XML is not hard, it is just a big piece of toilet for many (several?) of the tasks for which it is being proffered. A fundamental example is that it is increasingly being touted as a messaging grammar, which is just bollox, it is bytey (ie bloated on the wire), expensive to encode, expensive to parse and it ain't a grammar which means that the touted benefits of "meta"information fail to materialise.
The thing that gets me is the whole "ties" disparate systems together crap. One system talks about the "colour of objects" and the other talks about the "hue of items" and there ain't nothing about XML that helps with mapping the fact that "colour = hue" and "object = item" other than a programmer and XML adds _zero_ value to that process, XSL is _just_ a toy version of a compiler compiler. Use a real grammar to solve real grammatical problems.
But, as with so many shows, the writers stopped concentrating on each episode and instead went for the long-term storyline thing. It happens to so many shows, and it generally means they've outlived their useful lives. If you've run out of ideas to write a decent storyline for each show, stretching the storyline out over n seasons isn't going to help.
I find your point interesting but I think that the long story form is one that ought to be transferred to television. The classic bastardisation of this is the Soap Opera where the universe goes on forever, but they are all essentially melodrama. To tell a longer story than just the 40 minute "episode" of the classic American series is worth doing and attempts have been made (B5 the obvious example). Indeed the longer story arc owes much to Stephen Bochco (sp?), Hill Street being the start of the longer form dramatic series that he has developed to varying success subsequently.
However I think it is important to make a distinction about the American series because there are two specific characteristics that make British TV different. First, the average American "season" is 22-24 episodes, whereas the average British season is probablt six, certainly less than a dozen, (for non-soap and non panel show formats at least) which means that the idea of a sustained story over the life of a series is a different proposition and thus the experience here in the UK is somewhat different wrt to the longer story arc. Secondly, the commissioning methodology of the BBC has influenced all television over here to provide an outlet for writers to produce the simple 6-12 episode longer story form without the pressure of then wringing every penny out of the universe thus created by writing it until it is dead.
I have oft wondered about whether order not it would be good in the *NIX paradigm to have recursive paths. That is, you put/usr/local/bin in your path and then any files under that location would be in your path, eg/usr/local/bin/packageA/moduleB/bin,/usr/local/bin/packageX/bin, whatever (same for LD_LIBARY_PATH etc). Clearly you would not want this to be a universal rule since it is convenient to have "." in ones path some time but that would be recursively bad (same for some other directories as well probably). There is probably some good reason why this is a bad idea, butI have no idea what that is (sym links for example could be handled).
Look, I am as anti DRM as the next person, but I really don't care about it given one proviso. As long as I can buy a computer that is not DRM crippled (whatever the means by which that happens) then I am happy to let the "establishment" have their little DRM game. I choose not to play. I have already stopped buying DVD for exactly this reason, I don't buy RIA* music (in fact I pretty much don't buy any music), and my one concession is the cinema where (and I know about the fallacy of this point so don't bother with the critique) I am paying for the full meatspace experience of the cinema and I am happy for the cinema owner to profit from that service, and I would give that up too if needs must.
Now if it became impossible to buy a non DRM computer then I would fight harder, but it is still possible and Free Software pretty much guarantees that it is possible for the foreseeable future. There is one other avenue for concern and that is the provision of state services through the new media (online access to tax returns for example) now that needs to be fought about a little harder to make sure that those such as I are not marginalised, however that is a good fight and one that should be easy to keep winning.
So, let 'em have their DRM world, it just won't be my world, and I will be happier not knowing anything about "Matrix V" but being sure that I don't participate in their little (and doomed) DRM game.
Part of the problem is that a lot of people making websites are not programmers, or even really that informed about standards. A lot of sites are done by graphic designers, who only want it to be pretty.
Nope, that is 100% of the problem. Web designers that want to control the render are the bane of the web. The sooner they let it go the happier _everyone_ will be, themselves included. The web _is_ content. Within 5 years, the rendering will be so far removed from the designer that it will become impossible to control unless they us something like flash, where the browser is no longer the renderer and then that is no longer the web.
Cool. I think there is a class of problems for which we will eventually design machines that can "solve" or work with these problems, for example quantum mechanics or "awareness" and yet these machines will be unable to explain these problems to us becuase the organ we have for understanding is incapable of dealing with the answers. I don't mean that we are unable to grok it but that the organ we have, the brain, is incapable of resolving the issues involved in understanding the problems (or their solutions at least).
