1. Hardware modems have a simple (if clumsy) API for controlling them which is standard across all modem devices. All modems are supported by all operating systems that can control any of a few common serial UARTs.
2. Because modems need to produce signals with precise timings, and because some "winmodems" have very little timing logic in hardware, winmodem drivers can consume a surprisingly large amount of cputime. Some drivers of clumsy hardware are forced to busy-wait which means the cpu time they consume grows directly with the speed of the cpu, instead of decreasing like normal well-behaved software. This issue is limited to certain devices.
3. Some "winmodems" have undocumented interfaces, and some are protected with "trade secrets" or patents on algorithms in the closed driver. Undocumented hardware is offensive at least to me, although this might not matter to you. Practically speaking, some of these do not work in Linux because of the willful barriers to creating a working driver are high enough that no one has either desired or managed to do so.
A "winmodem" with well-published information on controlling it is quite possibly a more powerful device than a traditional hardware modem, and perhaps cheaper, but will likely not be supported as broadly, or quickly across a variety of operating systems, and may be more prone to failures in support in the future (say when you upgrade to Windows Vista). Thus even in the best case it's definitely a trade-off, and in the worst case can be a markedly inferior product. This doesn't matter to all users, but matters to enough to earn a tarnished reputation.
Personally I suspect you could make a single chip serial uart/modem these days that would cost about the same to manufacture as some dsp thing common in winmodems, but I guess sellers will probably modify existing popular designs (cheaper) which have specialized interfaces and specific drivers.
I don't give two hoots since I've not used a modem since 1997.
All these things are mostly true, but yet this card will _still_ give me better performance with upcoming technologies like composite and various hardware acceleration functions, because the nvidia and ATI drivers are made by people who don't care about these functions, and are not modifiable to suit these fuctions.
So for the typical use of my system, these funky cards will be faster and more stable. And I won't have to put up with some proprietary driver that will expire in a couple years when nvidia/ATI don't care about the hardware anymore.
So it does have real advantages, it just won't play Quake15 as well.
Speaking as someone who used to work in support for vendors of network products, a three way call with the customer and the network provider was something I _loved_. In fact I sometimes used to just get the customer to fork over the provider contact info and call the network vendor on the line immediately.
Once upon a time, this is what support was about: getting problems fixed, getting crap working. I got out of support when I could see where that 'industry' was headed.
Not to mention this kind of action earned huge customer respect. And helping customers who respect your suggestsions is _so_ much more pleasant than helping ones who do not.
P2V is a weird process. In the real world, if you shoved a hard drive with an OS from one machine into another machine with complete hardware, you would expect to spend a lot of time replacing drivers. The P2V products all attempt to do this driver replace automatically (since the target virtual machines have a limited set of hardware, this task is managable). Similarly, V2V is pretty simple (even more so than P2V). V2P is very tough because you have to support a large universe of hardware, which Microsoft and Linux OS engineers will tell you is no fun at all.
I disagree. I've done this many times and in the real world I have expected this to just work. In old Linux systems, it would boot up, I would make a few changes, and then everything would be fine. In modern Linux systems, everything is autodetected and fixed for me. In BeOS, the drive image booted on the new computer completely correctly without a single notice or warning with full functionality. On mac systems, the drive booted without notice or warning or problem. Dos of course always worked.
The only system which has given me significant trouble of this nature is Windows. It is astounding just how painful it is. So given that the meat of these products are pointed at windows, I agree with your message, if not your text.
Have you tried actually using HelixPlayer? It doesn't work.
Things that are not included: the ability to unpack the avi format, the ability to unpack the mov format, the ability to unpack any format which is in common use. I _think_ it can play ogg theora files, but it can't play avi theora files. You have to buy the addon code to just be able to unpack the wrappers, let alone the codecs, almost none of which are included.
The functionality provided by this open source player is inferior to all other open source players. The only special 'feature' it has is that it lets you give money to Real Networks to get the funcationality you can get elsewhere for free, although the legality of replay of some formats is less in question for the Helix Player + purchased realnetworks code solution.
If you were reading Groklaw, this would be clear already.
