Maybe they could use Crumb's "Black Angels" which was supposed to be played at volumes "on the threshold of pain". (I have listened to it loud but haven't pushed my speakers -- or my hearing -- quite that far.)
If your camera is going to record a vast amount of data only to throw away 90 percent of it when you compress, why not just save battery power and memory and record 90 percent less data in the first place?..
That's what a digital camera is about, isn't it?
Perhaps if you're using some low-end digital camera but not if your camera allows you to save images in RAW format. Sort of like it was in the days you might have spent in the darkroom: if it ain't on the negative you're not going to get it back in the darkroom. Why throw information away before even viewing it? The only reason to compress images (IMHO) is if you're going to put them up on a web site or transmit them via email. Yeah, compressed images allow you to save more on the memory card but memory card prices are such that you can throw a much bigger card than the one that shipped with the camera and shoot all day long. (I have an older camera that only takes up to 4GB cards and I still haven't been able to fill it up in less than a day.)
I guess I don't see the advantage to throwing away imagery information and praying that a mathematical algorithm might be able to get it back.
Come to the search game late then don't complain about being behind. "Gee... we've had a new search engine for, what, three months now? And we're not leading the market? Whaa!" It's not Google's fault that your previous attempts to field a search engine sucked like a tornado.
It shouldn't have been as bad as it was. I don't think the hockey puck shape was the problem. I think the main problem with it was that the buttons were placed on the side of the mouse. I've used a hockey-puck-style mouse on VMS workstations (ages ago though I still have one of those mice) and found it very comfortable to use. The difference was the three buttons were on the front of the mouse rather than the sides. That made it possible to rest your entire hand on the mouse with your index, middle, and ring fingers positioned over the buttons. The Apple design seems to force you to hold the thing with mainly your thumb and pinky and then use your thumb for most of the clicking; an awful design choice, IMHO, since, at least for me, my thumb is probably the least agile finger. I'd bet Apple sacked the ergonomics engineer that came up with that design.
...I was going to say that Monty Python already did a sketch like this. But once I saw how many mosquitos it was capable of downing, I think I want one of those suckers to cover my backyard.
It was only last year that I finally dumped some 1GB disks after copying off all the files. Four full height beasts that consumed something like 40W apiece. (They hadn't been used for about 10 years and were just taking up space and really just too expensive to run.) Other oddities I haven't been able to part with yet: a 200MB SCSI drive that I ran in a '486 back about '91 and an 80MB SCSI drive that someone gave me. I have it in a test system with an older release of SuSE on it. I'm still running some 2GB disks in our firewall; they're close to 20 years old and darned near indestructable (compared to the 500GB SATA drive that died in a matter of weeks). Then there's the 360KB and 1.2MB floppy drives and the ALR 386 motherboard that I keep on hand if I ever have the urge to throw something together to play some old Infocom games on. And who doesn't have some old UNIBUS core memory boards or some Q-BUS wirewrap prototyping boards laying around. And, of course, a bunch of Model M keyboards. (This one's pushing 18 years of use and the way these things hold up, I'm set for life for keyboards.)
Weird? Hell, it's all still useful stuff in the right hands.
A few comments about the photos in the article: First, the captions cracked me up. If the author thought the IBM Selectric was old, he ought to see the old manual Underwood we have in the basement. Does anyone remember when Wang sold mostly-DOS-compatible PCs? (Yep, they really did. I worked with a woman who brought hers into the office to use. We were mostly using CPTs back then. Only a few of us "early adopters" hauled their PCs into work.) The PC Mag article on plotters reminded me that I ran across an old carton had a small collection of HP 7470/7475 plotter pens rolling around in the bottom. God only knows why I hung onto those. (For some reason I didn't throw them away after discovering them. The Pack Rat's Curse.)
If I'm ever in the area, I've got to check this place out. I'd better leave my credit cards with the missus, though. Otherwise it could turn out to be an expensive day.
It's starting to seem like it. At some point, a judge is going to have to teach these buttheads a lesson by dismissing the damned case with prejudice. Or override any jury's damage amount and give them something like $100 dollars with the admonishment "Take or leave it but never file another suit over Thomas's copyright violations ever again.".
... South Carolina should have been allowed to secede. I mean, crimeny, just what are the qualifications for public office in that state? Documentation that you've previously been institutionalized?