I find this idea incredible appealing and it will be a true watershed in human development. Like the moment when first we used a lever to go beyond our physical power, amongst many other examples. That moment will be the time when we first lift the curtain on problems that we can never understand. It will also be the first time (will it?) that we have developed technology, the true workings of which nobody can understand
One of the worlds fastest growing operating systems, Linux, explicitly rejects the concept of intellectual property in its license
Unfortunately, no it doesn't. Indeed, Linux (and GNU) explicitly relies on IP to make the GPL binding. This is the problem, even the answer to IP, Free Software, requires IP in order to live because of the existence of IP in the first place. It is a classic Catch 22 situation
Au contraire, there are a number of reasons why 64bit is a good thing. One in particular is that God created integers and irrational numbers and all the rest is the work of the devil. 64bit means that there are a whole bunch of numbers that we used to have to store as floats (for pure size issues) that we can now store as integers and the math just got much more accurate (and simpler)
VC7 is just broken. Wait for the first service pack. We had to rearrange header files _and_ install the unreleased patch from MS just to get some code to compile (code that compiled find under, g++ (HP-UX, Linux, SunOS), aCC (HP-UX), CC (SunOS) and VC6).
Your argument presupposes that property in output of intellect is a natural thing. It is not. The critical problem is scarcity. Without a legal fiction, there is no value per se in the output of intellect since there is no scarcity, certainly not now that digital reproduction exists and is affordable. It is an accident of history that we in the west ever believed in such property. The accident never really happened in China and so the idea of such "piracy" in this region does not compute (and this is not a communist thing its a cultural thing).
Relax the notion of property and you will find that the gigging, regularly working (at their art), wage earning artist becomes the norm and this is not a bad thing. What is equally fantastic is that even under such a paradigm, one can, as an artist, still become fabulously wealthy by being s that you can receive speculative" payments from your millions of fans for your next work. So the economics (and many would say that economics is the study of scarcity) of capital will still work well in such a world without the notion of property in the output of intellect.
I have said before, and I will say again, the sooner this reality dawns on the west (and it must because eventually the misallocation of resources that results cannot be sustained) the better off we will all be, artist and consumer alike.
Check out "Maverick" by Ricardo Semmler. The "books" were open there and (IIRC) only one notable dissenter about salaries and even he changed his tune after a while.
Your examples of ["access information" leads to "deliterious effect"] is based on another factor, in the example above "harassing them with it" and it is this factor that is the actual wrong and can be dealt with by traditional means.
As for five years ago never having heard of it, sure maybe not data gleaned from HR database but people harassing each other with aspects of their personal life have been a part of workplace ecology since the dawn of time.
(I cannot believe my luck at the original poster. Nice one Mr Jenkins, I thought it might actually be a League feature film at first as well.)
Australia got rid of paper money years ago
on
Cashless Society
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In Oz, all Banknotes are printed on a polymer that lasts many times longer than paper notes. Oh and btw, they survive washing and swimming with them in your boardshorts just fine.
Copyright is a _civil_ issue. The increasing criminalisation of a civil wrong is very, very disturbing. It is getting to the stage where we are returning to a world that is as inequitous as the 18th and 19th centuries where imprisonment for debt was an accepted practice, and completely ruinous, just have a read of Dickens for a light critique of the time and the practice (particularly Little Dorrit).
Quite apart from that, copyright is broken. The sooner the full implications of the pandora's box that is digitial replication are realised, and the notion of "copyright" itself disappears the better off we will be both as a society and an economy. Free Software is the _first_ real tenet of the new world. It is oft quoted that the printing press was the seed that grew in to much of what is good about the modern world, I read with interest recently that Gutenburg used a modified wine press to make the first printing press and thus took a technology of the day to revolutionise the world. Those that would have us believe that the modern industrial state is too powerful to combat over this freeing up of content, should draw a comparison with the power of the church in the 15th century for there too the power was _too_ great and surely could not be changed. Er, it was not, and it did change.
We, the mass, are too busy being the serfs of the 21st century to fight the good fight in ernest, but the good few are fighting well on our behalf and eventually we can't help but prevail when eventually the strictures of what the content industry would have us do becomes too great. As to when this might be, a hundred years does not sound unreasonable, but I would not be surprised if it happened in ten.
Given that Digital TV is already compressed, what about just capturing to disk (or tape or whatever) the raw channel data as an RF stream and then "downloading" it vi RF back to the decoder when you want to view it or process it or whatever.
