What has been hogging IT resources for the last 2 years - viruses. So every single director of IT will definetly buy something that will instantly fix all their resourcing woes.
Intel, Symantec, etc, etc are all picking up on this and trying to sell products based on this. Do we trust the moral fibre of all of these companies with our freedom ? I think not.
Education is what people need, not products. I don't think people willfully leave their computers as Zombies.
On the other hand - if they are worried about the effects of flash crowds ,/. effect etc. then its a different matter. But I suspect they're just looking for more excuses to generate revenue.
Microsoft must really be begining to feel the heat if they are starting to push for 10 year contracts. I'll concede that a sense of permanance is good in IT (and especially local authority), but 10 years (in any industry) is a very, very, very long time to be betting on one horse.
Just look back at 1994 and see what has changed sense - and what hasn't changed. All the world has changed, except for Microsoft.
I just hope that Newham Council survuve this contract. Repeat after me: Microsoft doesn't scale. There is (believe it or not) a reason why it appears cheaper than all that nice Peoplesoft/Oracle/IBM - its not as good.
How about profiling bytecode interpreters for the new breed 64 bit processors.
Both Sun (the original innovators) and now Microsoft are putting their money on their bytecode (rather than binary) executables to try and avoid the whole backwards compatibilty problems when moving architectures. To get to grips with how important this is - Microsoft has only just recently managed to escape from the 16 bit code hell that it lived in for years (need proof - check out the Win16Lock you needed to get access to the video memory in DirectX).
That said, I can't imagine that many (someone might enlighten us here) performance benchmarks that a 64 bit bytecode interpreter could do better in when compared to its 32 bit smaller brother.
What would be interesting here would be to see how Javas bytecode and CIL scale to 64 bit. My first guess would be that Java should scale better (with Suns heritage of 64 bit platforms) but I wouldn't be surprised if MSFT weren't too far behind, as they were always keeping their eye on this test when designing the CIL. This would also be a good chance for the Mono project to try a "ours is better than yours" benchmark for their interpreterrs.
I wonder - is there any entity out there anymore that's rooting for the common person.
Here we have commercial interests censoring viewership of Athletic games, for which the Geeks used to halt all wars and campaigns to compete.
Traditionally we have relied on goverments to keep everything on the straight and narrow, but with gevernments now having their own agenda no one is keeping an eye on the corporations.
I don't like turning things political, but I came across an interesting definition in the auld dictionary today:
(From dictionary.com) One who governs by terrorism or intimidation; specifically, an agent or partisan of the revolutionary tribunal during the Reign of Terror in France. --Burke.
Irony - the term terrorist was originally coined for a government.
It would be awesome if Slashdot moderation worked like that at all. But, it doesn't. Moderators don't decide "this post is worth a 3, while that one is worth a 5, and that one is worth a -1." Moderators are only given three choices for a post: +1, 0, and -1. Slashdot uses an insanely boneheaded algorithm to map those three moderation choices to seven different thresholds: -1, 0, +1, +2, +3, +4, and +5.
There may be easier (and less contraversial) ways of implementing a moderation scheme.
One could reward a member for posting articles (that are interesting/insightful etc) by making their moderation points count for more than just +1 / -1
This can be taken to another level still - see what articles (and categories) people have been moderated highly on and use that to distinguish people that are probably knowledgeable in the area and people who just like posting funny quips.
How about allowing subscribers to moderate stories before they hit the main site.
People who are really busy could browse at +5 "Don't do anything else until you read this !!!" while people with loads of time (or in college) could browse at normal levels.
Oh, and as a plus, you would eliminate dupes as well.
Heat is really only a by-product of the problem. The main problem is power consumption. If you have a big enough fan you can cool anything (within reason) but who is going to buy a CPU that sucks 1KW (which is the way the power issues are leading).
FYI: The power issue is only going to get worse at smaller geometries.
Roughtly: Power = Switching Power + Leakage Power + Others.
The two we are interested in here is the Switching Power and the Leakage power. Up until now Switching power has been the greedy party, but when geometries shrink down to 90nm and below, leakage power really kicks in.
IBM and AMD have done some nifty stuff with strained silicon and silicon on insolutor to try and reduce the leakage power (and therefore the heat).
So heat really will not be solved by just taking it away faster - because there's a whole lot more of it lurking around the corner, to fix the heat issue, you have to fix the cause not the symptom.
