So if you look at it one way, the Windows Vista "kernel upgrade" isn't a fundamental update, but rather, an alignment of the two operating systems.
This is a smart move. It's easier to develop one kernel than two, so standardizing the two made sense. They've had more time to beat on Server 2008 and test it, and are incorporating those changes.
The end user won't see this, but the end user doesn't care. Their flashy GUI and UAC (snicker) will run faster as a result.
1. Identify key personnel and ask them for basics of the process
2. Research existing docs and look for "holes"
3. Interview action personnel to find out how things are actually done
4. Set up a base document, and document tree
5. Design a standard template and language
6. Write a draft
7. Get buy-in from legal and management
8. Ensure that someone or some role is there to update this and revision it.
All of these steps are important.
It is useful to have an experienced professional, -or- to take the time to learn the basics of process technical writing, which is like all careers not rocket science but requires some study and experience.
It is really helpful to have a role or person whose job is centered on this task, as then others are more likely to allow them to poke around and ask questions, and they won't destabilize existing office political arrangements or get anyone fired.
Tech writers always need to be the neutral third party under such circumstances.
After the interview, he talked to the reporter about some of the astronomy he does, including looking at what are called radio transients: bursts of radio waves that are seen once and never repeat. These may come from one-off events like colliding neutron stars, exploding stars, and so on.
Because I'm the neighborhood geek, people ask me about their problems. One problem is what to do with the old machine when they upgrade.
My advice for the past six months has been: buy it a new hard drive ($60) and install Ubuntu. The hard drive is what fails at 4-5 years, but the rest will keep on ticking and thanks to the thriftiness of Linux, doesn't slow them down.
They don't care that it's not Windows XP or Mac OS X. All GUIs look about the same for the tasks most people do.
With these newer cheap machines, I'm excited, but wary. Would I rather install $200 of junk or do a $60 upgrade to an older, but once more expensive machine with better hardware?
The Shuttle boxes I've worked with so far have been high quality but have tended to overheat. However, they were a good deal more expensive than $200. I wonder what corners got cut, and whether a five year old Dell that cost $900 when it was new would have these problems?
Either way, my compliments to the Ubuntu team. That's a convenient and reliable OS distro.
A whitebox PC can be upgraded piece by piece without throwing the whole thing out, and is going to last a heck of a lot longer than those tiny things with all those parts crammed in close together, generating heat and vibration.
My advice is to build your own machine, and buy parts that will last five years, then recycle responsibly. One way to do this is to use a friend's box from a Dell XPS one to ship your parts back to Dell for recycling.
I haven't been impressed by the reliability of Macintosh hardware, nor has Dell really blown me away. A well-planned white box computer can last upward of a decade although you'll have to replace the hard drive at the five year mark.
Anything that is not Microsoft, and makes us feel like the hipper kids in the street, is automatically beyond criticism. We all wish we were the rich kids in Redmond, but since we're townies instead, we will speak ill of them any time we can. Macintosh is not from Redmond. True, they are greedy and wealthy. But they are not our enemy so they are us.
When I first started programming, in BASIC on an Apple ][ (not IIe), I remember being baffled by the fact that the computer did not operate with multiple concurrent streams. To me, this seemed the point of making something that was "more than a calculator," and the only way we would be able to do the really interesting stuff with it.
When I first started writing object-oriented code, I was somewhat dismayed to find that OO was an extension to the same ol' linear programming. It seemed to me that objects should be able to exist as if alive and react freely, but really, they were just a fancy interface to the linear runtime. Color me disapointed yet again.
It's an important paradigm shift to recognize parallel computing. Maybe when the world realizes the importance of parallel computing, and parallel thinking, we'll have that singularity that some writers talk about. People will no longer think in such basic terms and be so ignorant of context and timing. That in itself must be nice.
Sutter's article hits home with all of this. His conclusion is that efficient programming, and elegant programming that takes advantage of, not conforms to, the parallel model is the future. Judging by the chips I see on the market today, he was right, 2.5 years ago. He will continue to be right. The question is whether programmers step up to this challenge, and see it as being as fun as I think it will be.
Too many people together form dogma, because most of them don't understand the vision of their leaders. If they don't have leaders, it's even worse.
I like Opera, but it was made by a small team with actual vision. Firefox is basically an IE clone at this point, with some "added features" of dubious value to most users. But it's a trend and it makes people feel happy to be part of it.
