I know that a lot of webmasters need and value the hits they get because it affects their advertising revenue and, for that reason, are loath to let users view static cached versions because they don't collect the right counts.
But I think you have a good point.
There ought to be some agreed upon way for sites to defer to mostly-static caches located downstream closer to the big pipes. Call it a cacheing router.
Would there be much of market for spiky demand service? It's not like Slashdotting saturation is going to do much for your web site's popularity. If 90% of peak visitors timeout, they're likely to leave with a less than favorable impression anyway.
If the cache operators would simply save rudimentary static hit counts and client IP addresses and then send them to you later (even perhaps by emulating the client side HTTP requests at a trickle rate), would you be happy?
Would owners of big services be willing to offer such services?
Would there be a simple way to flag that your site would defer to assistance during times of stress?
I'm using Mozilla to post this and I find it a wonderful standards compliant browser.
However, I've tried on occasion to download the source distribution and frankly I find it far too heavy (abstract, complex) for casual development. Guerilla development won't work for Mozilla; it has degenerated into long term trench warfare for anyone with the stamina for it. I applaud you Mozilla developers, but am not made of the same stuff.
I remember once coming across some C++ portability standards made up by the Mozilla team about 5 years ago. They were relevant to portability back then, but I think things have progressed some over the years. Many of those problems with different platforms have disappeared with release of the ANSI/ISO C++ standard and the work that's gone into modern compilers.
Personally, I think the Mozilla team ought to be unleased to begin Mozilla 2.0 from scratch, based on everything they know so far, and not be shackled to weird platforms from the early 1990s. Let the Moz 1.* tree address the needs of those using old platforms - the standards compliance should keep them humming for years to come.
The Moz 1.* development has progressed admirably, especially if, like me, you've worked in baroque plumbing factories of code, then you can doubly appreciate the accomplishments of the Moz developers.
But it's high time for them to start from a clean slate, just as the Safari folks have.
Lack of customer interest will likely cause this to fail.
Depends on the customer.
Many of `em will probably click on the icon to listen to some song over a TCPA enshackled device for a few minutes for some amount of credit card payment or putting up with some unavoidable ad-ware.
Certainly some fiercely independent geeks and paranoid folks from the general population will be disillusioned with what ??AA wants to ram down their throats, but most sheep are docile.
The upshot is that there will be a divergence between "entertainment devices" and general purpose computers. People buying servers don't want someone else controlling their computers.
While it's clear that consumers are not keen on this idea, if "the frog is boiled slowly" they might gradually buy into the scheme without knowing the full implications of what they're getting into.
As a consumer, though, I'd like a sword to cut both ways. With all this built-in technical protection for large copyright owners, as a consumer I'd like to exercise the same level of control over information about me: medical records, cross-correlations between my name and my SSN, etc.
If consumers would push their legislators on this front for privacy protection, then perhaps we'd enlist the direct marketers as a force againts the RIAA and MPAA and membership of the TCPA would wither.
No, you're right, that the topic deserves some careful consideration.
I tend to believe that intellectual commodities are fairly tenuous constructions and that the current legal protections err on the side of generosity to the "holders of IP" rather than on the side of the general public. If my patent (I actually do have one) were to generate a lot of revenue perhaps my attitude might change, but as it stands, 17 years seems appropriate to the 17th century.
The Digital Bill of Rights is a nice start towards defining some of what might make a good society, but it avoids the touchy issue of your right to share your right to listen to a song with friends, acquaintences, or people you don't even know.
...copyright owner their legal right to control their intellectual property...
[Sorry - I can't resist!]
<sarcasm>
Sounds damn near like one o' them "inalienable rights".
I'm surprised it didn't make its way into the United States Declaration of Independence.
Most citizens I talk to on the street every day are intensely aggrieved with the way that their "legal rights to control their intellectual property" are being abused in the most horrific ways.
</sarcasm>
Re:SGI is finally making some new products
on
New SGI Altix 3000
·
· Score: 2
much rather develop for a shared memory system than a message passing system.
Even for distributed memory message passing applications I kind of like the convenience of a single system image.
Running on a Sun E10K was more convenient compared to running on the various clusters and going through a batch queueing system.
No one disputes that tracking bugs and fixing them isn't an important thing to do.
Where there is contention and differing points of view is when it comes to specific bug tracking tools.
Many folks, like me, resent heavy, overly bureaucratic tools. You know the kind: everyone has "roles" and there are authorized bug managers, assistant deputy bug fixers, project manager, etc., and every single keystroke about fixing the bug in the code requires 10 corresponding keystrokes of entry into The System.
The System sells well to managers because they get shown screen shots displaying exactly who is doing what, when, and how the bugs are being managed so incredibly well. Wow! What detail! How impressive!