'I think we should be well advised to remember that what we have before us now is the first volume of a larger work... and be willing to suspend judgement... until we have seen the whole... The pleasure to be derived from this first volume is a pleasure not to be missed.'
Is that why Return Of The King was the only film of the three to get an Oscar for best film ?
(Before I'm completely slaughtered for complaining about performance, a disclaimer: I haven't done strict benchmarks)
Is it my imagination or are XSLT transforms very slow. I know this will depend on what engine you use to transform, but during the course of designing a website for a friend I tried several Java based transforms to go from XML to an XHTML page.
Why are these operations so slow - I thought XML (and therefore XHTML) was supposed to be straight forward and easy to parse.
In my limited experience XHTMLs benefits seem to be "weakened" by parsers/transformers that are still a bit away from maturity (speed-wise).
(Hint: if anyone knows a lean, mean transformer nows the time...)
I hate to be the harbinger of bad news, but the PDA market (and Tablet PC market for that matter) isn't really going to take off (in the way it should take off) until we can give people more than the 72/100 dots per inch on the screen.
Its hard to convince people to completly drop paper when any standard laser will spit out printouts at 600dpi (or greater) yet the best displays are still only pitched at 100 dpi.
If you had a choice, which would you pick ?
The same applies to the sensitivity of the touch-screen.
I'm not in school anymore...
on
VoIP Questioned
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
... now children, give me a 2000 word essay on VoIP.
I'd imagine that the bulk of kids these days would probably research the subject matter slightly better.
This writer clearly has NO IDEA on what he is talking about. Lets see if we can refute everything he says:
"TiVo, the digital video recording service, for example, requires a standard home phone line to complete the initial setup. Otherwise, you "can't get TiVo,"
I'm sure TiVo would be absolutely thrilled to use broadband for completing the setup. Just think of all the money they spend on 1800 calls for people to finish the setup. I'm sure they'd also be pretty happy to get viewer stats more or less in real time.
"That could lead to trouble dealing with businesses such as banks and major fast food companies that often check local phone listings to verify addresses."
How is this different from not being listed ? Why not raise the point that AT&T / Vonage need to provide a reliable database rather than spreading this line of "Fear".
"Some home alarm systems have trouble with broadband connections, or their manufacturers don't yet trust the reliability of the Internet."
The "some" being the companies that are too lazy to use more modern methods for monitoring.
"During a power outage, a VoIP phone is only as good as any battery backups on hand, because delivering power through the broadband connection isn't possible on a wide commercial basis. An emerging alternative broadband-delivery technique, broadband over power line, will solve this problem, but wide deployment is years away."
Where do I begin. Complete rubbish. Author probably read an article about it last month, so feels like he has to include it this month, just to get one back on New Scientist.
From here on in the article, we get a "dump" of interesting facts and other pieces of information that seem to completely go against what the author has just said.
Complete FUD. I wonder who's paying for the article.
Traditionally, libraries were the ultimate source of information. They were organised and well indexed - to help one find what they are looking for.
The internet has become an "instant library" to a lot of us. In ways, the internet is better than a library. Searching is trivial and the amount of information staggering. However, a lot of information is getting lost. I'm aware that there are Archiving sites, but often, these sites cannot index or record the information that sites present from their own MySQL/Oracle databases.
Search engines are really only good for searching a static site, and don't particularly scale well to sites that have content that change frequently.
It all boils down to this: HTML+Search Engine is not a good combination for giving people access to information over a long period of time. Web sites come and go (depending on the interest of their maintainters) and when they go, they're gone for good.
We need to start distributing the content on a global scale - the same way books distribute content among many people.
I thought Dell distanced themselves from this last week, claiming that third parties can load whatever OS they want onto their hardware.
This WOULD be news if Dell was offering Linux support along their Windows support, but a third party that buys a Dimension/Optiplex and sells it with Linux really isn't ground breaking news.
This has been duly covered and thrown out as complete rubbish before.
But this made me think - The numbers they give for Redhat and Suse are quite high. Thinking back over the last few months I don't think I needed to patch my server that number of times at all.
I think people need to distinguish between exploitable flaws and flaws that could be used in "theory".
Another point - flaws that are reported to Redhat aren't always installed on every server. A flaw could be reported in Apache, but that is not to say that everyone with Redhat Enterpise is running Apache.