Still, Firefox is a buggy piece of junk compared to Opera. I don't think open source is anything more than volunteer corporations, unless there's someone with some real vision involved, and that person has power.
Otherwise, I agree somewhat with your comments and would mod them up. Cheerio
1. Buy gadget 2. Replace batteries 3. Watch it break down 4. Attempt to fix 5. ??? 6. Profit (for the person who sold it) 7. Massive unrecycled waste (your gift to planet earth)
Good ideas: plants, books, tools, Slashdot membership, backrubs, fruit, nuts, candy wrapped in paper.
This holiday is about loving your family, go be with them, instead of working extra hours to buy them plastic crap you won't even remember in two years!
1. We hate the big guy side -- Firefox is God, Linux is God, they can do no wrong, the world will be saved if we go to Linux/FF. 2. We distrust the little guy side -- Firefox is funded by Google, Firefox is a revenge project against MSFT, you get uneven results in open source, the world will be doomed if we leave browsing up to volunteers.
But enough loud people do that the truth is as usual obscured. Firefox/Linux fanboys are the Amiga fanboys of the 00s!
Where F/OSS does well is in finding a software need of most computer users, and making a product to match. Although not all of these are open source, I'd consider the following great successes: PuTTy, EditPad, Opera, WinDiff, ActivePerl, WireShark, AirSnort, shttpd, Nero, Apache.
Where it does not work is in areas where centralization, and its proportionate reduction in expense per square foot of research and development and customer feedback integration, is beneficial. The aforementioned large DBs and projects like Lotus Notes or Microsoft Exchange come to mind.
However, it's fair to say that several things define the success of any project (sorry about the Wiki-formatting):
A F/OSS project without those, or a closed-source commercial project without those, is bound for failure. Every single time. Without variation.
There are some notable open source failures: Firefox, OpenOffice, CDBurner XP, PHP. They're popular so no one knows they're failures yet, but from a pure geek view of engineering quality and ability to do things well, they suck. (If you don't know that OpenOffice sucks yet, it's because you haven't tackled a larger or more complex writing project in it. Try AbiWord!)
I find Opera an inspiring example. Firefox, open source, sucks. IE, closed source, also sucks. Opera rules. If you aren't using Opera, you are being very foolish.
I whined about cross-browser compatibility chaos before, but it got ignored because I both slam Firefox and fail to really praise IE. Since I've been using Opera, I'm happier, although it could still use some work. Reminds me of the Dilbert cartoon where a rat's random typing becomes browser code.
The end result is that we waste a lot of time and generate thicker, uglier code. HTML became the standard because it was easily created, could link up with just about anything, and was a great lingua franca intermediate format. (It makes me feel weird to say this, but I think of the English language in much the same way.)
What's intriguing about HTML 5 is that it goes back to the original model of HTML, which was what made it successful in the first place, before much meddling occurred. I also agree with the other guy who replied that some things like flash and vector graphics need their own, embeddable standards.
HTML was never perfect. Then the standards people took too long to update it.
Netscape and then Microsoft added custom HTML.
At this point, the browser became written to execute bad code well...
Now we've got cross-browser headaches and standards confusion.
I say bring on HTML 5, and bring on the strict. Make it look good in both browsers. End the sheer boredom of trying to make code display well on FireFox and IE, both of which are bloated pieces of crap, when it works just fine in Opera.
Simplify, and abstract, but don't expect HTML coders to be coders... it's a language for layout for the rest of us, and its genius has always been its simplicity and adaptability.
Fact: Programmers need money to survive and are generally underpaid. Fact: People can work only 40-60 hours a week without burning out and writing crap code. Fact: Programmers have lives outside of the code.
For Open Source to survive, it's going to have to figure out how to compete in a market economy. Part of that means making better code, since some OSS projects (OpenOffice) are total garbage full of bugs. Part of it means a path by which the average OSS application can monetize itself and pay its developers.
Maybe SourceForge needs to distribute profit from its AdSense earnings, I dunno.
In the future: hackers find out that re-programming a phone to radically fluctuate its power consumption in the same pattern that in flashing lights induces seizures in gamers, within five minutes, causes the battery to detonate and eliminate the target.
Five minutes later, government denies it has *ever* heard of such a thing, and it would never do it, even if it knew how.
Five minutes later, the reporter who broke the story dies in a mysterious cell phone explosion.