I know there are _lots_ of channels, I am not suggesting that one should/could collect all the channels (is that even feasible), but the channels are all frequency modulated are they not? So just a bit of frequency channelling hardware and you should be able to record as many channels as you like without requiring multiple decoders.
As an aside, the big scam, IMHO, of the (non HD) digital TV business is the description of it as higher quality pictures, which is just wrong. As any (PAL:-) TV owner with good normal TV reception will tell you, the compression artefacts in DTV are there for all to see. The big advantage, and it is advantage enough to get my $1.00, is that the quality of image does not "degrade" with signal strength in the same way that normal TV does (oh and they can pack many more channels into the given bandwidth:-). Sure it gets a bit blocky when things go awry but overall you get crystal clear images all the time (compression artefacts apart).
I have only one piece of advice I give in answer to this kind of question. If you observe something in an application (and this applies to big ones more than little ones, but it is worthwhile for all software) that you cannot explain, it is a problem, almost certianly a bug. But a problem waiting to bite you in the ass nonetheless.
We spent almost two years with software that was live and on about three occasions during that time we observed a problem that was moderately serious (critical but for the redundancy of the architecture). Now eventually we found the problem, design flaw/bug, but the evidence for the problem was there for all to see a year before the system went live, even in testing. An apparently benign difference in counters between different instances of the same component, that none of us could adequately explain, since they should all have been the same, But all the other counters were identical (these other counters were of a coarser grain and counting different things). If we had found the cause of the difference at the time we would have found the flaw at the time (guaranteed, since it was obvious once one knew the source of the deviation).
That one is the best example that I can think of to demonstrate the "If you can't explain it, it's broken" aspect of software behaviour
I _really_ don't have a problem with media consolidation. My only gripe is the facelessness. Capital rarely finds its way into the media industry in order to get a good rate of return. It's because the "moguls" want to disseminate their opinions. I remember laughing outloud when one of the main media moguls in Australia said as much to a senate inquiry and the inquirers where "shocked". I have no issue with that goal, indeed I welcome it, but I want to know whose opinion it is being foisted upon me.
Now why do I welcome it? Well apart for the social policy issue that pissing all that good capital into shitty media organisations is just ineffecient, I think that the owners of capital should be allowed to invest their money where they like and that that policy issue is more important to me than the fact that they make shit radio/tv. I live in the UK, where pirate radio has a long tradition and I belive the pirates will return to save us all (eventually).
In truth, I never listen to the radio for music anymore, haven't in five years. But news, and spoken word (largely comedy) all the time. And when I miss it, I just get it from the net or DTV ah the joys of an independent public broadcaster.
And there my friends is an answer. Legislated funding, for those that don't know (bruhaha about current direction aside) the BBC here in the UK is funded by an annual GBP108.00 fee for the ownership of a Television (Colour, less for B&W, less for the disadvantaged and blind, yeah I know blind TV "watchers", go figure), this fee then funds the commissioning of content (TV and radio), operation of (essentially) 5 TV channels and _many_ radio channels (including the world service). The quality of which is variable, and the BBC sells product to gain more revenue (hence the bruhaha), but you get the idea. It may seem an anathema to the Americans amongst you, but it is "user" pays in that, if you don't watch (ie own) then you don't pay. Nice.
The true test of how valuable this resource, is that it is the politians who regularly threaten the removal of the legislative mandate for this funding. They must be doing something right:-) Classic example, they have a 24 hour news channel News24, hardly rates at all in the UK and so they, the polititicians mainly, say why bother. But recently someone pointed out that over 600 million people use it as their primary news service. That's a lot of people. Mandates come in many forms.
Most everyday on my way to work I walk through the cemetary where wherein Bayes is buried. I always wondered what that funny thudding noise was, I guess it was the sound of him spinning in his grave.
Bayesian Intermediaries, my arse. Bayesian fucking Intermediaries indeed!
Because in most developed countries:-P the telcos only charge to send SMS!!! Receiving them is free (same for calls). SMS does not require the recipient to be online at the moment you need to call them and the details are right there in front of them for when they eventually get it.
Nope. Not quite. You are right that if your message is sent to the network then you get a receipt, or acknowledgement of failure if it cannot reach the network.
I have seen several "issues" with SMS here in the UK. First, anecdotal, complete disappearance of messages, anecdotal in the sense that I have had many people say, with no need to lie and without being tech ignorant, I sent that SMS but it never got through, and I could swear that I have sent messages, got the confirmation and yet it has never been received. Secondly I have regularly often on a Sunday evening, received SMS messages that I have already received or not yet received upward of 24hours old all at once. Probably as a result of some kind of system reset.
