Nice to see that Cuneiform wasn't on the list. I tend to get most of my music lately from either Cuneiform or other labels available from Wayside Music (Cuneiform used to be the ``house'' label; much the same as WaxTrax (sp?) was a label started by the record store of the same name in Chicago.) I doubt that labels like ReR and other foreign labels would be RIAA members.
BTW, Is this the VAXman from Fermilab? (Just curious.)
--
I was thinking about how bugtraq might have more reports related to Linux than other operating systems. I suspect that the reason is that there are multiple distributions containing a utility that contains a bug, say sendmail. (I don't want to pick on sendmail, really, I've used it -- but I have kept patches up to date.:-) It just has a reputation.) Now suppose that 10, 20, 30, or more distributions include the buggy version of sendmail. Does this count as one submission on bugtraq? Or does each distribution that includes that buggy version bump up the bug count?
Please excuse me if I'm way off base here; I typically look at CERT or CIAC for security matters. BTW, the latest bulletin on CIAC lists 12 issues. Only two of these is an obvious Linux problem. Four were Microsoft related. For the year I see 61 bulletins; I counted 19 regarding Microsoft and only the 2 I mentioned earlier that were specific to Linux. (Of course, some of the utilities that had bulletins issued might run on Linux but I didn't look quite that deep.)
When I read the last paragraph of this interview, I nearly leapt out of my chair. I, as a consumer, DO NOT WANT CDs to go away! I still have and play old LPs (these are titles that will never be available in the CD format). If this guy thinks I'm going to start replacing CDs with some new digital format he's got another thing coming. And I'm sure he'll hear from thousands of other music enthusiasts as well.
I'm positive that the replacement format will require payment every time I download their watermarked MP3 format files. Whoops! My hard disk crashed. Whoops! The batteries died (or whatever). Guess I'll have to repurchase my music collection. I got the impression that an ulterior motive of the SDMI might be to corner the market on digital audio players just the same way that the CSS got a stranglehold on the licensing of DVD players. Next thing you know, you and I are paying royalties per listen.
Also, I'm already not any fan of a new format that is a step backward in terms of sound quality (MP3s are that sort of step as far as I can tell). I wonder how long it will be before people begin noticing that they can, indeed, hear a difference in the sound of watermarked audio files after all. Some of us consumers aren't half deaf.
Let's hope that the marketplace has the sense to make the SDMI watermarked audio format Dead On Arrival. --
``Remember, raw devices also means only one file per disk.''
Depends on your UNIX. Under Tru64 and some other Unices, you have storage management tools (under Tru64 there's Logical Storage Manager, for example) that'll let you slice up a disk into as many pieces as you like. You then access the disks through either/dev/vol/... or/dev/rvol/... (if you really want to use raw data partitions). Striping across SCSI adapters for better I/O performance is quite easy.
``P.S. $2K is way low for both the hardware and the database!''
Agreed. Some of the dollar estimates that people are throwing around are fairly humorous. --
``oracle uses its own raw partitions/filesystem to store its data. this speeds up oracle''
It doesn't have to manage it's own disk space. And it may, under certain conditions, provide better performance. We have been moving away from raw data partitions. This after running some benchmarks of a large table residing on raw partitions vs. the same data residing in tables in a filesystem. The performance was actually better while accessing the data in the filesystem. We're talking 10+% better performance not just a few percent. Our experience, based on our benchmarks, and discussions with Oracle technical people, is that the preference for using raw data partitions was based on performance tests using older versions of UNIX and less capable filesystems. Of course, your mileage may vary.
Aside from performance, if your database changes frequently, adding and deleting tablespaces is a major pain (with long downtime) when you're using raw data partitions but is a snap when you're using filesystems for data. If your database is fairly static raw partitions might buy some little bit of performance but, again, at the expense of managability. IMHO, raw data partitions just aren't worth it. Even if comparitive performance were a wash, the easier means of managing the database weighs in favor of filesystems.
``Alpha is cheap. A reasonably good alpha is under 5000$.''
I think you're talking about an Alpha-based workstation. No one's going to be hosting a 30+GB database on a workstation. They would be looking at a DS10 or DS20 at a minimum. Expect to pay something in the area of US$20K for a smallishly configured DS20.
