I think it will happen eventually. If there is one thing I have to do every day that I absolutely hate more than anything else it's shaving. And I'm sure many others do as well. It takes time, it's never good enough, and by the end of the day (in my case in a few hours) you look like you haven't shaved anyways. It's irritating and harsh to the skin (but an excellent exfoliant;) it feels unpleasant (tell me you like the feeling of shaving around your Adam's apple), and there's always the potential for cuts (even with 3 blade razors, and as an aside, I think the Mach 3 inventor deserves a Nobel, it's absolutely brilliant, better than sliced bread). I really hope I will live to see the day when I can just shlep on some goop on my face, wash it off and have not a trace of hair left for a couple of days.
Well, the best one I found is the stove that prepares a meal in 75 seconds. Microwaves come pretty darn close, these days you can stick pretty much anything into one and have it come out ready in a minute or two.
One of the most interesting ideas I found (that seems silly at first sight) is the water cooled house. Assuming you use ocean water (wasting such amounts of fresh water today, especially in California, probably is a crime), this is a very effective way to cool. This is what most air conditioning systems on office towers do today. Water has an excellent ability to absorb heat. The problem is of course the necessary infrastructure to bring so much water to every house. As an added bonus, water reflects more sun radiation than anything else we use on our roofs (which usually comes in very dark colours to boot!), and would help somewhat in reflecting more heat back into space.
There has been a general trend in predicting the future. It is always that the things people though would be easy to accomplish are even more difficult (now that we know more about them), and the 'hard' things are trivial.
1. Take space travel. 2000 was always seen as a time when people would travel into space, to the Moon and Mars on a daily basis, like taking the train. Today, not only is this not happening, but there is absolutely no reason for regular people to go into space. And there will not be for a long time to come, until there is money to be made out there.
2. Computing power. Always greatly underestimated. We have discovered that we can use the modern IC to extract great computing power. This is a development which could not have been predicted 50 years ago. Vacuum tubes only go so fast. We are at a point now where we can predict the upper limit of this technology (though it is being upgraded all the time with better conductors and smaller traces), and we see new technologies on the horizon (optics) which are expected to provide a huge leap in power, and of course quantum computing about which no one can make predictions on expected practical speed. It has been relatively easy to extract more and more speed from IC technology.
3. Diametrically opposed to #2, we still can't talk at computers. This is a theme found in any sci-fi or future sci story. Even though we have so much computing power at our finger tips, there's just not enough. No one could have predicted _how_ computers would be able to understand spoken words, so it seemed a relatively trivial feature. We now know (barring a breakthrough in linguistics or algorithms) speech recognition is a time consuming process, and it will probably not be prefected in our lifetimes.
So these future predictions are fun, fun to make and read, but they often miss in fundamental ways which could not have been forseen. Now for example, we stipulate that if a quantum computer is built it would be many orders of magnitude faster than anything we have today. But for all we know it will not be possible to build such a computer to run fast (or at all), or maybe that it can only be used in very specialized applications. We just don't know at this point, and anything we predict today will probably turn out to be as silly as space travel.
Unless you can describe how a certain thing can be accomplished, you can't predict if it will happen. Suppose we knew how make a quantum computer, but didn't have the technology to actually make it happen, we could at least say, in the future there will be quantum computers, they will be faster than we can possibly imagine today. Otherwise you will have the prediction that we'll be able to talk to computers, we don't have the faintest idea of how, but we'll be able to.
Well, historically, MS OSes have sold very well when they looked drastically different from the previous version (DOS -> Win 3.1, Win 3.2 -> Win 95, Win 95 -> XP(?)). Win 98 hasn't been a smashing success, and Win 2000 is doing even worse. THe common thread is they both look the same as Win 95, therefore they're not different enough, therefore they're not sellign very well.
NT 4 users are screwed because the software it runs (and the OS itself) is slowly losing MS support. Ever wonder why there will not be a SP 7 for NT 4? (http://www.microsoft.com/ntserver/sp7.asp) It's all for the benefit of the customer if you can't guess without reading the linked page. The real reason of course is that MS doesn't want people running NT 4 anymore.
Believe it or not Microsoft has got to actually SELL copies of Windows XP. If Windows XP is chuck full of stupid "features" that are actually disincentives to the upgrade then people will stick with what they have.
Oh please, all MS has to do is discontinue shipping other Windows versions (or make it prohibitively expensive), and Dell will give up his firstborn for the priviledge of selling XP for Bill.
By IP Filter you mean the IP Sec Policies, then a better interface would be most welcome (they can even call it a fiewall). Entering IP Policies is a big pain in the ass, I never know what I'm doing, or if it does what I want it to. Just give me a bunch of checkboxes and drop down lists damnit!