No expectation of anonymity
on
Spying On Tor
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
How does anyone expect anonymity? Traffic must somewhere go through ISPs, most of which rent their upstream from large providers like AT&T, who is surely not the only large corporation to get in bed with the government or anyone else who can pay. Enough of that information loaded into a database and compared will yield information about the suspect, even if it's too complex to explain to a "jury of your peers."
If you want anonymity, SSH through a string of compromised Eastern European servers to a comfortably log-agnostic Indonesian ISP, and do all your surfing through Lynx/Links. That's the only stab at anonymity you'll get, and they'll probably just install a keylogger anyway. Freedom is slavery.
Happier, more creative workers are the antithesis of call center workers.
Telecommuting is a win-win for employees and employers, resulting in higher morale and job satisfaction and lower employee stress and turnover. These were among the conclusions of psychologists who examined 20 years of research on flexible work arrangements.
If we spread more misery, people will need more misery-reducing products. AT&T is obviously about to start selling legal, over-the-counter, medical marijuana.
I can accept what you say, because it *is* your opinion.
Yeah, it has nothing to do with how often certain OSS office suites crash, mangle files, stall systems, and so on. It's all about opinions. Reality, truth and scientific accuracy don't exist!
I agree on both of those products. Photoshop and Office are superior to GIMP and OpenOffice. Office 2003 at least is stable, fast and reliable. It's not my favorite platform for writing, but I'd be out of touch if I insisted OpenOffice was better. It's a piece of junk. Journalists praise it because it's an easy story to write, but the reality of the situation is that life will hand you your ass if you do a serious writing project on OpenOffice. Most of the people here have found it to work for their needs, which are mainly writing letters. But just about anything can do that.
Slashdot Mirror
There's code to write, there's systems to set up, there's new software to explore, there's books to read;
and then
There's kids to cuddle, wife to romance, outdoor things I like to do, maybe even cook a chocolate cake!
How do YOU find time for games?
I was busy being a geek and... well... being alive!
This is a smart move. It's easier to develop one kernel than two, so standardizing the two made sense. They've had more time to beat on Server 2008 and test it, and are incorporating those changes.
The end user won't see this, but the end user doesn't care. Their flashy GUI and UAC (snicker) will run faster as a result.
Here's how I'd do it:
1. Identify key personnel and ask them for basics of the process
2. Research existing docs and look for "holes"
3. Interview action personnel to find out how things are actually done
4. Set up a base document, and document tree
5. Design a standard template and language
6. Write a draft
7. Get buy-in from legal and management
8. Ensure that someone or some role is there to update this and revision it.
All of these steps are important.
It is useful to have an experienced professional, -or- to take the time to learn the basics of process technical writing, which is like all careers not rocket science but requires some study and experience.
It is really helpful to have a role or person whose job is centered on this task, as then others are more likely to allow them to poke around and ask questions, and they won't destabilize existing office political arrangements or get anyone fired.
Tech writers always need to be the neutral third party under such circumstances.
Dozens report seeing UFO over Stephenville, Texas which must've been neutron stars colliding in the air over that Wal-Mart.
Because I'm the neighborhood geek, people ask me about their problems. One problem is what to do with the old machine when they upgrade.
My advice for the past six months has been: buy it a new hard drive ($60) and install Ubuntu. The hard drive is what fails at 4-5 years, but the rest will keep on ticking and thanks to the thriftiness of Linux, doesn't slow them down.
They don't care that it's not Windows XP or Mac OS X. All GUIs look about the same for the tasks most people do.
With these newer cheap machines, I'm excited, but wary. Would I rather install $200 of junk or do a $60 upgrade to an older, but once more expensive machine with better hardware?
The Shuttle boxes I've worked with so far have been high quality but have tended to overheat. However, they were a good deal more expensive than $200. I wonder what corners got cut, and whether a five year old Dell that cost $900 when it was new would have these problems?
Either way, my compliments to the Ubuntu team. That's a convenient and reliable OS distro.
It's a smart move. Russia has already demonstrated that it wants to be a superpower again, which means that its main competition is China and the USA.
It has to keep up with China's level of control, and not leave the internet in the hands of the USA, if it can.
Again Putin demonstrates a smart interpretation of Machiavellian Realpolitik while no one else yet realizes the Cold War is back on.
I will buy neither, for Green reasons.
A whitebox PC can be upgraded piece by piece without throwing the whole thing out, and is going to last a heck of a lot longer than those tiny things with all those parts crammed in close together, generating heat and vibration.
