In this particular case, however, it is not clear (from the article) how the purchase funds will be allocated. Perhaps they too will be spent entirely for actions within the scope of the charity's charter, and thus this becomes yet another way to fulfill their mission efficiently.
I do question the way it smells like the author of the software will no longer be involved with it. That part seems foolish.
You realize that you've made a false inference. 38% get less does not imply 62% getting more. Some people will get around the same. It's common for the "about the same" figure in surveys of humans to be quite high!
C allows you to express yourself directly in terms of memory layout. When interacting with hardware, this is often a requirement. While Python and C# contain special extensions which allow you to refer to memory blocks and do pointer-like things, try doing something like specifying that a certain buffer will reside at a specific address in physical memory.
One of the reasons people migrate away from C to something like C# or Java is precisely because the language model does not directly relate to the memory layout, thus greatly limiting the possibility for logic errors to overwrite memory, which is the source of all sorts of bugs, security or otherwise. But it is this precise aspect of C which is a requirement for systems programming.
It might be possible to design a language that would allow you to express the memory layout of both code and data without allowing logic errors to scribble over memory. It would have to rely on very strong build-time checks, and it might raise the complexity cost of use high enough to destroy its value. I have not used such a language. All efforts I have investigated to do systems programming in languages other than C still implement the low level operations in C.
Really? It came across as snarky and point-scoring to me. I see no suggestions for how to resolve anything, just mockery of Harald's blunt message. The german software engineering tradition as I have encountered it is to state things bluntly and confrontationally. I don't see any jerkiness.
As for misspellings, he's a foreign speaker, and.. you can usually rely on your tools to avoid errors. Down with namespace collisions known as "case insensitivity".
See, I can be points-scoring too. Don't confuse this with being solution-oriented.
I'm kinda confused. Why hasn't someone released a fix that removes all of this nonsense a while ago? If I was a Windows user I'd be trying to find out if i can pay someone besides Microsoft to manage my updates at this point, and shield me from the extreme conflict of interests that Microsoft is inflicting on its customers.
Why isn't there a product to fix this?
Hell, hasn't the warez world fixed this, or do all the illegal windows users just let their systems phone home too?
Yeah I left out most of it, because my point was: GO READ IT.
As for the XML-requirement, I think it's a bad idea to specificy encode that. I said so in my email to Leno and in my email to my assemblyperson. XML has some nice properties, but it's not the only format that can have those properties.
PDF, meanwhile, is a really bad format for data consumption. It's reasonably open for what it is, which is a printed-page representation. A fancy photograph of a document. It seems totally legitimiate to publish an something like ODF _and_ PDF, but PDF only lacks many useful features of something like ODF. Hell, even ODF is pretty poor at data consumption compared to some more focused XML document types, but PDF pretty much sucks rocks in that department.
Dammit people, read the damn bill, it's quite short. It has a four part test for formats to be adopted.
Interoperable among diverse internal and external platforms and applications
Fully published and available royalty-free
Implemnted by multiple vendors
Controlled by an open industry organization with a well-defined inclusive process for evolution of the standard
It's not perfectly worded (what are internal and external?), and it's not a perfect list, but it's a quite reasonable starting place and it doesn't allow any of the hand-wringing excuses I'm seeing in these comments. This open document stuff has been being debated in the public sector for some years now. Politicians may be many things, but they're not incapable of reading.
I've written my California Assemblyperson, you can too.
I agree with the point of that quote. Not sure it applies here. The standards of journalistic integrity generally suggest that one does due dillegence in investigation of stories so as not to simply spread false or misleading rumours. Is publishing rumours explicitly labelled as such a transgression of that? Maybe not, but it doesn't really seem in close keeping with it either. Perhaps if they dug up a bunch of corroborating information, but that's not really what (most) blogs are about. Blogs are typically about skipping a lot of the traditional journalistic overhead, and that's fine, but doing so _and_ denying the line between blogging and journalism isn't so great.
At least I hope it didn't get removed just because the driver was "old" and "buggy"...