I don't think there is such a limit, or if there is it's not anywhere near this low, I should know, I've seen one of my servers (wunning on W2K Pro) do almost 400 concurrent TCP connections. All you pay for in the server version is a higher CPU count support (Pro only does 1 and 2 CPUs) and bundled servers and some client licenses. You can't (to my knowledge) just download IIS (which does mail, news, web, ftp, telnet and god knows what else) and run it on Pro. In most cases you can just do a straight upgrade from Pro to Server (or the equivalent), and I remember going from NT 4 Server to NT 4 SuperDuperEnterpriseServer (which costs several thousand) required installing some freely downloadable options and turning on a few registry settings, but of course you can't do it because it's illegal and the login banner would say Server instead of SuperDuperEnterpriseServer, and we all know that's worth half the price right there.
System tools, configuration, install and uninstall, etc., are criminally in short supply or, where they exist, of poor quality. The very idea that I need to purchase an aftermarket uninstaller is criminal, as is the fact that I have to pay a license fee, ( built into the price of my software), to companies such as InstallShield to get the install and uninstall processes at least somewhat properly done.
This situation has only existed because MS never took the time to write core functionality into their OSes, going back to first DOS versions. Anyone remember the DOS defragger (symantec's?). For DOS 5.2 or 6.2 or whatever MS essentially said, 'you will license us the technology and will pay you pennies per copy, or we will write our own and put you out of business.' We now have the same situation. In Win 3 everyone had their own installer, then Install Shield came out. Good product, but now Windows 2000 (and an update for NT/Win 98) provides the Microsoft Installer. I'm sure you've seen.msi files before. ActiveState Perl comes like that. Now again you have core OS functionality (core because it should be, different installers should not have to exist to step on each others' toes, and I think application installation is a very basic feature that should be provided by the OS), space which was before occupied by 3rd parties, being taken over by Microsoft, putting another partner/competitor out of business. (BTW, I just love how MS calls all their competitors partners. With MS's reach pretty much anyone developing for Win32 is or will eventually be a competitor.) Right now, MSI may be a pretty rudimentary installer development environment, compared to an industry veteran like Install Shield, but in a revision or two it will become very powerful, and if it comes with all development tools (MC VC++, etc) no one will bother to purchase Install Shield anymore. Just like no one buys defraggers for Win 98. (It is beyond me why the MS defragger will not defrag partitions with allocation sizes over 4k).
Well, the thing is, the OS has never been a product, Microsft made it so. The OS always came with whatever hardware you bought. You paid for the hardware and support, and got the OS to run on your box. Microsoft was originally the only company making money on OSes, selling OSes. This was always given away, as indeed was most software back in the day (you always bought the hardware).
That's pretty close-minded. Most excellent programmers I know (yes, there are some better than me... sigh) cut their teeth programming basic. For someone curious about computers, in those days it was very easy to get into basic: it was bundled with dos, taught in (lower) schools, there were help files for it, and it's an easy language to pick up. The alternative was to buy a 'real' compiler for a 'real' language, either from Borland or Microsoft (TurboXXX and QuickXXX prespectively), unless one knew people who could get that stuff for you. And then a stack of books to be able to do anything useful. Now, I don't know how serious Dijkstra was when he made that statement, probably not very, I would hope. Otherwise it makes him seem arrogant, oh, look, lucky me, I never had to deal with basic, I started with a _man's_ programming language unlike those other losers!
They're not a business, and stop flaming other posters for no reason. The 'A' in RIAA and MPAA stands for 'Association', they are groups representing entertainment industries, for various purposes (lobbying being one of the more important ones). Just because someone gets (well) paid doesn't mean it's for profit, people need to make money, and MPAA/RIAA employees are compensated. But that doesn't make them businesses any more than Red Cross or any other charity is a business because it has paid employees.
Genre should be an attribute of a CD, and not a key item.
Genre should be an attribute of a track.
Only one CD allowed for each discid/genre.
I believe multiples are allowed, it just brings up a selection box when you search for a cd that has a dupicate.
All that said, yes, the original CDDB system was very hacked together, I even downloaded their server code once to look at it (it was available in source form in the past, possibly even gpled).
You can, however, copyright the layout of your phonebook.
Re:"People like you will never get it"
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Slash 2.0 Released
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Well, let's take your claim apart piece by piece now, as we see fit and out of context.
That is 100% your *opinion*.
It most certainly is, and I never claimed it was anything else.
"And its not like/. stories are time sensitive". Right, things like Viruses, Worms, Microsoft vulnerabilities, new kernel releases, all have no time sensitivity. None.
You're just splitting hairs here. There is no harm done in releasing a virus alert a few seconds or a few minutes later. Another non-issue, virus alerts don't even get announced on/. first, you're more likely to find a virus alert on zdnet first, which is where they're linked to from/.