Plan and simple: these type of statistics should always come with the caveat: your mileage may vary !!
What use are IEs extra features if they have to be turned off by default.
ActiveX should never have been embedded into a browser in the way it has been. Yet most of the sites that I have to use IE for is because of ActiveX controls.
Microsoft tricked a lot of the world into using ActiveX and now they're paying the price.
I can hear the support conversations already - "Yes, if your security zone is set to high your computer won't be vulnerable. But if you want to view anything with ActiveX (read: multimedia) you'll have to turn these vulnerabilities back on."
I think Sun are due a bit of credit here. They are in the space of 3-6 months after dropping an architecture they have developed and fathered since the late 80s. Would you abandon your own teenager?
Management have obviously faced the cold hard truth - the UltraSparc has been solidly beaten. A lot of companies are very slow to pull the plug on something with as a long a history as this, and usually that delay leads to their downfall - Sun, just maybe have caught this before it was too late, and I personally don't think it's too late yet: Intel have pretty substantial power issues - throwing registers at the problem has finally reached the end of the line for Intel.
Sun are clearly and intelligently hedging here - support the low end with Opteron, support the midrange with SPARC64 - all while waiting and seeing what their Throughput Computing brings out.
Its the same for their software - They're hedging Linux and Solaris.
It's all boiling back to Darwin again - Natural Selection.
I can remember reading an article a while back on Longhorns schedule (linked from/. no doubt) that claimed that WinFS might be dumped to get their overall schedule back on track.
Does anyone know if this is true, or just my imagination running away with itself.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree completely.
/. effect etc. then its a different matter. But I suspect they're just looking for more excuses to generate revenue.
What has been hogging IT resources for the last 2 years - viruses. So every single director of IT will definetly buy something that will instantly fix all their resourcing woes.
Intel, Symantec, etc, etc are all picking up on this and trying to sell products based on this. Do we trust the moral fibre of all of these companies with our freedom ? I think not.
Education is what people need, not products. I don't think people willfully leave their computers as Zombies.
On the other hand - if they are worried about the effects of flash crowds ,
Finally my point is proven - this is what happens when the marketing department controls projects !!
Stupid question: which would you use Peoplesoft or Microsoft ?
Microsoft must really be begining to feel the heat if they are starting to push for 10 year contracts. I'll concede that a sense of permanance is good in IT (and especially local authority), but 10 years (in any industry) is a very, very, very long time to be betting on one horse.
Just look back at 1994 and see what has changed sense - and what hasn't changed. All the world has changed, except for Microsoft.
I just hope that Newham Council survuve this contract. Repeat after me: Microsoft doesn't scale. There is (believe it or not) a reason why it appears cheaper than all that nice Peoplesoft/Oracle/IBM - its not as good.
How about profiling bytecode interpreters for the new breed 64 bit processors.
Both Sun (the original innovators) and now Microsoft are putting their money on their bytecode (rather than binary) executables to try and avoid the whole backwards compatibilty problems when moving architectures. To get to grips with how important this is - Microsoft has only just recently managed to escape from the 16 bit code hell that it lived in for years (need proof - check out the Win16Lock you needed to get access to the video memory in DirectX).
That said, I can't imagine that many (someone might enlighten us here) performance benchmarks that a 64 bit bytecode interpreter could do better in when compared to its 32 bit smaller brother.
What would be interesting here would be to see how Javas bytecode and CIL scale to 64 bit. My first guess would be that Java should scale better (with Suns heritage of 64 bit platforms) but I wouldn't be surprised if MSFT weren't too far behind, as they were always keeping their eye on this test when designing the CIL. This would also be a good chance for the Mono project to try a "ours is better than yours" benchmark for their interpreterrs.
How can any product compete with a social movement that uses a Penguin as a mascot !!
"No, I'd like to try that other thing, oh, darn, I can't remember the name,
I wonder - is there any entity out there anymore that's rooting for the common person.
Here we have commercial interests censoring viewership of Athletic games, for which the Geeks used to halt all wars and campaigns to compete.
Traditionally we have relied on goverments to keep everything on the straight and narrow, but with gevernments now having their own agenda no one is keeping an eye on the corporations.
I don't like turning things political, but I came across an interesting definition in the auld dictionary today:
(From dictionary.com)
One who governs by terrorism or intimidation; specifically, an agent or partisan of the revolutionary tribunal during the Reign of Terror in France. --Burke.