My advice is to build your own machine, and buy parts that will last five years, then recycle responsibly. One way to do this is to use a friend's box from a Dell XPS one to ship your parts back to Dell for recycling.
I haven't been impressed by the reliability of Macintosh hardware, nor has Dell really blown me away. A well-planned white box computer can last upward of a decade although you'll have to replace the hard drive at the five year mark.
VMware player is open source:
http://www.vmware.com/products/player/
It also has a secure browsing "virtual appliance," or virtual machine with software pre-installed:
http://www.vmware.com/appliances/directory/browserapp.html
The software is open-source.
They are not Microsoft.
Therefore
They are beyond criticism.
Anything that is not Microsoft, and makes us feel like the hipper kids in the street, is automatically beyond criticism. We all wish we were the rich kids in Redmond, but since we're townies instead, we will speak ill of them any time we can. Macintosh is not from Redmond. True, they are greedy and wealthy. But they are not our enemy so they are us.
(See also Apple's identity problem.)
When I first started programming, in BASIC on an Apple ][ (not IIe), I remember being baffled by the fact that the computer did not operate with multiple concurrent streams. To me, this seemed the point of making something that was "more than a calculator," and the only way we would be able to do the really interesting stuff with it.
When I first started writing object-oriented code, I was somewhat dismayed to find that OO was an extension to the same ol' linear programming. It seemed to me that objects should be able to exist as if alive and react freely, but really, they were just a fancy interface to the linear runtime. Color me disapointed yet again.
It's an important paradigm shift to recognize parallel computing. Maybe when the world realizes the importance of parallel computing, and parallel thinking, we'll have that singularity that some writers talk about. People will no longer think in such basic terms and be so ignorant of context and timing. That in itself must be nice.
Sutter's article hits home with all of this. His conclusion is that efficient programming, and elegant programming that takes advantage of, not conforms to, the parallel model is the future. Judging by the chips I see on the market today, he was right, 2.5 years ago. He will continue to be right. The question is whether programmers step up to this challenge, and see it as being as fun as I think it will be.
I think it's in the numbers.
Too many people together form dogma, because most of them don't understand the vision of their leaders. If they don't have leaders, it's even worse.
I like Opera, but it was made by a small team with actual vision. Firefox is basically an IE clone at this point, with some "added features" of dubious value to most users. But it's a trend and it makes people feel happy to be part of it.
Still, Firefox is a buggy piece of junk compared to Opera. I don't think open source is anything more than volunteer corporations, unless there's someone with some real vision involved, and that person has power.
Otherwise, I agree somewhat with your comments and would mod them up. Cheerio
1. Buy gadget
2. Replace batteries
3. Watch it break down
4. Attempt to fix
5. ???
6. Profit (for the person who sold it)
7. Massive unrecycled waste (your gift to planet earth)
Good ideas: plants, books, tools, Slashdot membership, backrubs, fruit, nuts, candy wrapped in paper.
This holiday is about loving your family, go be with them, instead of working extra hours to buy them plastic crap you won't even remember in two years!
Opera is doomed in its mission of a lawsuit. However, it's the best of the three browsers out there.
As I explain in detail here, the issue is more complicated than most people see.
Most of us don't fit into these two sides:
1. We hate the big guy side -- Firefox is God, Linux is God, they can do no wrong, the world will be saved if we go to Linux/FF.
2. We distrust the little guy side -- Firefox is funded by Google, Firefox is a revenge project against MSFT, you get uneven results in open source, the world will be doomed if we leave browsing up to volunteers.
But enough loud people do that the truth is as usual obscured. Firefox/Linux fanboys are the Amiga fanboys of the 00s!
http://technical-writing.dionysius.com/resources/CSS-2.0.pdf
Helped me through many a "what's that called again?" session.
Link updated because both original links were dead.
If it uses Ogg Vorbis, Bush and Jobs will meet in Washington, DC to discuss invasion strategies. Rumors of the iBomb are beginning to surface...
It's true: no method applies in all cases.
Where F/OSS does well is in finding a software need of most computer users, and making a product to match. Although not all of these are open source, I'd consider the following great successes: PuTTy, EditPad, Opera, WinDiff, ActivePerl, WireShark, AirSnort, shttpd, Nero, Apache.
Where it does not work is in areas where centralization, and its proportionate reduction in expense per square foot of research and development and customer feedback integration, is beneficial. The aforementioned large DBs and projects like Lotus Notes or Microsoft Exchange come to mind.