You insult him, you attack him
Oh, now _I'm_ insulted! I never insulted the man, I'm just stating my opinion, it has nothing to do with him personally, his writing (believe it or not), his code or his other work. I'm just saying, it is my opinion posting stories with spelling mistakes for millions of people to see does not seem professional to me. Nothing more nothing less. Roblimo doesn't post stuff like that, Cliff doesn't (usually), Katz just needs to be more liberal with periods.
Whether YOU rank those [cnn] higher or not doesnt matter one itsy, teeny, little bit.
It doesn't and I never said it did.
...go build your own weblog... [et al]
Typical/. response to any criticism, no matter how minor or trivial. 'Go build your own'. That's hardly something even worth responding to, it's so disingeneous, a last ditch defense when you can't think of anything else. In any case, my point still stands unassaulted, there is no excuse not to take (literally) a few seconds and look over your writing before you post it.
But thats just my opinion, and I state it as such.
Well, good for you, that was just so gosh darn +5 Insightful. I mean, wow, you didn't put words in my mouth, take them out of context or even totally ignore what I was saying.
Patent laws ENCOURAGE Innovation because it ensures that people can reap the rewards of successful R&D, and can recoup the money they invest.
Yes they are very useful, but only when the patents are legitimate and are used to their intended purpose. These days anything under the sun is patentable (assuming it runs on a Sun, hehe, owww, bad joke...), business methods, code... Patents were also meant to encourage development and innovations, where people can build devices and other ideas (possibly patentable as well) on top of your patents, they're not supposed to be used by huge corporations to club their competition when the going gets tough.
Geez, people like you will never get it. It's not just about getting the message across, it's doing so in a professional and clear manner. If you take pride in something you pay more attention to it. You hit preview before posting. What's it say right below the post comment window? 'Use the Preview Button!'
In any case, saying they have to wade through thousands of stories a day is just a red herring. No matter how many they have to wade through they only post a few. It's the posting that matters. I don't care if Taco corrects the spelling of all the submissions before he checks them out, all that matters is that he check spelling before _posting_. It literally only takes a few seconds. It's the right thing to do. Would you release code to the entire world without comments, with generic variable names and no indenting? Of course not, you'd be embarassed to. So why make such simple mistakes when posting stories to a site you built from the ground, that you make a living off, that the entire world reads?
And it's not like/. stories are time sensitive. No one's gonna die or get hurt if a story is a few seconds late while Taco pulls up a new browser window for dictionary.com ./. posts are just regurgitations of other stories, and the occasional exclusive/original features definitely don't have any urgency. I don't understand what the problem is.
I dunno, it's a matter of talking pride in everything you do, no matter how small or important. Spelling mistakes just give out a strong impression of unprofessionalism and slopiness.
Re:Unions and what they can do for us
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IT Unions?
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Then maybe don't call it a union.
People today know all about unions, at least as they stand today. Here is what we know happens when a union comes in:
you get a raise, enjoy it because it'll be the last major raise you'll get, but don't get too excited, you haven't seen your union dues bill yet.
you won't have a choice, join the union or you're out of here.
forget about that promotion you've worked so hard for, that guy next to you has 2 weeks seniority on you, get in line.
pay raise? what pay raise, you're on a schedule buddy, and the dot in 0.5% isn't misplaced.
some loser cow-worker pissing around and wreaking havoc with your project? get used to it, he's not going anywhere.
feeling a little tired and don't want to start your day until 9 or 10? trade in a day or an afternoon for weekend work? pulled an all-nighter with a wonky router and would rather take the morning off than fill out endless paperwork for overtime pay? forget it, there's a clock to be punched 8:00-4:30.
like chatting and hanging out with your boss, because he's a friendly guy? that's enemy territory now buddy, just remember what can happen to you when you side with management when push comes to shove.
Did I miss something? I'm sure I did, those are just my major beefs unions. Unions have been highly successful in industries where the worker org structure is very flat, or the work is extremely dangerous. The second one is understandable, lets look at the first part.
Factories, physical labor industries... there are a bunch of front-line floor workers, some foremen, the rest are all management and administrators. At a table they sit opposite unions. Factory floor workers have virtually no chance of ever advancing beyond their current position. They had no new skills to acquire to do a lateral career change.
Compare this to the information industry, where the org structure is very deep, from data entry and html code monkeys and tech support to high level architecture designers, there are plenty of opportunities for upward advancement, well into upper management, even for the lowest of the low given enough determination and education. And there is a lot to learn, new skills to acquire and so forth to do a career change in case things go awry. So you're a java programmer right now? No problem, take a few evening courses and you can be a db admin, or a network admin, technical sales, even management. IT is a highly competitive and fast moving industry, and quick changes are made on a regular basis.