``Storage will be a 1000$ more.''
A whopping $1000 for disk space to host a database? Only if you plan on sticking the entire thing on a single 36GB drive which would be an inexcusable performance hit. And that would leave no money for any kind of mirroring.
I guess this $6000 configuration isn't intended for a production system. --
``With Intel, isn't the limit still 4CPU for the latest generation?''
I don't think so. Didn't the recent benchmark comparing IIS vs. the new webserver from RedHat run on an 8 CPU SMP system? You can get more CPUS... you just don't see them in the advertising aimed at Joe Sixpack. They tend to be just a bit on the pricy side.
...all the time in the Chicago area. It's getting to the point where nearly half of the phone calls we receive have `dead air' on the other end. Then, some time later, we get a call from a real telemarketer. The current theory is that the telemarketers have their computer call to see if anyone's at home, then queue up the call to one of their telemarketing drones who make the real call.
OK, this isn't exactly what the main posting's about. But this is: I have received several messages on our Ameritech voice mail containing what sound like computer synthesized messages. Mostly regarding whether I want/need new cellular service (Hint to Motorola: NO TO BOTH QUESTIONS!) Since I cannot fast forward through voice mail on Ameritech's service, this really torques me off. If it keeps up I'll have to cancel my voice mail and go back to a tape machine. Wonder if I complain to Ameritech enough whether they'll do anything about the annoyance... Nah! What am I thinking?
www.dejanews.com was a usable site. Once they made the transition to www.deja.com it's been spiraling downward, out of control.
The site is one of the most difficult to navigate that I've ever seen (and I've seen a lot of difficult sites). Just the activity of looking up a topic to see what other's are talking about is a total mess. Once upon a time you could search for, say, sound cards and actually find a discussion about what others are doing with sound cards. Nowadays, you perform that same search and you'll be very lucky to find a real discussion but you'll quickly be taken to product ratings complete with links to sites where you can buy sound cards. Not very useful when you're trying to solve a problem with a sound card.
Sending any complaints to Deja is like talking to a brick wall. They'll thank you for your input and then tell you that no one else seems to have the same complaint as you.
I plan on finding a means of getting an honest-to-God newsfeed as soon as I can. --
...is that this program is only for a portion of their coverage area. And their DSL coverage area only covers a small fraction of their service area. --
I would be, shall we say, less than happy to receive my very own personalized spin doctoring from some corporate PR department. Much preferred would be for corporations to do a little self-examination and find out what it is about themsleves that has customers (or employees) so steamed up. These corporations should bear in mind that the ones who actually go to the effort to post a nastygram on a web site or even go so far as to create a web site pointing out the corporations shortcomings are only the smallest minority of their unhappy customers. Word gets out that they're going after their unhappy customers and they'll have a PR problem that they will can't even imagine. And nailing a disgruntled employee after they post complaints about or blow the whistle on their employer will do, um, wonders for their recruitment effort; especially in a labor market tilted in the employees favor like it is now (and is likely to remain, at least for high tech workers, for the foreseeable future).
I would consider it an evening well-spent putting together a cover letter explaining how I really don't want to receive personal attention from their PR department and to please just spend more time cleaning up your act/image/products, etc. etc., and a mechanism for me to easily forward that cover letter (with their email as an attachment) back to them. If anyone out their develops such procedure, let me know about it. --
Just out of curiosity: Did anyone else get the impression that the RedHat system was configured to handle the SCSI adapter using a loadable module? Is there a performance disadvantage to running your SCSI drives using the loadable module as opposed to having the driver resident in the kernel? I would have thought that they'd rebuild the kernel and include the driver in the kernel.
Also, why not use a Pentium optimized distribution, like Mandrake, instead of the generic 386 oriented RedHat? All these magazine testers seem to do this; apparently when they think of Linux the gears in their heads turn only once and they come up with RedHat (no offense, RH, I use your stuff and am happy with it). --
``Just a fact: they teach kids to count, add, subtract, multiply, and divide with a calculator now.''
