What we need to do is stop making it okay to be computer illiterate.... Why aren't we teaching basic skills like common Unix commands, bash, Perl, and SQL in schools?
Because those interfaces are too hard for most people to learn and don't lend well to daily use. They are langauges for specific tasks on specific systems.
Better to get our tools to understand us in our native langauge then convince the people to learn yet another paradym. As computing power increases, and our ability to program them improves, us IT guys should be able to make the tools more able to help people use them more effectively.
This works both ways, however. If you already have Windows servers, it doesn't make sense to rewrite in Java just so you can port from one Unix system you don't own to other Unix systems you don't own.
Not if its already written in.NET. But if you have to write it from scratch then you might as well write it in Java and then the port to Unix is much, much simpler if you decide down the track you want to move it to one of your big boxes - or even a small Linux one. Hell, even at home that's what I do. Why lock your self into and operating system if there is no GOOD reason?
It is if I pay for it. I only buy stuff so that I can own it. If they aren't going to sell ownership to me then I'm not buying. Then I'm not paying for it. I buy a CD, I own the CD and I can listen to it whereever and on whatever I choose.
Four years ago I started a project at home in order to flex my programming muscles in new technologies. The project was to build a home network, media centre, home automataion, etc. Build my own "smart house" essentially with an English interface, speech, PDA, and a bunch of other ways me and mine could control the house, our entertainment and orgaise our lives.
Now I have six PCs spread across the house with a fast network, permanent net connection and a family of cherubs that use this stuff everyday. So in thtat sense its been very practicial as our lives have been transformed from the sheer ease with which we now live.
The technology benefit: I've had to build my own boxes, install o/s and configure the network. I've customed built a two linux boxes, a media centre, and added other hardware. I've had to custom write a control system, media catalog and allow it to be fully distributed both externally and at home accessible from any box (or even from work through proxies) and have faced problems that your not going to face any other way. Whilst I've written most of it in Java I've had to spread into a diverse range of Java technologies, hook into MS Outlook and other.NET stuff, interface with Winamp, and other media players. I've even hooked up a remote dialler, linked to an SMS gateway and have caller ID installed. At one stage I was plowing through the ID2 spec to read MP3 tags and then jumped onto the RIFF spec to catalog AVIs. Deep stuff.
In short, a bucket-load of technologies, both hardware and software, that I would never, ever, get my hands on in my professional roles. I've faced a myraid of difficult problems, spent lots of late nights arguing with the thing, and shouted loudly. I have learnt an immense shit-load in a variety of tools and specialities. The project (Blade, see my URL) comes up n every interview lately with much discussion on the technologies that I've had to learn. Its proudly on my resume.
The best bit is that whilst learning I've built something that benefits me and my family immensly, which is always a proven motivator. Much more motivating than learning something because its your job. And the scale of the project will keep me learning and adapting for the next coupe of decades.
Best of all - my wife and kids are proud of me:-) Shucks.
Rick
These additions were also made royally late in the game, and only when Sun had to realize, to its embarassment, that all these fancy java.util classes were completely un-reentrant. The GP poster is still right in his complaint.
Except that has back in Java 1.0 before the Collections interface in 1.1. And that was - what 7 or 8 years ago??? A very early release (late in the game?).
Time for the GP to get over it. Nobody uses Vector or Hashtable anymore, they are only there for backwards compatability and for newbee / incompetant coders who can't handle multi-threaded code (like so many early Java programmers who came over from C/C++). When Sun tried to remove them in 1.4 and again in 1.5 the market shouted them down. Don't blame Sun for them, blame the industry and your fellow coders.
Yes thats right google has tracked you and every other poster on slashdot.
Only those of you that don't have Firefox and NoScript. Most regular Slashdotters know this so its mostly anonymous cowards and IE users who get caught and tracked. But they need to be hunted down and shot for the good of mankind anyway, so what's the harm or hypocisy?
Here is the answer I give them:... You call it criminal, I call it civil disobedience to an extortion scheme
Whilst I personally agree with you the law is on their side in most countries (including down here). When you break criminal law you're a criminal. It's not an opinion (IANAL) - it's the definition of criminal.
If you disagree with what the pollies have mandated (legitamate law-setting bodies setting law) then you're not being disobedient: you're a criminal.