If you're putting bolt DF878454A on part Y2643-L 8 hours a day and your company decides they no longer need as many of you, or they have a robot to do your job, or maybe Y2643-L is now obsolete, they're very motivated to fire you. It's not like they're losing thousands of dollars in recruiting and training, they're not losing any critical knowledge or skills. If you lose a finger while putting on that bolt a similar situation could occur. This is where unions come in, to protect the ones with the least leverage.
The most common argument for unions in IT is that not everyone is making 6 figures and working in a lavish environment, not everyone is l337 (not even you), and even if you are, for how long? Who's to say your company won't suddenly change into another Ford plant? The truth is we're not all highly skilled, highly paid and highly sought after, we're not really arrogant or think we're so great we don't need unions. But, the IT industry has it good, and will for many years to come, until the next huge business ideology develops in a couple hundred years (space travel/exploration/mining comes to mind here). And by then we'll (well, our great-great-great-great-grand kids) be the cogs and automatons of IT, easily replacable, and the next wave of workers in the new industry will again be hot dogs. And the same question will be asked; should we unionize like our IT employed fathers were a few generations ago, and we'll have come full circle.
Maybe unions can change, but history so far shown this is not the case, unions are (almost by definiton) highly resistant to change, change is bad, change is when people go on strike, when they get fired and when they're forced to retire. Change is not opportunity for unions. So excuse us if we're a little slow in seeing a need for unions in IT.
Re:IT will never unionize...
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IT Unions?
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Of course it will never happen, do you expect geeks to march a picket line out in the heat of summer when their offices are air conditioned?
This all really depends on how big you want to be. Of course one starts small, and all that. I personally don't know the market in Australia, but I gather there are 1 or 2 major telcos/ISPs and some smaller ones. The big problem these days (in the US/Canada anyways) is that you really have to be pretty big to start an ISP. The start up costs are huge. People expect quite a bit these days. Think bandwidth (huge cost), hardware (you do want some damn reliable servers), people (tech support, customer service, admins, some management). Dealing with telcos, carriers and vendors is a nightmare, you need to advertise and market yourself. You need to properly configure and run mail/pop/imap servers, radius servers, terminal/dial-in servers, routers, you need to have a good architecture in place (even a small ISP will have many machines). You need to arrange for a news feed of some sort (many users will expect this) which will burn through your bandwidth in no time. You will need a professional web presence, and some tools for your clients to manage their accounts (or be prepared to hire lots of customer service people to handle simple things like password changes and mailbox purges). You need to have a proper account management system, and a hopefully automated account creation and maintenance system. And we're not even into the business and money side yet. Without a question you need to have good business sense, unless you know others to do this you will have to do the initial hiring. Then there is the question of is it worth it? From an experience point of view, if you don't have too much to lose it's definitely worth starting and running your own business. But these days with all the big ISPs tying up the dialup market and fighting over each others' user base there isn't much money to be made on dialup. The margins are very slim. Think about all your costs, estimate your client base (be optimistic), multiply those by $20-35/month and figure out how long it'll take you to make a profit. The big money is to be made providing 'business solutions': web hosting, ecommerce stuffs, connectivity. And you can't do those on any significant scale unless you're already big and well known. Sort of a catch-22. In summary, it's really really tough, (should have started 5-6 years ago, hmm?) but like many people here will tell you, there _is_ money in providing good, friendly and reliable service, people will still pay for this, despite the $10/month deals you see every so often. Probably won't make you a millionaire (even and AUD one), but you can make a living on it eventually if things to right.
Every ISP, I repeat, EVERY ISP uses shared bandwidth. Including DSL providers.
Yeah, and not just at the ISP uplink level, what do you think the CO (where your DSL line goes to) is connected to the ISP with? A T1. Sometimes better.
Windows wouldn't have to drop any features to be UNIX certified. But it would have to add some, most notably hard links, which to this day are not possible with FAT or NTFS.
I think Katz went a little far this time. He was probably saying movies like Mars Attacks are bad as well, criticizing the 'plot' and characters, when in fact they're not supposed to be serious. Mummy Returns wasn't a creepy movie and it wasn't meant to be, it wasn't made to compete with any mummy horror classics, or even mummy action classics.
That said, the movie was pretty bad, and definitely not worth the $11.50 CDN ticket price. (As an aside, I have a question: was this movie played too loud? I noticed many parts were really loud, and I understand the reasoning behind it, but I'm half-deaf from listening to loud music:) and I thought it was way too loud) Yeah, it was bad. The action was bad (except for the girl knife fights), the effects were rather average, with the face effects the only memorable bits. The acting was attrocious (except for Anck-Su-Namun, she's realy cool;) the dialogue literally made me cringe it was so painful to listen to, the plot (what plot there was) was pathetic, none of the characters were believable. Need I go on? Take any film genre and sub genre, and this movie failed to do well in any of them. It was not funny, it was not scary, it was not suspenseful, it was not romantic, it wasn't dramatic, it wasn't even cheesy, it was just borderline entertaining.
