Java, C, VB and PHP in the top spots seem reasonable. But Delphi, Pascal, Lisp, FoxPro and ColdFusion gaining ground? Mainly the latter 3? Come on. There is probably more Fortran code out there than the five combined. Also, Javascript going away?
The currently 'en vogue' languages from this list are Java, PHP, Python, C#, Ruby, Javascript and maybe VB - no matter what any study tells you. C and C++ are going to stay for a *long* time - probably just as long as COBOL and Fortran did.
While I can somehow understand the 'mental suffering' part - although 25000$ seems very excessive - I don't see how their home should suffer from "diminished value".
Their home is going to be worth *more* if anything (more visibility = more famous = more value).
TFA is mainly about SaaS - Software as a Service (yes, I had to look it up). GMail, Google Calendar etc. in other words.
Honestly I think that parallelism and SaaS are pretty much on the opposite sides of the spectrum. Your typical SaaS application requires no parallelism whatsoever since they are typically low-impact programs. The only real improvement over ordinary software is that you don't have to install it, don't have to maintain it and that you can access it anytime from anywhere.
A typical SaaS provider has a few dozen to a few thousand servers running a few hundred to a few million instances of his software. Since typically a single server will run many instances of the software, parallelization will "just happen" for free.
A typical SaaS client runs in a web browser. Since a web browser is probably about the least efficient application GUI ever made (it runs in Javascript over XML over HTTP and uses HTML and DOM to "emulate" a drawing library), parallelization is not your problem there either.
SaaS can be great and so can parallelization. But they're not related.
Not to be a nitpick, but saying "Opera's software leads now with 98%, closely following by Safari with 96% and Firefox 3 beta 4 with 71%" is like saying "Car A reaches 274 km/h, closely followed by car B with 268 km/h and car C with 198 km/h".
I like Firefox more than Opera or Safari, but saying that 98% is "closely followed" by 96 AND 71% is just stupid. The fact that IE is worse is not a justification.
Here's what's I think is important (and new) Ubuntu 8.04 Beta, with my comments. There are more new things, but I don't care about them.
Xorg 7.3 - the main advantage should be easier configuration, especially in multi-monitor setups. I haven't tried it yet, so I can't say. But it can only be better than what we have now.
Linux kernel 2.6.24 - The new & neat things here are dynticks for amd64 (power savings), the new CFS scheduler (you should experience less lags when your system is loaded). I'm mostly interested in the dynticks part.
PulseAudio - this is supposed to clean up the linux audio mess. I say wait and see.
Firefox 3 Beta 4 - I tried Beta 3 and it's *really* an advance over Firefox 2. I can't say that I personally witnessed any real speedups, but the new location bar is really cool. It takes a day or two to get used to it, but it really changes the way you surf.
Transmission - a new Bittorrent client. I'm using it regularly since months, and it *rules*. It's exactly the way a bittorrent client should be.
Brasero - a new CD/DVD burning program. I have never used it, but I can only hope that it is the way Nero 5 was.
World clock for the clock applet - that's really handy. Never type "what's the time in california" into google again!
Virtualization - it's supposed to be some super-easy and clicky integration of virtualization. I'm looking forward to it.
Come on. The software bundles are *always* ludicrous. They typically include:
- A crappy "Home User"-Antivirus with huge splash screens and big colorful dialog boxes pissing you off a few times a day. - A crappy toolbar for your browser (often Yahoo or Google, sometimes worse) - Some "software update center" which is usually far worse than even Windows Update - A CD Recording application which is ALWAYS crap. - A software firewall yelling "OMG PACKET" every time someone sends an UDP broadcast on your network. - A few "click here to sign up" icons of various services no one has ever heard of (or wants). - Half a dozen media players fighting for world domination (and stealing file extensions from each other all the time).
Come on. The software bundles are *always* ludicrous. They typically include:
- A crappy "Home User"-Antivirus with huge splash screens and big colorful dialog boxes pissing you off a few times a day.
- A crappy toolbar for your browser (often Yahoo or Google, sometimes worse)
- Some "software update center" which is usually far worse than even Windows Update
- A CD Recording application which is ALWAYS crap.
- A software firewall yelling "OMG PACKET" every time someone sends an UDP broadcast on your network.
- A few "click here to sign up" icons of various services no one has ever heard of (or wants).
- Half a dozen media players fighting for world domination (and stealing file extensions from each other all the time).
