Why is no one buying CDs?... I don't know. But there is one, inescapable truth - Internet piracy is mostly to blame.
You just admitted you don't know, but you're sure it piracy. Does that make sense?
I got sick of paying $17+ for music that amortized itself before I was born!
We the undersigned wish to make it clear that the ISO fucked up and should never have made OOXML a standard, and that we will continue to attack ISO until it is revoked.
As a firm believer in competition in the marketplace; I welcome choosing between two competing standards. Seriously, let the marketplace decide this one.
The human eye is naturally lazy, and likes to look at things that do not cause it to send strong signals. To that end, a black background is essential for "easy on the eyes" formatting. From there, pretty much any light colour can be use for the text.
It's kinda funny, when I was younger, I prefered the black background, white text in console mode.
But now, when I read a web site that's white text on a black background, it causes me to see stripes. It's very hard to read; even though I essentially have perfect vision.
I don't understand how people are always complaining about their hard drives failing. In 30 years it hasn't happened to me yet.
I've had two drives fail on me in the last three years. The most recent case was interesting. My group at work moved to a new building, and the week after we moved, two drives failed.
My failure was rather spectacular. I arrived at work, and much to my surprise, iTunes couldn't find my music. After I realized that it was dead, my co workers started arriving and telling me how my hard drive was making a loud screeching sound the night prior.
In response to another article, I said that we should start encrypting all of our traffic and asked for programmers to start adding that functionality and making it the default so that even unsophisticated users' trafic would be encrypted.
Ooooh, you just hit a nerve! I'm currently enabling SSL in a project that I'm working on.
The problem with saying "let's just encrypt everything" is that, at some point, both parties need to exchange keys. With SSL, unless you use a certificate signed by a trusted 3rd party, the ISP can intercept the initial key exchange and perform a man-in-the-middle attack.
Getting a certificate signed by a 3rd party is a pain-in-the-ass. In order for the scheme to work, certificates must be signed to a specific domain. This means that you have to trust that the 3rd party is reliable enough not to let your ISP generate a correct certificate when it performs a man-in-the-middle attack.
Really, the "let's just encrypt everything" mindset is going to turn into an arms race. The 3rd party can be impersonated or intercepted.
There are many people, myself included, who watch the Super Bowl for the ads
Even though I own a DVR, I still watch many commercials. Sometimes I'm actually interested in the ad. Other times, the ad is quite entertaining. (I always watch every new Apple ad.) I'm also a sucker for any ad that has lots of attractive people dancing.
I also click on interesting ads on web sites. Sometimes the best way to communicate is to pay someone to link to you. There's nothing wrong with that...
... but the problem comes when advertisers delude themselves into thinking that they're entitled to my eyeballs, or when they try to distract me from the content that I'm really interested in. I am not obliged to watch a commercial, nor am I obliged to look at an ad on a web site. Obscuring a web site with an ad is simply biting the hand that feeds it.
"My favorite lecturer quote, "Oh, I don't really do any coding at all"." That's not a big deal. Computer Science is not about coding in particular, but understanding the practices to design and implement solutions to a problem. Computer Science is more about applied math then writing in language X. I learned some of the most important concepts in a class that was all done in pseudocode. Understanding how to approach a problem and solve it efficiently is more important then learning a language. In fact, once you know how most things are working, with a few basic concepts such as pointers or how a computer interpret an instruction listing, you should be able to pick up almost any language fairly easily. If you are not capable of learning things on your own without being handheld through a set of power point lectures, even if you knew C++ instead of Java you aren't going to be worthwhile in the real world anyways. You are destined to be a code monkey
Likewise, I had a few professors who didn't write any code. I never took them seriously because they couldn't take their knowledge and apply it to any real situations.
I remember spending 7 weeks on regular expressions, but never understanding the class because we never actually tried using regular expressions on a text file.
I remember spending 7 weeks on databases, but finding many of the concepts elusive because the instructor was incapable of using a REAL database.