The managers buying the system don't actually use it, though. Their staff do. And the staff suffers and learns to avoid The System at all costs so they can get some real work done - like fixing bugs for example.
Make sure that you evaluate potential bug tracking systems with the actual people who will be using it.
Other plusses to look for are a simple linear learning curve. Avoid the ones where you have to upload your brain with 4 days of training classes in order to use The System.
My pinewood derby car was heavy and had polished axles but that wasn't enough to win.
The killer for me was that the wheels were too wobbly on the nail axle, which effectively added more friction.
I'm wondering if evenly distributed weight on the outer surface of the wheels might have helped stabilize them from wobbling. Either do that, or somehow add some filler to insure your axle-wheel gap is not too sloppy, and then add the lubricant.
It's heartening that Java is so popular being a relatively new language and less ugly than the other top runners. You might think pure technical merits of a language would translate directly into market dominance, but inertial forces are strong.
A lot of the languages are legacy (no COBOL, though) such as VB, which is kind of ugly but practical like JavaScript, which is semi-detestable in its own right.
But it reminds me that the IT world is a practical place full of ugly old legacy code that needs to be fixed, maintained and "slightly enhanced"
Everyone hopes to get a job with a clean sexy new language (designing Ferrari's), but the reality is much different (fixing Chevy's).
That people became aware of just how much information there is out there on them.
In the past I've decried how much of my life was getting profiled for the sake of direct marketers via credit card transactions, magazine subscriptions and frequent buyer cards.
Nobody cared. In fact, they still don't care for the most part.
It's only now, that the recipient of the information is the government instead of various corporations that people are starting to get slightly concerned.
But it's just the same old thing.
I hope that if martial law is declared as part of some perceived emergency and elections are "temporarily suspended" that people have properly feathered their profiles to look innocuous so they don't get visited by an anti-terrorism task force investigator.
I'm cool with the government letting me write off the 2400 bucks for logging disks:D
So would I.
Unfortunately, the way the government typically works is "mandate but not fund".
I've worked in government organizations where dictates to do something have come down from on high, but no mention is made of which particular previously authorized and planned project is going to get taxed to pay for the new mandate.
There's a much tighter correlation between cost and benefit in small businesses - I think larger corporations can get the same "drifting disease of disconnect", but not as badly as the government.
I'm guessing it's because they're deathly afraid of users having tech problems related to software and they desperately want to be able to pass the buck when the time comes.
It doesn't make sense to me, because they have to possess some willingness to take risks to be the cell phone business anyway.
Maybe they're more comfortable with hardware problems than software problems.
But you're right - they're paying for that comfort big time.
I mean, if the prosecution has been fiddling and adjusting the charges this much it pretty much says either that
they don't feel they have precisely focussed their case,
they didn't understand the technology and are constantly learning more about it
but in either event, their competence is called into question at the very least, or else the motivation for bringing up the charges was not done under the same rigorous way that Norwegian citizens could hope to expect.
I hope the jury gets the same sense of shoddiness in the prosecutions case that I'm getting.
Reminds me of this readable account of Australian research into more effective mousepox strains.
Imagine an air-borne influenza with the same kind of engineered ability to agitate and misdirect the human immune system response. It would make the 1918 influenza look tame by comparison.
Yeah, I think what they're hoping is that the new materials will have less dispersion so that many more multiple wavelengths can loaded up onto a single fiber for longer hauls, the DWDM approach.
Um, because they'll get shares of MSFT which are backed by $40 billion in cash reserves?
But you're right, that's the end.
Borland's products will be examined for what they can contribute to MS Visual Whatever and then be slowly phased out after they've been assimilated.
Taking the argument further, and in reverse, I think it's been a damn shame that good compiler technology has been kept on a leash in Redmond to further awkward corporate interests rather than simply providing quality, standards-based development tools. Yes, MS does provide development tools that are good to some extent already, but they could be so even more if they were untied from the corporation.
Slashdot Mirror
I know that a lot of webmasters need and value the hits they get because it affects their advertising revenue and, for that reason, are loath to let users view static cached versions because they don't collect the right counts.
But I think you have a good point.
There ought to be some agreed upon way for sites to defer to mostly-static caches located downstream closer to the big pipes. Call it a cacheing router.
Would there be much of market for spiky demand service? It's not like Slashdotting saturation is going to do much for your web site's popularity. If 90% of peak visitors timeout, they're likely to leave with a less than favorable impression anyway.
If the cache operators would simply save rudimentary static hit counts and client IP addresses and then send them to you later (even perhaps by emulating the client side HTTP requests at a trickle rate), would you be happy?
Would owners of big services be willing to offer such services?
Would there be a simple way to flag that your site would defer to assistance during times of stress?
Or is this all a stillborn idea?
they have a rough time of it if you put 3 or 4 cards near them at once
Sounds like the tin foil hat concerns could then be just as well addressed by carrying around lots of these RFID tags.