Irony - the term terrorist was originally coined for a government.
It would be awesome if Slashdot moderation worked like that at all. But, it doesn't. Moderators don't decide "this post is worth a 3, while that one is worth a 5, and that one is worth a -1." Moderators are only given three choices for a post: +1, 0, and -1. Slashdot uses an insanely boneheaded algorithm to map those three moderation choices to seven different thresholds: -1, 0, +1, +2, +3, +4, and +5.
There may be easier (and less contraversial) ways of implementing a moderation scheme.
One could reward a member for posting articles (that are interesting/insightful etc) by making their moderation points count for more than just +1 / -1
This can be taken to another level still - see what articles (and categories) people have been moderated highly on and use that to distinguish people that are probably knowledgeable in the area and people who just like posting funny quips.
How about allowing subscribers to moderate stories before they hit the main site.
People who are really busy could browse at +5 "Don't do anything else until you read this !!!" while people with loads of time (or in college) could browse at normal levels.
Oh, and as a plus, you would eliminate dupes as well.
Heat is really only a by-product of the problem. The main problem is power consumption. If you have a big enough fan you can cool anything (within reason) but who is going to buy a CPU that sucks 1KW (which is the way the power issues are leading).
FYI: The power issue is only going to get worse at smaller geometries.
Roughtly: Power = Switching Power + Leakage Power + Others.
The two we are interested in here is the Switching Power and the Leakage power. Up until now Switching power has been the greedy party, but when geometries shrink down to 90nm and below, leakage power really kicks in.
IBM and AMD have done some nifty stuff with strained silicon and silicon on insolutor to try and reduce the leakage power (and therefore the heat).
So heat really will not be solved by just taking it away faster - because there's a whole lot more of it lurking around the corner, to fix the heat issue, you have to fix the cause not the symptom.
'I think we should be well advised to remember that what we have before us now is the first volume of a larger work... and be willing to suspend judgement... until we have seen the whole... The pleasure to be derived from this first volume is a pleasure not to be missed.'
Is that why Return Of The King was the only film of the three to get an Oscar for best film ?
(Before I'm completely slaughtered for complaining about performance, a disclaimer: I haven't done strict benchmarks)
Is it my imagination or are XSLT transforms very slow. I know this will depend on what engine you use to transform, but during the course of designing a website for a friend I tried several Java based transforms to go from XML to an XHTML page.
Why are these operations so slow - I thought XML (and therefore XHTML) was supposed to be straight forward and easy to parse.
In my limited experience XHTMLs benefits seem to be "weakened" by parsers/transformers that are still a bit away from maturity (speed-wise).
(Hint: if anyone knows a lean, mean transformer nows the time...)
I hate to be the harbinger of bad news, but the PDA market (and Tablet PC market for that matter) isn't really going to take off (in the way it should take off) until we can give people more than the 72/100 dots per inch on the screen.
Its hard to convince people to completly drop paper when any standard laser will spit out printouts at 600dpi (or greater) yet the best displays are still only pitched at 100 dpi.
If you had a choice, which would you pick ?
The same applies to the sensitivity of the touch-screen.
... now children, give me a 2000 word essay on VoIP.
I'd imagine that the bulk of kids these days would probably research the subject matter slightly better.
This writer clearly has NO IDEA on what he is talking about. Lets see if we can refute everything he says:
"TiVo, the digital video recording service, for example, requires a standard home phone line to complete the initial setup. Otherwise, you "can't get TiVo,"
I'm sure TiVo would be absolutely thrilled to use broadband for completing the setup. Just think of all the money they spend on 1800 calls for people to finish the setup. I'm sure they'd also be pretty happy to get viewer stats more or less in real time.
"That could lead to trouble dealing with businesses such as banks and major fast food companies that often check local phone listings to verify addresses."
How is this different from not being listed ? Why not raise the point that AT&T / Vonage need to provide a reliable database rather than spreading this line of "Fear".
"Some home alarm systems have trouble with broadband connections, or their manufacturers don't yet trust the reliability of the Internet."
The "some" being the companies that are too lazy to use more modern methods for monitoring.
"During a power outage, a VoIP phone is only as good as any battery backups on hand, because delivering power through the broadband connection isn't possible on a wide commercial basis. An emerging alternative broadband-delivery technique, broadband over power line, will solve this problem, but wide deployment is years away."
