while i don't have objections to people putting this device on small children, i think the real boom for such a device would be to track dogs. talk to any person who lost a dog and i'll bet you have found someone who wishes they had this device on that dog collar.
yes, this is a very expensive tracking device for a dog. one thing that would make it way cheaper would be to get rid of the cellphone part. if you lived in a town where they had wireless ethernet (yes, a huge infrastructure that needs to happen now, and not just for this purpose), you could build a unit to hang on the dog's collar that would periodically check for local networks, grab an ip address, then ping your home server to let you know the dog's location. of course, this requires some kind of IP mapping that lays down over a real city map, but that shouldn't be too big of a challenge. with the citywide wireless, things like a lojak device for bikes suddenly becomes way cheaper. because the bike won't come to you when you call (like a dog), you'd still need the GPS function because once you narrow down the location of a stolen bike to it's IP address, you'll need a more granular search method.
If you take a look at all the other solutions being discussed here, you'll see that all of them are providing a toolkit for you to use to build your own content managment system.
Having had personal experience with the Vignette CMS solution, i'd have to say that your criticisms are unfounded simply because you don't have actual experience with other systems to compare. All the other posters criticizing the vignette solution because of price or bloat have valid complaints. But your voice is coming from an obvious lack of perspective on the issue:
It really sucks having paid a huge amount of cash for something that is built around a free language.
after that comment you talk about trying to "concentrate on just Java". Well, like all the other solutions discussed here (except for the new microsoft CMS system), that's going to be a free language. And if you start from scratch building your own stuff in java, you'll end up spending a mountain of time (money) 'for something that is built around a free language'. I'm not saying that you shouldn't do that. Just pointing out that systems and toolkits like people are discussing here are not going to be without their own coding requirements.
If you're so interested in a java-based solution, i recommend you stick with the vignette software you've already purchased. you can code your stuff in jsp and leverage all the workflow, history, etc. provided by the vignette CMS.
I would also encourage you to spend more time trying to understand the caching system. You don't want to keep everything in your DB and pull it out for every page request, regardless of the system being used. That's way too expensive on the DB and scales horribly. Caching stuff on the filesystem is the optimum way to go. When you say you could have done that without the content manager, i really question how you might execute that system.
On average, it brings up her score on term papers by a letter grade.
I'm not trying to flame you. Just offering some words of encouragement here. Like the 'cycle of dependency' poster said, it sounds like tools such as the grammar checker is functioning as a crutch. If your wife's grammar is so poor that teachers are marking her down an entire letter grade, then she really needs to take a remedial english course. If she writes with poor grammar, you might think, "Oh. This won't matter because she is pursuing a career that doesn't depend on good writing skills." The trick here, though, is that speech draws upon the same grammar skillset on which writing depends. If someone's writing makes them sound like a hillbilly, that person's speaking skills will project the same impression.
Why is this important enough for me to drone on about it? Just trying to help out. In the same way your wife finds she receives higher grades for papers built with correct grammar, she'll also find higher salaries resulting from job interviews where she was well-spoken.
Possibly this is for AI. visual stuff won't need that much processing, plus distributed computing isn't so fantastic for real-time video rendering because you can't depend on the network connectivity speed of home gamers.
but how about if this were applied to AI algorithms? they could do some real intersting 'sims' type stuff with that..
Harry is easily manipulated by the publicists. his ability to objectively review films equals his grasp of english grammar.
anytime a movie needs good buzz or hype from a reviewer with 'street cred', the hollywood publicists will throw some bone to H. Knowles. they'll invite him to some party to hang out with the stars of the film. sometimes they'll fly him to the premiere (Godzilla 2k, that KISS movie a couple years ago) and lavish him with attention and compliments.
who is Harry but a loser that lives with his dad and is so fat that he has to walk with a cane and SMELLS REALLY BAD? in the face of all this ego-massaging he gets, can you actually expect him to pan a film? do you think he'll say, "thank you for telling me i'm so cool ms. jolie. i'm afraid i'm giving tomb raider a thumbs-down"??