"For example, interface inconsistencies between software modules which pass data from one part of a program to another occurred at the rate of one in every seven interfaces on average in the programming language Fortran, and one in every 37 interfaces in the language C. This is hugely worrying when you realise that just one error -- just one -- will usually invalidate a computer program. What he also discovered, even more worryingly, is that the accuracy of results declined from six significant figures to one significant figure during the running of programs.'"
The best way to keep this from happening is to avoid passing formatted, human-readable data between programs. That's what FORTRAN's unformatted I/O was meant for. Same thing for C. Don't convert to a convenient human-readable form until the very end.
Actually, I heard someone propose (semi-seriously , I think) back when the initial onslaught of AoL users hit the Internet and viruses began propagating that anyone using a computer running a Microsoft operating system should be denied access to the internet. (Things weren't so bad when AoL was mostly its own little closed world.) Just a few years earlier, you pretty much had to know someone with an internet connection -- say an administrator at a local college -- and show that you knew how to properly administer a computer system before you could even get a dial-in connection to send mail or transfer files via UUCP. Once the totally computer-ignorant masses running Windows-based systems began accessing the 'net, that's when things started going to hell in a hand-basket.
Mundie's license should require that applicants ditch their Windows OS before even being allowed to take the license exam. Any people out there want to figure the odss of that happening? I suspect that Mundie's idea of a license is merely paying some government department a fee and filling out an application. That's not a license but a set of identification papers. As in: May I see your papers? Mundie's almost certainly trying to divert attention from the fact that his company's crappy software is what's made the Internet the mess that it is today? The saddest thing -- to me anyway -- is that there would be people out there that are actually looking to Microsoft to provide a solution. Any parallels between Mundie's brilliant idea to fix the Internet and former Wall Street bankers trying to fix the economic mess they helped to create? Yet another example of the ideas in ``Shock Doctrine''?
... and I didn't see anything in the article that led me to believe that this upturn wouldn't just be an increase in business for hardware and software vendors. Most people working in "IT" work for other types of businesses. That hardware manufacturers and software development companies are going to see improvement is great but that's only a small part of the business environment that involves "IT".
I suspect that what Forrester is seeing is that a lot of companies may be, at long last, planning on opening up the purse strings to go out and buy the equipment and software for projects that have been on hold for a long time. Good news for the Dells, HPs, and Microsofts of the world. Call me pessimistic, but I also suspect that they'll be executing those projects with existing employees and some contractors (as needed) rather than adding actual FTEs.
There were a couple of scenes in Avatar that reminded me that I'd been meaning to reread the old Stainless Steel Rat novels. (Maybe it's just me but bits of Pandora reminded me of the planet Pyrrus in the Deathworld trilogy.) Making one or more of them into movies would be great. Not really a reboot since, IFAIK, they've never been in the theatres or on TV before.
Most peoples' phones still "go off" when the text arrives, though. It's an interruption to everyone around them.
My worst-case example of someone (younger) who expected the instant reponse to any message was a woman that I worked with some years ago. She'd send you an email with a question. Then she'd send you a text page wanting to know if you saw her email. Finally, she'd show up at your cubicle demanding an answer to the original email. All within a time span of 15-20 minutes.
Want to pour a new driveway, build a retaining wall, blow up a whale with TNT? There's a site for that.
OK. It's lucky that I have a Model M keyboard and can remove the keys to clean up from the near spit take after reading that.
But would you buy a house if you knew that it was wired by whatever random jackass lived there before you? No, you buy a house that was wired by a qualified electrician."
After having lived in a house (20+ years ago) that was built by a guy in his spare time, I know exactly what you mean. Even though the builder was himself a carpenter, he didn't know squat about electrical work or plumbing. Our wiring was, I think, the inspiration for the Douglas's house in Green Acres. You actually could not brew coffee in the kitchen or use a hair drier in the bathroom at the same time. And the plumbing looked like something out a WWII submarine. (The guy was so cheap, he wouldn't spring for a trap but made one out of spare bits of pipe he cut to size and threaded himself and a bunch of unions. There were so many connections it was a miracle that any water made it out the other end.)
I've seen servers that were set up by software devs masquerading as IT who followed online guides. Did they work? Yes, sort of. They were tough to maintain, performed poorly, had *no* extensibility, and if anything went wrong you were royally screwed."