OK. McDonalds has to have cash registers with a button for each kind of hamburger rather than requiring the person behind the counter actually enter the actual price. Wonder which came first: students who didn't know math requiring McDonalds to install the idiot cash registers? Or did McDonalds install the new cash registers so the schools decided that students didn't really have to know much math after all. Those automated change dispensers attached to cash registers pretty eliminated the need to know any math. Subtraction is so hard.
Children will learn more through the interactivity of the classroom than by the solitary process of plopping down in front of a PC with a crappy piece of ``educational'' software. My girls will be learning their math on the computer (unless it's numerical integration and that probably won't be until high school). --
Mirror, mirror, on the wall... Who's the most innovative of all?
``"Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates is the most admired man among information technology executives."''
Is someone at Microsoft trying to garner brownie points with Bill Gates by coming up with these web sites? I couldn't make up my mind to laugh out loud or toss cookies (I had the misfortune to visit the FIN (?) site just after eaten lunch -- I should have known better).
\begin{aside}
``footnote: why the heck has Slashdot buggered with the link colours?... It's the freaking de facto standard, and changing it is just a PITA for everyone.''
Slashdot isn't the only site to have made questionable changes to their websites. Linux Today's site change (about a month ago) forced me to set by browser to override their site's (all all other sites' as well) color selections because the unvisited and the visited sites all came out the same color. Add to that, returning to the site after following a link and you lost your place; hard to tell where you were when all link colors are the same. InfoWorld Electric had to tinker with their online forums some time ago and broke them... badly. The first time they did this, the reverted back to the previous layout. The second time they broke them, they (IWE) just turned them off and they've been disabled for around 6 months or so. Hopefully, there's a few out-of-work web designers as a result of that fiasco. Anyway, Slashdot's plain-vanilla, light-on-the-graphics view works fine for me. I wish more sites had the user-selectable interface that Slashdot has.
Has anyone else noticed how web sites that are connected to long-time print magazines seem to be the most likely to be the ones whose sites are the least readable, the most likely to have forced (read: squinty) font sizes, gratuitous animated GIFs, pixel-based table widths, tinkered with link colors, and other eye-candy that might look OK in print but is a nightmare for the online viewer?
... for the review. I bought a copy of this book a few weeks ago to read on my vacation. I'm thinking I made a good choice. Check out G.K.'s web site for excerpts, etc. (Sorry I cannot lay my hands on the URL just now.)
``... they have an awefully big picture with an awfully small sidebar of text.''
Right. Even I know how to make the text wrap around an image on a web page.
Congratulations on one of the least readable sites I've encountered in recent weeks.
Also... Are 67 individuals enough to draw much of a conclusion? What was the age distribution? I have a feeling that if they managed to find a bunch of people who regularly read newspapers that don't have a ton of photos, say the Wall Street Journal, that could skew their results enough to make the study's result quite questionable. Testing a population that prefers People magazine would, I'm betting, result in a different conclusion. --
Ouch! That would be nasty. I guess I'd be less likely to encounter those sort of errors since I tend to enclose literal strings in quotes, especially if I'm hard-coding an argument in a hash like in your example. Even if they're not required the quotes can save your behind and haven't been a problem... so far. Only a little extra typing.
``...just try using perl -w on a file that is residing on a remote web server...''
If you're referring to CGI scripts or something similar then I'd surely, whole-heartedly agree. Debugging Perl CGI scripts is a different animal altogether. I usually wind up having the script generate extra HTML output (if it's not causing outright server errors) or open a special file to write debug output to and it's a pain. But for general Perl scripts, say for daily sysadmin tasks, ``-w'' and its friends do just fine.
``Banks used to be closed on weekends, and were only open from around 10-4 on Mondays to Wednesdays, and 10-6 on Thursdays and Fridays.''
Depends on where you lived. I took out the cash for my first car late on a Saturday afternoon... from a drive-through.
There was no such thing as direct deposit, so everyone had to take their paycheques to the bank. Most people got paid on Wednesday or Thursday, in order to hit the one-hour window during their lunch-hour the following day, or the one-hour window after work on either Thursday or Friday.
I seem to recall that going to the bank was not such the big deal that you think it was... of course, you would have been a toddler in those days. I remember running into friends at the bank. Also, the need for instant cash that everyone seems to have now wasn't so widespread. I worked some summers at places that would cash employee's checks at the job site. (Mainly, we thought, so they could blow it all on beer when they got off work. Me? I could always wait until Saturday morning when I could walk to the bank.)