It got removed because it was old, buggy, and no one cared. Quite a number of kernel releases went by (6 I believe?) during which ftape never worked. No one wrote in to say this mattered. No one stepped up to fix the subsystem. The users (you included) apparently were completely silent on the matter.
Granted you might not have installed a new linux kernel in the past 6 months (or more?), or might not have actually used your tape writer in the same interval, so might not have been a position to notice the situation. But the fact that no one cared enough to raise the issue spoke volumes. And so it was axed.
I'm sure if someone steps up to the plate and says "I want to forward port the ftapd driver to the current kernel release and continue to maintain it" and provides patches, that they will be accepted. If that hardware is truly valuable to you, please do seek to let the world know.
Most ftape devices are not useful to most people by now, because they are too slow, too unreliable, and too small capacity. Other larger faster formats have become available, and alternatives to tape have become available such that the aging ftape devices are not interesting to most people. Add to this that tape isn't a very good archival format and you quickly see the dwindling market for such devices. But the 2.4 kernel is still maintained. Ftape works there, I believe, so you can continue to back up your data with Linux.
No I am not intentionally misreading anything. The whole car analogy sucked, and arguing by analogy sucks. I thought you realized that, but then carried it on anyway, that's what I got from your post. Maybe you didn't see the problem, so I'll come out and say it.
98% of analogies on slashdot are completely useless and actively obfuscatory. Don't get dragged into them, don't participate. Respond to the point if you must (as you did), but don't pile on further strain to an analogy which was almost certainly counterproductive to begin with.
As for the operating system comparison, I don't care at all.
Wait, so your argument 1) is that nonsense laws should be followed because if you don't it makes sheep feel bad? and 2) That nonsense laws must be followed because there is a procedure for chainging nonsense laws and disrespecting nonsense laws is bad?
My responses:
1- Sheep following nonsense laws should be made to feel uneasy about the situation. It might encourage them to change their behavior.
2- There is no reason to show respect for nonsense laws. It might be worth going through the effort to have nonsense laws changed, but showing disrespect for nonsense laws is reasonable even if it shows disrespect for the whole machinery of democracy, because the whole machinery of democracy created the nonsense laws.
Again, you seem to be making a lot of mummary around respect for the law for its own sake. Hogwash, I say. We work to make the law reasonable, and that reasonability and effectiveness in turn creates respect. It doesn't flow from nowhere.
As for civil disobediencing having to be high profile, hogwash on that too. Thoreau, who created the term, said nothing about having to do it in a flashy public way. Although I Really have no idea how you got onto the topic of civil disobedience either. My view is just following idiotic laws because they are laws is dumb. THe law is not self justifying.
If a law required you to sacrifice your firstborn, I would say no. However, a law requiring you to touch your nose as you exit your house in the morning would be idiotic, but should still be followed.
Sir, may i presume the rest of your post was framing for this parody of respect for the law for its own sake?
Yeah, kids are going to want to try driving the car because they see dad and mom do it, regardless of the advert. I certainly managed to start the car and back it up about 4-5 feet in a parking lot completely accidentally. I was "playing" at driving it, never having intended to actually put it in gear. I couldn't tell you how I managed it either. I was probably around 6.
I think this is about as normal as kids cutting their own hair. Which happens with humourous and ugly results. The difference is the driving experiment is more dangerous.
One of the best prevantatives is to treat the car seriously. Take driving seriously. Don't fuck around while doing it, and don't convey that driving is lighthearded by your actions. Of course that goes against the cultural grain, but it's a grain we could really seek to change.
If you include all programs that have reimplemented some amount of their own code to work with the ODF format, you get about 15. If you include programs with fairly good support, you still get at least Abiword, Gnumeric, OpenOffice, KOffice, Zoho, ajax, scribus.
Granted that only KOffice and OpenOffice seem to have implemented the vast majority of the format, but the number of implementers is continuing to grow. Calling it an OO native format is specious at this time. It did start out that way at one point, but rounds of standards process and implementation have filed down the edges and made it (apparently!) workable enough for various parties to reimplement without crying in their beer.
