GM has gone on the record saying that, because of the elimination of most of the moving parts, these cars could realistically last 20 years. Which is a big concern for GM, obviously having a 20-year-turnover on cars is going to nail their bottom line... until you figure in the savings on engine parts, assembly lines for those engine parts, etc.
The very first GSM mobile phone that came out would work well today. It doesn't stop people from changing their phone every year for the latest 'trendy' mobile. Once the prices, as you say, drop significantly then it opens up a whole new market for designer cars that people can change on a far more regular basis.
My first thought when I first saw GM's vehical is what happens when I'm crusing down the street then reach to change the radio station?
You must be driving a pretty prehistoric car. All the cars I've driven in the past few years, you can control the radio directly from the steering wheel.
Plus in the UK, the highway code states that you should have both hands on the steering wheel at all times except to change gears. Though a lot of the top-end cars now use Tiptronic where you change gears using buttons on the steering wheel.
Hmmm, I'd get back and practice on the gamepad if I were you.
I'm surprised that the majority of posters are resorting to unimaginative "what BS" posts instead of thinking up innovative ideas. Ok, here is my idea:
Most web pages have a lot of static content in, especially menus etc. You could start rendering the page immediately from the cache from the last page and rerender afterwards as the new page starts to differ from the cached version.
As the page comes in, keep switching to the page that is closest to same structure in cache (ie predominantly on the HTML tags). Don't render the text until the initial few chars are confirmed by the version downloading, then progressively render that (ie show old version then modify words where they differ).
This would have the effect of progressively rendering the page as a whole much like those progressive GIFs. It would show a large speedup on pages that contain tables, as most browsers these days won't render a table until it has recieved the/table.
This would be a 'faster' browser with no compression or pre-caching.
Maybe the article is referring to capabilities, not processing speed. A PC can, in theory, perform an infinite number of different tasks. A PVR (like any other specialized device) is restricted to a few.
All computers have a finite instruction set and finite memory in which to store information, therefore cannot in theory perform infinite number of tasks.
I too would love to see XML natively available for PHP. I've written a module that gives a nice simple API to XML, it's available here, but the problem is it needs to come with PHP as standard for it to become widely used.
It's still not clear to me what this is supposed to be. Is it intended as a replacement for x86-like CPUs, as most people here seem to assume, or something novel, as the cryptic reference to RISC suggests?
If they want to create cheap knock-off PCs then it would need to be x86 compatiable. If they wanted efficiency and speed and were aiming at a homegrown market based on Red Flag Linux then they could drop the gross x86 legacy and use something like the ARM instruction set (and use ARM Linux port for plenty of existing binaries).
Ahh, nothing like a zealot PHB to fuck up one's work life. I'm sure the poor schmuck just trying to do his job appreciated your insipid political antics.
You should keep your personal battles out of the workplace. You wouldn't like it if your employer involved itself in your personal life.
It's called a company having ethics.
At my company before last the management landed a large tobacco account. They had to cancel the contract because the team refused to work on the account on ethical grounds. It happens. Some of us care. We don't submit to the cowardly excuse "if we don't do it someone else will".
Final point. It's not our "personal life", this guy is a fellow software engineer and the outcome will affect what we can and can't do professionally.
And as an aside, I'd -personally- consider it very poorly managed if you colo a machine (or lease a dedicated server somewhere) and the hosting company -DOESN'T- have root. That's fucking stupid, because -part- of what you're paying them for is to keep yer machine up. If you don't want someone else having root on your machines, then lease your own T1 and drop it into your house/apartment. Seriously.
I disagree. I expect from my colo 100% uptime in my connection to the outside world, but if I am managing the server myself I don't expect a stranger to be able to go poking around inside it with no security restrictions. My advice is create a root2 and use that, then ONLY allow root to execute commands 'halt' and 'reboot'. That's all a colo should ever need.
1) UPS has battery that runs out. This has hydrogen that runs out. same deal.?
Not same deal. You can keep popping out any buying more hydrogen cannisters and go indefinately with the fuel cell. Your UPS will buy you some time (enough time to shut down your networks safely) but not to continue operations. Essentially it is generator and UPS all rolled into one.