``There was no such thing as ABMs,...''
There still aren't. They're prohibited by a treaty. (I know, I know... you meant A-T-Ms.)
``...direct-debit payments at stores, and credit cards were not nearly as widespread as they are now, so most purchases were with cash. If you missed your one-hour opportunity to deposit your cheque and get enough cash for a week, then you were screwed until Monday at lunch.''
Most stores accepted checks for purchases. Nowadays, clerks look at you like you're from Mars when you want to pay with a check. If you were incapable of managing your money, I can see where not having 24x7 access to your bank could be a problem. Most people were able to plan their expenditures and have the appropriate amount of real cash on available, otherwise theyd write a check. As far as the easy availability of credit cards, one could argue that easy access to credit has not been such a good thing. You rarely heard of people declaring bankruptcy back in the good old '70s. Nowadays, it seems that every other person you meet has had a credit card revoked or has declared Chapter Something-or-other because they got themselves into financial trouble via easy access to credit. Not exactly progress, IMHO.
I'm not all that sentimental about those days. I just don't think that they were as bad as some people make them out to be. Things weren't bad, just different. --
First of all, I believe the phrase counts in that Wired came up with to be wildy inaccurate. At least it sure felt like these phrases were uttered more often than that.
Plus, I had this image of the plaintiff lawyer sitting at the table using a series of recorded objections (sort like Brian Wilson playing back comments on his tape recorders). Jeez! Every single question was objected to with something inane like: ``Ambiguous'', ``Lacks foundation'', ``Assumes facts not in evidence'', or, when in doubt, combine them altogether to say ``It's ambiguous. It's an incomplete hypothetical. Assumes facts not in evidence, and it calls for a legal conclusion''. It's truly sad that this is what passes as the quest for the truth in the American legal system nowadays.
From reading the deposition, it seems (unbelievably) that Jack Valenti had absolutely no idea that there's a legal proceeding underway until he was told so by his laywer. Therefore, he couldn't answer any questions since that would have violated client-lawyer confidentiality. How convenient!
Let's hope this deposition can be used to blow Mr. Valenti's credibility on this subject right out of the water because it sure seemed that he didn't know anything about the subject (even though he testifies as though he's up to speed on this stuff). --
Couldn't software that surrepticiously collects information on your computer and sends it to a vendor be considered a form of illegal wiretap? Actions like this on the part of any software vendor are outragious. I've already questioned using any software made by Mattel (especially since they raised such a stink because someone actually thought you, as a user of their filtering software, should know what web sites that you're being denied access to); this just reinforces my decision to suspect their motives. Hypocrits!
I'm sure glad I don't access the internet using WinXX from my home systems. --
``So you are urged to buy something that makes you special and different...''
Is it just me or did this remind anyone else of the scene in ``Life of Brian'' where everyone announces in unison (something like) ``We are all individuals!''. It wasn't too many years ago (well I guess it was in the early '80s, so I guess is was a little longer ago than I thought) that I was sitting in the local shopping mall marvelling at the sheep that thought they were announcing their individuality by wearing clothing with some corporate logo emblazened across the front (The Benneton sweatshirts, etc. were probably the most ludicrous examples). ``Why do you want to offer them free advertising?'' was what I asked myself. There's a scene in ``Crumb'' where Robert Crumb was sittong on a streetside bench having much the same feeling that struck a cord with me when I saw the movie. People have become brainwashed to a certain extent by corporations and their advertising campaigns. I can't remember the name of it, but there was an old, old Jerry Lewis movie where some little old lady (his landlady, I think) was so brainwashed by advertising that she was constanly asking him to buy whatever it was she'd just seen on the TV ads. (As a result she had all this useless crap sitting around that she never really needed; the perfect individual in the eyes of our corporations.)
``The jobs we are given, and the careers we follow fracture more and more any social cohesion....
I mean malls whith huge parking lots and poorly conected suburban areas with no smal stores. But I do not really know the USA so I can't say.''