Even better is when the folks doing this cookbook approach deviate from the recipe and don't document their changes. I've run into this after inheriting systems from departments that had manage their own systems until things were centralized. One system, in particular, had been configured by a consultant (primarily a Java developer) who was never adequately supervised or required to supply documentation as to how he set up applications and utilities he installed on the system. You might be able to see the way things were configured but you'll never be able to figure out why they're that way. I seem to recall my boss mentioning that, had we known it had been slapped together the way it was, we would never have allowed them to turn that system over to the infrastructure team to manage. Too late for us. The consulant was already in his next high-paying gig, probably sowing more seeds of confusion.
And in fact there was a few months later a similar project in which the entire tech team was worked effectively double-shifts for months, and despite assurances that our work would be recognized we haven't seen a dime extra.
Ah... I was right. No respect whatsoever for your contributions to the company.
During the kickoff meeting (at which was we discussed the need for extensive overtime, getting up at 3 AM to launch the product to production, and so on), I asked what us developers would get as a reward for our hard work. I was told, and I quote, "You get to keep your job."
I would have made a mental note to watch out for whoever made such a comment in response to your completely valid (IMHO) question. He or she obviously has little to no respect for your position/function in the company. I'd guess that if it hadn't been too expensive, your entire team would be out on the pavement and a consultant brought in to accomplish their short-term project.
... the cumulative IQ of the "jury of their peers". Over 2000? (Imagine the sort of questions that'll be asked of the potential jurors by the defense counsel.) Ah, heck. With the way most courts seem to work nowadays, it'd probably be lucky to break 1000.
Heck. They've been doing that for decades. When my mother was working for city government (late 50s/early 60s), she used to tells us stories she'd been told from cops who bragged about turning on the lights and siren to speed through town in order to get to the Steak-N-Shake in time to have lunch with their buddies.
Everyone in upper management where I used to work. Just the subtitle -- "Why Principles Are More Important Than Process" -- will send them right over the edge. They wouldn't do anything without some process being defined to control how everyone would accomplish it. "Process" was their life and they can't imagine anything happening without it. It was their ultimate mechanism for killing innovation in IT.
"there are lots of low density areas where the Telcos have not bothered to put in the infrastructure to handle DSL"
And this despite the monthly charge that appeared on all our phone bills that was supposed to fund that infrastructure build-out. It probably paid for more DC lobbyists to fight regulation instead of what it was intended for.
.. for people whose minds haven't already deteriorated?
Why was the study limited to people 72 and older? I thought Ginko was supposed to prevent the deterioration of mental function. Not restore it to people who may have already lost it. Since the mind is supposed to begin losing some of its function beginning at much earlier ages (I've read that some function begins to be lost in the late 20s), why the heck wasn't the study including younger people?
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I haven't been able to stomach the excuse for coffee that Starbuck's sells for many years. Now I know why.
Maybe they could use Crumb's "Black Angels" which was supposed to be played at volumes "on the threshold of pain". (I have listened to it loud but haven't pushed my speakers -- or my hearing -- quite that far.)
Perhaps if you're using some low-end digital camera but not if your camera allows you to save images in RAW format. Sort of like it was in the days you might have spent in the darkroom: if it ain't on the negative you're not going to get it back in the darkroom. Why throw information away before even viewing it? The only reason to compress images (IMHO) is if you're going to put them up on a web site or transmit them via email. Yeah, compressed images allow you to save more on the memory card but memory card prices are such that you can throw a much bigger card than the one that shipped with the camera and shoot all day long. (I have an older camera that only takes up to 4GB cards and I still haven't been able to fill it up in less than a day.)
I guess I don't see the advantage to throwing away imagery information and praying that a mathematical algorithm might be able to get it back.
... bein fair play?
Come to the search game late then don't complain about being behind. "Gee... we've had a new search engine for, what, three months now? And we're not leading the market? Whaa!" It's not Google's fault that your previous attempts to field a search engine sucked like a tornado.
It shouldn't have been as bad as it was. I don't think the hockey puck shape was the problem. I think the main problem with it was that the buttons were placed on the side of the mouse. I've used a hockey-puck-style mouse on VMS workstations (ages ago though I still have one of those mice) and found it very comfortable to use. The difference was the three buttons were on the front of the mouse rather than the sides. That made it possible to rest your entire hand on the mouse with your index, middle, and ring fingers positioned over the buttons. The Apple design seems to force you to hold the thing with mainly your thumb and pinky and then use your thumb for most of the clicking; an awful design choice, IMHO, since, at least for me, my thumb is probably the least agile finger. I'd bet Apple sacked the ergonomics engineer that came up with that design.