In obtaining more hydrogen, you can either buy it or you can generate it yourself (though electrolysis - via solar or mains). You can see the latest fuel cell stories at Future Energies.
I think if I had one testament to carve for a future generation that wishes to reconstruct my digital data and try and emulate the system, it would be "hey,:x to save and quit"
My experience is that good managers who are knowledgable about the workforce will hire people without degrees. People who are poor managers and in over their heads are too afraid to hire non-degreed personnel because they feel it will reflect poorly on them. It's the HR equivalent of "no one ever got fired for buying Microsoft".
I would consider someone with a degree over someone without (if they were roughly equal in all other ways) as I know the person that studied CompSci will have a reasonable exposure to algorithms, OS and hardware architecture, as well as software engineering methodology. You at least know you aren't going to get someone that would use a O(n^2) algorithm for a basic sort. Of course you can take time and give all the candidates extensive technical tests, but with a degree that's already done at someone else's expense.
Odd, Frontpage (also a WYSIWYG HTML editor) produces "human readable" code--well, at least as well as Mozilla does...
If it's anything as bad as Frontpage then it must be pretty awful. Does it double the size of each page throwing in FONT and DIV tags around everything?
If running PHP scripts, add the follow lines at the start: ini_set('zlib.output_compression', 'On'); ini_set('zlib.output_compression_level', '3');
It will gzip your pages as they leave the server. To save on cpu, I cache my HTML pages... then also system() call to gzip it in the same dir. I then: if (strstr($HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING, 'gzip')) { serve_gzipped_file; } else { serve_uncompressed_html } It means the server doesn't need to gzip the file on every single request.
But today, when 90% of the stuff served (besides images) by web servers are dynamic content, why does a web server like this get a headline?
My first thought is for serving images. Our server is quite heavily loaded, and it seems a waste that Apache is being used to serve up images (85% of our traffic) which don't use any of its capability.
Ok, to continue offtopic for a couple of seconds... here is my 2c (and I'm not criticising you in *any* way, or saying you are wrong, this is _my_ experience):
What is the point of array_push() why can't it just be called 'push()'? I know it works on an array!
You know it works on an array because it's called array_push:-P
Nope, instead we have a whole set of mysql_* functions for MySql and another whole set of pg_* functions for Postgre
You can always use ADODB.
(item1,item2,item3) is not treated as a list or an array. I can't do ($fieldname,$fieldname2) = mysql_fetch_row()... nope I have to put them into a temporary array and set them one by one:(
Well I've never used that syntax in *any* language! (must be a Perl thing?)
It wouldn't be so bad if I could declare my global variables once at the top of the program but no.. i have to redeclare them global in each function I'm going to use them in.
This is down to personal taste. I much prefer having to redeclare in each function, as it's a lot safer since you don't have to explicitly declare local variables.
Personally, PHP does the job for me. It has its short-comings, but for small-medium size web sites you can't beat it imho.
I still wouldn't write a web-server in it though:->
If using linux or any other open source solution requires staff to be paid more, then those staff will come from the same country. Therefore this will keep that money in the local economy rather than pouring it into MS coffers. I you were a foreign government would you rather give money to a) your citizens or b) foreign megacorp ?
I think the usual idea is for a government to cut its IT costs so that it can spend the money on other things such as health and education. If the extra cost outweighs the license fees, plus the cost of downtime through inadequate security and viruses, then a government is unlikely to switch (imho)
Privoxy is based on Junkbuster, but adds the following. Under Windows it really is just click and go, and comes with all the rules you need built in (though you can easily add regex filtering). I use it in conjunction with Phoenix and don't suffer from any ads/pop-ups/cookie/Javascript annoyances. Another great plus is that you can enable it and disable it directly from the taskbar.
I know plenty of out-of-work Sys Admins at the moment, but no unemployed programmers, so stick to programming if I were you. I don't know why the above post is moderated funny, you should look for buzzwords. (a) it's what clueless HR people look for on a CV and (b) large companies will pay over the odds to get someone with the buzzword skills, as there is always a lag between a new technology and a wide pool of people with those skills. You will have to 're-skill' fairly often but to be honest most of the complicated-sounding buzzwords hide some piss-easy jobs. Add OO to your imperative language skills, and you should be able to pick up pretty much any buzzword skill very quickly. You then get to irk the people in the company you join because they are probably more qualified in the skill than you but the management are paying you twice as much because they wanted a 'specialist':-/
Transmeta's only claim to fame for their chips was using software to reduce power consumption, and it worked -- obviously, the Intelligent Energy Manager is just a ripoff of Transmeta's design. Linus should sue.