Yep. You got it about right. Our local town zoning boards have pretty well killed off the concept of the local grocery store or just about any business within walking distance from where you live. Plus, the major store chains have somehow convinced themselves that we won't actually shop in a store that's smaller than a certain size which pretty much guarantees that you'll be driving to some MEGAmall if you want to shop. After your daily 90-minute-each-way commute the last thing you want to do is have to drive to a mall but what choice do you have? Sometimes you wonder if the auto manufacturers and the oil companies haven't been bribing the zoning boards.:-(
``If you want to live that way - fine. But people who are forced to live that way don't usually find it funny.''
Slashdot Mirror
Nice to see that Cuneiform wasn't on the list. I tend to get most of my music lately from either Cuneiform or other labels available from Wayside Music (Cuneiform used to be the ``house'' label; much the same as WaxTrax (sp?) was a label started by the record store of the same name in Chicago.) I doubt that labels like ReR and other foreign labels would be RIAA members.
BTW, Is this the VAXman from Fermilab? (Just curious.)
--
I was thinking about how bugtraq might have more reports related to Linux than other operating systems. I suspect that the reason is that there are multiple distributions containing a utility that contains a bug, say sendmail. (I don't want to pick on sendmail, really, I've used it -- but I have kept patches up to date. :-) It just has a reputation.) Now suppose that 10, 20, 30, or more distributions include the buggy version of sendmail. Does this count as one submission on bugtraq? Or does each distribution that includes that buggy version bump up the bug count?
Please excuse me if I'm way off base here; I typically look at CERT or CIAC for security matters. BTW, the latest bulletin on CIAC lists 12 issues. Only two of these is an obvious Linux problem. Four were Microsoft related. For the year I see 61 bulletins; I counted 19 regarding Microsoft and only the 2 I mentioned earlier that were specific to Linux. (Of course, some of the utilities that had bulletins issued might run on Linux but I didn't look quite that deep.)
One's gotta ask: ``What's Fred smoking?''
--
When I read the last paragraph of this interview, I nearly leapt out of my chair. I, as a consumer, DO NOT WANT CDs to go away! I still have and play old LPs (these are titles that will never be available in the CD format). If this guy thinks I'm going to start replacing CDs with some new digital format he's got another thing coming. And I'm sure he'll hear from thousands of other music enthusiasts as well.
I'm positive that the replacement format will require payment every time I download their watermarked MP3 format files. Whoops! My hard disk crashed. Whoops! The batteries died (or whatever). Guess I'll have to repurchase my music collection. I got the impression that an ulterior motive of the SDMI might be to corner the market on digital audio players just the same way that the CSS got a stranglehold on the licensing of DVD players. Next thing you know, you and I are paying royalties per listen.
Also, I'm already not any fan of a new format that is a step backward in terms of sound quality (MP3s are that sort of step as far as I can tell). I wonder how long it will be before people begin noticing that they can, indeed, hear a difference in the sound of watermarked audio files after all. Some of us consumers aren't half deaf.
Let's hope that the marketplace has the sense to make the SDMI watermarked audio format Dead On Arrival.
--
Depends on your UNIX. Under Tru64 and some other Unices, you have storage management tools (under Tru64 there's Logical Storage Manager, for example) that'll let you slice up a disk into as many pieces as you like. You then access the disks through either /dev/vol/... or /dev/rvol/... (if you really want to use raw data partitions). Striping across SCSI adapters for better I/O performance is quite easy.
Agreed. Some of the dollar estimates that people are throwing around are fairly humorous.
--
It doesn't have to manage it's own disk space. And it may, under certain conditions, provide better performance. We have been moving away from raw data partitions. This after running some benchmarks of a large table residing on raw partitions vs. the same data residing in tables in a filesystem. The performance was actually better while accessing the data in the filesystem. We're talking 10+% better performance not just a few percent. Our experience, based on our benchmarks, and discussions with Oracle technical people, is that the preference for using raw data partitions was based on performance tests using older versions of UNIX and less capable filesystems. Of course, your mileage may vary.