Seriously, every "platform" is going to endure some sort of post-launch slump sooner or later. There's a push to get the thing out the door and to start developing market share. There's a bunch of developers who are successfully encouraged to create "launch" titles because new buyers will want to buy *something*. Then at some point the pace is going to die down to fit the "natural" progression of titles related to the sum total of the game writing industry as well as the the overall installed base of the platform.
This is a normal phenomenon, and for me at least is non-news.
I don't know how representative I am, but I download music (for free, from p2p services) to try out new music. It's just way more convenient than any other method. Non-RIAA music I eventually buy. Sometimes not the same album, because sometimes the real physical record store doesn't _have_ that album. But I buy something from the group.
RIAA music, I try to avoid sampling, but sometimes I fall in love with a recording, only to find out it's RIAA-owned. I feel avoiding giving money to this party is the lesser of two evils. Of course, I have the option of just deleting it, but sometimes I am weak.
It all depends upon the bitrates and the application. Also mp3 is not as static a target as you might think, with the advancements in lame over time.
If you believe the folks on hydrogen audio, when strong music fidelity is a concern, WMA has unpleasant artifacts at most bitrates, save the very high where even still mp3 is probably your best bet for transparent lossy compression. Well, maybe wavepack if you're really hardcore, but mp3 seems "good enough" for most ears, while wma does not.
At lower bitrates (128kbs down to 40kbps or so) mp3 isn't as competitive, and the winners at different bitrates seem to be AAC and Vorbis AoTuV. This is really impressive for Vorbis because it is a _much_ simpler format, without various special tweaks and features to help out at certain format ranges. The specialized features of AAC help it hit certain windows, but also cost overall in format complexity, which has a minor effect on size overall, and a major effect on implementability. Vorbis by contrast is much simpler and therefore re-implementable, although market forces have not pushed as hard for tuned implementations.
Once you start heading south of 40kbps, you probably aren't really so interested in music anymore, and other more focused audio codecs, probably for speech, are what you'll want to look at.
But the point is mp3 still has some application domains (~200-300kbps, full spectrum music) where it is probably the best format in terms of fidelity and certainly implementatability, primarily because of the maturity of the encoder sourcebase. Surprising, but true.
Personally, for portable music replay, I use Vorbis AoTuV at around 160kbps, because while in testing on my portable player I could often tell the difference, the differences were never offensive. It's possible that some form of aac encoder could achieve this as well for me, but FAAC could not, and I am not willing to pirate and run windows or mac binaries just to encode music in formats that aren't broadly supported anyway on current devices (especially mine). WMA had an unpalatable flat quality at all rates I tested. Maybe it's improved but I was really testing for novelty. That format is even worse than AAC, which at least has an open specification.
In the case of a provider such as cable modem, where the network fees are primarily in uplink, bittorrent can SAVE the cable provider money in terms of services offered per cost, by smart protocol management. You can redirect bittorrent connections within your corporate network, and back that with caching, and increase the amount downloadable through your network significantly without increasing costs. Because of the manner of operation of bittorrent, you can do this with really no cache at all by connecting your users to each other, which makes it more efficient and cheaper than, for example, http caching. The focusing of many users on a relatively small number of popular binary blobs certainly doesn't hurt.
For DSL providers as you say it typically doesn't help much, as most of their costs are in the WAN links (ATM load, whatever). But in some situations, bittorrent really can be a win for everyone.
Re:Let it rest in peace!
on
AmigaOS 4
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· Score: 1
I have successfully built and run uae (patched to 0.8.25 , I used a debian source package to start), and e-uae from rcdrummond on a intel macintosh. I recommend e-uae.
It's a hassly program to set up, as some emulators are (Basilisk is similarly effortful), but once this effort is paid, I find it keeps working without too much trouble. Getting floppy based games working can be more work than you want, sometimes.
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In this particular case, however, it is not clear (from the article) how the purchase funds will be allocated. Perhaps they too will be spent entirely for actions within the scope of the charity's charter, and thus this becomes yet another way to fulfill their mission efficiently.
I do question the way it smells like the author of the software will no longer be involved with it. That part seems foolish.