I thought their claim to fame was using VLIW for power at low clock cycles, then giving the chip the ability to emulate instruction sets via a translation layer above? Doesn't sound much to do with general energy saving techniques which you think they may have a patent on. ARM chips are already very lower power, my last desktop PC I think it ran at 30mW. Asynchronous designs such as the Amulet seem to be the future of _very_ lower power devices (and being ARM instruction set should drop right in). That works at the gate level. There are PCs that run on ARM, but there are very few ARM laptop currently (though as Linux becomes more the desktop OS, I'm sure we'll see ARMLinux laptops appearing).
Open Source software is, by definition, fully documented [snip]
LMAO
Yes, source code does count as documentation, because it can be used to understand things like binary data formats when printed manuals are not available.
Fully commented source code counts a documentation.
Documentation created today should be readable tomorrow and ten years from now. Is that true of Microsoft Word or Powerpoint?
Or of Abiword? Or any other proprietry file format used by an Open Source application? We are moving off the subject of Open Source and onto Open Standards.
do you know how many companies have all their documentation in Office formats? Wouldn't they feel safer knowing that their documentation isn't fundamentally bound to one company's products? Unfortunately, they don't think about such things.
Or maybe they are especially cunning and figure that there are so many.doc files out there someone will most likely write a.doc->Open Standard convertor? (no, I don't go for that theory either)
there's no way I'll stop using IE until there exists the equivalent of the Google toolbar [google.com] for Mozilla. I don't know if I could function without it.
I don't know about Mozilla but Phoenix certainly has it. It's much better than the Google toolbar as with one click I can make it search the online PHP or MySql documentation (as well as other things). Phoenix is faster than IE on my machine too.
Anyway, the biggest evidence that these are real screenshots is that the background image is of such shitty quality. What kind of person could believe that MS would still give you such a collection of crappy images after all the $ spent of marketing fluff and trying the make the GUI look good?;)
The same kind of people that use clip-art personas for their testamonials instead of spending a couple of dollars on a roll of film?
I cant speak for the others, but have you ever looked at the source for PHPNuke?
Do you think more than 5% of its users have? Do you think they care what's underneath? Someone can drag and drop some files in a directory, enter their mysql username and password in one file, and they have a fully-operational magazine with registration, slashdot-style comments, forums, Yahoo!-style directory, file downloads section, and goodness knows how many other things. Security is poor, but if you run a personal blog or a tiny niche magazine then you really aren't to worried. Someone trashes the mag then it's 5 mins to put back PHPNuke and a few more mins for the sys admin to restore last nights db backup. It's not like it's going to be used for anything critical, but it gives newbies a very easy entry into the world of online publishing. Those that don't get bored and let the mag die after a few weeks/months will then grow up and move onto more serious software.
That I was testing some of our sites with a fellow employee, when after a while he seemed puzzled as to why one of the buttons didn't seem to click (Mozilla doesn't seem to like myform.button.value, you have to put document.myform.button.value). He seemed visibly surprised when I told him I wasn't using Explorer. Then I showed him reading down a web page, right clicking on links where they loaded in tabs in the background... then going and reading each of the pages afterwards. Plus right clicking on tabs to instantly close them. He was very impressed.
Even though Phoenix is faster and more stable than Explorer, I found the only real way to switch was to delete all the Explorer icons from the desktop and the taskbar. Otherwise some old habits are too hard to break!
Phoenix combined with Privoxy (plus the occasional run of AdAware)... the currently unbeatable combination on WinXP.
Slashdot Mirror
GM has gone on the record saying that, because of the elimination of most of the moving parts, these cars could realistically last 20 years. Which is a big concern for GM, obviously having a 20-year-turnover on cars is going to nail their bottom line... until you figure in the savings on engine parts, assembly lines for those engine parts, etc.