In a civil suit for redress of this nature, there are not appeals. I do not know the full details of when appeals are relevant and not, but they are not in this case.
As for going after corporate officers, I agree that they may be exposed to such, but that would hinge on demonstrating that their actions were designed to inflate the stock price temporarily, which involves intention, which is not easy. Normally if such information were to become available it would be stockholders or the SEC who would be plaintiffs in such suits, depending upon the nature of the offenses. I do not really see that IBM would have the grounds to sue in those particular matters.
IBM _has_ started to do discovery into the realm of the funding money trail for this whole fishing expidition. I don't know how much will be found there, but it's quite possible that the countersuit may become a matter of anticompetitive behavior by a company with a monopoly situation, with SCO acting as a very willing accomplice in this duplicity. That would certainly be a tasty outcome indeed.
You are confusing interface with implementation. File system implementations have gotten more sophisticated. File system interfaces have gotten simpler.
You keep claiming that there's this exclusionary principle in making the software better for acceessability versus making the software better for other people. Or further that somehow an encouragement to make software more accessible should be rejected because there are more important things that have to come first.
The truth is that software, especially open source software, doesn't work like this. Resources are flexible with interest areas, some improvements in design reap efficiency rewards in development, while others cost.
Most accessability improvements in user faceing software tend to benefit all users by regularizing and streamlining interfaces. To some extent this work will also be undertaken by people who would not be undertaking the work (whatever it is) that you think is more essential.
But also there is the matter that accsessibility is something that permeates interface-oriented software. It is to some extent like security. Starting with a good set of accesibility design principles makes it easy. Trying to make an interface accessible long after it has been built into complexity is likely to be more work than caring about it from the start. Thus, advocating "putting this work off" will likely make it more costly (in resources) in the long run. Seperately, because of crossover benefits I believe it will make the software less good in the short run.
Of course, luckily, these decisions won't be made because of anything you or I advocate in these silly comments.
The assertion is that this method of transmitting nuggets of information (news entries) is similar to an older method of transmitting nuggets of information (usenet posts). Do you really not understand that the goals here are comparable?
That said, RSS/ATOM have a single source of the truth, while usenet is a web of inserters and receivers. RSS/ATOM are uniformly linear in nature, usenet is not. RSS/ATOM are by intention very very short entries; usenet posts can be much larger. RSS/ATOM are not intended (really) to convey binary payloads, urls are used for this purpose. usenet is abused to send all kinds of things.
In short, a naive anlysis suggests that the way these things are designed and used are divergent in some significant areas. I would be surprised if the solutions to their problems were close enough to consider it a reinvention.
Does the asserter of this view have supporting analysis?
Yeah, I think the political "radioactivity" (pardon the pun) of nuclear energy is just going to wilt in front of real energy demands. But nevertheless our shipping, travel, and possibly food production economics and even urban organization will change drastically.
I'm not going to be a chicken little and say this is going to happen Real Soon Now, but the forces that will cause it are slowly coming our way. Models for when the economic cruch over energy availability will arrive vary from next week to 60 years.
Okay so, I agree that guild spamming seems dumb. And that spamming the general channel seems dumb. And that recruiting for guilds seems dumb.
Where I think you're absolutely wrong is if guild spamming is going on that the people who guild spam advertise for the "gay guild" shouldn't because it "might offend someone". You believe this person wanted to create a ruckus. That's your highly arguable view. That they shouldn't be allowed to talk because it's a topic that might cause a ruckus when it matches other activities is just an unimpressive argument for (partially) silencing a minority.
Blizzard's ultimate response of moving all guild advertising off the general channel and allowing any guild advertising in the guild advertising channel seems efficacious, although a system of searching for guilds that want to list themselves (optional) would seem superior.
Yes, you will see the United States and other countries investing in alternate energy sources, if only to keep the electric grid satisfied. However, in order to provide (less efficiently) the energy now expended in moving goods and people via petroleum in vehicles we would require thousands and thousands of nuclear reactors. Aside from the fact that these can't be built in time, we don't have the ability to extract nuclear fuel at this rate.