You realize that you've made a false inference. 38% get less does not imply 62% getting more. Some people will get around the same. It's common for the "about the same" figure in surveys of humans to be quite high!
C allows you to express yourself directly in terms of memory layout. When interacting with hardware, this is often a requirement. While Python and C# contain special extensions which allow you to refer to memory blocks and do pointer-like things, try doing something like specifying that a certain buffer will reside at a specific address in physical memory.
One of the reasons people migrate away from C to something like C# or Java is precisely because the language model does not directly relate to the memory layout, thus greatly limiting the possibility for logic errors to overwrite memory, which is the source of all sorts of bugs, security or otherwise. But it is this precise aspect of C which is a requirement for systems programming.
It might be possible to design a language that would allow you to express the memory layout of both code and data without allowing logic errors to scribble over memory. It would have to rely on very strong build-time checks, and it might raise the complexity cost of use high enough to destroy its value. I have not used such a language. All efforts I have investigated to do systems programming in languages other than C still implement the low level operations in C.
Really? It came across as snarky and point-scoring to me. I see no suggestions for how to resolve anything, just mockery of Harald's blunt message. The german software engineering tradition as I have encountered it is to state things bluntly and confrontationally. I don't see any jerkiness.
As for misspellings, he's a foreign speaker, and.. you can usually rely on your tools to avoid errors. Down with namespace collisions known as "case insensitivity".
See, I can be points-scoring too. Don't confuse this with being solution-oriented.
Right, this totally doesn't apply to FreeBSD advocates.
Or windows advocates.
Or Sony Playstation advocates, or Subaru sportscar advocates, or...
Cluephone. THis is the nature of advocates, in the main.
I'm kinda confused. Why hasn't someone released a fix that removes all of this nonsense a while ago? If I was a Windows user I'd be trying to find out if i can pay someone besides Microsoft to manage my updates at this point, and shield me from the extreme conflict of interests that Microsoft is inflicting on its customers.
Why isn't there a product to fix this?
Hell, hasn't the warez world fixed this, or do all the illegal windows users just let their systems phone home too?
Yeah I left out most of it, because my point was: GO READ IT.
As for the XML-requirement, I think it's a bad idea to specificy encode that. I said so in my email to Leno and in my email to my assemblyperson. XML has some nice properties, but it's not the only format that can have those properties.
PDF, meanwhile, is a really bad format for data consumption. It's reasonably open for what it is, which is a printed-page representation. A fancy photograph of a document. It seems totally legitimiate to publish an something like ODF _and_ PDF, but PDF only lacks many useful features of something like ODF. Hell, even ODF is pretty poor at data consumption compared to some more focused XML document types, but PDF pretty much sucks rocks in that department.
Dammit people, read the damn bill, it's quite short. It has a four part test for formats to be adopted.
It's not perfectly worded (what are internal and external?), and it's not a perfect list, but it's a quite reasonable starting place and it doesn't allow any of the hand-wringing excuses I'm seeing in these comments. This open document stuff has been being debated in the public sector for some years now. Politicians may be many things, but they're not incapable of reading.
I've written my California Assemblyperson, you can too.
Yes and no. To wit, libel is not journalism.
I agree with the point of that quote. Not sure it applies here. The standards of journalistic integrity generally suggest that one does due dillegence in investigation of stories so as not to simply spread false or misleading rumours. Is publishing rumours explicitly labelled as such a transgression of that? Maybe not, but it doesn't really seem in close keeping with it either. Perhaps if they dug up a bunch of corroborating information, but that's not really what (most) blogs are about. Blogs are typically about skipping a lot of the traditional journalistic overhead, and that's fine, but doing so _and_ denying the line between blogging and journalism isn't so great.
Death of utility of word "actual" reported. Film at 11.
(In related news, 'actually' apparently now means "I am a rude person".)
It got removed because it was old, buggy, and no one cared. Quite a number of kernel releases went by (6 I believe?) during which ftape never worked. No one wrote in to say this mattered. No one stepped up to fix the subsystem. The users (you included) apparently were completely silent on the matter.
