phones home with private user data or does some of the other things that have been mentioned in the comments here. If that patch can pass the auditing standards of the project and still accomplish that, then perhaps you'll have a point. In the meantime, the various C contests will remain a provocative challenge for C programmers to display their ingenuity and serve as a learning tool for the rest of us.
I say to you, sir, that this here is America and we'll not have any of your personal responsibility nonsense.
Here's one way to look at it: The "good eyes" are only doing what is legal and encouraged. Open source software by definition allows people (both "good" and "bad" eyes) to view the source and encourage them to do so. Closed source software makes it illegal to do so, removing the "good eyes" from the pool of people looking at the code.
What you're left with is only "bad eyes" looking at the closed source software with no "good eyes" to counteract the negative influence. Contrast that with open source software which may have the same number of "bad eyes" looking at it but having even one pair of "good eyes" looking at it is already a better situation.
Perhaps he was dictating?
You're right that it's probably an exaggeration, and I'm sure that any honest Wine user will agree. I love it and use it often but I've had my fair share of getting Windows apps to work correctly, whereas I've had few problems getting things to run on my Vista PC at work.
However, I also think it's an exaggeration to say that "There is no way Wine is more compatible." In my experience, though unlikely, it is possible. More than once I've actually seen app run faster and with more stability in Wine than on the original platform. Remember, Wine is a re-implementation of the Win32 API so it's certainly within the realm of possibility that bugs and inefficient coding could reduce the performance and reliability of apps running on Vista/XP.
Any argument about this is going to be wildly offtopic so I'll just say that one is to bailout some failing arrogant companies while the other is (or was) an investment in improving the infrastructure that is a major part of the economy.
Yeah? Maybe that should be a hint that I was referring to something other than population, say land area:
I can't really do an extrapolation with Canada because I have no data on such telecom investments in Canada. If you'd like to provide some, sure, I'll do the math for you. For reference though, Canada is actually a little bigger than the US with 1/10th of the population density.
Oh, and they have higher bandwidth too.
Properly managed, it shouldn't be that hard. Not an insurmountable challenge at any stretch. I suspect they already have managers that handle regions, to areas, and to cities and number of subscribers dictate. If it's too much to ask to deal with cities/towns individually, group them by area. Invite one or two representatives from each town and negotiate with them as a whole. You might find that this helps eliminate those nagging, trivial issues that have more to do with politics and egos than with real physical problems with the network deployment. I somehow doubt there would need to be much negotiation in the first place though. Are communities really going to start complaining if Verizon makes them competitive in the broadband service sector at no cost?
This most likely applies to the cable running to the buildings, which the municipality likely owns. These contracts usually are in the form of "we own the copper but we recognize your contribution and efforts to get it there so you have the exclusive right to sell services on it." In any case it's irrelevant since we're talking about fiber, not cable.
While this reads a bit to me like "oh those poor monopolizing telcos, not being allowed to make $15 billion instead of $12 billion," I agree that this clusterfuck of a situation is not entirely the fault of the industry. It's the combination of corruption, bizarre legislation, and blind greed that has lead to the current state.
Well you're correct that currently most home users have no need for a gigabit connection as they don't use anywhere near that amount of bandwidth. Of course, they can't anyway because it's not available to them. It's the chicken and the egg problem.
That said, you're probably right that with current usage patterns the average home user is not going to saturate a 1 Gbps pipe. I absolutely can see a family of four saturating a 100 Mbps pipe. That's 25 each and with filesharing and streaming HD video that 25 Mbps will go fast.
More to the point is the ability to handle traffic spikes. Even in the previous scenario, each member of the family is probably not using 25 Mbps constantly. However, what happens when there is a major spike and all of a sudden total demand goes over 100Mbps? Service degradation.
If the both the provider and home networks can theoretically handle 1 Gbps, the negative effects of traffic spikes should be significantly, if not completely, reduced.
Yes, the last sentence of my post you quoted is a reference to the so-called $200 billion broadband scandal. If you browse through my comment history you'll see that I've been calling the whole "area too large" argument bogus since the beginning, but I too would be thrilled to hear we could get 100Mbps connections in major cities. I would then even understand if they couldn't quite justify rolling out tens of thousands of dollars worth of fiber to every farmhouse in America.
Anyway, I agree with you wholeheartedly. We're supposedly the strongest and wealthiest nation in the world and supposedly the leader in information technology and yet our communications network is just downright embarrassing when you compare it with other nations that have fewer resources and less of a head-start on the technologies involved.
Yes, you are absolutely correct. Symmetric as in same bandwidth upstream and down. Both words start with "sy," are infrequently used, and I've had synchronization on my mind all morning. Always proofread. :)
That's like saying that internet connectivity is better now than it was before the start of the current Iraq war so clearly we've seen a return on our investment there! The $200 billion was supposed to get 45Mbps bidirectional internet connections to many millions of subscribers by 2006. Verizon didn't even begin rolling out its FiOS service until September of 2005 and had on the order of 10,000 customers by 2006. As of April, 2008 there weren't even 2 million FiOS subscribers. Oh and it's still not 45Mbps synchronous.