Simply put, there is _no energy source_ nor any collection of energy sources which will replace declining fossil fuels that is currently known. Someone may pull a rabbit out of a hat, but that hasn't happened for the last 100 years and people ahve been looking. The reasonable expectation is that energy availability will fall drastically over time, which _will_ defeat our ability to continue in our society as currently structured.
A claim of agrarian economy is certainly overstated, but it will become economically necessary to produce many good closer to where they are consumed, because the cost of shipping them will increase significantly.
You are of course correct. I didn't check the string closely enough since I assumed browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers existed, which it does not.
I presume this is because I am running Firefox 1.0.7.
It is possible to have homosexuality without politics or sex. I don't know this history of this one, but on the face of it you are pulling the classic false association of saying that a GLBT guild is sexual.
So, great, you can split out the pages associated with a lib versus allocated directly. But this still doesn't show you how much memory the program is actually using. My bittorent client is actually using 55 megs of ram, but pmap will show 161 megs of writable/private.
Why? Because some is swapped out, and some is allocated but not used. Sure, swapped out is a cost, but in most apps things may get swapped out and never used again, thus the real cost of that memory usage is quite low.
Additionally the library cost is not to be dismissed. On my system I have many libraries loaded for just one process.
Both your reasons for staying with C++ are insane. There are plenty of other execution-efficient languages, and interfacing with libs is something every language pretty much has to be able to do.
Your other ideas also cut directly against simplicity and execution efficiency in a lot of cases, so dogmatically insisting on C++ is stupid.
That said, language is not your largest problem. Investigate provably correct software, less than perfect proofs, tools for evaluating code for correctness in automated manner, test first development, and lots of other things. And hire someone more experienced than yourself, you clearly don't have the background to pull it off.
My memory of the court case was that liability was shared, although the balance fell on McDonalds. I don't, however, see where the parent poster insists there was no responsibility on the part of the woman. Maybe it implied strongly enough that you see it in that way.
The redeeming fact is that the number of writes is now well over the number that people actually achieve in any normal application, including general purpose computing and even swap. Modern flash devices intended for general use are capable of distributing the phyiscal usage across the entire device, and the number of writes keeps slowly climbing orders of magnitude upwards.
You're right in what you say, but the scary scenario to me is not "oh my some data did not get out to the disk". In typical personal user cases, the last thing I saved was a long time ago, and I don't really care that the last thing the computer was up to gets saved. Obviously you could have higher level logic issues if stuff doesn't hit the disk, but that's rarely a problem in Linux.
The personal use case scenario disaster situation is when a program begins rewriting the content of a file, such as appending data to it, but then the system crashes or is powered off. The data inside the file is now corrupt, and potentially unusable, depending on how it is loaded/parsed etc. So a system which is arbitrarily powered off does not just stand to lose the data which has not yet been written, but the content of files undergoing modification is likely to become unusable, and thus lost. The best part of this is of course you may not realize it is gone for weeks or months, until you need it again, at which point the data on your backups is probably corrupt too.
Yes of course, once you transfer the solar energy into the batteries it becomes _electrical_ energy. So it's not allowed. And of course the motor changes it into/kinetic/ energy?
Just who are they trying to fool, cheating with kinetic energy?
Re:Uh, hurricanes have been around longer than SUV
on
Controlling Hurricanes?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Not that it's reasonable to chalk up Katrina specifically to global warming, but there is now solid scientific research that suggests that global warming is not increasing the number of cyclone-type storm systems, but is increasing their strength, longevity, and overall energy level.
Please refer to: "Increasing destructiveness of tropical cyclones over the past 30 years" by Kerry Emanuel, an established researcher in the field.
This is a new direction in research, and the overall data in hurricanes is not overwhelmingly extensive, but the data does not look inconclusive.
In short, global warming may well cause an increase in destruction caused by hurricanes in an ongoing and increasing basis. This is especially true when you combine their flooding potential with the rising oceans.
My proxy blocks all persistant cookies every single time. There's really no need for storing settings that I don't explicitly want, so I don't allow sites to do it. Ever.
Session cookies? All are accepted. No problem. Incidentally my brwoser sessions last a few days.