Granted you might not have installed a new linux kernel in the past 6 months (or more?), or might not have actually used your tape writer in the same interval, so might not have been a position to notice the situation. But the fact that no one cared enough to raise the issue spoke volumes. And so it was axed.
I'm sure if someone steps up to the plate and says "I want to forward port the ftapd driver to the current kernel release and continue to maintain it" and provides patches, that they will be accepted. If that hardware is truly valuable to you, please do seek to let the world know.
Most ftape devices are not useful to most people by now, because they are too slow, too unreliable, and too small capacity. Other larger faster formats have become available, and alternatives to tape have become available such that the aging ftape devices are not interesting to most people. Add to this that tape isn't a very good archival format and you quickly see the dwindling market for such devices. But the 2.4 kernel is still maintained. Ftape works there, I believe, so you can continue to back up your data with Linux.
No I am not intentionally misreading anything. The whole car analogy sucked, and arguing by analogy sucks. I thought you realized that, but then carried it on anyway, that's what I got from your post. Maybe you didn't see the problem, so I'll come out and say it.
98% of analogies on slashdot are completely useless and actively obfuscatory. Don't get dragged into them, don't participate. Respond to the point if you must (as you did), but don't pile on further strain to an analogy which was almost certainly counterproductive to begin with.
As for the operating system comparison, I don't care at all.
Wait, so your argument 1) is that nonsense laws should be followed because if you don't it makes sheep feel bad? and 2) That nonsense laws must be followed because there is a procedure for chainging nonsense laws and disrespecting nonsense laws is bad?
My responses:
1- Sheep following nonsense laws should be made to feel uneasy about the situation. It might encourage them to change their behavior.
2- There is no reason to show respect for nonsense laws. It might be worth going through the effort to have nonsense laws changed, but showing disrespect for nonsense laws is reasonable even if it shows disrespect for the whole machinery of democracy, because the whole machinery of democracy created the nonsense laws.
Again, you seem to be making a lot of mummary around respect for the law for its own sake. Hogwash, I say. We work to make the law reasonable, and that reasonability and effectiveness in turn creates respect. It doesn't flow from nowhere.
As for civil disobediencing having to be high profile, hogwash on that too. Thoreau, who created the term, said nothing about having to do it in a flashy public way. Although I Really have no idea how you got onto the topic of civil disobedience either. My view is just following idiotic laws because they are laws is dumb. THe law is not self justifying.
But, didn't you think (rightly) that their lines were foolish? ...
Sir, may i presume the rest of your post was framing for this parody of respect for the law for its own sake?
Well you could go pure event handling/message passing or something. There are other approaches to code execution interleaving.
Certainly some kind of threading/processes is the far and away most popular, familiar though. So I expect most projects to use that.
"do gooders" thinking they know better than everyone else and have the duty to step into the lives of others. Sounds like the christian church to me!
Not that they have a monopoly on this, but they seem the *ahem* canonical example.
Yeah, kids are going to want to try driving the car because they see dad and mom do it, regardless of the advert. I certainly managed to start the car and back it up about 4-5 feet in a parking lot completely accidentally. I was "playing" at driving it, never having intended to actually put it in gear. I couldn't tell you how I managed it either. I was probably around 6.
I think this is about as normal as kids cutting their own hair. Which happens with humourous and ugly results. The difference is the driving experiment is more dangerous.
One of the best prevantatives is to treat the car seriously. Take driving seriously. Don't fuck around while doing it, and don't convey that driving is lighthearded by your actions. Of course that goes against the cultural grain, but it's a grain we could really seek to change.
If you include all programs that have reimplemented some amount of their own code to work with the ODF format, you get about 15. If you include programs with fairly good support, you still get at least Abiword, Gnumeric, OpenOffice, KOffice, Zoho, ajax, scribus.
Granted that only KOffice and OpenOffice seem to have implemented the vast majority of the format, but the number of implementers is continuing to grow. Calling it an OO native format is specious at this time. It did start out that way at one point, but rounds of standards process and implementation have filed down the edges and made it (apparently!) workable enough for various parties to reimplement without crying in their beer.