A core part of Computer Science is learning how to apply knowledge. Likewise, many parts of Computer Science are best learned by "doing". Teaching any part of Computer Science without being able to implement it is just as bad as teaching a mathematical theory without being able to prove it!
In a sane world, behaving like a bunch of asshats by trying to squeeze us for every penny they can, would mean that their contract wouldn't be renewed by ICANN; so there would be such an incentive. In a sane world.
What's really happening is that there's been a landrush on every concievable domain because they're so cheap. Now, if you want to register a domain, chances are there's a squatter willing to sell it to you for $1000 because they were able to squat on it for $10-$15 bucks.
I hate to say this, but it seems that.coms are "cheaper" if Verisign charges what the market will bear; because it'll drive the squatters out of business.
About a year ago, my college had an alumni breakfast in Silicon Valley. One of my fellow alumni proudly exclaimed that he worked for NVidea writing drivers.
When asked about Vista, he told us how Microsoft was "sooo understanding" about letting them ship drivers before they were complete. I bit my tounge and decided to stay away from Vista.
So we've got plenty of predictions from the 60s and 70s, and this guy mananged to get several of his right (though others are way way off).
Basically, predictions that require large amounts of energy stored in tiny spaces are the ones that fail. We could have 250MPH flying cars today, except for the fact that they would get something like 10 gallons to the mile! The same thing goes for climate controlled cities; they would use more energy then we can afford!
Likewise, we could build the trains in tubes and plastic highways; but it's just too economically unfeasable.
People have more time for leisure activities in the year 2008. The average work day is about four hours. But the extra time isn't totally free. The pace of technological advance is such that a certain amount of a jobholder's spare time is used in keeping up with the new developments--on the average, about two hours of home study a day.
Sooooo true... The only difference is that most people have an 8 hour workday with 4 hours spent goofing off!
Honestly, who here DOESN'T spend two hours a day educating themselves on the latest technology?
You need to give yourself some options! There are plenty of schools that are good enough for you!
First, there are plenty of MIT-class schools in the US.
Stanford is in the center of Silicon Valley, and is where the first GUI and computer mouse were invented! On a side note, I work very close to Stanford, and I've been to events where Vint Cerf (lead the TCP-IP projects) and Douglas Engelbert (invented the mouse and GUI) were present.
Berkeley is about an hour north of Silicon Valley, and has a culture similar to MIT. They also like to get out-of-state people. BSD (the open-source unix that MacOS uses) came from Berkeley.
Second, most reigons have tech schools that are excellent. I ended up going to Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), which is very well known in the Northeastern US. (It's about 1 hour west of MIT.) You can look at Rensellere (sorry if I spelt it wrong,) RIT, Case-Western, CMU, UMass Amhearst, some of the California State Schools...
I've worked with very smart people who went to school in Ohio, Michigan, ect.
Third, don't forget that you can always transfer into another school after a semester, year, ect.
Finally: Don't forget that Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerman (Facebook) both dropped out of Harvard. Harvard and MIT are a short bus ride apart, and share student events. (I went to a concert at MIT as a guest of a Harvard student.)
The fact is that there are many ways to achieve your life goals, and many schools are capable of getting you there. If you're smart and determined, you'll be successful...
Stop letting off hot air on the dumbass article. See installing fedora core 8 on hyper-v . Even Ubuntu server is being used by people on HyperV. SUSE is supported in the sense of calling up MS's support desk and talking to them about it. But Linux distributions work just fine. This is just MS's way of telling people that they're on their own if they try other distributions(this is usually true for Linux servers anyway).
That might be true, but...
In the virtualization world, sometimes a less-popular Linux distro does something a little different or is missing a driver needed to interface with a well-known video card, NIC, hard drive controller, ect. (VMs work by emulating well-known and well-supported hardware.)
Correction, accepting something as fact despite a lack of evidence is faith. Accepting something as fact despite evidence to the contrary is foolishness.