The very first GSM mobile phone that came out would work well today. It doesn't stop people from changing their phone every year for the latest 'trendy' mobile. Once the prices, as you say, drop significantly then it opens up a whole new market for designer cars that people can change on a far more regular basis.
Phillip.
My first thought when I first saw GM's vehical is what happens when I'm crusing down the street then reach to change the radio station?
You must be driving a pretty prehistoric car. All the cars I've driven in the past few years, you can control the radio directly from the steering wheel.
Plus in the UK, the highway code states that you should have both hands on the steering wheel at all times except to change gears. Though a lot of the top-end cars now use Tiptronic where you change gears using buttons on the steering wheel.
Hmmm, I'd get back and practice on the gamepad if I were you.
Phillip.
I'm surprised that the majority of posters are resorting to unimaginative "what BS" posts instead of thinking up innovative ideas. Ok, here is my idea:
/table.
Most web pages have a lot of static content in, especially menus etc. You could start rendering the page immediately from the cache from the last page and rerender afterwards as the new page starts to differ from the cached version.
As the page comes in, keep switching to the page that is closest to same structure in cache (ie predominantly on the HTML tags). Don't render the text until the initial few chars are confirmed by the version downloading, then progressively render that (ie show old version then modify words where they differ).
This would have the effect of progressively rendering the page as a whole much like those progressive GIFs. It would show a large speedup on pages that contain tables, as most browsers these days won't render a table until it has recieved the
This would be a 'faster' browser with no compression or pre-caching.
Phillip.
Maybe the article is referring to capabilities, not processing speed. A PC can, in theory, perform an infinite number of different tasks. A PVR (like any other specialized device) is restricted to a few.
All computers have a finite instruction set and finite memory in which to store information, therefore cannot in theory perform infinite number of tasks.
Phillip.
I too would love to see XML natively available for PHP. I've written a module that gives a nice simple API to XML, it's available here, but the problem is it needs to come with PHP as standard for it to become widely used.
Phillip.
It's still not clear to me what this is supposed to be. Is it intended as a replacement for x86-like CPUs, as most people here seem to assume, or something novel, as the cryptic reference to RISC suggests?
If they want to create cheap knock-off PCs then it would need to be x86 compatiable. If they wanted efficiency and speed and were aiming at a homegrown market based on Red Flag Linux then they could drop the gross x86 legacy and use something like the ARM instruction set (and use ARM Linux port for plenty of existing binaries).
Phillip.
Ahh, nothing like a zealot PHB to fuck up one's work life. I'm sure the poor schmuck just trying to do his job appreciated your insipid political antics.
You should keep your personal battles out of the workplace. You wouldn't like it if your employer involved itself in your personal life.
It's called a company having ethics.
At my company before last the management landed a large tobacco account. They had to cancel the contract because the team refused to work on the account on ethical grounds. It happens. Some of us care. We don't submit to the cowardly excuse "if we don't do it someone else will".
Final point. It's not our "personal life", this guy is a fellow software engineer and the outcome will affect what we can and can't do professionally.
Phillip.
And as an aside, I'd -personally- consider it very poorly managed if you colo a machine (or lease a dedicated server somewhere) and the hosting company -DOESN'T- have root. That's fucking stupid, because -part- of what you're paying them for is to keep yer machine up. If you don't want someone else having root on your machines, then lease your own T1 and drop it into your house/apartment.
Seriously.
I disagree. I expect from my colo 100% uptime in my connection to the outside world, but if I am managing the server myself I don't expect a stranger to be able to go poking around inside it with no security restrictions. My advice is create a root2 and use that, then ONLY allow root to execute commands 'halt' and 'reboot'. That's all a colo should ever need.
Phillip.
1) UPS has battery that runs out. This has hydrogen that runs out. same deal.?
Not same deal. You can keep popping out any buying more hydrogen cannisters and go indefinately with the fuel cell. Your UPS will buy you some time (enough time to shut down your networks safely) but not to continue operations. Essentially it is generator and UPS all rolled into one.
In obtaining more hydrogen, you can either buy it or you can generate it yourself (though electrolysis - via solar or mains). You can see the latest fuel cell stories at Future Energies.