The first Mummy movie has a reputation for good sound, and this one will likely follow as well, so get the DVD if you have a good sound system. There are better and more entertaining movies playing this week, go see them with your friends instead, at least you'll have something to talk about afterwards.
You are incorrect a to the cause of innovation. People don't innovate because something doens't work right, they innovate because they can make it work even better. They innovate because that's what people do. Even perfectly working technologies get replaced by better (or just different) things. The batteries in Dell laptops, even if they worked perfectly, will be replaced by better, smaller, longer lasting and more environment friendly batteries, and it has nothing to do with how good (or bad) they are right now.
I get seen HOLDING a screwdriver, and the electricians union goes crazy and files a grievance.
Unions are extremely strict in this respect. If you're ever seen anything you're not explicitely supposed to be doing you're obviously taking someone else's job away from them. If you have to do something that someone else in the union is paid to do, tough luck, you'll be put in your place quickly. Unfortunatelly, those of us who like their jobs (despite being unionized) and like to work and want to excell, unions are just shackles, you can't lift a finger without their say so.
Now go away, don't you have a coffee break to take or something?
Slashdot Mirror
I think it will happen eventually. If there is one thing I have to do every day that I absolutely hate more than anything else it's shaving. And I'm sure many others do as well. It takes time, it's never good enough, and by the end of the day (in my case in a few hours) you look like you haven't shaved anyways. It's irritating and harsh to the skin (but an excellent exfoliant ;) it feels unpleasant (tell me you like the feeling of shaving around your Adam's apple), and there's always the potential for cuts (even with 3 blade razors, and as an aside, I think the Mach 3 inventor deserves a Nobel, it's absolutely brilliant, better than sliced bread). I really hope I will live to see the day when I can just shlep on some goop on my face, wash it off and have not a trace of hair left for a couple of days.
One of the most interesting ideas I found (that seems silly at first sight) is the water cooled house. Assuming you use ocean water (wasting such amounts of fresh water today, especially in California, probably is a crime), this is a very effective way to cool. This is what most air conditioning systems on office towers do today. Water has an excellent ability to absorb heat. The problem is of course the necessary infrastructure to bring so much water to every house. As an added bonus, water reflects more sun radiation than anything else we use on our roofs (which usually comes in very dark colours to boot!), and would help somewhat in reflecting more heat back into space.
1. Take space travel. 2000 was always seen as a time when people would travel into space, to the Moon and Mars on a daily basis, like taking the train. Today, not only is this not happening, but there is absolutely no reason for regular people to go into space. And there will not be for a long time to come, until there is money to be made out there.
2. Computing power. Always greatly underestimated. We have discovered that we can use the modern IC to extract great computing power. This is a development which could not have been predicted 50 years ago. Vacuum tubes only go so fast. We are at a point now where we can predict the upper limit of this technology (though it is being upgraded all the time with better conductors and smaller traces), and we see new technologies on the horizon (optics) which are expected to provide a huge leap in power, and of course quantum computing about which no one can make predictions on expected practical speed. It has been relatively easy to extract more and more speed from IC technology.
3. Diametrically opposed to #2, we still can't talk at computers. This is a theme found in any sci-fi or future sci story. Even though we have so much computing power at our finger tips, there's just not enough. No one could have predicted _how_ computers would be able to understand spoken words, so it seemed a relatively trivial feature. We now know (barring a breakthrough in linguistics or algorithms) speech recognition is a time consuming process, and it will probably not be prefected in our lifetimes.
So these future predictions are fun, fun to make and read, but they often miss in fundamental ways which could not have been forseen. Now for example, we stipulate that if a quantum computer is built it would be many orders of magnitude faster than anything we have today. But for all we know it will not be possible to build such a computer to run fast (or at all), or maybe that it can only be used in very specialized applications. We just don't know at this point, and anything we predict today will probably turn out to be as silly as space travel.
Unless you can describe how a certain thing can be accomplished, you can't predict if it will happen. Suppose we knew how make a quantum computer, but didn't have the technology to actually make it happen, we could at least say, in the future there will be quantum computers, they will be faster than we can possibly imagine today. Otherwise you will have the prediction that we'll be able to talk to computers, we don't have the faintest idea of how, but we'll be able to.