I think 7.5% sounds a bit high, but SMS is such a bizarre thing that it is not unreasonable for some failure. By bizarre, I mean that it was designed for a purpose and it is such a limited technology that its preponderance as a means of communications, and I for one use it _all_ the time, and as the back bone for telco profits is just bizarre.
I agree, but by way of example, dirve by wire has been around for some time at least to some extent. The 5 door honda civic (current model) has no drive train running through the middle of the car. The steering wheel is not mechanically connected to the steering mechanics, I think the Gearbox is similarly disjointed.
The layout of the floor pan is awesome in that vehicle. I can only imagine that the possibilities in this design are Awesome.
As for the "home user" installing new shells, I am not so sure I agree with you. I can anticipate a whole wave of kit cars based on the platform. Plus enhancements to the interior particularly become far more functional questions rather than structure. All in all, _real_ interesting.
Guess who's run cable for a living before:-) Next thing you'll be telling him that the best way to run cable thought the loft is to attach it to some conduit and throw it like a javelin.
I wasn't suggesting hand coding to save cycles. What I was suggesting is that we have a very efficient solution to a real world problem where by the portion of the problem domain that we can solve is constrained by the speed of existing hardware (850MHz SPARC chips) that is affordable to the client and the inherently unparallisable nature of the problem. In this case (and mine is just one of many) you cannot piss about with languages where you do not have control over the execution path or where there is unnecessary overhead in the way the language works since they will constrain the portion of the problem space that you can solve to such an extent that you no longer have a solution.
The classic example in the Markets is handling the impact on derivative instruments of a change in the price of the underlying instrument on which the derivative is based, and then handling the implications of these changes for strategy based orders (spreads, butterflies, straddles etc) and then handling that change for the N actors who are altering their own pricing decisions. As the number of underlying price changes increases (even up to multiple changes per second) and the number of instruments expands, you start reaching the limits of your hardware. Anyone who says that they are achieving this process, without legging risk, whilst using Java or the like is either not solving the whole problem, lying or a fool.
Really, when is the last time you coded up new algorithms of a nontrivial nature? Often knowing the libraries is more important.
Seriously, all the time. But more than that, there are sometimes when you are solving big iron probllems and you need a big iron language.
I think that the advent of modern languages (Java, VB etc) has lowered the barrier to entry for a lot of people to implement solutions to problems. Invariably they will implement the solution poorly or in such a way that they will miss the performance levels that the real languages (C etc) provide. Anytime, anyone tells me about the latest whizz bang implementation of something in the financial markets using java or web delivered using blah blah technology, I know they are either fools or mickey mouse. Because I know how many CPU cycles and TCP packets that we waste using C and C++ and you waste any more and you just can't solve the big _real time_ problems. End of Story.
I am not surprised that there are many more Java jobs than say C, but there are many many more code monkeys than software developers and the vast majority of those jobs are for code monkeys.
Your point is very interesting, but there is still something missing. You see there is a limited amount of "meta"information that we all understand about piping data from one process to another. For example the shell metamodel really only knows file io (stdout-->stdin) we as programmer provide all the information about how to manipulate the data via command line args etc. The fundamentals of this metamodel are really simple and all the programs we are talking about (in shell land) conform to it.
If we are to expand into some more complex object model, we need to get some way to unleash the power of the model through a similarly minimal metamodel. For example when I execute a query on my datbase and I want the "result set" to be passed through a "spreadsheet" the database needs to be able to tell the spreadsheet what "result set" means and the spreadsheet needs to be able to tell the database how it can receive the data in the "result set". The complexity of this process in the current object models is extraordinary and not yet solved because there is no "standard" way of describing services yet alone implementing the physical connectivity. Microsoft would have us believe that the answer is dotNyet. I do not believe so, not because it os MS, although that is why they can never be the source of the solution, but rather it is an unsolved problem and nothing is close to solving it yet.
Do not underestimate the extraordinary difficulty of this task. We only just understand the representation of flat data as a vehicle for communication when there is ZERO information about functionality passed between the links in a processing chain. This is one of those traditional, 0, 1, many problems in Comp Sci and we are only just beginning to deal with the one problem (things like CORBA and DCOM) where you can find a known service abstractly. We haven't really solved the ability to represent "service" abstractly yet alone allow an object to understand what service it requires and then find it in a way that maps to the stdio approach of shells and pipes.
IMHO this is a _really_ big deal, and we are not close to solving it.