Too many Christians can't get that right but one of those traits the Bible commends while the other is harshly criticized.
There are also too many Christians who claim to believe in the Bible, but have never actually read it. They believe their ministers' interpretations of the Bible.
I once had someone tell me that homosexuality is a sin because the Bible said so. So I said, "no, the Bible doesn't say that." So the person pulled out her Bible and quoted the passage to me. I told her that the passage only states that sodomy is a sin; it says nothing about homosexuality.
It's the people who say they made $200 "in profit" that drive me nuts. Spending 20 hours to make $200 (which is really $120 after taxes) means you're making less than minimum wage. I guess they don't teach about "opportunity cost" in high school economics any more.
You don't get it... For most people; gambling's entertainment.
Maybe you shouldn't talk about things you have no experience in, let alone try to make analogies that bare no relevance to the discussion. Maybe your closed-mindedness is the reason that interfaces haven't changed much, but I'm willing to bet that you will get on your Iphone and call all your friends to discuss how stupid this poster named OMNI-something was on/.... or if not you'll sure send them a text message using T9 instead of just pounding out each letter individually. Tell Fisher Price about that.
Actually, on an iPhone, it'll be easier to send a text message.;) Remember that IM and email thrived long after tape recorders, telephones, and voice mail came around.
An old boss of mine was a big fan of voice control for computers, and spend a good portion of his career working in the field. What he told me is that he eventually learned that, for many things, perfect voice control is too limited when compared to a keyboard and mouse.
That being said, I think simple commands like "Turn lights on", "Dim lights," "Start playing NiN's new album," "Turn on TV and watch American Idol" are all ideal for voice command. They're certainly easier then using a Clapper.
This is why you write an abstraction layer to sit between your business logic and the platform. ...
This is actually one of the gripes I have against web programming as it stands today. It seems to me that programmers are far too eager to call the database directly from their application, without using any sort of abstraction layer.
In my professional non-php applications, I isolate all of my data access into methods in separate classes. The overhead is minimal, when paired with a simple O/R mapper.
The problem with PHP/MySQL is that it's too hard to isolate data access, because the MySQL API isn't abstract enough to be able to throw a simple O/R mapper into the mix. When I hack together stuff in PHP/MySQL, I end up reading my results directly from the reader objects with hard-coded numbers. It's just too time consuming to engineer anything more elegant.
Apparently, Netflix doesn't have a column in their database saying WHAT language a movie uses principally, it just has a flag saying it is not English. It's the only explanation I can see for not checking for such a strong correlation. I admit, I might not be sharing the experience of the most common movie-renting drone in the bunch, but I doubt I'm the only person who has such a lopsided taste in movies. If the language (or alternate soundtrack languages) ARE known in the database, please see if the renter has a bias for movies in a particular language.
...Which leads me to believe that Netflix doesn't have enough information to get an accurate enough reccomendation. In my experience with Machine Learning; you can only make accurate predictions if your input data contains the information you need to make an accurate prediction. If your input data only has 87% correlation with the prediction you're trying to make, then there's no way to achieve 90% accuracy.
Tell me please exactly HOW digital downloads are going to happen. There is a reason a new disc was needed for HD, movies take up a LOT of space. Even recompressed a HD movie is several GB, how are people going to download this when there are plenty of ISP's that limit you to several GB per month? That's right, thanks to our ISP's we could MAYBE just download a SINGLE movie before being cutoff. What about the speed? What if I got only a work laptop? Meaning I can only leave it on for a couple of hours when I am home? Do you think your average ISP connection is fast enough for that? Where do I store it all?
Whoa! Technology really doesn't move as fast as we think it does!
People began talking about television in the early 1900s, because image transfer technology for Newspapers was getting faster. Television didn't take off until the 1940s, even though there were low-resolution systems as early as the late 1920s. That's right, it took television ~40 years to move into the home!