Don your RF Mega ID shirt as if it were chain mail. Walk through detectors and presto!
- You are a McDonald's Happy Meal, and
- You are 2005 Porsche Boxster, and
- You are a Victoria's Secret 38D, and
- You are a pallet of 1.75 liter Jack Daniel's bottles.
You are instantly a man of mystery and one fun dude!I'm using Mozilla to post this and I find it a wonderful standards compliant browser.
However, I've tried on occasion to download the source distribution and frankly I find it far too heavy (abstract, complex) for casual development. Guerilla development won't work for Mozilla; it has degenerated into long term trench warfare for anyone with the stamina for it. I applaud you Mozilla developers, but am not made of the same stuff.
I remember once coming across some C++ portability standards made up by the Mozilla team about 5 years ago. They were relevant to portability back then, but I think things have progressed some over the years. Many of those problems with different platforms have disappeared with release of the ANSI/ISO C++ standard and the work that's gone into modern compilers.
Personally, I think the Mozilla team ought to be unleased to begin Mozilla 2.0 from scratch, based on everything they know so far, and not be shackled to weird platforms from the early 1990s. Let the Moz 1.* tree address the needs of those using old platforms - the standards compliance should keep them humming for years to come.
The Moz 1.* development has progressed admirably, especially if, like me, you've worked in baroque plumbing factories of code, then you can doubly appreciate the accomplishments of the Moz developers.
But it's high time for them to start from a clean slate, just as the Safari folks have.
Good point.
As my network BW increases and I won't tolerate high latencies, I'll probably start complaining about error rates like 1 per 1e18 as being atrocious.
Never mind that I put up with much worse error rates using a handset coupler for 110 baud modems some years back...
Lack of customer interest will likely cause this to fail.
Depends on the customer.
Many of `em will probably click on the icon to listen to some song over a TCPA enshackled device for a few minutes for some amount of credit card payment or putting up with some unavoidable ad-ware.
Certainly some fiercely independent geeks and paranoid folks from the general population will be disillusioned with what ??AA wants to ram down their throats, but most sheep are docile.
The upshot is that there will be a divergence between "entertainment devices" and general purpose computers. People buying servers don't want someone else controlling their computers.
While it's clear that consumers are not keen on this idea, if "the frog is boiled slowly" they might gradually buy into the scheme without knowing the full implications of what they're getting into.
As a consumer, though, I'd like a sword to cut both ways. With all this built-in technical protection for large copyright owners, as a consumer I'd like to exercise the same level of control over information about me: medical records, cross-correlations between my name and my SSN, etc.
If consumers would push their legislators on this front for privacy protection, then perhaps we'd enlist the direct marketers as a force againts the RIAA and MPAA and membership of the TCPA would wither.
So, with my limited understanding, I think of this thing running the BIOS through a one-way hash and comparing it to what's written in stone on NVRAM.
Doesn't this mean that you cannot upgrade the BIOS?
Or, that any "upgradeability" is tantamount to leaving a door open to unauthorized "upgrades" to the BIOS?
TIA.
No, you're right, that the topic deserves some careful consideration.
I tend to believe that intellectual commodities are fairly tenuous constructions and that the current legal protections err on the side of generosity to the "holders of IP" rather than on the side of the general public. If my patent (I actually do have one) were to generate a lot of revenue perhaps my attitude might change, but as it stands, 17 years seems appropriate to the 17th century.
The Digital Bill of Rights is a nice start towards defining some of what might make a good society, but it avoids the touchy issue of your right to share your right to listen to a song with friends, acquaintences, or people you don't even know.
[Sorry - I can't resist!]
<sarcasm>
Sounds damn near like one o' them "inalienable rights".
I'm surprised it didn't make its way into the United States Declaration of Independence.
Most citizens I talk to on the street every day are intensely aggrieved with the way that their "legal rights to control their intellectual property" are being abused in the most horrific ways.
</sarcasm>much rather develop for a shared memory system than a message passing system.
Even for distributed memory message passing applications I kind of like the convenience of a single system image.
Running on a Sun E10K was more convenient compared to running on the various clusters and going through a batch queueing system.
No one disputes that tracking bugs and fixing them isn't an important thing to do.
Where there is contention and differing points of view is when it comes to specific bug tracking tools.
Many folks, like me, resent heavy, overly bureaucratic tools. You know the kind: everyone has "roles" and there are authorized bug managers, assistant deputy bug fixers, project manager, etc., and every single keystroke about fixing the bug in the code requires 10 corresponding keystrokes of entry into The System.
The System sells well to managers because they get shown screen shots displaying exactly who is doing what, when, and how the bugs are being managed so incredibly well. Wow! What detail! How impressive!