Aside from performance, if your database changes frequently, adding and deleting tablespaces is a major pain (with long downtime) when you're using raw data partitions but is a snap when you're using filesystems for data. If your database is fairly static raw partitions might buy some little bit of performance but, again, at the expense of managability. IMHO, raw data partitions just aren't worth it. Even if comparitive performance were a wash, the easier means of managing the database weighs in favor of filesystems.
--
I think you're talking about an Alpha-based workstation. No one's going to be hosting a 30+GB database on a workstation. They would be looking at a DS10 or DS20 at a minimum. Expect to pay something in the area of US$20K for a smallishly configured DS20.
A whopping $1000 for disk space to host a database? Only if you plan on sticking the entire thing on a single 36GB drive which would be an inexcusable performance hit. And that would leave no money for any kind of mirroring.
I guess this $6000 configuration isn't intended for a production system.
--
I don't think so. Didn't the recent benchmark comparing IIS vs. the new webserver from RedHat run on an 8 CPU SMP system? You can get more CPUS... you just don't see them in the advertising aimed at Joe Sixpack. They tend to be just a bit on the pricy side.
Cheers...
--
...all the time in the Chicago area. It's getting to the point where nearly half of the phone calls we receive have `dead air' on the other end. Then, some time later, we get a call from a real telemarketer. The current theory is that the telemarketers have their computer call to see if anyone's at home, then queue up the call to one of their telemarketing drones who make the real call.
OK, this isn't exactly what the main posting's about. But this is: I have received several messages on our Ameritech voice mail containing what sound like computer synthesized messages. Mostly regarding whether I want/need new cellular service (Hint to Motorola: NO TO BOTH QUESTIONS!) Since I cannot fast forward through voice mail on Ameritech's service, this really torques me off. If it keeps up I'll have to cancel my voice mail and go back to a tape machine. Wonder if I complain to Ameritech enough whether they'll do anything about the annoyance... Nah! What am I thinking?
--
www.dejanews.com was a usable site. Once they made the transition to www.deja.com it's been spiraling downward, out of control.
The site is one of the most difficult to navigate that I've ever seen (and I've seen a lot of difficult sites). Just the activity of looking up a topic to see what other's are talking about is a total mess. Once upon a time you could search for, say, sound cards and actually find a discussion about what others are doing with sound cards. Nowadays, you perform that same search and you'll be very lucky to find a real discussion but you'll quickly be taken to product ratings complete with links to sites where you can buy sound cards. Not very useful when you're trying to solve a problem with a sound card.
Sending any complaints to Deja is like talking to a brick wall. They'll thank you for your input and then tell you that no one else seems to have the same complaint as you.
I plan on finding a means of getting an honest-to-God newsfeed as soon as I can.
--
...is that this program is only for a portion of their coverage area. And their DSL coverage area only covers a small fraction of their service area.
--
I would be, shall we say, less than happy to receive my very own personalized spin doctoring from some corporate PR department. Much preferred would be for corporations to do a little self-examination and find out what it is about themsleves that has customers (or employees) so steamed up. These corporations should bear in mind that the ones who actually go to the effort to post a nastygram on a web site or even go so far as to create a web site pointing out the corporations shortcomings are only the smallest minority of their unhappy customers. Word gets out that they're going after their unhappy customers and they'll have a PR problem that they will can't even imagine. And nailing a disgruntled employee after they post complaints about or blow the whistle on their employer will do, um, wonders for their recruitment effort; especially in a labor market tilted in the employees favor like it is now (and is likely to remain, at least for high tech workers, for the foreseeable future).
I would consider it an evening well-spent putting together a cover letter explaining how I really don't want to receive personal attention from their PR department and to please just spend more time cleaning up your act/image/products, etc. etc., and a mechanism for me to easily forward that cover letter (with their email as an attachment) back to them. If anyone out their develops such procedure, let me know about it.
--
Just out of curiosity: Did anyone else get the impression that the RedHat system was configured to handle the SCSI adapter using a loadable module? Is there a performance disadvantage to running your SCSI drives using the loadable module as opposed to having the driver resident in the kernel? I would have thought that they'd rebuild the kernel and include the driver in the kernel.
Also, why not use a Pentium optimized distribution, like Mandrake, instead of the generic 386 oriented RedHat? All these magazine testers seem to do this; apparently when they think of Linux the gears in their heads turn only once and they come up with RedHat (no offense, RH, I use your stuff and am happy with it).