This doesn't necessarily mean that most spam comes from six botnets. Some of the bots could be used by multiple bot masters; OTOH some botmasters could control multiple botnets using different bots.
Something else I just thought of:
The botmasters are going to use the best bot available, i.e. the one enabling them to send most spam at the least cost. On the other hand, the "good guys" are fighting spam (and the bots). So whenever a certain bot starts taking over (currently Srizbi) all the good guys will focus on that one and try to shut it down. So the bot decreases in value and another, better bot will take over. Evolution at its best.
The Antivirus companies which are trying to fight the malware are also trying their best. The big difference is that while the success of a spambot can be easily measured by the customer (i.e. the botmaster), the success of an AV product is much harder to estimate. Also, the typical AV customer doesn't have the ability/time to find out which AV product is best for him. Moreover, AV products are some sort of subscription service (you buy the package and get 1 year of updates) which makes it hard to switch products. Often AV products are bundled with computers, selected by business principles and not by technical superiority.
In other words, the evolution process of malware is far superior to the one of AV products.
It's an ugly overpriced piece of shit. 10000 GBP (that's about 20000$) for a dual quad core running at 3.2 GHz in an ugly case? Come on. You can get a Mac Pro with the same speed for a *fourth* of the price. And it looks better.
When a computer is four times more expensive than the equivalent from *Apple*, then you know that something is seriously wrong.
I'm not sure, but is it not the outer part which is faster (because it's moving faster past the head)? I don't see how seek time should be different on the inner/outer cylinders.
I really hope that this trend continues. I'd love to see something like this:
An online music store with all kinds of music (like the iTunes store), but:
- No DRM *at all*. - Previews as MP3. Say, the first 30 secs of every track. The first 50% would be better. Should be "kind of good quality", say >= 128kbit. - All tracks in at least the following formats:
- MP3 "good quality", say >= 256 kbit
- Lossless in a free, open format. Flac in other words. - The ability to use the store from the web. - The ability to put multiple tracks in a "cart" and download the whole cart as a zip would be a big plus. - An open API for different clients would be a huge plus. - And, last but not least, the ability to have some sort of "account" and to re-download tracks I already purchased, whenever, wherever and how many times I want to.
It would be ok if the tracks are somehow watermarked, i.e. if they can tell from a file which user downloaded a track and block his or her account if they are redistributing the tracks.
I would also appreciate formats "better than CD", e.g. Flac tracks in DVD Audio quality (24 bit, 96 kHz if I'm not mistaken). I'd also appreciate album covers and similar stuff.
I am prepared to pay for a quality product I can use for years to come. I am not prepared to pay for some badly encoded track I can use on few specific players, and I do *not* want to re-buy everything if I switch players/want higher quality etc.
Now that's what I call innovation! An oversized power strip which will, eh, save space! I mean, the thing is so huge that it needs a handle! Imagine it with 12 adapters plugged in.
Roland obviously botched the summary. It's not about hydrogen powered cars as in "cars in whose tanks you put hydrogen", but about hydrogen powered cars as in "cars with conventional fuel in the tank, which then gets split into hydrogen and carbon, and the hydrogen is used in the engine". TFA is actually interesting.
Notice that this is *not* a call to spam him; that won't help anybody. Informed, thoughtful considerations about why a copyright extension is a good/bad idea might. Maybe he listens to what citizens are saying.
Everybody loves bashing RIAA, MPAA and the big bad studios, but come on: The Lord of the Rings was originally published in *1955* (more than 50 years ago). Tolkien died in 1973 (more than 35 years ago). The publishers really had enough time to make money; it should be public domain by now. Yes, I know copyright usually expires 50/70 years after the author's death, but these laws really need updating.
I can see that this might help to reduce false positives (i.e. legitimate mail misclassified as spam), but I don't see how it can reduce false negatives (i.e. spam misclassified as legitimate mail). Basically it's similar to SPF but with cryptographic protection.
If the "big" spam targets (Paypal, Ebay and Amazon spring to mind) and the big mail providers (GMail, Hotmail, AOL etc) work together, it might reduce the amount of spam as well; for example, Paypal could state that *all* of their Mail will be signed with DomainKeys; Gmail could then immediately put all non-signed mail from Paypal into the spam folder (or reject it).
Since more and more people are using the big providers for their personal E-Mail, it might help with false positives there too.