The other button you are looking for is just up and to the left of the trackpad. It is labelled '
ctrl' and is used in conjunction with the main button associated with the trackpad.
That 944 Turbo of yours is a
FAST car. It's also reliable and cheap to buy and maintain. For people looking to get into Porches, the 944 Turbo may not represent, but it is a very fun car.
I'd throw my vote for the worst porsche at the forthcoming Cayenne SUV they've been vaporously planning to launch for the last year or so. Jesus.
In pop-culture there is a term for when something great goes bad. "Jumping the shark." As in the episode of Happy Days where Fonzi jumps a shark on his motorcycle. In
Porsche's history, this SUV will be where the company Jumps the Shark much like SGI jumped the shark when it began shipping WinNT boxes. So much engineering resources have been directed at this project that they've withdrew their work on GT racing and basically let the Dodge Viper dominate where Porsche was once king. If you think it sucks working at a tech company as a developer and having to follow the Dilbertesque whims of the Product Marketing department in planning features, etc. imagine what it must have been like for those engineers working on f-ing fast race cars and having to design a 4x4 mini-van to sell to the insane SUV market in the US! For thee I shed a tear, Porsche Engineers.
I generally agree with the comment made by the annonymous coward when he says make way for the future.
Your attitude here is rather counter-productive to anything improving. You eagerly jump into a catch-22 with your suggestion that quality of life can't be improved over the long run because of the temporary short-term inconveniences associated with the changes.
I also agree with your desire to save the existing 'local flavor' of your downtown. Gentrification often has the undesireable effect of Starbucking local businesses and residences out of very cool neighborhoods. That doesn't mean they have to disappear. In some instances, you'll be able to keep such artifacts in the centralized areas because they are part of the attraction for people. In other cases, they'll simply move to another location where rent is more equitable for their demand.
I guess we should all accept the way things are. Stop trying. Stop supporting and developing alternatives. The war has been lost. Just like rape, we have no choice so we might as well sit back and enjoy it.
Your sentiment here is best captured by the "Resistance is futile" slogan so often associated with Microsoft. I'd like to know what you think differentiates yourself from those you describe as "the AOL using rubes that buy the games [and] all use Windows".
...insane amounts of money for a project that will benefit roughly 5% of the state's population.
To extend this philosophy, you would also discourage spending on mental hospitals because of the small percentage of the population that they serve. Libraries? Forget them. More people buy books than borrow. Come on. You are ignoring the benefit of basic infrastructure, which can often be expensive. You think we've got a lot of crazies out on the streets now, try tearing out the mental hospitals.
What I'd really like to draw your attention to, though, is the fact that this Minneapolis project you cite, which I know nothing about, is likely a foundation for a bigger project. Maybe right now it might only connect a few things. But watch over time as stuff starts to centralize around those stations. People fed up with commutes will gravitate towards housing that's served by the light rail. Those property values will increase and more housing (apartments / lofts) will be built. With a denser city-center, the taxes can be better allocated to serving the needs of a more centralized population. Do you think it's cheap to run water, gas, sewage, and electricity out to the subrubs and maintain it? How about schools, police, fire, and ambulance services? Yeah, you're paying a billion dollars now, but in the long run, if the light rail system has the desired effect, you won't even be able to count the money saved by minimizing suburban sprawl. It's huge. Check out this Sierra Club page about those costs.
And when those suburbs get developed, who do you think funds all those city services? Tax money from the already developed areas!I recommend two exercises for anyone who thinks more roads are a better solution to traffic than rail:
1. Visit Santa Clara (Silicon Valley) for a week and drive a car three miles a day between 4:00 pm and 7:30 pm.
2. Play Railroad Tycoon II for a few hours to see the benefit of centralizing populations and connecting them with rail.
Steve works for an annual salary of one dollar per year for Apple (Annual Report, 1998). He also owns only one share of stock in Apple, and has consistently rejected their offers of a salary and stock options (1998).
You might avoid the whole thing by describing the fact that you use pine to read your e-mail. Tell them about how you'll have to save the file, ftp it to your local computer, etc. Ask if there is some sort of special formatting that plain text, HTML, or PDF cannot handle. Ask them to simply copy-and-paste the content into the body of their e-mail. If they've got an HTML-savvy mail client, it can probably spin the format on the fly.