Slashdot Mirror
XML is not hard, it is just a big piece of toilet for many (several?) of the tasks for which it is being proffered. A fundamental example is that it is increasingly being touted as a messaging grammar, which is just bollox, it is bytey (ie bloated on the wire), expensive to encode, expensive to parse and it ain't a grammar which means that the touted benefits of "meta"information fail to materialise.
The thing that gets me is the whole "ties" disparate systems together crap. One system talks about the "colour of objects" and the other talks about the "hue of items" and there ain't nothing about XML that helps with mapping the fact that "colour = hue" and "object = item" other than a programmer and XML adds _zero_ value to that process, XSL is _just_ a toy version of a compiler compiler. Use a real grammar to solve real grammatical problems.
end rant.
But, as with so many shows, the writers stopped concentrating on each episode and instead went for the long-term storyline thing. It happens to so many shows, and it generally means they've outlived their useful lives. If you've run out of ideas to write a decent storyline for each show, stretching the storyline out over n seasons isn't going to help.
I find your point interesting but I think that the long story form is one that ought to be transferred to television. The classic bastardisation of this is the Soap Opera where the universe goes on forever, but they are all essentially melodrama. To tell a longer story than just the 40 minute "episode" of the classic American series is worth doing and attempts have been made (B5 the obvious example). Indeed the longer story arc owes much to Stephen Bochco (sp?), Hill Street being the start of the longer form dramatic series that he has developed to varying success subsequently.
However I think it is important to make a distinction about the American series because there are two specific characteristics that make British TV different. First, the average American "season" is 22-24 episodes, whereas the average British season is probablt six, certainly less than a dozen, (for non-soap and non panel show formats at least) which means that the idea of a sustained story over the life of a series is a different proposition and thus the experience here in the UK is somewhat different wrt to the longer story arc. Secondly, the commissioning methodology of the BBC has influenced all television over here to provide an outlet for writers to produce the simple 6-12 episode longer story form without the pressure of then wringing every penny out of the universe thus created by writing it until it is dead.
I have oft wondered about whether order not it would be good in the *NIX paradigm to have recursive paths. That is, you put /usr/local/bin in your path and then any files under that location would be in your path, eg /usr/local/bin/packageA/moduleB/bin, /usr/local/bin/packageX/bin, whatever (same for LD_LIBARY_PATH etc). Clearly you would not want this to be a universal rule since it is convenient to have "." in ones path some time but that would be recursively bad (same for some other directories as well probably). There is probably some good reason why this is a bad idea, butI have no idea what that is (sym links for example could be handled).
Look, I am as anti DRM as the next person, but I really don't care about it given one proviso. As long as I can buy a computer that is not DRM crippled (whatever the means by which that happens) then I am happy to let the "establishment" have their little DRM game. I choose not to play. I have already stopped buying DVD for exactly this reason, I don't buy RIA* music (in fact I pretty much don't buy any music), and my one concession is the cinema where (and I know about the fallacy of this point so don't bother with the critique) I am paying for the full meatspace experience of the cinema and I am happy for the cinema owner to profit from that service, and I would give that up too if needs must.
Now if it became impossible to buy a non DRM computer then I would fight harder, but it is still possible and Free Software pretty much guarantees that it is possible for the foreseeable future. There is one other avenue for concern and that is the provision of state services through the new media (online access to tax returns for example) now that needs to be fought about a little harder to make sure that those such as I are not marginalised, however that is a good fight and one that should be easy to keep winning.
So, let 'em have their DRM world, it just won't be my world, and I will be happier not knowing anything about "Matrix V" but being sure that I don't participate in their little (and doomed) DRM game.
Part of the problem is that a lot of people making websites are not programmers, or even really that informed about standards. A lot of sites are done by graphic designers, who only want it to be pretty.
Nope, that is 100% of the problem. Web designers that want to control the render are the bane of the web. The sooner they let it go the happier _everyone_ will be, themselves included. The web _is_ content. Within 5 years, the rendering will be so far removed from the designer that it will become impossible to control unless they us something like flash, where the browser is no longer the renderer and then that is no longer the web.
Cool. I think there is a class of problems for which we will eventually design machines that can "solve" or work with these problems, for example quantum mechanics or "awareness" and yet these machines will be unable to explain these problems to us becuase the organ we have for understanding is incapable of dealing with the answers. I don't mean that we are unable to grok it but that the organ we have, the brain, is incapable of resolving the issues involved in understanding the problems (or their solutions at least).