That's why the MPAA and R*AA can use the tactics they use. Sux it does.
So MPAA, if you're listening, please give me one reason to give you money.
Here's the reason MPAA will give you: You have no choice. Our DVDs are the only legal way you can view our copyrighted content at home. (Yeah, excluding TV of course).
P2P of copyrighted material is illegal. You want to view it legally give them whatever money they ask, or don't view it. MPAA don't have to give you any other reason.
Full stop.
If they want to run a business in the UK and play it by the UK legal rules (as they so far do) they should close shop under.org and move to spamhaus.org.uk
Which domain they operate under does not imply a jurisdication for a court. Spanhoaus is a UK organisation and have no phisical operations in the US let along Illonois. Having their site under.org does not change this, so moving to.org.uk wouldn't change a damn thing either.
First, the diameter of a "black hole" is proportional to its mass. The sun, for example, must be compressed to a diameter of about 3km to become a black hole. A black hole with the mass of billion suns would have a dameter=3 billion km or 1000 times our solar system. The density of this black hole would be "low" as in much thinner than air. (Do the math yourself. Mass of sun is 2x10E30kg)
Actually the volume of a black hole is propertial to its mass (that's what density is). For the densisty to remain the same the diamater would only increase 1000 fold, ie to 3000km according to your calcs. Besides, 3 billion km is within our solor system - ex-planet Pluto is 4.7 billion km on average.
Pffffft! Most people don't choose to have children...
Unless they were raped they had a choice. The fact that these people (most?? - doubt it) don't have the maturity to control their dicks doesn't abdigate their responsibility.
Penuses are far more dangerous than guns or cars. Perhaps they should be licensed, though some would still choose to where them on their heads.
DRM is a system that lets everybody but you control when, where and on what you can watch video or listen to music, and how much you'll be paying for the privledge. This includes artists, distributers, copyright owners, manufacturers, and the government.
I think anyone who says "feed them first, then give them a computer" misses the point that if all you do is ever feed people and then move on, that's as far as they get.
So give them farming equipment. Or fishing rods. Seeds, cattle, feed. Give them something to help them feed themselves. Teach them how to dig wells - or move their villages closer to the water. Give them those second hand US textbooks so that they can learn. Give them books, pens, paper, and most importantly teachers and well trained staff to pass on that knowledge and feed their imagination.
How's a $100 toy going to give them a leg-up when their entire economy is stalled and their survival a day-to-day question mark?
The only way to find out is to do the experiment. The fact that India someone in India rejects it so loudly and publically before it's even been tried suggests less than the best motivation.
Actually TFA directly states that the Indian government does recognise the need for more reasearch and an experiment. Their response is "Not with our kids!"
Has this been proposed for other countries? Have other governments been giving this marvellous option of improving their own kids? Think there aren't a million impoverished kids in the UK, US or even here down under that could benefit from this wonderful gift of gratitude?
That's the core point of the Indian representative. Why spend $100 million on something that is not proven and that no other contry in the world has done. Giving laptops to preppie kids at a few schools is way different to a mass roll out to a million kids.
Not to mention issues such as support, teaching, upgrades, networking infrastructure, software. Hell - how many of this fortunate children would be in reach of a regular supply of electricity to charge their mighty laptops?
Laptops for a milion kids is a half baked plan of symbolistic philanthropy. Its a gesture only. Its not practical to implement, and the benefits are dubious in the current world climate.
No, they are defending their IP which is there right.
I disagree. They are defending their copyright which is granted by the law. It's not a right! It's an artifical construct of our legal system. Right or wrong, good or bad - I'm going to digress into that discussion - but it is a result of our legal and economic system. It was for economic reasons the concept of copyright was invented.
It's not the same is an inalienable human right that should be given to all regardless of economics or legal systems, such as the right to freedom, etc.
As a parent I have a duty to ensure my kids are brought up safely by guarding both their intellect, emaotinos and phyiscal form. The world can be a very nasty place, and I have must protect them for things that will do them harm, because children - particularly young children - do not have the capacity to protect themselves.
I don't think anybody will argue with that. The divisions begin in "how" I chose to "protect" my children. That multitude of fine lines involved in "protecting for their own good" is a daily choice. My wife and I will choose differently to you, and you are free to shelter your kids based on your own views and culture. That is your right as a parent.