It will not help with E-Mail from Domains not using DomainKeys, for domains set up by spammers (they can DomainKeys as everybody else) and for "small" domains, i.e. not deemed important enough by the big players to be listed as "non-spamming".
If the big players really work together on this, it might reduce spam a little but it will also damage the small players; since they're not whitelisted, their E-Mail is more likely to be classified as spam. Which makes the big players more attractive, so more people will use them and so on. It leads to a centralization of E-Mail.
I'm not sure whether this is good or bad.
Re:Let's think about this for a second...
on
Energy From Raindrops
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Annual rainfall where I live is around 1-3 metres (more slightly inland than on the coast). Let's say 2m as an average. Cumulous cloud (the kind that typically causes rain) forms at 2-16km. Picking a number somewhere in the middle, let's say 8km for the average distance rain drops fall. That means, every year, two cubic metres of rain fall 8km per square metre of ground. That's 2,000 litres, which means roughly 2,000 kg. The total energy in this is calculated as mgh, so: 2,000 x 9.8 x 8,000 = 156,800,000 J.
The calculation seems to be correct but the concepts don't hold.
The *potential* energy of the rain can indeed be calculated using m*g*h as you said. The piezoelectric panels convert the rain's *kinetic* energy to electricity. The kinetic energy on impact is *not* equal to the potential energy, because most of it is lost to air friction.
As others pointed out, the speed of a rain drop is around 8 m/s. This means that the kinetic energy of your 2t of water is E = mv^2 = 2000 * 64 = 128,000J. You're three orders of magnitude off.
Slashdot Mirror
In other news, man tests usability of Duke Nukem Forever running on GNU Hurd by making his GIRLFRIEND play it.
That study seems pretty crappy to me.
Java, C, VB and PHP in the top spots seem reasonable. But Delphi, Pascal, Lisp, FoxPro and ColdFusion gaining ground? Mainly the latter 3? Come on. There is probably more Fortran code out there than the five combined. Also, Javascript going away?
The currently 'en vogue' languages from this list are Java, PHP, Python, C#, Ruby, Javascript and maybe VB - no matter what any study tells you. C and C++ are going to stay for a *long* time - probably just as long as COBOL and Fortran did.
I see better out of my left eye than my right. Maybe we should go to cinema together.
While I can somehow understand the 'mental suffering' part - although 25000$ seems very excessive - I don't see how their home should suffer from "diminished value".
Their home is going to be worth *more* if anything (more visibility = more famous = more value).
TFA is mainly about SaaS - Software as a Service (yes, I had to look it up). GMail, Google Calendar etc. in other words.
Honestly I think that parallelism and SaaS are pretty much on the opposite sides of the spectrum. Your typical SaaS application requires no parallelism whatsoever since they are typically low-impact programs. The only real improvement over ordinary software is that you don't have to install it, don't have to maintain it and that you can access it anytime from anywhere.
A typical SaaS provider has a few dozen to a few thousand servers running a few hundred to a few million instances of his software. Since typically a single server will run many instances of the software, parallelization will "just happen" for free.
A typical SaaS client runs in a web browser. Since a web browser is probably about the least efficient application GUI ever made (it runs in Javascript over XML over HTTP and uses HTML and DOM to "emulate" a drawing library), parallelization is not your problem there either.
SaaS can be great and so can parallelization. But they're not related.
Not to be a nitpick, but saying "Opera's software leads now with 98%, closely following by Safari with 96% and Firefox 3 beta 4 with 71%" is like saying "Car A reaches 274 km/h, closely followed by car B with 268 km/h and car C with 198 km/h".
I like Firefox more than Opera or Safari, but saying that 98% is "closely followed" by 96 AND 71% is just stupid. The fact that IE is worse is not a justification.
If we want to nitpick...a ton is *not* a unit of weight. It's a unit of mass. Mass != weight. The corresponding unit of weight is the "ton force".
Here's what's I think is important (and new) Ubuntu 8.04 Beta, with my comments. There are more new things, but I don't care about them.
Xorg 7.3 - the main advantage should be easier configuration, especially in multi-monitor setups. I haven't tried it yet, so I can't say. But it can only be better than what we have now.
Linux kernel 2.6.24 - The new & neat things here are dynticks for amd64 (power savings), the new CFS scheduler (you should experience less lags when your system is loaded). I'm mostly interested in the dynticks part.