So even if we actually have seen some sort of progress and it's not exactly 0%, it's damn close. If you're actually arguing that far less than 1% of subscribers receiving 40% of the promised bandwidth is acceptable progress, perhaps it is not me that is making intellectually dishonest arguments?
Oh and RE your sig, "Randall nailed you privacy nerds", I dare say you might be missing the point. The security of a system is only as good as its weakest link, which almost invariably is the human element. In this case the encryption is sufficient to make the computer portion of information security too difficult of a target, making the soft human target much more efficient and practical. Of course, all this is assuming you can even base an argument on a web comic whose purpose is much more likely to make us nerds laugh and not "nail" an argument one way or the other.
In case the point was missed, I was referring to this. I saw this article and was amused to see how closely the numbers fit to our friend the broadband scandal.
With respect to your comment, I can only point out that you completely missed the point. Of course it wouldn't work out quite like that (which is why I said "based on size only"). My point was that after investing money into such a project, even assuming 90% losses through inefficiency and corruption (which is ridiculous to begin with), one should then hope to have an increase of 10% of the proposed expansion. However, as we have seen, even investing twice the amount the Korean government is, we get exactly... 0% return. You don't see a problem with that?
Another way to look at it is that is only 100 times larger than South Korea and has an economy over 10 times as strong and yet can't seem to distribute even 1/100th of the bandwidth.
I totally agree with you. The whole "we're too spread out" thing has been bogus from the beginning. One only has to look at countries like Sweden which have lower population densities than the US but still have very high speed synchronous connections for less than we pay for a fraction of the service level here.
I might even buy into the spread out argument if it applied to truly rural areas. I could understand a telco not running $20,000 in fiber to one farmhouse. I can't understand why densely populated cities, especially newer growth cities, are still stuck with slow DSL and cable connections.
Korea is roughly 1/100th the size of the US. If we estimate a similar plan in the US based on size only, it would cost $2.46 trillion USD. The Korean government is paying 1.3 trillion of the 34.1 total (or roughly 4%). If the US government did something similar, it would be about $100 billion USD. If they were generous they might give 8% which would be about $200 billion USD. I wonder what might happen if the US gave its private telecom companies $200 billion to execute such a plan...
"Still just a theory?" Please revisit middle school science for the definition of theory in the context of science. Hint: theory != hypothetical. Some reading to get you started:
Furthermore, it is my understanding that so-called "microevolution" has been conclusively demonstrated repeatedly. It doesn't take much of a leap of faith to extrapolate and say that enough "micro" evolutions will eventually yield a "macro" evolution.
That's what really stands out to me here. If this Microsoft extension was really above-the-board, they should have just gone to Mozilla and said: "Hey guys, look we've this extension here and we'd like to include it with Firefox because we think it will help websites be more compatible with Firefox." (assuming that's what it's for)
Covertly installing updates/modifications to another party's software is very bad form. I'd be just as pissed if a Firefox update installed some mysterious IE plugin or a game update installed some add-on to my IM software. When I download and install an update for a piece of software, I expect it to only update that program. Personally, I don't think it should even come with updates/add-ons for other software but if it does it damn well better ask me before installing it.
No, although this used to be true. Newer versions of Qt use the native platform APIs to draw widgets instead of using emulation.
What part of the release being intended for people to test and contribute is unclear there? The statement was not "For those interested in getting packages to install and replace their existing desktop environment." In that same section, there is a list of distributions that had/have packages for the 4.0 release and many have "alpha" or "experimental" in the description.
...".
Neither the WayBack Machine nor the kubuntu.org site have complete records around that time, but this shows that at least 4.0RC2 was also being released as a test "If you want to test KDE 4
If we go look at the 4.1 announcement:
That's also pretty clear that 4.1 is not intended for the average end-user. As if declaring it is the firstKDE4 release intended for even early adopters wasn't enough, the tone of the announcement is still one of "Get it, run it, test it."
Contrast that with the 4.2 announcement that "the KDE Community is now confident we have a compelling offering for the majority of end users." The tone of the 4.2 announcement is much more install it and "Spread the Word."
So maybe the KDE devs didn't plaster the site in blink tags with spinning siren gifs and bold red text saying "OMFG DON'T USE THIS, IT IS BROKEN AND WILL EAT YOUR COMPUTER. IN FACT, IF YOU EVEN ARE THINKING ABOUT USING THIS YOU ARE RETARDED AND SHOULD BE STERILIZED." That doesn't excuse you from ignoring what they stated in the announcement. Of course they mentioned the new technology and features they were developing into the new platform. The point is to get people excited about it so that they will test and contribute. Do end-users test and contribute? No, not really.
P.S.
We're all tired of hearing people like you dismiss the "broadband scandal." If you actually presented the TRUTH, the fact is that digitization of telephone exchanges mostly finished in the 1980s. The 1996 Telecommunications Act and the "broadband scandal" are two separate things (although somewhat related).