The same can be said for color. There were demonstrations of color television in the 1930s, but it didn't take off until the late 60s.
I watched my first streaming video about 10 years ago... I think Netflix will keep me happy for a few more years.
Don't laugh, I went to a catholic grade school which had books in the library that honestly showed a earth centered solar system.
And so did I. It was used as an example of how our knowledge of the universe changes over time.
My Catholic grade school spent more time teaching evolution then Adam & Eve. We spent an entire week talking about how dolphins and whales evoloved from land-walking mammals.
I understand your point, and it's well taken, but you are introducing a tautology. Standards compliance is absolute, by _definition_.
Some attempts to comply with written standards may fail, and as such are not compliant. It may well be true that no browsers exist that are standards compliant, as the standards are written. However, please don't go waving around poisonous ideas like "standards compliance is a relative term".
Americans seem to have adopted a very lax relativism of late, a kind of fuzzy belief that everything is subjective. Some things are not. Some things are just facts that must be heeded. The definition is not up for negotiation, that's what _makes_ it a standard.
That's assuming that "standards compliance" is possible! A standard can be logically inconsistant; meaning that parts of the standard are impossible to implement. Also, a standard can have poorly-defined areas, meaning that two "compliant" implementations are incompatible.
For example, a "standard" could say something like, "the ENABLED attribute tells if feature X is enabled or not." Without saying what the valid values of ENABLED are, one implementation could say "true" and "false", another could say "yes" or "no", and another could say "enabled" or "disabled". In such a scenario, all three implementations are compliant; yet incompatible.
HTML, and all of the other "standards" that come with it, are so complex that I wonder if true standards compliance is even possible. We might need to revise the standards to eliminate ambiguities, which will make "standards compliance" an absolute term, as you claim that it is.
On Friday, a bunch of people asked me about Ruby on Rails. I decided it was time to educate myself. After reading O'Reily's book that provided an overview of Rails, I felt that I should spend some time understanding the underlying language.
By pure coincidence, I bought this book. It's well-written. Last night, I couldn't put it down.
Ruby is a complex, but expressive language. I can't speak from real-world usage, but Ruby appears to provide many subtle variations in its syntax as a way of simplifying how the programmer expresses something. Overall, I'm highly impressed.
What I'm curious about is how flexible the language is. Will I be able to make an API that allows the programmer to use it with a convention that's not normal Ruby?
Slashdot Mirror
I got sick of paying $17+ for music that amortized itself before I was born!
As a firm believer in competition in the marketplace; I welcome choosing between two competing standards. Seriously, let the marketplace decide this one.
It's kinda funny, when I was younger, I prefered the black background, white text in console mode.
But now, when I read a web site that's white text on a black background, it causes me to see stripes. It's very hard to read; even though I essentially have perfect vision.
I've had two drives fail on me in the last three years. The most recent case was interesting. My group at work moved to a new building, and the week after we moved, two drives failed.
My failure was rather spectacular. I arrived at work, and much to my surprise, iTunes couldn't find my music. After I realized that it was dead, my co workers started arriving and telling me how my hard drive was making a loud screeching sound the night prior.
Ooooh, you just hit a nerve! I'm currently enabling SSL in a project that I'm working on.
The problem with saying "let's just encrypt everything" is that, at some point, both parties need to exchange keys. With SSL, unless you use a certificate signed by a trusted 3rd party, the ISP can intercept the initial key exchange and perform a man-in-the-middle attack.
Getting a certificate signed by a 3rd party is a pain-in-the-ass. In order for the scheme to work, certificates must be signed to a specific domain. This means that you have to trust that the 3rd party is reliable enough not to let your ISP generate a correct certificate when it performs a man-in-the-middle attack.
Really, the "let's just encrypt everything" mindset is going to turn into an arms race. The 3rd party can be impersonated or intercepted.