Phillip.
I think if I had one testament to carve for a future generation that wishes to reconstruct my digital data and try and emulate the system, it would be "hey, :x to save and quit"
Phillip.
My experience is that good managers who are knowledgable about the workforce will hire people without degrees. People who are poor managers and in over their heads are too afraid to hire non-degreed personnel because they feel it will reflect poorly on them. It's the HR equivalent of "no one ever got fired for buying Microsoft".
I would consider someone with a degree over someone without (if they were roughly equal in all other ways) as I know the person that studied CompSci will have a reasonable exposure to algorithms, OS and hardware architecture, as well as software engineering methodology. You at least know you aren't going to get someone that would use a O(n^2) algorithm for a basic sort. Of course you can take time and give all the candidates extensive technical tests, but with a degree that's already done at someone else's expense.
Phillip.
Odd, Frontpage (also a WYSIWYG HTML editor) produces "human readable" code--well, at least as well as Mozilla does...
If it's anything as bad as Frontpage then it must be pretty awful. Does it double the size of each page throwing in FONT and DIV tags around everything?
Phillip.
If running PHP scripts, add the follow lines at the start:
ini_set('zlib.output_compression', 'On');
ini_set('zlib.output_compression_level', '3');
It will gzip your pages as they leave the server. To save on cpu, I cache my HTML pages... then also system() call to gzip it in the same dir. I then:
if (strstr($HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING, 'gzip'))
{ serve_gzipped_file; }
else { serve_uncompressed_html }
It means the server doesn't need to gzip the file on every single request.
Phillip.
But today, when 90% of the stuff served (besides images) by web servers are dynamic content, why does a web server like this get a headline?
My first thought is for serving images. Our server is quite heavily loaded, and it seems a waste that Apache is being used to serve up images (85% of our traffic) which don't use any of its capability.
Phillip.
Ok, to continue offtopic for a couple of seconds... here is my 2c (and I'm not criticising you in *any* way, or saying you are wrong, this is _my_ experience):
:-P
... nope I have to put them into a temporary array and set them one by one :(
.. i have to redeclare them global in each function I'm going to use them in.
:->
What is the point of array_push() why can't it just be called 'push()'? I know it works on an array!
You know it works on an array because it's called array_push
Nope, instead we have a whole set of mysql_* functions for MySql and another whole set of pg_* functions for Postgre
You can always use ADODB.
(item1,item2,item3) is not treated as a list or an array. I can't do ($fieldname,$fieldname2) = mysql_fetch_row()
Well I've never used that syntax in *any* language! (must be a Perl thing?)
It wouldn't be so bad if I could declare my global variables once at the top of the program but no
This is down to personal taste. I much prefer having to redeclare in each function, as it's a lot safer since you don't have to explicitly declare local variables.
Personally, PHP does the job for me. It has its short-comings, but for small-medium size web sites you can't beat it imho.
I still wouldn't write a web-server in it though
Phillip.
If using linux or any other open source solution requires staff to be paid more, then those staff will come from the same country. Therefore this will keep that money in the local economy rather than pouring it into MS coffers. I you were a foreign government would you rather give money to a) your citizens or b) foreign megacorp ?
I think the usual idea is for a government to cut its IT costs so that it can spend the money on other things such as health and education. If the extra cost outweighs the license fees, plus the cost of downtime through inadequate security and viruses, then a government is unlikely to switch (imho)
Phillip.
Privoxy is based on Junkbuster, but adds the following. Under Windows it really is just click and go, and comes with all the rules you need built in (though you can easily add regex filtering). I use it in conjunction with Phoenix and don't suffer from any ads/pop-ups/cookie/Javascript annoyances. Another great plus is that you can enable it and disable it directly from the taskbar.
Phillip.
I know plenty of out-of-work Sys Admins at the moment, but no unemployed programmers, so stick to programming if I were you. I don't know why the above post is moderated funny, you should look for buzzwords. (a) it's what clueless HR people look for on a CV and (b) large companies will pay over the odds to get someone with the buzzword skills, as there is always a lag between a new technology and a wide pool of people with those skills. You will have to 're-skill' fairly often but to be honest most of the complicated-sounding buzzwords hide some piss-easy jobs. Add OO to your imperative language skills, and you should be able to pick up pretty much any buzzword skill very quickly. You then get to irk the people in the company you join because they are probably more qualified in the skill than you but the management are paying you twice as much because they wanted a 'specialist' :-/
Phillip.