However, it's fair to say that several things define the success of any project (sorry about the Wiki-formatting):
* Leadership
* Personnel
* Funding
* Clear mission statement
A F/OSS project without those, or a closed-source commercial project without those, is bound for failure. Every single time. Without variation.
There are some notable open source failures: Firefox, OpenOffice, CDBurner XP, PHP. They're popular so no one knows they're failures yet, but from a pure geek view of engineering quality and ability to do things well, they suck. (If you don't know that OpenOffice sucks yet, it's because you haven't tackled a larger or more complex writing project in it. Try AbiWord!)
I find Opera an inspiring example. Firefox, open source, sucks. IE, closed source, also sucks. Opera rules. If you aren't using Opera, you are being very foolish.
I whined about cross-browser compatibility chaos before, but it got ignored because I both slam Firefox and fail to really praise IE. Since I've been using Opera, I'm happier, although it could still use some work. Reminds me of the Dilbert cartoon where a rat's random typing becomes browser code.
The end result is that we waste a lot of time and generate thicker, uglier code. HTML became the standard because it was easily created, could link up with just about anything, and was a great lingua franca intermediate format. (It makes me feel weird to say this, but I think of the English language in much the same way.)
What's intriguing about HTML 5 is that it goes back to the original model of HTML, which was what made it successful in the first place, before much meddling occurred. I also agree with the other guy who replied that some things like flash and vector graphics need their own, embeddable standards.
HTML was never perfect. Then the standards people took too long to update it.
Netscape and then Microsoft added custom HTML.
At this point, the browser became written to execute bad code well...
Now we've got cross-browser headaches and standards confusion.
I say bring on HTML 5, and bring on the strict. Make it look good in both browsers. End the sheer boredom of trying to make code display well on FireFox and IE, both of which are bloated pieces of crap, when it works just fine in Opera.
Simplify, and abstract, but don't expect HTML coders to be coders... it's a language for layout for the rest of us, and its genius has always been its simplicity and adaptability.
Fact: Programmers need money to survive and are generally underpaid.
Fact: People can work only 40-60 hours a week without burning out and writing crap code.
Fact: Programmers have lives outside of the code.
For Open Source to survive, it's going to have to figure out how to compete in a market economy.
Part of that means making better code, since some OSS projects (OpenOffice) are total garbage full of bugs.
Part of it means a path by which the average OSS application can monetize itself and pay its developers.
Maybe SourceForge needs to distribute profit from its AdSense earnings, I dunno.
In the future: hackers find out that re-programming a phone to radically fluctuate its power consumption in the same pattern that in flashing lights induces seizures in gamers, within five minutes, causes the battery to detonate and eliminate the target.
Five minutes later, government denies it has *ever* heard of such a thing, and it would never do it, even if it knew how.
Five minutes later, the reporter who broke the story dies in a mysterious cell phone explosion.
How does anyone expect anonymity? Traffic must somewhere go through ISPs, most of which rent their upstream from large providers like AT&T, who is surely not the only large corporation to get in bed with the government or anyone else who can pay. Enough of that information loaded into a database and compared will yield information about the suspect, even if it's too complex to explain to a "jury of your peers."
If you want anonymity, SSH through a string of compromised Eastern European servers to a comfortably log-agnostic Indonesian ISP, and do all your surfing through Lynx/Links. That's the only stab at anonymity you'll get, and they'll probably just install a keylogger anyway. Freedom is slavery.
Hi, I'm in Maryland, and I'll cut your lawn for $25,000 and throw in a custom eCommerce system absolutely free!
If we spread more misery, people will need more misery-reducing products. AT&T is obviously about to start selling legal, over-the-counter, medical marijuana.
Yeah, it has nothing to do with how often certain OSS office suites crash, mangle files, stall systems, and so on. It's all about opinions. Reality, truth and scientific accuracy don't exist!
I agree on both of those products. Photoshop and Office are superior to GIMP and OpenOffice. Office 2003 at least is stable, fast and reliable. It's not my favorite platform for writing, but I'd be out of touch if I insisted OpenOffice was better. It's a piece of junk. Journalists praise it because it's an easy story to write, but the reality of the situation is that life will hand you your ass if you do a serious writing project on OpenOffice. Most of the people here have found it to work for their needs, which are mainly writing letters. But just about anything can do that.