I find this idea incredible appealing and it will be a true watershed in human development. Like the moment when first we used a lever to go beyond our physical power, amongst many other examples. That moment will be the time when we first lift the curtain on problems that we can never understand. It will also be the first time (will it?) that we have developed technology, the true workings of which nobody can understand
One of the worlds fastest growing operating systems, Linux, explicitly rejects the concept of intellectual property in its license
Unfortunately, no it doesn't. Indeed, Linux (and GNU) explicitly relies on IP to make the GPL binding. This is the problem, even the answer to IP, Free Software, requires IP in order to live because of the existence of IP in the first place. It is a classic Catch 22 situation
Au contraire, there are a number of reasons why 64bit is a good thing. One in particular is that God created integers and irrational numbers and all the rest is the work of the devil. 64bit means that there are a whole bunch of numbers that we used to have to store as floats (for pure size issues) that we can now store as integers and the math just got much more accurate (and simpler)
VC7 is just broken. Wait for the first service pack. We had to rearrange header files _and_ install the unreleased patch from MS just to get some code to compile (code that compiled find under, g++ (HP-UX, Linux, SunOS), aCC (HP-UX), CC (SunOS) and VC6).
Your argument presupposes that property in output of intellect is a natural thing. It is not. The critical problem is scarcity. Without a legal fiction, there is no value per se in the output of intellect since there is no scarcity, certainly not now that digital reproduction exists and is affordable. It is an accident of history that we in the west ever believed in such property. The accident never really happened in China and so the idea of such "piracy" in this region does not compute (and this is not a communist thing its a cultural thing).
Relax the notion of property and you will find that the gigging, regularly working (at their art), wage earning artist becomes the norm and this is not a bad thing. What is equally fantastic is that even under such a paradigm, one can, as an artist, still become fabulously wealthy by being s that you can receive speculative" payments from your millions of fans for your next work. So the economics (and many would say that economics is the study of scarcity) of capital will still work well in such a world without the notion of property in the output of intellect.
I have said before, and I will say again, the sooner this reality dawns on the west (and it must because eventually the misallocation of resources that results cannot be sustained) the better off we will all be, artist and consumer alike.
Check out "Maverick" by Ricardo Semmler. The "books" were open there and (IIRC) only one notable dissenter about salaries and even he changed his tune after a while.
Your examples of ["access information" leads to "deliterious effect"] is based on another factor, in the example above "harassing them with it" and it is this factor that is the actual wrong and can be dealt with by traditional means.
As for five years ago never having heard of it, sure maybe not data gleaned from HR database but people harassing each other with aspects of their personal life have been a part of workplace ecology since the dawn of time.
Dave...
Hello Dave...
Is Dave here?
(I cannot believe my luck at the original poster. Nice one Mr Jenkins, I thought it might actually be a League feature film at first as well.)
In Oz, all Banknotes are printed on a polymer that lasts many times longer than paper notes. Oh and btw, they survive washing and swimming with them in your boardshorts just fine.
Copyright is a _civil_ issue. The increasing criminalisation of a civil wrong is very, very disturbing. It is getting to the stage where we are returning to a world that is as inequitous as the 18th and 19th centuries where imprisonment for debt was an accepted practice, and completely ruinous, just have a read of Dickens for a light critique of the time and the practice (particularly Little Dorrit).
Quite apart from that, copyright is broken. The sooner the full implications of the pandora's box that is digitial replication are realised, and the notion of "copyright" itself disappears the better off we will be both as a society and an economy. Free Software is the _first_ real tenet of the new world. It is oft quoted that the printing press was the seed that grew in to much of what is good about the modern world, I read with interest recently that Gutenburg used a modified wine press to make the first printing press and thus took a technology of the day to revolutionise the world. Those that would have us believe that the modern industrial state is too powerful to combat over this freeing up of content, should draw a comparison with the power of the church in the 15th century for there too the power was _too_ great and surely could not be changed. Er, it was not, and it did change.
We, the mass, are too busy being the serfs of the 21st century to fight the good fight in ernest, but the good few are fighting well on our behalf and eventually we can't help but prevail when eventually the strictures of what the content industry would have us do becomes too great. As to when this might be, a hundred years does not sound unreasonable, but I would not be surprised if it happened in ten.
Given that Digital TV is already compressed, what about just capturing to disk (or tape or whatever) the raw channel data as an RF stream and then "downloading" it vi RF back to the decoder when you want to view it or process it or whatever.