Transmeta's only claim to fame for their chips was using software to reduce power consumption, and it worked -- obviously, the Intelligent Energy Manager is just a ripoff of Transmeta's design. Linus should sue.
I thought their claim to fame was using VLIW for power at low clock cycles, then giving the chip the ability to emulate instruction sets via a translation layer above? Doesn't sound much to do with general energy saving techniques which you think they may have a patent on. ARM chips are already very lower power, my last desktop PC I think it ran at 30mW. Asynchronous designs such as the Amulet seem to be the future of _very_ lower power devices (and being ARM instruction set should drop right in). That works at the gate level. There are PCs that run on ARM, but there are very few ARM laptop currently (though as Linux becomes more the desktop OS, I'm sure we'll see ARMLinux laptops appearing).
Phillip.
Then you'll stop wasting key strokes and type :x
Phillip.
Open Source software is, by definition, fully documented [snip]
.doc files out there someone will most likely write a .doc->Open Standard convertor? (no, I don't go for that theory either)
LMAO
Yes, source code does count as documentation, because it can be used to understand things like binary data formats when printed manuals are not available.
Fully commented source code counts a documentation.
Documentation created today should be readable tomorrow and ten years from now. Is that true of Microsoft Word or Powerpoint?
Or of Abiword? Or any other proprietry file format used by an Open Source application? We are moving off the subject of Open Source and onto Open Standards.
do you know how many companies have all their documentation in Office formats? Wouldn't they feel safer knowing that their documentation isn't fundamentally bound to one company's products? Unfortunately, they don't think about such things.
Or maybe they are especially cunning and figure that there are so many
Phillip.
there's no way I'll stop using IE until there exists the equivalent of the Google toolbar [google.com] for Mozilla. I don't know if I could function without it.
I don't know about Mozilla but Phoenix certainly has it. It's much better than the Google toolbar as with one click I can make it search the online PHP or MySql documentation (as well as other things). Phoenix is faster than IE on my machine too.
Phillip.
Anyway, the biggest evidence that these are real screenshots is that the background image is of such shitty quality. What kind of person could believe that MS would still give you such a collection of crappy images after all the $ spent of marketing fluff and trying the make the GUI look good? ;)
The same kind of people that use clip-art personas for their testamonials instead of spending a couple of dollars on a roll of film?
Phillip.
I cant speak for the others, but have you ever looked at the source for PHPNuke?
Do you think more than 5% of its users have? Do you think they care what's underneath? Someone can drag and drop some files in a directory, enter their mysql username and password in one file, and they have a fully-operational magazine with registration, slashdot-style comments, forums, Yahoo!-style directory, file downloads section, and goodness knows how many other things. Security is poor, but if you run a personal blog or a tiny niche magazine then you really aren't to worried. Someone trashes the mag then it's 5 mins to put back PHPNuke and a few more mins for the sys admin to restore last nights db backup. It's not like it's going to be used for anything critical, but it gives newbies a very easy entry into the world of online publishing. Those that don't get bored and let the mag die after a few weeks/months will then grow up and move onto more serious software.
Phillip.
That I was testing some of our sites with a fellow employee, when after a while he seemed puzzled as to why one of the buttons didn't seem to click (Mozilla doesn't seem to like myform.button.value, you have to put document.myform.button.value). He seemed visibly surprised when I told him I wasn't using Explorer. Then I showed him reading down a web page, right clicking on links where they loaded in tabs in the background... then going and reading each of the pages afterwards. Plus right clicking on tabs to instantly close them. He was very impressed.
Even though Phoenix is faster and more stable than Explorer, I found the only real way to switch was to delete all the Explorer icons from the desktop and the taskbar. Otherwise some old habits are too hard to break!
Phoenix combined with Privoxy (plus the occasional run of AdAware)... the currently unbeatable combination on WinXP.
Phillip.