There are many people, myself included, who watch the Super Bowl for the ads
Even though I own a DVR, I still watch many commercials. Sometimes I'm actually interested in the ad. Other times, the ad is quite entertaining. (I always watch every new Apple ad.) I'm also a sucker for any ad that has lots of attractive people dancing.
I also click on interesting ads on web sites. Sometimes the best way to communicate is to pay someone to link to you. There's nothing wrong with that...
... but the problem comes when advertisers delude themselves into thinking that they're entitled to my eyeballs, or when they try to distract me from the content that I'm really interested in. I am not obliged to watch a commercial, nor am I obliged to look at an ad on a web site. Obscuring a web site with an ad is simply biting the hand that feeds it.
Likewise, I had a few professors who didn't write any code. I never took them seriously because they couldn't take their knowledge and apply it to any real situations.
I remember spending 7 weeks on regular expressions, but never understanding the class because we never actually tried using regular expressions on a text file.
I remember spending 7 weeks on databases, but finding many of the concepts elusive because the instructor was incapable of using a REAL database.
A core part of Computer Science is learning how to apply knowledge. Likewise, many parts of Computer Science are best learned by "doing". Teaching any part of Computer Science without being able to implement it is just as bad as teaching a mathematical theory without being able to prove it!
What's really happening is that there's been a landrush on every concievable domain because they're so cheap. Now, if you want to register a domain, chances are there's a squatter willing to sell it to you for $1000 because they were able to squat on it for $10-$15 bucks.
I hate to say this, but it seems that .coms are "cheaper" if Verisign charges what the market will bear; because it'll drive the squatters out of business.
About a year ago, my college had an alumni breakfast in Silicon Valley. One of my fellow alumni proudly exclaimed that he worked for NVidea writing drivers.
When asked about Vista, he told us how Microsoft was "sooo understanding" about letting them ship drivers before they were complete. I bit my tounge and decided to stay away from Vista.
Ritalin, Adderall, Provigil... They're just not sold over the counter.
Basically, predictions that require large amounts of energy stored in tiny spaces are the ones that fail. We could have 250MPH flying cars today, except for the fact that they would get something like 10 gallons to the mile! The same thing goes for climate controlled cities; they would use more energy then we can afford!
Likewise, we could build the trains in tubes and plastic highways; but it's just too economically unfeasable.
Sooooo true... The only difference is that most people have an 8 hour workday with 4 hours spent goofing off!
Honestly, who here DOESN'T spend two hours a day educating themselves on the latest technology?
You need to give yourself some options! There are plenty of schools that are good enough for you!
First, there are plenty of MIT-class schools in the US.
Stanford is in the center of Silicon Valley, and is where the first GUI and computer mouse were invented! On a side note, I work very close to Stanford, and I've been to events where Vint Cerf (lead the TCP-IP projects) and Douglas Engelbert (invented the mouse and GUI) were present.
Berkeley is about an hour north of Silicon Valley, and has a culture similar to MIT. They also like to get out-of-state people. BSD (the open-source unix that MacOS uses) came from Berkeley.
Second, most reigons have tech schools that are excellent. I ended up going to Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), which is very well known in the Northeastern US. (It's about 1 hour west of MIT.) You can look at Rensellere (sorry if I spelt it wrong,) RIT, Case-Western, CMU, UMass Amhearst, some of the California State Schools...
I've worked with very smart people who went to school in Ohio, Michigan, ect.
Third, don't forget that you can always transfer into another school after a semester, year, ect.
Finally: Don't forget that Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerman (Facebook) both dropped out of Harvard. Harvard and MIT are a short bus ride apart, and share student events. (I went to a concert at MIT as a guest of a Harvard student.)
The fact is that there are many ways to achieve your life goals, and many schools are capable of getting you there. If you're smart and determined, you'll be successful...
That might be true, but...
In the virtualization world, sometimes a less-popular Linux distro does something a little different or is missing a driver needed to interface with a well-known video card, NIC, hard drive controller, ect. (VMs work by emulating well-known and well-supported hardware.)