PulseAudio - this is supposed to clean up the linux audio mess. I say wait and see.
Firefox 3 Beta 4 - I tried Beta 3 and it's *really* an advance over Firefox 2. I can't say that I personally witnessed any real speedups, but the new location bar is really cool. It takes a day or two to get used to it, but it really changes the way you surf.
Transmission - a new Bittorrent client. I'm using it regularly since months, and it *rules*. It's exactly the way a bittorrent client should be.
Brasero - a new CD/DVD burning program. I have never used it, but I can only hope that it is the way Nero 5 was.
World clock for the clock applet - that's really handy. Never type "what's the time in california" into google again!
Virtualization - it's supposed to be some super-easy and clicky integration of virtualization. I'm looking forward to it.
(Same post as before, formatted properly)
Come on. The software bundles are *always* ludicrous. They typically include:
- A crappy "Home User"-Antivirus with huge splash screens and big colorful dialog boxes pissing you off a few times a day.
- A crappy toolbar for your browser (often Yahoo or Google, sometimes worse)
- Some "software update center" which is usually far worse than even Windows Update
- A CD Recording application which is ALWAYS crap.
- A software firewall yelling "OMG PACKET" every time someone sends an UDP broadcast on your network.
- A few "click here to sign up" icons of various services no one has ever heard of (or wants).
- Half a dozen media players fighting for world domination (and stealing file extensions from each other all the time).
Come on. The software bundles are *always* ludicrous. They typically include: - A crappy "Home User"-Antivirus with huge splash screens and big colorful dialog boxes pissing you off a few times a day. - A crappy toolbar for your browser (often Yahoo or Google, sometimes worse) - Some "software update center" which is usually far worse than even Windows Update - A CD Recording application which is ALWAYS crap. - A software firewall yelling "OMG PACKET" every time someone sends an UDP broadcast on your network. - A few "click here to sign up" icons of various services no one has ever heard of (or wants). - Half a dozen media players fighting for world domination (and stealing file extensions from each other all the time).
What TFA says is that most Spam comes from the following six types of Bot:
Srizbi: 39%
Rustock: 20%
Mega-D: 11%
Hacktool.Spammer: 7%
Pushdo: 6%
Storm: 2%
Other: 15%
This doesn't necessarily mean that most spam comes from six botnets. Some of the bots could be used by multiple bot masters; OTOH some botmasters could control multiple botnets using different bots.
Something else I just thought of:
The botmasters are going to use the best bot available, i.e. the one enabling them to send most spam at the least cost. On the other hand, the "good guys" are fighting spam (and the bots). So whenever a certain bot starts taking over (currently Srizbi) all the good guys will focus on that one and try to shut it down. So the bot decreases in value and another, better bot will take over. Evolution at its best.
The Antivirus companies which are trying to fight the malware are also trying their best. The big difference is that while the success of a spambot can be easily measured by the customer (i.e. the botmaster), the success of an AV product is much harder to estimate. Also, the typical AV customer doesn't have the ability/time to find out which AV product is best for him. Moreover, AV products are some sort of subscription service (you buy the package and get 1 year of updates) which makes it hard to switch products. Often AV products are bundled with computers, selected by business principles and not by technical superiority.
In other words, the evolution process of malware is far superior to the one of AV products.
It's an ugly overpriced piece of shit. 10000 GBP (that's about 20000$) for a dual quad core running at 3.2 GHz in an ugly case? Come on. You can get a Mac Pro with the same speed for a *fourth* of the price. And it looks better.
When a computer is four times more expensive than the equivalent from *Apple*, then you know that something is seriously wrong.
I'm not sure, but is it not the outer part which is faster (because it's moving faster past the head)? I don't see how seek time should be different on the inner/outer cylinders.
I really hope that this trend continues. I'd love to see something like this:
An online music store with all kinds of music (like the iTunes store), but:
- No DRM *at all*.
- Previews as MP3. Say, the first 30 secs of every track. The first 50% would be better. Should be "kind of good quality", say >= 128kbit.
- All tracks in at least the following formats:
- MP3 "good quality", say >= 256 kbit
- Lossless in a free, open format. Flac in other words.
- The ability to use the store from the web.
- The ability to put multiple tracks in a "cart" and download the whole cart as a zip would be a big plus.
- An open API for different clients would be a huge plus.