For me, stripping the nude scene out of Titanic may mean that that film now becomes acceptable for me and my family to watch. For you, perhaps it means that you don't watch the film at all. But that's MY choice, not the director's. The director's choice is what vision he chooses to show to the world. I have the freedom to show my children a different view, if I feel they need it. I don't see it as a "show this or show nothing" choice - not in my own home.
Just like I have the freedom to block adds off websites if I choose...
The recomended viewing distance for standard TV is ~8X. It's ~3X for HDTV.
Nope, have to ping you on that one. I'll pull out my old university text to prove it. You telling me I should be sitting 20m away from my 2.5m projector screen????
You can claim all the crazy crap you want, but that won't make it true.
Many, many people have seen HDTV, and can definitively tell you that anyone who isn't blind CAN SEE THE HUGE DIFFERENCE IT MAKES
Yeah, right. Yelling helps your argument. Some difference, maybe, minor difference, more probably. Huge difference?
Maybe you have kids, but if you are letting your children handle these discs, you must also let them handle your old LPs, reel-to-reel tapes, wax cylinders, and myriad other somewhat-fragile storage media that have existed throughout history that we have to be reasonably careful handling.
Indeed I do, and no I no longer let them touch the DVDs themselves. Primarily I started ripping for exactly the same reason you have - central storage for distributed viewing. I've retasked the large DVD cabinet I built and now use it to store books. It took me months to rip the DVDs I own, but once ripped they all go under the stairs out of the way.
I back up the rips so that when my shiney new 250GB hard drive fails mysteriously in the middle of the night I don't have to RIP THEM ALL AGAIN. Easier to throw them on another drive in a mass copy and just restore if one of the drives goes bunk.
And yes, I do dislike DVDs. I get DVDs from friends that - for some reason or another - just won't play on any of my drives. "Oh but they play on mine" they say. Great. DVDs are next to useless if they don't play on ALL DVD drives, particularly future ones. DVDs are not as friendly nor ubiquitous as CDs became, not as a data storage format.
Four whole years? Yeah, I'm totally taking YOUR word for it on archive media.
Flamebait. RTFC mate. Four years ain't long to be shouting a "best archive mnedia" mantra. As I said: Granted its only been four years, and yes, hard drives are not archive grade storage mediums.
Though with all the Web 2.0 hype going on around the place, seems a lot of people consider 4 years to be an eon ago, lost in the backwater of time.
That catalogging program sounds interesting. What OS is it under? Interested in sharing?
Its written in Java so (in theory) most platforms. I'm running the server on Windows 2000 Server, though I have other Windows clients and a Puppy Linux client attached.
The Blade Multimedia Catalog has some volume and archive management built in. This gives me a snapshot of my mounted volumes showing me capacities and free space that I have available, including the archive drives, plus indexes all my videos, music and photos and tracks which have been copied to the archive drives. Next version also integrates with BitTorrent clients such as Azureus.
Just out of curiosity, are you using them in a RAID for redundancy? Are you using Firewire? E-Sata? SCSI? Removable ATA bays? NAS with gigabit?
Just simple IDE drives plugged into an external case. Every week or two I stick in my current archive drive, copy new data to it, and then pull it out and stick it on the shelf. I have a catalog program I wrote to keep track of what's archived and what's not.
This, for me, is a suitable strategy for backing up large files that don't change often, ie DVD rips, mail backups, software installation disks, drivers, etc. More active files - such as databases - go through a different process and only end up on those drives for historical reference. So far, I'm up to 1.4TB backed up in this way on eight drives I purchased over the last couple of years. How many DVDs is that. How many HD-DVDs?:->
Not me, unless you count "two" as a pile. And those two failed because I let them bang around in my truck and get scratched to hell, not because they were played or otherwise magically rotted.
Then you've had better luck then me:-)
As for hard drives, I certainly haven't had the good luck you seem to be having. If I have an older drive that is powered down for a couple of years, the chances of it spinning up seem to be far from 100%.
Something I haven't encountered yet, true, though I've had a couple of drives begin to fail after a few years running 24x7. I'm gonna have to do annual checks of these drives and if I detect problems transfer to newer ones. Anybody know what the expected data retention time is for hard drive platters? [Off topic maybe]
Of course, these same arguments will hold true for CDs and DVDs at some point in the not-too-distant future, as well as any current hard drive communications bus.