Well, historically, MS OSes have sold very well when they looked drastically different from the previous version (DOS -> Win 3.1, Win 3.2 -> Win 95, Win 95 -> XP(?)). Win 98 hasn't been a smashing success, and Win 2000 is doing even worse. THe common thread is they both look the same as Win 95, therefore they're not different enough, therefore they're not sellign very well.
NT 4 users are screwed because the software it runs (and the OS itself) is slowly losing MS support. Ever wonder why there will not be a SP 7 for NT 4? (http://www.microsoft.com/ntserver/sp7.asp) It's all for the benefit of the customer if you can't guess without reading the linked page. The real reason of course is that MS doesn't want people running NT 4 anymore.
Oh please, all MS has to do is discontinue shipping other Windows versions (or make it prohibitively expensive), and Dell will give up his firstborn for the priviledge of selling XP for Bill.
By IP Filter you mean the IP Sec Policies, then a better interface would be most welcome (they can even call it a fiewall). Entering IP Policies is a big pain in the ass, I never know what I'm doing, or if it does what I want it to. Just give me a bunch of checkboxes and drop down lists damnit!
I don't think there is such a limit, or if there is it's not anywhere near this low, I should know, I've seen one of my servers (wunning on W2K Pro) do almost 400 concurrent TCP connections. All you pay for in the server version is a higher CPU count support (Pro only does 1 and 2 CPUs) and bundled servers and some client licenses. You can't (to my knowledge) just download IIS (which does mail, news, web, ftp, telnet and god knows what else) and run it on Pro. In most cases you can just do a straight upgrade from Pro to Server (or the equivalent), and I remember going from NT 4 Server to NT 4 SuperDuperEnterpriseServer (which costs several thousand) required installing some freely downloadable options and turning on a few registry settings, but of course you can't do it because it's illegal and the login banner would say Server instead of SuperDuperEnterpriseServer, and we all know that's worth half the price right there.
This situation has only existed because MS never took the time to write core functionality into their OSes, going back to first DOS versions. Anyone remember the DOS defragger (symantec's?). For DOS 5.2 or 6.2 or whatever MS essentially said, 'you will license us the technology and will pay you pennies per copy, or we will write our own and put you out of business.' We now have the same situation. In Win 3 everyone had their own installer, then Install Shield came out. Good product, but now Windows 2000 (and an update for NT/Win 98) provides the Microsoft Installer. I'm sure you've seen .msi files before. ActiveState Perl comes like that. Now again you have core OS functionality (core because it should be, different installers should not have to exist to step on each others' toes, and I think application installation is a very basic feature that should be provided by the OS), space which was before occupied by 3rd parties, being taken over by Microsoft, putting another partner/competitor out of business. (BTW, I just love how MS calls all their competitors partners. With MS's reach pretty much anyone developing for Win32 is or will eventually be a competitor.) Right now, MSI may be a pretty rudimentary installer development environment, compared to an industry veteran like Install Shield, but in a revision or two it will become very powerful, and if it comes with all development tools (MC VC++, etc) no one will bother to purchase Install Shield anymore. Just like no one buys defraggers for Win 98. (It is beyond me why the MS defragger will not defrag partitions with allocation sizes over 4k).
Well, the thing is, the OS has never been a product, Microsft made it so. The OS always came with whatever hardware you bought. You paid for the hardware and support, and got the OS to run on your box. Microsoft was originally the only company making money on OSes, selling OSes. This was always given away, as indeed was most software back in the day (you always bought the hardware).
That's pretty close-minded. Most excellent programmers I know (yes, there are some better than me... sigh) cut their teeth programming basic. For someone curious about computers, in those days it was very easy to get into basic: it was bundled with dos, taught in (lower) schools, there were help files for it, and it's an easy language to pick up. The alternative was to buy a 'real' compiler for a 'real' language, either from Borland or Microsoft (TurboXXX and QuickXXX prespectively), unless one knew people who could get that stuff for you. And then a stack of books to be able to do anything useful. Now, I don't know how serious Dijkstra was when he made that statement, probably not very, I would hope. Otherwise it makes him seem arrogant, oh, look, lucky me, I never had to deal with basic, I started with a _man's_ programming language unlike those other losers!
They're not a business, and stop flaming other posters for no reason. The 'A' in RIAA and MPAA stands for 'Association', they are groups representing entertainment industries, for various purposes (lobbying being one of the more important ones). Just because someone gets (well) paid doesn't mean it's for profit, people need to make money, and MPAA/RIAA employees are compensated. But that doesn't make them businesses any more than Red Cross or any other charity is a business because it has paid employees.
Genre should be an attribute of a track.
Only one CD allowed for each discid/genre.
I believe multiples are allowed, it just brings up a selection box when you search for a cd that has a dupicate.
All that said, yes, the original CDDB system was very hacked together, I even downloaded their server code once to look at it (it was available in source form in the past, possibly even gpled).