Calling it a memory dump is insulting.
Is the magic gone?
No.
Seriously, every "platform" is going to endure some sort of post-launch slump sooner or later. There's a push to get the thing out the door and to start developing market share. There's a bunch of developers who are successfully encouraged to create "launch" titles because new buyers will want to buy *something*. Then at some point the pace is going to die down to fit the "natural" progression of titles related to the sum total of the game writing industry as well as the the overall installed base of the platform.
This is a normal phenomenon, and for me at least is non-news.
I don't know how representative I am, but I download music (for free, from p2p services) to try out new music. It's just way more convenient than any other method. Non-RIAA music I eventually buy. Sometimes not the same album, because sometimes the real physical record store doesn't _have_ that album. But I buy something from the group.
RIAA music, I try to avoid sampling, but sometimes I fall in love with a recording, only to find out it's RIAA-owned. I feel avoiding giving money to this party is the lesser of two evils. Of course, I have the option of just deleting it, but sometimes I am weak.
It all depends upon the bitrates and the application. Also mp3 is not as static a target as you might think, with the advancements in lame over time.
If you believe the folks on hydrogen audio, when strong music fidelity is a concern, WMA has unpleasant artifacts at most bitrates, save the very high where even still mp3 is probably your best bet for transparent lossy compression. Well, maybe wavepack if you're really hardcore, but mp3 seems "good enough" for most ears, while wma does not.
At lower bitrates (128kbs down to 40kbps or so) mp3 isn't as competitive, and the winners at different bitrates seem to be AAC and Vorbis AoTuV. This is really impressive for Vorbis because it is a _much_ simpler format, without various special tweaks and features to help out at certain format ranges. The specialized features of AAC help it hit certain windows, but also cost overall in format complexity, which has a minor effect on size overall, and a major effect on implementability. Vorbis by contrast is much simpler and therefore re-implementable, although market forces have not pushed as hard for tuned implementations.
Once you start heading south of 40kbps, you probably aren't really so interested in music anymore, and other more focused audio codecs, probably for speech, are what you'll want to look at.
But the point is mp3 still has some application domains (~200-300kbps, full spectrum music) where it is probably the best format in terms of fidelity and certainly implementatability, primarily because of the maturity of the encoder sourcebase. Surprising, but true.
Personally, for portable music replay, I use Vorbis AoTuV at around 160kbps, because while in testing on my portable player I could often tell the difference, the differences were never offensive. It's possible that some form of aac encoder could achieve this as well for me, but FAAC could not, and I am not willing to pirate and run windows or mac binaries just to encode music in formats that aren't broadly supported anyway on current devices (especially mine). WMA had an unpalatable flat quality at all rates I tested. Maybe it's improved but I was really testing for novelty. That format is even worse than AAC, which at least has an open specification.
And you blame this on the existence of container formats?
Blame the user interfaces of the toosl and shells for being so unhelpful that users are forced to rely on extensions to guess what files contain.
Oh my god, zip files can contain *anything*!
In the case of a provider such as cable modem, where the network fees are primarily in uplink, bittorrent can SAVE the cable provider money in terms of services offered per cost, by smart protocol management. You can redirect bittorrent connections within your corporate network, and back that with caching, and increase the amount downloadable through your network significantly without increasing costs. Because of the manner of operation of bittorrent, you can do this with really no cache at all by connecting your users to each other, which makes it more efficient and cheaper than, for example, http caching. The focusing of many users on a relatively small number of popular binary blobs certainly doesn't hurt.
For DSL providers as you say it typically doesn't help much, as most of their costs are in the WAN links (ATM load, whatever). But in some situations, bittorrent really can be a win for everyone.
I have successfully built and run uae (patched to 0.8.25 , I used a debian source package to start), and e-uae from rcdrummond on a intel macintosh. I recommend e-uae.
It's a hassly program to set up, as some emulators are (Basilisk is similarly effortful), but once this effort is paid, I find it keeps working without too much trouble. Getting floppy based games working can be more work than you want, sometimes.