...I was going to say that Monty Python already did a sketch like this. But once I saw how many mosquitos it was capable of downing, I think I want one of those suckers to cover my backyard.
It was only last year that I finally dumped some 1GB disks after copying off all the files. Four full height beasts that consumed something like 40W apiece. (They hadn't been used for about 10 years and were just taking up space and really just too expensive to run.) Other oddities I haven't been able to part with yet: a 200MB SCSI drive that I ran in a '486 back about '91 and an 80MB SCSI drive that someone gave me. I have it in a test system with an older release of SuSE on it. I'm still running some 2GB disks in our firewall; they're close to 20 years old and darned near indestructable (compared to the 500GB SATA drive that died in a matter of weeks). Then there's the 360KB and 1.2MB floppy drives and the ALR 386 motherboard that I keep on hand if I ever have the urge to throw something together to play some old Infocom games on. And who doesn't have some old UNIBUS core memory boards or some Q-BUS wirewrap prototyping boards laying around. And, of course, a bunch of Model M keyboards. (This one's pushing 18 years of use and the way these things hold up, I'm set for life for keyboards.)
Weird? Hell, it's all still useful stuff in the right hands.
A few comments about the photos in the article: First, the captions cracked me up. If the author thought the IBM Selectric was old, he ought to see the old manual Underwood we have in the basement. Does anyone remember when Wang sold mostly-DOS-compatible PCs? (Yep, they really did. I worked with a woman who brought hers into the office to use. We were mostly using CPTs back then. Only a few of us "early adopters" hauled their PCs into work.) The PC Mag article on plotters reminded me that I ran across an old carton had a small collection of HP 7470/7475 plotter pens rolling around in the bottom. God only knows why I hung onto those. (For some reason I didn't throw them away after discovering them. The Pack Rat's Curse.)
If I'm ever in the area, I've got to check this place out. I'd better leave my credit cards with the missus, though. Otherwise it could turn out to be an expensive day.
It's starting to seem like it. At some point, a judge is going to have to teach these buttheads a lesson by dismissing the damned case with prejudice. Or override any jury's damage amount and give them something like $100 dollars with the admonishment "Take or leave it but never file another suit over Thomas's copyright violations ever again.".
... South Carolina should have been allowed to secede. I mean, crimeny, just what are the qualifications for public office in that state? Documentation that you've previously been institutionalized?
The best way to keep this from happening is to avoid passing formatted, human-readable data between programs. That's what FORTRAN's unformatted I/O was meant for. Same thing for C. Don't convert to a convenient human-readable form until the very end.
Don't make me laugh.
Actually, I heard someone propose (semi-seriously , I think) back when the initial onslaught of AoL users hit the Internet and viruses began propagating that anyone using a computer running a Microsoft operating system should be denied access to the internet. (Things weren't so bad when AoL was mostly its own little closed world.) Just a few years earlier, you pretty much had to know someone with an internet connection -- say an administrator at a local college -- and show that you knew how to properly administer a computer system before you could even get a dial-in connection to send mail or transfer files via UUCP. Once the totally computer-ignorant masses running Windows-based systems began accessing the 'net, that's when things started going to hell in a hand-basket.
Mundie's license should require that applicants ditch their Windows OS before even being allowed to take the license exam. Any people out there want to figure the odss of that happening? I suspect that Mundie's idea of a license is merely paying some government department a fee and filling out an application. That's not a license but a set of identification papers. As in: May I see your papers? Mundie's almost certainly trying to divert attention from the fact that his company's crappy software is what's made the Internet the mess that it is today? The saddest thing -- to me anyway -- is that there would be people out there that are actually looking to Microsoft to provide a solution. Any parallels between Mundie's brilliant idea to fix the Internet and former Wall Street bankers trying to fix the economic mess they helped to create? Yet another example of the ideas in ``Shock Doctrine''?
... that explains how the whole Mentos+soda thing was actually a failed attempt at cold fusion?
Are they looking for some candidates to shut down? I've got a nice list of IP addresses I gleaned from my Junk folder.
Free for the asking.