You can, however, copyright the layout of your phonebook.
That is 100% your *opinion*.
It most certainly is, and I never claimed it was anything else.
"And its not like /. stories are time sensitive". Right, things like Viruses, Worms, Microsoft vulnerabilities, new kernel releases, all have no time sensitivity. None.
You're just splitting hairs here. There is no harm done in releasing a virus alert a few seconds or a few minutes later. Another non-issue, virus alerts don't even get announced on /. first, you're more likely to find a virus alert on zdnet first, which is where they're linked to from /.
You insult him, you attack him
Oh, now _I'm_ insulted! I never insulted the man, I'm just stating my opinion, it has nothing to do with him personally, his writing (believe it or not), his code or his other work. I'm just saying, it is my opinion posting stories with spelling mistakes for millions of people to see does not seem professional to me. Nothing more nothing less. Roblimo doesn't post stuff like that, Cliff doesn't (usually), Katz just needs to be more liberal with periods.
Whether YOU rank those [cnn] higher or not doesnt matter one itsy, teeny, little bit.
It doesn't and I never said it did.
Typical /. response to any criticism, no matter how minor or trivial. 'Go build your own'. That's hardly something even worth responding to, it's so disingeneous, a last ditch defense when you can't think of anything else. In any case, my point still stands unassaulted, there is no excuse not to take (literally) a few seconds and look over your writing before you post it.
But thats just my opinion, and I state it as such.
Well, good for you, that was just so gosh darn +5 Insightful. I mean, wow, you didn't put words in my mouth, take them out of context or even totally ignore what I was saying.
Yes they are very useful, but only when the patents are legitimate and are used to their intended purpose. These days anything under the sun is patentable (assuming it runs on a Sun, hehe, owww, bad joke...), business methods, code... Patents were also meant to encourage development and innovations, where people can build devices and other ideas (possibly patentable as well) on top of your patents, they're not supposed to be used by huge corporations to club their competition when the going gets tough.
In any case, saying they have to wade through thousands of stories a day is just a red herring. No matter how many they have to wade through they only post a few. It's the posting that matters. I don't care if Taco corrects the spelling of all the submissions before he checks them out, all that matters is that he check spelling before _posting_. It literally only takes a few seconds. It's the right thing to do. Would you release code to the entire world without comments, with generic variable names and no indenting? Of course not, you'd be embarassed to. So why make such simple mistakes when posting stories to a site you built from the ground, that you make a living off, that the entire world reads?
And it's not like /. stories are time sensitive. No one's gonna die or get hurt if a story is a few seconds late while Taco pulls up a new browser window for dictionary.com . /. posts are just regurgitations of other stories, and the occasional exclusive/original features definitely don't have any urgency. I don't understand what the problem is.
I dunno, it's a matter of talking pride in everything you do, no matter how small or important. Spelling mistakes just give out a strong impression of unprofessionalism and slopiness.
People today know all about unions, at least as they stand today. Here is what we know happens when a union comes in:
Did I miss something? I'm sure I did, those are just my major beefs unions. Unions have been highly successful in industries where the worker org structure is very flat, or the work is extremely dangerous. The second one is understandable, lets look at the first part.
Factories, physical labor industries... there are a bunch of front-line floor workers, some foremen, the rest are all management and administrators. At a table they sit opposite unions. Factory floor workers have virtually no chance of ever advancing beyond their current position. They had no new skills to acquire to do a lateral career change.
Compare this to the information industry, where the org structure is very deep, from data entry and html code monkeys and tech support to high level architecture designers, there are plenty of opportunities for upward advancement, well into upper management, even for the lowest of the low given enough determination and education. And there is a lot to learn, new skills to acquire and so forth to do a career change in case things go awry. So you're a java programmer right now? No problem, take a few evening courses and you can be a db admin, or a network admin, technical sales, even management. IT is a highly competitive and fast moving industry, and quick changes are made on a regular basis.
If you're putting bolt DF878454A on part Y2643-L 8 hours a day and your company decides they no longer need as many of you, or they have a robot to do your job, or maybe Y2643-L is now obsolete, they're very motivated to fire you. It's not like they're losing thousands of dollars in recruiting and training, they're not losing any critical knowledge or skills. If you lose a finger while putting on that bolt a similar situation could occur. This is where unions come in, to protect the ones with the least leverage.