--
OK. McDonalds has to have cash registers with a button for each kind of hamburger rather than requiring the person behind the counter actually enter the actual price. Wonder which came first: students who didn't know math requiring McDonalds to install the idiot cash registers? Or did McDonalds install the new cash registers so the schools decided that students didn't really have to know much math after all. Those automated change dispensers attached to cash registers pretty eliminated the need to know any math. Subtraction is so hard.
Children will learn more through the interactivity of the classroom than by the solitary process of plopping down in front of a PC with a crappy piece of ``educational'' software. My girls will be learning their math on the computer (unless it's numerical integration and that probably won't be until high school).
--
Mirror, mirror, on the wall...
Who's the most innovative of all?
Is someone at Microsoft trying to garner brownie points with Bill Gates by coming up with these web sites? I couldn't make up my mind to laugh out loud or toss cookies (I had the misfortune to visit the FIN (?) site just after eaten lunch -- I should have known better).
\begin{aside}
Slashdot isn't the only site to have made questionable changes to their websites. Linux Today's site change (about a month ago) forced me to set by browser to override their site's (all all other sites' as well) color selections because the unvisited and the visited sites all came out the same color. Add to that, returning to the site after following a link and you lost your place; hard to tell where you were when all link colors are the same. InfoWorld Electric had to tinker with their online forums some time ago and broke them... badly. The first time they did this, the reverted back to the previous layout. The second time they broke them, they (IWE) just turned them off and they've been disabled for around 6 months or so. Hopefully, there's a few out-of-work web designers as a result of that fiasco. Anyway, Slashdot's plain-vanilla, light-on-the-graphics view works fine for me. I wish more sites had the user-selectable interface that Slashdot has.
Has anyone else noticed how web sites that are connected to long-time print magazines seem to be the most likely to be the ones whose sites are the least readable, the most likely to have forced (read: squinty) font sizes, gratuitous animated GIFs, pixel-based table widths, tinkered with link colors, and other eye-candy that might look OK in print but is a nightmare for the online viewer?
\end{aside}
--
... for the review. I bought a copy of this book a few weeks ago to read on my vacation. I'm thinking I made a good choice. Check out G.K.'s web site for excerpts, etc. (Sorry I cannot lay my hands on the URL just now.)
--
Right. Even I know how to make the text wrap around an image on a web page.
Congratulations on one of the least readable sites I've encountered in recent weeks.
Also... Are 67 individuals enough to draw much of a conclusion? What was the age distribution? I have a feeling that if they managed to find a bunch of people who regularly read newspapers that don't have a ton of photos, say the Wall Street Journal, that could skew their results enough to make the study's result quite questionable. Testing a population that prefers People magazine would, I'm betting, result in a different conclusion.
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should read
Management apologizes for any inconvenience.
--
FYI: You can get NASA News by using finger:
To ``subscribe'' (well, sort of), put it in your crontab:
will send retrieve it on Mondays and Thursdays (Twice a week should be enough unless you like getting a lot of duplicate stories.)
--
Ouch! That would be nasty. I guess I'd be less likely to encounter those sort of errors since I tend to enclose literal strings in quotes, especially if I'm hard-coding an argument in a hash like in your example. Even if they're not required the quotes can save your behind and haven't been a problem... so far. Only a little extra typing.
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If you're referring to CGI scripts or something similar then I'd surely, whole-heartedly agree. Debugging Perl CGI scripts is a different animal altogether. I usually wind up having the script generate extra HTML output (if it's not causing outright server errors) or open a special file to write debug output to and it's a pain. But for general Perl scripts, say for daily sysadmin tasks, ``-w'' and its friends do just fine.
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Not trying to be a smart aleck or anything but I have to ask: ``It took hours to debug a typo?'' What about
or
I'd think those would be the first things to try when debugging Perl.
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Depends on where you lived. I took out the cash for my first car late on a Saturday afternoon... from a drive-through.