:-) TV owner with good normal TV reception will tell you, the compression artefacts in DTV are there for all to see. The big advantage, and it is advantage enough to get my $1.00, is that the quality of image does not "degrade" with signal strength in the same way that normal TV does (oh and they can pack many more channels into the given bandwidth :-). Sure it gets a bit blocky when things go awry but overall you get crystal clear images all the time (compression artefacts apart).
I know there are _lots_ of channels, I am not suggesting that one should/could collect all the channels (is that even feasible), but the channels are all frequency modulated are they not? So just a bit of frequency channelling hardware and you should be able to record as many channels as you like without requiring multiple decoders.
As an aside, the big scam, IMHO, of the (non HD) digital TV business is the description of it as higher quality pictures, which is just wrong. As any (PAL
I have only one piece of advice I give in answer to this kind of question. If you observe something in an application (and this applies to big ones more than little ones, but it is worthwhile for all software) that you cannot explain, it is a problem, almost certianly a bug. But a problem waiting to bite you in the ass nonetheless.
We spent almost two years with software that was live and on about three occasions during that time we observed a problem that was moderately serious (critical but for the redundancy of the architecture). Now eventually we found the problem, design flaw/bug, but the evidence for the problem was there for all to see a year before the system went live, even in testing. An apparently benign difference in counters between different instances of the same component, that none of us could adequately explain, since they should all have been the same, But all the other counters were identical (these other counters were of a coarser grain and counting different things). If we had found the cause of the difference at the time we would have found the flaw at the time (guaranteed, since it was obvious once one knew the source of the deviation).
That one is the best example that I can think of to demonstrate the "If you can't explain it, it's broken" aspect of software behaviour
I _really_ don't have a problem with media consolidation. My only gripe is the facelessness. Capital rarely finds its way into the media industry in order to get a good rate of return. It's because the "moguls" want to disseminate their opinions. I remember laughing outloud when one of the main media moguls in Australia said as much to a senate inquiry and the inquirers where "shocked". I have no issue with that goal, indeed I welcome it, but I want to know whose opinion it is being foisted upon me.
:-) Classic example, they have a 24 hour news channel News24, hardly rates at all in the UK and so they, the polititicians mainly, say why bother. But recently someone pointed out that over 600 million people use it as their primary news service. That's a lot of people. Mandates come in many forms.
Now why do I welcome it? Well apart for the social policy issue that pissing all that good capital into shitty media organisations is just ineffecient, I think that the owners of capital should be allowed to invest their money where they like and that that policy issue is more important to me than the fact that they make shit radio/tv. I live in the UK, where pirate radio has a long tradition and I belive the pirates will return to save us all (eventually).
In truth, I never listen to the radio for music anymore, haven't in five years. But news, and spoken word (largely comedy) all the time. And when I miss it, I just get it from the net or DTV ah the joys of an independent public broadcaster.
And there my friends is an answer. Legislated funding, for those that don't know (bruhaha about current direction aside) the BBC here in the UK is funded by an annual GBP108.00 fee for the ownership of a Television (Colour, less for B&W, less for the disadvantaged and blind, yeah I know blind TV "watchers", go figure), this fee then funds the commissioning of content (TV and radio), operation of (essentially) 5 TV channels and _many_ radio channels (including the world service). The quality of which is variable, and the BBC sells product to gain more revenue (hence the bruhaha), but you get the idea. It may seem an anathema to the Americans amongst you, but it is "user" pays in that, if you don't watch (ie own) then you don't pay. Nice.
The true test of how valuable this resource, is that it is the politians who regularly threaten the removal of the legislative mandate for this funding. They must be doing something right
Most everyday on my way to work I walk through the cemetary where wherein Bayes is buried. I always wondered what that funny thudding noise was, I guess it was the sound of him spinning in his grave.
Bayesian Intermediaries, my arse. Bayesian fucking Intermediaries indeed!
There must be some reason why it's so popular?
Because in most developed countries :-P the telcos only charge to send SMS!!! Receiving them is free (same for calls). SMS does not require the recipient to be online at the moment you need to call them and the details are right there in front of them for when they eventually get it.
Nope. Not quite. You are right that if your message is sent to the network then you get a receipt, or acknowledgement of failure if it cannot reach the network.
I have seen several "issues" with SMS here in the UK. First, anecdotal, complete disappearance of messages, anecdotal in the sense that I have had many people say, with no need to lie and without being tech ignorant, I sent that SMS but it never got through, and I could swear that I have sent messages, got the confirmation and yet it has never been received. Secondly I have regularly often on a Sunday evening, received SMS messages that I have already received or not yet received upward of 24hours old all at once. Probably as a result of some kind of system reset.