Absolutely. All technology can/will become obsolete.
I prefer offline hard drives because they are much more reliable than DVD (at least in my experience) and have proven themselves. The Ultra-DMA standards haven't changed in a decade and even after the introduction of SATA five years ago, ISA drives are still very common and cheap. DVDs and certainly HD-DVD have yet to prove themselves long term.
So I guess the only way to "future-proof" your backups is to move them to newer media every few years, whichever media you choose at the time. Also a chance to go through the archives and see whether the stuff I backed up five years ago is still worth worrying about.
Perhaps that is why the recommendation from Kodak as to how to backup digital photos is to print them on archival quality, photographic paper and stick 'em in an air-tight box in a dark cupboard.:-)
I've had two hard drives die in my home PC within six months, and a couple weeks ago, two identical drives died at work on the very same day. (All four of them were Maxtors.)
I don't think I have been completely clear. My backup hard drives are offline. I only hook them up in order to do more backups or to restore. Otherwise they sit on a shelf.
I would never consider online drives to be suitable long term backups - maybe interim nightly or weekly backups, but nothing long term.
Agreed. Now if movie companies were to double the standard frame-rate, rather than the resolution... then I'd be interested.
Got to agree with you on that. The blink rate for a human is between 26-28 fps or thereabouts. And that's measured using a single point of the same colour. Thousands of points of different colours don't blend nearly as well, so I'd suspect the blink rate is not a true measure of how well humans can detect fast changes, and therefore what the rate of frames should be. 25 or 30 fps is borderline. 50fps just looks sharper.
Still, we've been watching 25-30 fps for a lot of years...
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Because those interfaces are too hard for most people to learn and don't lend well to daily use. They are langauges for specific tasks on specific systems.
Better to get our tools to understand us in our native langauge then convince the people to learn yet another paradym. As computing power increases, and our ability to program them improves, us IT guys should be able to make the tools more able to help people use them more effectively.
Not if its already written in .NET. But if you have to write it from scratch then you might as well write it in Java and then the port to Unix is much, much simpler if you decide down the track you want to move it to one of your big boxes - or even a small Linux one. Hell, even at home that's what I do. Why lock your self into and operating system if there is no GOOD reason?
It is if I pay for it. I only buy stuff so that I can own it. If they aren't going to sell ownership to me then I'm not buying. Then I'm not paying for it. I buy a CD, I own the CD and I can listen to it whereever and on whatever I choose.
Four years ago I started a project at home in order to flex my programming muscles in new technologies. The project was to build a home network, media centre, home automataion, etc. Build my own "smart house" essentially with an English interface, speech, PDA, and a bunch of other ways me and mine could control the house, our entertainment and orgaise our lives.
Now I have six PCs spread across the house with a fast network, permanent net connection and a family of cherubs that use this stuff everyday. So in thtat sense its been very practicial as our lives have been transformed from the sheer ease with which we now live.
The technology benefit: I've had to build my own boxes, install o/s and configure the network. I've customed built a two linux boxes, a media centre, and added other hardware. I've had to custom write a control system, media catalog and allow it to be fully distributed both externally and at home accessible from any box (or even from work through proxies) and have faced problems that your not going to face any other way. Whilst I've written most of it in Java I've had to spread into a diverse range of Java technologies, hook into MS Outlook and other .NET stuff, interface with Winamp, and other media players. I've even hooked up a remote dialler, linked to an SMS gateway and have caller ID installed. At one stage I was plowing through the ID2 spec to read MP3 tags and then jumped onto the RIFF spec to catalog AVIs. Deep stuff.
In short, a bucket-load of technologies, both hardware and software, that I would never, ever, get my hands on in my professional roles. I've faced a myraid of difficult problems, spent lots of late nights arguing with the thing, and shouted loudly. I have learnt an immense shit-load in a variety of tools and specialities. The project (Blade, see my URL) comes up n every interview lately with much discussion on the technologies that I've had to learn. Its proudly on my resume.
The best bit is that whilst learning I've built something that benefits me and my family immensly, which is always a proven motivator. Much more motivating than learning something because its your job. And the scale of the project will keep me learning and adapting for the next coupe of decades.
Best of all - my wife and kids are proud of me :-) Shucks.