I seem to recall that going to the bank was not such the big deal that you think it was... of course, you would have been a toddler in those days. I remember running into friends at the bank. Also, the need for instant cash that everyone seems to have now wasn't so widespread. I worked some summers at places that would cash employee's checks at the job site. (Mainly, we thought, so they could blow it all on beer when they got off work. Me? I could always wait until Saturday morning when I could walk to the bank.)
There still aren't. They're prohibited by a treaty. (I know, I know... you meant A- T -Ms.)
Most stores accepted checks for purchases. Nowadays, clerks look at you like you're from Mars when you want to pay with a check. If you were incapable of managing your money, I can see where not having 24x7 access to your bank could be a problem. Most people were able to plan their expenditures and have the appropriate amount of real cash on available, otherwise theyd write a check. As far as the easy availability of credit cards, one could argue that easy access to credit has not been such a good thing. You rarely heard of people declaring bankruptcy back in the good old '70s. Nowadays, it seems that every other person you meet has had a credit card revoked or has declared Chapter Something-or-other because they got themselves into financial trouble via easy access to credit. Not exactly progress, IMHO.
I'm not all that sentimental about those days. I just don't think that they were as bad as some people make them out to be. Things weren't bad, just different.
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First of all, I believe the phrase counts in that Wired came up with to be wildy inaccurate. At least it sure felt like these phrases were uttered more often than that.
Plus, I had this image of the plaintiff lawyer sitting at the table using a series of recorded objections (sort like Brian Wilson playing back comments on his tape recorders). Jeez! Every single question was objected to with something inane like: ``Ambiguous'', ``Lacks foundation'', ``Assumes facts not in evidence'', or, when in doubt, combine them altogether to say ``It's ambiguous. It's an incomplete hypothetical. Assumes facts not in evidence, and it calls for a legal conclusion''. It's truly sad that this is what passes as the quest for the truth in the American legal system nowadays.
From reading the deposition, it seems (unbelievably) that Jack Valenti had absolutely no idea that there's a legal proceeding underway until he was told so by his laywer. Therefore, he couldn't answer any questions since that would have violated client-lawyer confidentiality. How convenient!
Let's hope this deposition can be used to blow Mr. Valenti's credibility on this subject right out of the water because it sure seemed that he didn't know anything about the subject (even though he testifies as though he's up to speed on this stuff).
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Couldn't software that surrepticiously collects information on your computer and sends it to a vendor be considered a form of illegal wiretap? Actions like this on the part of any software vendor are outragious. I've already questioned using any software made by Mattel (especially since they raised such a stink because someone actually thought you, as a user of their filtering software, should know what web sites that you're being denied access to); this just reinforces my decision to suspect their motives. Hypocrits!
I'm sure glad I don't access the internet using WinXX from my home systems.
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Is it just me or did this remind anyone else of the scene in ``Life of Brian'' where everyone announces in unison (something like) ``We are all individuals!''. It wasn't too many years ago (well I guess it was in the early '80s, so I guess is was a little longer ago than I thought) that I was sitting in the local shopping mall marvelling at the sheep that thought they were announcing their individuality by wearing clothing with some corporate logo emblazened across the front (The Benneton sweatshirts, etc. were probably the most ludicrous examples). ``Why do you want to offer them free advertising?'' was what I asked myself. There's a scene in ``Crumb'' where Robert Crumb was sittong on a streetside bench having much the same feeling that struck a cord with me when I saw the movie. People have become brainwashed to a certain extent by corporations and their advertising campaigns. I can't remember the name of it, but there was an old, old Jerry Lewis movie where some little old lady (his landlady, I think) was so brainwashed by advertising that she was constanly asking him to buy whatever it was she'd just seen on the TV ads. (As a result she had all this useless crap sitting around that she never really needed; the perfect individual in the eyes of our corporations.)
Yep. You got it about right. Our local town zoning boards have pretty well killed off the concept of the local grocery store or just about any business within walking distance from where you live. Plus, the major store chains have somehow convinced themselves that we won't actually shop in a store that's smaller than a certain size which pretty much guarantees that you'll be driving to some MEGAmall if you want to shop. After your daily 90-minute-each-way commute the last thing you want to do is have to drive to a mall but what choice do you have? Sometimes you wonder if the auto manufacturers and the oil companies haven't been bribing the zoning boards. :-(
Got that right.
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