Slashdot Mirror
The major differences are as follows:
1. Hardware modems have a simple (if clumsy) API for controlling them which is standard across all modem devices. All modems are supported by all operating systems that can control any of a few common serial UARTs.
2. Because modems need to produce signals with precise timings, and because some "winmodems" have very little timing logic in hardware, winmodem drivers can consume a surprisingly large amount of cputime. Some drivers of clumsy hardware are forced to busy-wait which means the cpu time they consume grows directly with the speed of the cpu, instead of decreasing like normal well-behaved software. This issue is limited to certain devices.
3. Some "winmodems" have undocumented interfaces, and some are protected with "trade secrets" or patents on algorithms in the closed driver. Undocumented hardware is offensive at least to me, although this might not matter to you. Practically speaking, some of these do not work in Linux because of the willful barriers to creating a working driver are high enough that no one has either desired or managed to do so.
A "winmodem" with well-published information on controlling it is quite possibly a more powerful device than a traditional hardware modem, and perhaps cheaper, but will likely not be supported as broadly, or quickly across a variety of operating systems, and may be more prone to failures in support in the future (say when you upgrade to Windows Vista). Thus even in the best case it's definitely a trade-off, and in the worst case can be a markedly inferior product. This doesn't matter to all users, but matters to enough to earn a tarnished reputation.
Personally I suspect you could make a single chip serial uart/modem these days that would cost about the same to manufacture as some dsp thing common in winmodems, but I guess sellers will probably modify existing popular designs (cheaper) which have specialized interfaces and specific drivers.
I don't give two hoots since I've not used a modem since 1997.
All these things are mostly true, but yet this card will _still_ give me better performance with upcoming technologies like composite and various hardware acceleration functions, because the nvidia and ATI drivers are made by people who don't care about these functions, and are not modifiable to suit these fuctions.
So for the typical use of my system, these funky cards will be faster and more stable. And I won't have to put up with some proprietary driver that will expire in a couple years when nvidia/ATI don't care about the hardware anymore.
So it does have real advantages, it just won't play Quake15 as well.
Speaking as someone who used to work in support for vendors of network products, a three way call with the customer and the network provider was something I _loved_. In fact I sometimes used to just get the customer to fork over the provider contact info and call the network vendor on the line immediately.
Once upon a time, this is what support was about: getting problems fixed, getting crap working. I got out of support when I could see where that 'industry' was headed.
Not to mention this kind of action earned huge customer respect. And helping customers who respect your suggestsions is _so_ much more pleasant than helping ones who do not.
I disagree. I've done this many times and in the real world I have expected this to just work. In old Linux systems, it would boot up, I would make a few changes, and then everything would be fine. In modern Linux systems, everything is autodetected and fixed for me. In BeOS, the drive image booted on the new computer completely correctly without a single notice or warning with full functionality. On mac systems, the drive booted without notice or warning or problem. Dos of course always worked.
The only system which has given me significant trouble of this nature is Windows. It is astounding just how painful it is. So given that the meat of these products are pointed at windows, I agree with your message, if not your text.
Have you tried actually using HelixPlayer? It doesn't work.
Things that are not included: the ability to unpack the avi format, the ability to unpack the mov format, the ability to unpack any format which is in common use. I _think_ it can play ogg theora files, but it can't play avi theora files. You have to buy the addon code to just be able to unpack the wrappers, let alone the codecs, almost none of which are included.
The functionality provided by this open source player is inferior to all other open source players. The only special 'feature' it has is that it lets you give money to Real Networks to get the funcationality you can get elsewhere for free, although the legality of replay of some formats is less in question for the Helix Player + purchased realnetworks code solution.
If you were reading Groklaw, this would be clear already.
In a civil suit for redress of this nature, there are not appeals. I do not know the full details of when appeals are relevant and not, but they are not in this case.
As for going after corporate officers, I agree that they may be exposed to such, but that would hinge on demonstrating that their actions were designed to inflate the stock price temporarily, which involves intention, which is not easy. Normally if such information were to become available it would be stockholders or the SEC who would be plaintiffs in such suits, depending upon the nature of the offenses. I do not really see that IBM would have the grounds to sue in those particular matters.