Where do I begin. Complete rubbish. Author probably read an article about it last month, so feels like he has to include it this month, just to get one back on New Scientist.
From here on in the article, we get a "dump" of interesting facts and other pieces of information that seem to completely go against what the author has just said.
Complete FUD. I wonder who's paying for the article.
I think this touches upon a much larger problem.
Traditionally, libraries were the ultimate source of information. They were organised and well indexed - to help one find what they are looking for.
The internet has become an "instant library" to a lot of us. In ways, the internet is better than a library. Searching is trivial and the amount of information staggering. However, a lot of information is getting lost. I'm aware that there are Archiving sites, but often, these sites cannot index or record the information that sites present from their own MySQL/Oracle databases.
Search engines are really only good for searching a static site, and don't particularly scale well to sites that have content that change frequently.
It all boils down to this: HTML+Search Engine is not a good combination for giving people access to information over a long period of time. Web sites come and go (depending on the interest of their maintainters) and when they go, they're gone for good.
We need to start distributing the content on a global scale - the same way books distribute content among many people.
Does anyone know what the minimum specs are ?
If I need hardware, I need to be ordering it now !!
I thought Dell distanced themselves from this last week, claiming that third parties can load whatever OS they want onto their hardware.
This WOULD be news if Dell was offering Linux support along their Windows support, but a third party that buys a Dimension/Optiplex and sells it with Linux really isn't ground breaking news.
This already exists in the linux 2.6 kernel (I think it may be back ported to the 2.4 as well).
Its called OProfile.
While not identical to DTrace it lets you perform the same task.
And another advantage of open source - if you do find a resource hog, you can go in and "make it right".
Heck, for really silly bottlenecks you could fix it in hours/days rather than months.
This has been duly covered and thrown out as complete rubbish before.
But this made me think - The numbers they give for Redhat and Suse are quite high. Thinking back over the last few months I don't think I needed to patch my server that number of times at all.
I think people need to distinguish between exploitable flaws and flaws that could be used in "theory".
Another point - flaws that are reported to Redhat aren't always installed on every server. A flaw could be reported in Apache, but that is not to say that everyone with Redhat Enterpise is running Apache.
Plan and simple: these type of statistics should always come with the caveat: your mileage may vary !!
What use are IEs extra features if they have to be turned off by default.
ActiveX should never have been embedded into a browser in the way it has been. Yet most of the sites that I have to use IE for is because of ActiveX controls.
Microsoft tricked a lot of the world into using ActiveX and now they're paying the price.
I can hear the support conversations already -
"Yes, if your security zone is set to high your computer won't be vulnerable. But if you want to view anything with ActiveX (read: multimedia) you'll have to turn these vulnerabilities back on."
Does anyone else find this mildly insane ?
Although I suppose there is more info.
A renaissance .... probably not.
I think Sun are due a bit of credit here. They are in the space of 3-6 months after dropping an architecture they have developed and fathered since the late 80s. Would you abandon your own teenager?
Management have obviously faced the cold hard truth - the UltraSparc has been solidly beaten. A lot of companies are very slow to pull the plug on something with as a long a history as this, and usually that delay leads to their downfall - Sun, just maybe have caught this before it was too late, and I personally don't think it's too late yet: Intel have pretty substantial power issues - throwing registers at the problem has finally reached the end of the line for Intel.
Sun are clearly and intelligently hedging here - support the low end with Opteron, support the midrange with SPARC64 - all while waiting and seeing what their Throughput Computing brings out.
Its the same for their software - They're hedging Linux and Solaris.
It's all boiling back to Darwin again - Natural Selection.
May the best OS/Chip Architecture win.
Did you forget, this is slashdot. Post first, read the article later!
Is it my imagination, or is there actually a reasonable migration to linux underway ?
I would imagine that Oracle had a long ramp up for this.
Putting it in perspective - the next chance M$ will have to try and pull accounts back is in two years time.
What am I getting at:
If Acme Co decides to start a Linux changeover today - it could be implemented before the next OS release by MS.
My Point: The traffic is really only going to go one way for at least two years (assuming that the companies that switch now benefit from the change).
A lot of the articles focus seems to be on WinFS.
/. no doubt) that claimed that WinFS might be dumped to get their overall schedule back on track.
I can remember reading an article a while back on Longhorns schedule (linked from
Does anyone know if this is true, or just my imagination running away with itself.