The most common argument for unions in IT is that not everyone is making 6 figures and working in a lavish environment, not everyone is l337 (not even you), and even if you are, for how long? Who's to say your company won't suddenly change into another Ford plant? The truth is we're not all highly skilled, highly paid and highly sought after, we're not really arrogant or think we're so great we don't need unions. But, the IT industry has it good, and will for many years to come, until the next huge business ideology develops in a couple hundred years (space travel/exploration/mining comes to mind here). And by then we'll (well, our great-great-great-great-grand kids) be the cogs and automatons of IT, easily replacable, and the next wave of workers in the new industry will again be hot dogs. And the same question will be asked; should we unionize like our IT employed fathers were a few generations ago, and we'll have come full circle.
Maybe unions can change, but history so far shown this is not the case, unions are (almost by definiton) highly resistant to change, change is bad, change is when people go on strike, when they get fired and when they're forced to retire. Change is not opportunity for unions. So excuse us if we're a little slow in seeing a need for unions in IT.
They might get a sunburn ;)
This all really depends on how big you want to be. Of course one starts small, and all that. I personally don't know the market in Australia, but I gather there are 1 or 2 major telcos/ISPs and some smaller ones. The big problem these days (in the US/Canada anyways) is that you really have to be pretty big to start an ISP. The start up costs are huge. People expect quite a bit these days. Think bandwidth (huge cost), hardware (you do want some damn reliable servers), people (tech support, customer service, admins, some management). Dealing with telcos, carriers and vendors is a nightmare, you need to advertise and market yourself. You need to properly configure and run mail/pop/imap servers, radius servers, terminal/dial-in servers, routers, you need to have a good architecture in place (even a small ISP will have many machines). You need to arrange for a news feed of some sort (many users will expect this) which will burn through your bandwidth in no time. You will need a professional web presence, and some tools for your clients to manage their accounts (or be prepared to hire lots of customer service people to handle simple things like password changes and mailbox purges). You need to have a proper account management system, and a hopefully automated account creation and maintenance system. And we're not even into the business and money side yet. Without a question you need to have good business sense, unless you know others to do this you will have to do the initial hiring. Then there is the question of is it worth it? From an experience point of view, if you don't have too much to lose it's definitely worth starting and running your own business. But these days with all the big ISPs tying up the dialup market and fighting over each others' user base there isn't much money to be made on dialup. The margins are very slim. Think about all your costs, estimate your client base (be optimistic), multiply those by $20-35/month and figure out how long it'll take you to make a profit. The big money is to be made providing 'business solutions': web hosting, ecommerce stuffs, connectivity. And you can't do those on any significant scale unless you're already big and well known. Sort of a catch-22. In summary, it's really really tough, (should have started 5-6 years ago, hmm?) but like many people here will tell you, there _is_ money in providing good, friendly and reliable service, people will still pay for this, despite the $10/month deals you see every so often. Probably won't make you a millionaire (even and AUD one), but you can make a living on it eventually if things to right.
Yeah, and not just at the ISP uplink level, what do you think the CO (where your DSL line goes to) is connected to the ISP with? A T1. Sometimes better.
Windows wouldn't have to drop any features to be UNIX certified. But it would have to add some, most notably hard links, which to this day are not possible with FAT or NTFS.
That said, the movie was pretty bad, and definitely not worth the $11.50 CDN ticket price. (As an aside, I have a question: was this movie played too loud? I noticed many parts were really loud, and I understand the reasoning behind it, but I'm half-deaf from listening to loud music :) and I thought it was way too loud) Yeah, it was bad. The action was bad (except for the girl knife fights), the effects were rather average, with the face effects the only memorable bits. The acting was attrocious (except for Anck-Su-Namun, she's realy cool ;) the dialogue literally made me cringe it was so painful to listen to, the plot (what plot there was) was pathetic, none of the characters were believable. Need I go on? Take any film genre and sub genre, and this movie failed to do well in any of them. It was not funny, it was not scary, it was not suspenseful, it was not romantic, it wasn't dramatic, it wasn't even cheesy, it was just borderline entertaining.
The first Mummy movie has a reputation for good sound, and this one will likely follow as well, so get the DVD if you have a good sound system. There are better and more entertaining movies playing this week, go see them with your friends instead, at least you'll have something to talk about afterwards.
You are incorrect a to the cause of innovation. People don't innovate because something doens't work right, they innovate because they can make it work even better. They innovate because that's what people do. Even perfectly working technologies get replaced by better (or just different) things. The batteries in Dell laptops, even if they worked perfectly, will be replaced by better, smaller, longer lasting and more environment friendly batteries, and it has nothing to do with how good (or bad) they are right now.
Unions are extremely strict in this respect. If you're ever seen anything you're not explicitely supposed to be doing you're obviously taking someone else's job away from them. If you have to do something that someone else in the union is paid to do, tough luck, you'll be put in your place quickly. Unfortunatelly, those of us who like their jobs (despite being unionized) and like to work and want to excell, unions are just shackles, you can't lift a finger without their say so.
Now go away, don't you have a coffee break to take or something?