Rick
Except that has back in Java 1.0 before the Collections interface in 1.1. And that was - what 7 or 8 years ago??? A very early release (late in the game?).
Time for the GP to get over it. Nobody uses Vector or Hashtable anymore, they are only there for backwards compatability and for newbee / incompetant coders who can't handle multi-threaded code (like so many early Java programmers who came over from C/C++). When Sun tried to remove them in 1.4 and again in 1.5 the market shouted them down. Don't blame Sun for them, blame the industry and your fellow coders.
Only those of you that don't have Firefox and NoScript. Most regular Slashdotters know this so its mostly anonymous cowards and IE users who get caught and tracked. But they need to be hunted down and shot for the good of mankind anyway, so what's the harm or hypocisy?
Whilst I personally agree with you the law is on their side in most countries (including down here). When you break criminal law you're a criminal. It's not an opinion (IANAL) - it's the definition of criminal.
If you disagree with what the pollies have mandated (legitamate law-setting bodies setting law) then you're not being disobedient: you're a criminal.
That's why the MPAA and R*AA can use the tactics they use. Sux it does.
Unless they were raped they had a choice. The fact that these people (most?? - doubt it) don't have the maturity to control their dicks doesn't abdigate their responsibility.
Penuses are far more dangerous than guns or cars. Perhaps they should be licensed, though some would still choose to where them on their heads.
DRM is a system that lets everybody but you control when, where and on what you can watch video or listen to music, and how much you'll be paying for the privledge. This includes artists, distributers, copyright owners, manufacturers, and the government.
Simple.
So give them farming equipment. Or fishing rods. Seeds, cattle, feed. Give them something to help them feed themselves. Teach them how to dig wells - or move their villages closer to the water. Give them those second hand US textbooks so that they can learn. Give them books, pens, paper, and most importantly teachers and well trained staff to pass on that knowledge and feed their imagination.
How's a $100 toy going to give them a leg-up when their entire economy is stalled and their survival a day-to-day question mark?
Actually TFA directly states that the Indian government does recognise the need for more reasearch and an experiment. Their response is "Not with our kids!"
Has this been proposed for other countries? Have other governments been giving this marvellous option of improving their own kids? Think there aren't a million impoverished kids in the UK, US or even here down under that could benefit from this wonderful gift of gratitude?
That's the core point of the Indian representative. Why spend $100 million on something that is not proven and that no other contry in the world has done. Giving laptops to preppie kids at a few schools is way different to a mass roll out to a million kids.
Not to mention issues such as support, teaching, upgrades, networking infrastructure, software. Hell - how many of this fortunate children would be in reach of a regular supply of electricity to charge their mighty laptops?
Laptops for a milion kids is a half baked plan of symbolistic philanthropy. Its a gesture only. Its not practical to implement, and the benefits are dubious in the current world climate.
I disagree. They are defending their copyright which is granted by the law. It's not a right! It's an artifical construct of our legal system. Right or wrong, good or bad - I'm going to digress into that discussion - but it is a result of our legal and economic system. It was for economic reasons the concept of copyright was invented.
It's not the same is an inalienable human right that should be given to all regardless of economics or legal systems, such as the right to freedom, etc.
As a parent I have a duty to ensure my kids are brought up safely by guarding both their intellect, emaotinos and phyiscal form. The world can be a very nasty place, and I have must protect them for things that will do them harm, because children - particularly young children - do not have the capacity to protect themselves.
I don't think anybody will argue with that. The divisions begin in "how" I chose to "protect" my children. That multitude of fine lines involved in "protecting for their own good" is a daily choice. My wife and I will choose differently to you, and you are free to shelter your kids based on your own views and culture. That is your right as a parent.
For me, stripping the nude scene out of Titanic may mean that that film now becomes acceptable for me and my family to watch. For you, perhaps it means that you don't watch the film at all. But that's MY choice, not the director's. The director's choice is what vision he chooses to show to the world. I have the freedom to show my children a different view, if I feel they need it. I don't see it as a "show this or show nothing" choice - not in my own home.
Just like I have the freedom to block adds off websites if I choose...
I stand corrected. My mistake.