Heck... I've been using a P1 sig for years now.
... and I didn't see anything in the article that led me to believe that this upturn wouldn't just be an increase in business for hardware and software vendors. Most people working in "IT" work for other types of businesses. That hardware manufacturers and software development companies are going to see improvement is great but that's only a small part of the business environment that involves "IT".
I suspect that what Forrester is seeing is that a lot of companies may be, at long last, planning on opening up the purse strings to go out and buy the equipment and software for projects that have been on hold for a long time. Good news for the Dells, HPs, and Microsofts of the world. Call me pessimistic, but I also suspect that they'll be executing those projects with existing employees and some contractors (as needed) rather than adding actual FTEs.
There were a couple of scenes in Avatar that reminded me that I'd been meaning to reread the old Stainless Steel Rat novels. (Maybe it's just me but bits of Pandora reminded me of the planet Pyrrus in the Deathworld trilogy.) Making one or more of them into movies would be great. Not really a reboot since, IFAIK, they've never been in the theatres or on TV before.
Most peoples' phones still "go off" when the text arrives, though. It's an interruption to everyone around them.
My worst-case example of someone (younger) who expected the instant reponse to any message was a woman that I worked with some years ago. She'd send you an email with a question. Then she'd send you a text page wanting to know if you saw her email. Finally, she'd show up at your cubicle demanding an answer to the original email. All within a time span of 15-20 minutes.
OK. It's lucky that I have a Model M keyboard and can remove the keys to clean up from the near spit take after reading that.
After having lived in a house (20+ years ago) that was built by a guy in his spare time, I know exactly what you mean. Even though the builder was himself a carpenter, he didn't know squat about electrical work or plumbing. Our wiring was, I think, the inspiration for the Douglas's house in Green Acres. You actually could not brew coffee in the kitchen or use a hair drier in the bathroom at the same time. And the plumbing looked like something out a WWII submarine. (The guy was so cheap, he wouldn't spring for a trap but made one out of spare bits of pipe he cut to size and threaded himself and a bunch of unions. There were so many connections it was a miracle that any water made it out the other end.)
Even better is when the folks doing this cookbook approach deviate from the recipe and don't document their changes. I've run into this after inheriting systems from departments that had manage their own systems until things were centralized. One system, in particular, had been configured by a consultant (primarily a Java developer) who was never adequately supervised or required to supply documentation as to how he set up applications and utilities he installed on the system. You might be able to see the way things were configured but you'll never be able to figure out why they're that way. I seem to recall my boss mentioning that, had we known it had been slapped together the way it was, we would never have allowed them to turn that system over to the infrastructure team to manage. Too late for us. The consulant was already in his next high-paying gig, probably sowing more seeds of confusion.
Ah... I was right. No respect whatsoever for your contributions to the company.
I would have made a mental note to watch out for whoever made such a comment in response to your completely valid (IMHO) question. He or she obviously has little to no respect for your position/function in the company. I'd guess that if it hadn't been too expensive, your entire team would be out on the pavement and a consultant brought in to accomplish their short-term project.
... the cumulative IQ of the "jury of their peers". Over 2000? (Imagine the sort of questions that'll be asked of the potential jurors by the defense counsel.) Ah, heck. With the way most courts seem to work nowadays, it'd probably be lucky to break 1000.
Heck. They've been doing that for decades. When my mother was working for city government (late 50s/early 60s), she used to tells us stories she'd been told from cops who bragged about turning on the lights and siren to speed through town in order to get to the Steak-N-Shake in time to have lunch with their buddies.
Everyone in upper management where I used to work. Just the subtitle -- "Why Principles Are More Important Than Process" -- will send them right over the edge. They wouldn't do anything without some process being defined to control how everyone would accomplish it. "Process" was their life and they can't imagine anything happening without it. It was their ultimate mechanism for killing innovation in IT.
And this despite the monthly charge that appeared on all our phone bills that was supposed to fund that infrastructure build-out. It probably paid for more DC lobbyists to fight regulation instead of what it was intended for.
.. for people whose minds haven't already deteriorated?
Why was the study limited to people 72 and older? I thought Ginko was supposed to prevent the deterioration of mental function. Not restore it to people who may have already lost it. Since the mind is supposed to begin losing some of its function beginning at much earlier ages (I've read that some function begins to be lost in the late 20s), why the heck wasn't the study including younger people?