I think 7.5% sounds a bit high, but SMS is such a bizarre thing that it is not unreasonable for some failure. By bizarre, I mean that it was designed for a purpose and it is such a limited technology that its preponderance as a means of communications, and I for one use it _all_ the time, and as the back bone for telco profits is just bizarre.
I agree, but by way of example, dirve by wire has been around for some time at least to some extent. The 5 door honda civic (current model) has no drive train running through the middle of the car. The steering wheel is not mechanically connected to the steering mechanics, I think the Gearbox is similarly disjointed.
The layout of the floor pan is awesome in that vehicle. I can only imagine that the possibilities in this design are Awesome.
As for the "home user" installing new shells, I am not so sure I agree with you. I can anticipate a whole wave of kit cars based on the platform. Plus enhancements to the interior particularly become far more functional questions rather than structure. All in all, _real_ interesting.
Guess who's run cable for a living before :-) Next thing you'll be telling him that the best way to run cable thought the loft is to attach it to some conduit and throw it like a javelin.
I wasn't suggesting hand coding to save cycles. What I was suggesting is that we have a very efficient solution to a real world problem where by the portion of the problem domain that we can solve is constrained by the speed of existing hardware (850MHz SPARC chips) that is affordable to the client and the inherently unparallisable nature of the problem. In this case (and mine is just one of many) you cannot piss about with languages where you do not have control over the execution path or where there is unnecessary overhead in the way the language works since they will constrain the portion of the problem space that you can solve to such an extent that you no longer have a solution.
The classic example in the Markets is handling the impact on derivative instruments of a change in the price of the underlying instrument on which the derivative is based, and then handling the implications of these changes for strategy based orders (spreads, butterflies, straddles etc) and then handling that change for the N actors who are altering their own pricing decisions. As the number of underlying price changes increases (even up to multiple changes per second) and the number of instruments expands, you start reaching the limits of your hardware. Anyone who says that they are achieving this process, without legging risk, whilst using Java or the like is either not solving the whole problem, lying or a fool.
Really, when is the last time you coded up new algorithms of a nontrivial nature? Often knowing the libraries is more important.
Seriously, all the time. But more than that, there are sometimes when you are solving big iron probllems and you need a big iron language.
I think that the advent of modern languages (Java, VB etc) has lowered the barrier to entry for a lot of people to implement solutions to problems. Invariably they will implement the solution poorly or in such a way that they will miss the performance levels that the real languages (C etc) provide. Anytime, anyone tells me about the latest whizz bang implementation of something in the financial markets using java or web delivered using blah blah technology, I know they are either fools or mickey mouse. Because I know how many CPU cycles and TCP packets that we waste using C and C++ and you waste any more and you just can't solve the big _real time_ problems. End of Story.
I am not surprised that there are many more Java jobs than say C, but there are many many more code monkeys than software developers and the vast majority of those jobs are for code monkeys.
Your point is very interesting, but there is still something missing. You see there is a limited amount of "meta"information that we all understand about piping data from one process to another. For example the shell metamodel really only knows file io (stdout-->stdin) we as programmer provide all the information about how to manipulate the data via command line args etc. The fundamentals of this metamodel are really simple and all the programs we are talking about (in shell land) conform to it.
If we are to expand into some more complex object model, we need to get some way to unleash the power of the model through a similarly minimal metamodel. For example when I execute a query on my datbase and I want the "result set" to be passed through a "spreadsheet" the database needs to be able to tell the spreadsheet what "result set" means and the spreadsheet needs to be able to tell the database how it can receive the data in the "result set". The complexity of this process in the current object models is extraordinary and not yet solved because there is no "standard" way of describing services yet alone implementing the physical connectivity. Microsoft would have us believe that the answer is dotNyet. I do not believe so, not because it os MS, although that is why they can never be the source of the solution, but rather it is an unsolved problem and nothing is close to solving it yet.
Do not underestimate the extraordinary difficulty of this task. We only just understand the representation of flat data as a vehicle for communication when there is ZERO information about functionality passed between the links in a processing chain. This is one of those traditional, 0, 1, many problems in Comp Sci and we are only just beginning to deal with the one problem (things like CORBA and DCOM) where you can find a known service abstractly. We haven't really solved the ability to represent "service" abstractly yet alone allow an object to understand what service it requires and then find it in a way that maps to the stdio approach of shells and pipes.
IMHO this is a _really_ big deal, and we are not close to solving it.