- And, last but not least, the ability to have some sort of "account" and to re-download tracks I already purchased, whenever, wherever and how many times I want to.
It would be ok if the tracks are somehow watermarked, i.e. if they can tell from a file which user downloaded a track and block his or her account if they are redistributing the tracks.
I would also appreciate formats "better than CD", e.g. Flac tracks in DVD Audio quality (24 bit, 96 kHz if I'm not mistaken). I'd also appreciate album covers and similar stuff.
I am prepared to pay for a quality product I can use for years to come. I am not prepared to pay for some badly encoded track I can use on few specific players, and I do *not* want to re-buy everything if I switch players/want higher quality etc.
Just had to say that.
Now that's what I call innovation! An oversized power strip which will, eh, save space! I mean, the thing is so huge that it needs a handle! Imagine it with 12 adapters plugged in.
Wikipedia says it's only 1000 light years thick.
Oh my god! It even has a touch sensitive keypad! Now that's unheard of!
Roland obviously botched the summary. It's not about hydrogen powered cars as in "cars in whose tanks you put hydrogen", but about hydrogen powered cars as in "cars with conventional fuel in the tank, which then gets split into hydrogen and carbon, and the hydrogen is used in the engine". TFA is actually interesting.
Maybe EU residents should E-Mail the commissioner to tell him what they think.
His name is Charlie McCreevy; you can have a look at his bio/profile/portfolio etc here:
http://ec.europa.eu/commission_barroso/mccreevy/index_en.htm
His E-Mail Address: Charlie.Mc-Creevy@cec.eu.int
Notice that this is *not* a call to spam him; that won't help anybody. Informed, thoughtful considerations about why a copyright extension is a good/bad idea might. Maybe he listens to what citizens are saying.
Everybody loves bashing RIAA, MPAA and the big bad studios, but come on: The Lord of the Rings was originally published in *1955* (more than 50 years ago). Tolkien died in 1973 (more than 35 years ago). The publishers really had enough time to make money; it should be public domain by now. Yes, I know copyright usually expires 50/70 years after the author's death, but these laws really need updating.
I can see that this might help to reduce false positives (i.e. legitimate mail misclassified as spam), but I don't see how it can reduce false negatives (i.e. spam misclassified as legitimate mail). Basically it's similar to SPF but with cryptographic protection.
If the "big" spam targets (Paypal, Ebay and Amazon spring to mind) and the big mail providers (GMail, Hotmail, AOL etc) work together, it might reduce the amount of spam as well; for example, Paypal could state that *all* of their Mail will be signed with DomainKeys; Gmail could then immediately put all non-signed mail from Paypal into the spam folder (or reject it).
Since more and more people are using the big providers for their personal E-Mail, it might help with false positives there too.
It will not help with E-Mail from Domains not using DomainKeys, for domains set up by spammers (they can DomainKeys as everybody else) and for "small" domains, i.e. not deemed important enough by the big players to be listed as "non-spamming".
If the big players really work together on this, it might reduce spam a little but it will also damage the small players; since they're not whitelisted, their E-Mail is more likely to be classified as spam. Which makes the big players more attractive, so more people will use them and so on. It leads to a centralization of E-Mail.
I'm not sure whether this is good or bad.
The calculation seems to be correct but the concepts don't hold.
The *potential* energy of the rain can indeed be calculated using m*g*h as you said. The piezoelectric panels convert the rain's *kinetic* energy to electricity. The kinetic energy on impact is *not* equal to the potential energy, because most of it is lost to air friction.
As others pointed out, the speed of a rain drop is around 8 m/s. This means that the kinetic energy of your 2t of water is E = mv^2 = 2000 * 64 = 128,000J. You're three orders of magnitude off.
Dammit, now with proper formatting:
http://www.ronkleinphotos.com.nyud.net/Lawrence.html
http://www.ronkleinphotos.com.nyud.net/success.html
http://www.ronkleinphotos.com.nyud.net/lawrenceorderform.html
Please mod parent redundant.
Here are all the important links (I thought coral cache would rewrite the links, but it doesn't): http://www.ronkleinphotos.com.nyud.net/Lawrence.html http://www.ronkleinphotos.com.nyud.net/success.html http://www.ronkleinphotos.com.nyud.net/lawrenceorderform.html Please mod parent redundant.
Coral Cache link: http://www.ronkleinphotos.com.nyud.net/Lawrence.html