There are also too many Christians who claim to believe in the Bible, but have never actually read it. They believe their ministers' interpretations of the Bible.
I once had someone tell me that homosexuality is a sin because the Bible said so. So I said, "no, the Bible doesn't say that." So the person pulled out her Bible and quoted the passage to me. I told her that the passage only states that sodomy is a sin; it says nothing about homosexuality.
Probabilistic chips are essentially analog. In the analog world; the hiss is the inaccuracy in the least-significant digits.
You don't get it... For most people; gambling's entertainment.
Actually, on an iPhone, it'll be easier to send a text message. ;) Remember that IM and email thrived long after tape recorders, telephones, and voice mail came around.
An old boss of mine was a big fan of voice control for computers, and spend a good portion of his career working in the field. What he told me is that he eventually learned that, for many things, perfect voice control is too limited when compared to a keyboard and mouse.
That being said, I think simple commands like "Turn lights on", "Dim lights," "Start playing NiN's new album," "Turn on TV and watch American Idol" are all ideal for voice command. They're certainly easier then using a Clapper.
In my professional non-php applications, I isolate all of my data access into methods in separate classes. The overhead is minimal, when paired with a simple O/R mapper.
The problem with PHP/MySQL is that it's too hard to isolate data access, because the MySQL API isn't abstract enough to be able to throw a simple O/R mapper into the mix. When I hack together stuff in PHP/MySQL, I end up reading my results directly from the reader objects with hard-coded numbers. It's just too time consuming to engineer anything more elegant.
...Which leads me to believe that Netflix doesn't have enough information to get an accurate enough reccomendation. In my experience with Machine Learning; you can only make accurate predictions if your input data contains the information you need to make an accurate prediction. If your input data only has 87% correlation with the prediction you're trying to make, then there's no way to achieve 90% accuracy.
Whoa! Technology really doesn't move as fast as we think it does!
People began talking about television in the early 1900s, because image transfer technology for Newspapers was getting faster. Television didn't take off until the 1940s, even though there were low-resolution systems as early as the late 1920s. That's right, it took television ~40 years to move into the home!
The same can be said for color. There were demonstrations of color television in the 1930s, but it didn't take off until the late 60s.
I watched my first streaming video about 10 years ago... I think Netflix will keep me happy for a few more years.
And so did I. It was used as an example of how our knowledge of the universe changes over time.
My Catholic grade school spent more time teaching evolution then Adam & Eve. We spent an entire week talking about how dolphins and whales evoloved from land-walking mammals.
That's assuming that "standards compliance" is possible! A standard can be logically inconsistant; meaning that parts of the standard are impossible to implement. Also, a standard can have poorly-defined areas, meaning that two "compliant" implementations are incompatible.
For example, a "standard" could say something like, "the ENABLED attribute tells if feature X is enabled or not." Without saying what the valid values of ENABLED are, one implementation could say "true" and "false", another could say "yes" or "no", and another could say "enabled" or "disabled". In such a scenario, all three implementations are compliant; yet incompatible.
HTML, and all of the other "standards" that come with it, are so complex that I wonder if true standards compliance is even possible. We might need to revise the standards to eliminate ambiguities, which will make "standards compliance" an absolute term, as you claim that it is.
As you can probably tell, I haven't made it to the part of the book that covers DSLs... But it looks like they are what I want.
On Friday, a bunch of people asked me about Ruby on Rails. I decided it was time to educate myself. After reading O'Reily's book that provided an overview of Rails, I felt that I should spend some time understanding the underlying language.
By pure coincidence, I bought this book. It's well-written. Last night, I couldn't put it down.
Ruby is a complex, but expressive language. I can't speak from real-world usage, but Ruby appears to provide many subtle variations in its syntax as a way of simplifying how the programmer expresses something. Overall, I'm highly impressed.
What I'm curious about is how flexible the language is. Will I be able to make an API that allows the programmer to use it with a convention that's not normal Ruby?