IBM _has_ started to do discovery into the realm of the funding money trail for this whole fishing expidition. I don't know how much will be found there, but it's quite possible that the countersuit may become a matter of anticompetitive behavior by a company with a monopoly situation, with SCO acting as a very willing accomplice in this duplicity. That would certainly be a tasty outcome indeed.
You are confusing interface with implementation. File system implementations have gotten more sophisticated. File system interfaces have gotten simpler.
You keep claiming that there's this exclusionary principle in making the software better for acceessability versus making the software better for other people. Or further that somehow an encouragement to make software more accessible should be rejected because there are more important things that have to come first.
The truth is that software, especially open source software, doesn't work like this. Resources are flexible with interest areas, some improvements in design reap efficiency rewards in development, while others cost.
Most accessability improvements in user faceing software tend to benefit all users by regularizing and streamlining interfaces. To some extent this work will also be undertaken by people who would not be undertaking the work (whatever it is) that you think is more essential.
But also there is the matter that accsessibility is something that permeates interface-oriented software. It is to some extent like security. Starting with a good set of accesibility design principles makes it easy. Trying to make an interface accessible long after it has been built into complexity is likely to be more work than caring about it from the start. Thus, advocating "putting this work off" will likely make it more costly (in resources) in the long run. Seperately, because of crossover benefits I believe it will make the software less good in the short run.
Of course, luckily, these decisions won't be made because of anything you or I advocate in these silly comments.
He didn't ask why is office space cheaper than hotel space. He asked why _should_ it be cheaper.
You addressed the former.
The assertion is that this method of transmitting nuggets of information (news entries) is similar to an older method of transmitting nuggets of information (usenet posts). Do you really not understand that the goals here are comparable?
That said, RSS/ATOM have a single source of the truth, while usenet is a web of inserters and receivers. RSS/ATOM are uniformly linear in nature, usenet is not. RSS/ATOM are by intention very very short entries; usenet posts can be much larger. RSS/ATOM are not intended (really) to convey binary payloads, urls are used for this purpose. usenet is abused to send all kinds of things.
In short, a naive anlysis suggests that the way these things are designed and used are divergent in some significant areas. I would be surprised if the solutions to their problems were close enough to consider it a reinvention.
Does the asserter of this view have supporting analysis?
Yeah, I think the political "radioactivity" (pardon the pun) of nuclear energy is just going to wilt in front of real energy demands. But nevertheless our shipping, travel, and possibly food production economics and even urban organization will change drastically.
I'm not going to be a chicken little and say this is going to happen Real Soon Now, but the forces that will cause it are slowly coming our way. Models for when the economic cruch over energy availability will arrive vary from next week to 60 years.
Okay so, I agree that guild spamming seems dumb. And that spamming the general channel seems dumb. And that recruiting for guilds seems dumb.
Where I think you're absolutely wrong is if guild spamming is going on that the people who guild spam advertise for the "gay guild" shouldn't because it "might offend someone". You believe this person wanted to create a ruckus. That's your highly arguable view. That they shouldn't be allowed to talk because it's a topic that might cause a ruckus when it matches other activities is just an unimpressive argument for (partially) silencing a minority.
Blizzard's ultimate response of moving all guild advertising off the general channel and allowing any guild advertising in the guild advertising channel seems efficacious, although a system of searching for guilds that want to list themselves (optional) would seem superior.
Yes, you will see the United States and other countries investing in alternate energy sources, if only to keep the electric grid satisfied. However, in order to provide (less efficiently) the energy now expended in moving goods and people via petroleum in vehicles we would require thousands and thousands of nuclear reactors. Aside from the fact that these can't be built in time, we don't have the ability to extract nuclear fuel at this rate.
Simply put, there is _no energy source_ nor any collection of energy sources which will replace declining fossil fuels that is currently known. Someone may pull a rabbit out of a hat, but that hasn't happened for the last 100 years and people ahve been looking. The reasonable expectation is that energy availability will fall drastically over time, which _will_ defeat our ability to continue in our society as currently structured.