The managers buying the system don't actually use it, though. Their staff do. And the staff suffers and learns to avoid The System at all costs so they can get some real work done - like fixing bugs for example.
Make sure that you evaluate potential bug tracking systems with the actual people who will be using it.
Other plusses to look for are a simple linear learning curve. Avoid the ones where you have to upload your brain with 4 days of training classes in order to use The System.
My pinewood derby car was heavy and had polished axles but that wasn't enough to win.
The killer for me was that the wheels were too wobbly on the nail axle, which effectively added more friction.
I'm wondering if evenly distributed weight on the outer surface of the wheels might have helped stabilize them from wobbling. Either do that, or somehow add some filler to insure your axle-wheel gap is not too sloppy, and then add the lubricant.
expect a nice older 75gxp to self-wipe before it gets full.
Now you tell me. (though I heard those horror stories earlier, too.)
I've got one of those 75 GB IBM drives in my TiVo at home archiving some classic shows and it looks like I'm in danger of losing it all...
It's heartening that Java is so popular being a relatively new language and less ugly than the other top runners. You might think pure technical merits of a language would translate directly into market dominance, but inertial forces are strong.
A lot of the languages are legacy (no COBOL, though) such as VB, which is kind of ugly but practical like JavaScript, which is semi-detestable in its own right.
But it reminds me that the IT world is a practical place full of ugly old legacy code that needs to be fixed, maintained and "slightly enhanced"
Everyone hopes to get a job with a clean sexy new language (designing Ferrari's), but the reality is much different (fixing Chevy's).
That people became aware of just how much information there is out there on them.
In the past I've decried how much of my life was getting profiled for the sake of direct marketers via credit card transactions, magazine subscriptions and frequent buyer cards.
Nobody cared. In fact, they still don't care for the most part.
It's only now, that the recipient of the information is the government instead of various corporations that people are starting to get slightly concerned.
But it's just the same old thing.
I hope that if martial law is declared as part of some perceived emergency and elections are "temporarily suspended" that people have properly feathered their profiles to look innocuous so they don't get visited by an anti-terrorism task force investigator.
I'm cool with the government letting me write off the 2400 bucks for logging disks
So would I.
Unfortunately, the way the government typically works is "mandate but not fund".
I've worked in government organizations where dictates to do something have come down from on high, but no mention is made of which particular previously authorized and planned project is going to get taxed to pay for the new mandate.
There's a much tighter correlation between cost and benefit in small businesses - I think larger corporations can get the same "drifting disease of disconnect", but not as badly as the government.
Heh, I've been thinking the same thing all along...
I was thinking how cool it would be to have colored metallic foil RFID tattoos!
It sure would look nicer than the black and white UPC bar code on the top of my forehead - for some reason hot chix don't dig it very much.
I'm guessing it's because they're deathly afraid of users having tech problems related to software and they desperately want to be able to pass the buck when the time comes.
It doesn't make sense to me, because they have to possess some willingness to take risks to be the cell phone business anyway.
Maybe they're more comfortable with hardware problems than software problems.
But you're right - they're paying for that comfort big time.
When I think of all of the effort that they are expending and how it could benefit a modern, viable platform, it seems a terrible waste.
It's not!
Where do you think people cut their teeth learning how to program? That's right, those same dinosaur platforms!
that means the male dolls will run Unix
Yes, but I'm guessing people purchasing male dolls will not be running Eunuchs.
I mean, if the prosecution has been fiddling and adjusting the charges this much it pretty much says either that
- they don't feel they have precisely focussed their case,
- they didn't understand the technology and are constantly learning more about it
but in either event, their competence is called into question at the very least, or else the motivation for bringing up the charges was not done under the same rigorous way that Norwegian citizens could hope to expect.I hope the jury gets the same sense of shoddiness in the prosecutions case that I'm getting.
Reminds me of this readable account of Australian research into more effective mousepox strains.
Imagine an air-borne influenza with the same kind of engineered ability to agitate and misdirect the human immune system response. It would make the 1918 influenza look tame by comparison.
How would MS make development tools if it wasn't part of the corporation?
It wouldn't.
Like just about every other software development company, it would go out and buy those tools from independent competing vendors, such as Borland.
Yeah, I think what they're hoping is that the new materials will have less dispersion so that many more multiple wavelengths can loaded up onto a single fiber for longer hauls, the DWDM approach.
successful? How?
Um, because they'll get shares of MSFT which are backed by $40 billion in cash reserves?
But you're right, that's the end.
Borland's products will be examined for what they can contribute to MS Visual Whatever and then be slowly phased out after they've been assimilated.
Taking the argument further, and in reverse, I think it's been a damn shame that good compiler technology has been kept on a leash in Redmond to further awkward corporate interests rather than simply providing quality, standards-based development tools. Yes, MS does provide development tools that are good to some extent already, but they could be so even more if they were untied from the corporation.