Nope, have to ping you on that one. I'll pull out my old university text to prove it. You telling me I should be sitting 20m away from my 2.5m projector screen???? You can claim all the crazy crap you want, but that won't make it true. Many, many people have seen HDTV, and can definitively tell you that anyone who isn't blind CAN SEE THE HUGE DIFFERENCE IT MAKES
Yeah, right. Yelling helps your argument. Some difference, maybe, minor difference, more probably. Huge difference?
Indeed I do, and no I no longer let them touch the DVDs themselves. Primarily I started ripping for exactly the same reason you have - central storage for distributed viewing. I've retasked the large DVD cabinet I built and now use it to store books. It took me months to rip the DVDs I own, but once ripped they all go under the stairs out of the way.
I back up the rips so that when my shiney new 250GB hard drive fails mysteriously in the middle of the night I don't have to RIP THEM ALL AGAIN. Easier to throw them on another drive in a mass copy and just restore if one of the drives goes bunk.
And yes, I do dislike DVDs. I get DVDs from friends that - for some reason or another - just won't play on any of my drives. "Oh but they play on mine" they say. Great. DVDs are next to useless if they don't play on ALL DVD drives, particularly future ones. DVDs are not as friendly nor ubiquitous as CDs became, not as a data storage format.
Flamebait. RTFC mate. Four years ain't long to be shouting a "best archive mnedia" mantra. As I said:
Granted its only been four years, and yes, hard drives are not archive grade storage mediums.
Though with all the Web 2.0 hype going on around the place, seems a lot of people consider 4 years to be an eon ago, lost in the backwater of time.
Its written in Java so (in theory) most platforms. I'm running the server on Windows 2000 Server, though I have other Windows clients and a Puppy Linux client attached.
It's free and available from http://blade.dnsalias.net/ or as a torrent.
The Blade Multimedia Catalog has some volume and archive management built in. This gives me a snapshot of my mounted volumes showing me capacities and free space that I have available, including the archive drives, plus indexes all my videos, music and photos and tracks which have been copied to the archive drives. Next version also integrates with BitTorrent clients such as Azureus.
Email address on the site if you have a prob :-)
Just simple IDE drives plugged into an external case. Every week or two I stick in my current archive drive, copy new data to it, and then pull it out and stick it on the shelf. I have a catalog program I wrote to keep track of what's archived and what's not.
This, for me, is a suitable strategy for backing up large files that don't change often, ie DVD rips, mail backups, software installation disks, drivers, etc. More active files - such as databases - go through a different process and only end up on those drives for historical reference. So far, I'm up to 1.4TB backed up in this way on eight drives I purchased over the last couple of years. How many DVDs is that. How many HD-DVDs? :->
Something I haven't encountered yet, true, though I've had a couple of drives begin to fail after a few years running 24x7. I'm gonna have to do annual checks of these drives and if I detect problems transfer to newer ones. Anybody know what the expected data retention time is for hard drive platters? [Off topic maybe] Of course, these same arguments will hold true for CDs and DVDs at some point in the not-too-distant future, as well as any current hard drive communications bus.
Absolutely. All technology can/will become obsolete.
I prefer offline hard drives because they are much more reliable than DVD (at least in my experience) and have proven themselves. The Ultra-DMA standards haven't changed in a decade and even after the introduction of SATA five years ago, ISA drives are still very common and cheap. DVDs and certainly HD-DVD have yet to prove themselves long term.
So I guess the only way to "future-proof" your backups is to move them to newer media every few years, whichever media you choose at the time. Also a chance to go through the archives and see whether the stuff I backed up five years ago is still worth worrying about.
Perhaps that is why the recommendation from Kodak as to how to backup digital photos is to print them on archival quality, photographic paper and stick 'em in an air-tight box in a dark cupboard. :-)
I don't think I have been completely clear. My backup hard drives are offline. I only hook them up in order to do more backups or to restore. Otherwise they sit on a shelf.
I would never consider online drives to be suitable long term backups - maybe interim nightly or weekly backups, but nothing long term.
Got to agree with you on that. The blink rate for a human is between 26-28 fps or thereabouts. And that's measured using a single point of the same colour. Thousands of points of different colours don't blend nearly as well, so I'd suspect the blink rate is not a true measure of how well humans can detect fast changes, and therefore what the rate of frames should be. 25 or 30 fps is borderline. 50fps just looks sharper.
Still, we've been watching 25-30 fps for a lot of years...