The telcos were promising fiber and/or broadband (which at the time was defined as 45Mbps bidirectional) to millions of homes by 1995 if they got the tax incentives. They started one-uping each other and it became a plan to rewire most of America by 2006 if the payment was large enough. Meanwhile, the telco lobbyists had been trying to get a honeypot of a bill (the 1996 Act) written. Turns out, with all the merging and games going on, the bill mostly let them off the hook and only required that they be able to provide DSL service. DSL service that was already available on their networks given that they had been converted to digital already. Now there is evidence that they were blowing smoke up our skirts to begin with and that they didn't really have the technology available to deploy fiber all over the country. So which is it, fraud in then sense that they promised to deploy their technology and then didn't, or fraud in that they promised a technology that didn't exist?
Quite frankly, I don't give a fuck. Either way what they did is an absolute scandal and they ripped off the American people in such a way that it's shocking that it's not more shocking to more people.
Can we put this myth to bed already? Population density should not (and largely does not) factor in to availability of high-speed broadband. Both Canada and Sweden (just as two examples) have lower population density than the US and both have higher availability of broadband services.
Even if the vast expanses of the US were a significant factor in the deployment of broadband, why then is it still a problem in large cities? Why then does New York City, with a population density almost twice that of Tokyo, not have access to 1Gbps symmetric connections?
Not necessarily. The reason they charge more to insurance companies is for the shenanigans that they pull on the doctors. Think about all the paperwork, time, and effort that is spent getting the insurance companies to cough up the money owed to the doctors. That's not free. Apparently it's probably an extra 10% in cost and the extra 5% is incentive for more people to pay directly.
I've found that this is because Python stays out of the way so that you don't notice it as much. A Python-powered web page is not likely to have monstrosities like "index.php?sid=123456789&f=viewTopic&tid=123&cid=321&r=index.php...etc" in the URL. Perhaps it's simply the current developer community, but Python apps also seem to be less likely to have coding errors pop up in production (i.e. errors/exceptions are properly caught and handled). Anyway, the point is that there actually are quite a few sites that use Python (such as any site using a Python framework or CMS like Django or Plone [NASA, eBay, etc]). These sites might have some legacy PHP pages, but the fact that they are using Python should illustrate it's usefulness as a web programming language.
Well, it's of course a subjective opinion, but I have to strongly disagree on the readability comment. In a C-like language:
In Python:
The only difference is there is less noise from the brackets. The blocks are still indented the same. (Of course everyone likes to bring up the fact that you can write everything on one line with almost no spaces in C, but if you are actually doing this in code, I hate you and your code. Seriously.)
With respect to IDE support and code folding, I've found code folding to be mostly a "oh neat" factor rather than a truly useful productivity feature. Maybe it's just my coding style or I haven't been shown the wonder of folding but there it is. And complaining that Python is not a good language choice because your IDE of choice doesn't support it for code folding is, no offense, stupid. That's like saying C is a horrible systems programming language because Notepad won't auto-indent, brace-match, and fold the code. Get an IDE that supports your language or use a real code editor like Vim or Emacs that has easily configured code helpers.
This has turned into more of a flame than I intended. I just had to comment because I used to be a C and PHP junkie. C was the first language I learned and even today my first language of choice for a cross-platform application would be C++ with a good cross-platform library like Qt. PHP was my first experience with web programming and I fell right into it due to the similarities with other C-like languages. My first experience with Python was for a project at university (research a language, present it) and I thought it was neat but didn't really look much into it, primarily because I also thought the lack of brackets was stupid and forcing me to indent grated on my independent side. Eventually I realized that a low opinion of a language simply for not being C recreated was silly, and I religiously indent my code anyway so what's the big deal about the required block indentation? So, at the urging of a friend, I gave a real shot with a personal website using Django. An hour or so later you could say I was a convert. It really is easy to use and makes it a joy to program (even for the web, which has always been a real pain in the ass for me).
So, my point is, if you don't like Python, fine. No language is right for everyone or every situation, but don't snub a beautiful and easy to use language simply because it isn't C with dollar signs in front of variables. Give it a real shot and you might just find you like it. A lot.
The algorithm does not care one bit about which link is more elite, classy, or respected, only about it's relation to other pages on the web. The fact that Wikipedia comes up as the number one result simply illustrates just how popular it is. Ironically, if Jorge read Wikipedia, he might know that.
It's interesting to see that while Britannica lacks a search result for PageRank, Wikipedia has a full article containing mathematical formulas and informative history and commentary about the algorithm. It also cites 16 references and an additional 6 in further reading. Which encyclopedia is inferior, again?
Now, certainly, Wikipedia should not be used as an authoritative source, but its PageRank alone demonstrates just how effective it has been at bringing knowledge to the masses. Wikipedia is almost always my first stop for a search because it often has a full article for a topic that I might otherwise spend minutes searching for on Google and will have many links to related topics and sources for the article if I want to dig deeper. Most of the time though, I'm not looking for a fully researched, academic quality paper, just a quick overview of the subject. I have a feeling that most people use it for the same reason.