A claim of agrarian economy is certainly overstated, but it will become economically necessary to produce many good closer to where they are consumed, because the cost of shipping them will increase significantly.
You are of course correct. I didn't check the string closely enough since I assumed browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers existed, which it does not.
I presume this is because I am running Firefox 1.0.7.
Sorry for the noise.
I appreciate your highlighting this.
However my firefox has defaulted this value to 50. I am distrustful of an article which is factually contradicted by local evidence.
Anyone have any ideas to explain the discrepancy?
It is possible to have homosexuality without politics or sex. I don't know this history of this one, but on the face of it you are pulling the classic false association of saying that a GLBT guild is sexual.
It isn't, necessarily.
So, great, you can split out the pages associated with a lib versus allocated directly. But this still doesn't show you how much memory the program is actually using. My bittorent client is actually using 55 megs of ram, but pmap will show 161 megs of writable/private.
Why? Because some is swapped out, and some is allocated but not used. Sure, swapped out is a cost, but in most apps things may get swapped out and never used again, thus the real cost of that memory usage is quite low.
Additionally the library cost is not to be dismissed. On my system I have many libraries loaded for just one process.
Both your reasons for staying with C++ are insane. There are plenty of other execution-efficient languages, and interfacing with libs is something every language pretty much has to be able to do.
Your other ideas also cut directly against simplicity and execution efficiency in a lot of cases, so dogmatically insisting on C++ is stupid.
That said, language is not your largest problem. Investigate provably correct software, less than perfect proofs, tools for evaluating code for correctness in automated manner, test first development, and lots of other things. And hire someone more experienced than yourself, you clearly don't have the background to pull it off.
My memory of the court case was that liability was shared, although the balance fell on McDonalds. I don't, however, see where the parent poster insists there was no responsibility on the part of the woman. Maybe it implied strongly enough that you see it in that way.
Oh, I dunno, maybe he's talking about the headphones made by shure?
The redeeming fact is that the number of writes is now well over the number that people actually achieve in any normal application, including general purpose computing and even swap. Modern flash devices intended for general use are capable of distributing the phyiscal usage across the entire device, and the number of writes keeps slowly climbing orders of magnitude upwards.
You're right in what you say, but the scary scenario to me is not "oh my some data did not get out to the disk". In typical personal user cases, the last thing I saved was a long time ago, and I don't really care that the last thing the computer was up to gets saved. Obviously you could have higher level logic issues if stuff doesn't hit the disk, but that's rarely a problem in Linux.
The personal use case scenario disaster situation is when a program begins rewriting the content of a file, such as appending data to it, but then the system crashes or is powered off. The data inside the file is now corrupt, and potentially unusable, depending on how it is loaded/parsed etc. So a system which is arbitrarily powered off does not just stand to lose the data which has not yet been written, but the content of files undergoing modification is likely to become unusable, and thus lost. The best part of this is of course you may not realize it is gone for weeks or months, until you need it again, at which point the data on your backups is probably corrupt too.
Yes of course, once you transfer the solar energy into the batteries it becomes _electrical_ energy. So it's not allowed. And of course the motor changes it into /kinetic/ energy?
Just who are they trying to fool, cheating with kinetic energy?
Not that it's reasonable to chalk up Katrina specifically to global warming, but there is now solid scientific research that suggests that global warming is not increasing the number of cyclone-type storm systems, but is increasing their strength, longevity, and overall energy level.
t /abs/nature03906.html
Please refer to: "Increasing destructiveness of tropical cyclones over the past 30 years" by Kerry Emanuel, an established researcher in the field.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurren
This is a new direction in research, and the overall data in hurricanes is not overwhelmingly extensive, but the data does not look inconclusive.
In short, global warming may well cause an increase in destruction caused by hurricanes in an ongoing and increasing basis. This is especially true when you combine their flooding potential with the rising oceans.
My proxy blocks all persistant cookies every single time. There's really no need for storing settings that I don't explicitly want, so I don't allow sites to do it. Ever.
Session cookies? All are accepted. No problem. Incidentally my brwoser sessions last a few days.