I find that a lot of people send me emails with silly memos attached as word docs. I usually respond by telling them that if the content of the memo is important, it would be more likely to be read by the recipients if there were fewer obstacles to access the content. By attaching it in a word processor document, people will have to launch an app, etc. Usually, people think what they're saying is important, so this sort of comment makes them think twice about whether the word doc is the best channel of broadcasting their message. It also takes the weight off you and puts it on the un-named others who are too lazy.
Or you could buy the lifetime package and be done with it.
Do you boycott all products / services that package something freely available in a more useful form? Sure, I don't buy bottled water, but what about the newspaper? What about linux distros? Why go to the movies at the theater when they'll eventually be shown on broadcast tv stations like NBC or FOX?
I find myself buying the newspaper rather than looking at the online version because I enjoy the portability and bathroom-readability of it. I purchase SuSE cdroms to support the improvement of the product without having to get my hands dirty writing code. I pay $7.50 to see movies in the theater because I want to see them on a big screen with a great sound system and share the experience with a few hundred other people.
There often is a value-add in a company taking something that's freely available and selling it. If there wasn't, then there would be legions more people who share your perspective, and these companies wouldn't be able to stay afloat. In the case of TiVO, they have significant value-add with using the tv listings. It's not a box that simply displays the channel guide (channel 7 here in Austin, TX). Consider Tivo to be your TV administrator. It watches those listings like a damn hawk, swooping down and snatching up the programs you wouldn't have noticed were on. Unless, of course, you want to spend more than $10.00 of your time and energy each month monitoring those tv listings yourself. It has such value add as providing a hot-list of celebrities to watch for, so it'll record Conan Obrien whenever some hot chick you saw in Maxim is on there (or any other show she appears on).
Look, I'm not trying to sell people a tivo. It's just my experience that some freely-available stuff can be improved and worth purchasing.
I agree that it would be very valuable for Apple to develop quicktime for linux. At the same time, we have to remember that the expense to develop and support quicktime on another non-Apple OS is very expensive. When that market makes up less than 2% of all desktops out there, it doesn't seem too smart at this point to battle to put Quicktime on linux boxes when they could simply more heavily market for windows users. If they get 1% m0re of all the windows users to install quicktime, that's probably more than there are linux desktop users total.
I hope this announcement means that future Tivo units will have networking built-in so I can remotely control my Tivo without hacking the crap out of it beyond the extra hard drive I've already installed. I hope having RealPlayer on the tivo doesn't mean that it'll be used for playing those commercials TiVo is now downloading periodically at night on my phone line.
There's a surf-punk(ish) band called Man Or Astroman? that has incorporated their on-stage computer into its own cabinet and it looks like a mainframe computer. They call it the Eeviac or something like that. They've also been known to bring old applewriter dot matrix printers onstage to play songs. Check out a pic of their computer
setup (it's behind them in the band pics).
Note the vertical keyboard placement. That makes it super-easy for them to just punch a button without having the keyboard take up horizontal space on the stage. Plus it makes a good target for beer-throwers to contribute their own key-pressings to the performance.
Probably because we now live in a world where the better mousetrap doesn't always win. Welcome to 2002!
I am right there with you on this. I wish BeOS had succeeded. I wish we operated our computers in a networked environment with as much diversity as the amazon jungles, but bound together with standard protocols and known APIs. Perhaps our last hope rests with java.
Re:So much for the Pro line.
on
New iMac Announced
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I was thinking this too, at first.
The more I ponder this release, though, I think they are 'reinforcing the front line' before they make a significant advancement. Had they announced G5 powermacs, this iMac might seem a little underpowered and it would dim some of this limelight. As it stands, the new iMac is undisputibly incredible. People like yourself are comparing it to the professional line. No criticism can even be levelled at it. In fact, the only criticism is that it's "too good".
Let Apple sell a couple months worth of these, then MacWorld Tokyo. Boom. A new reason to buy a new computer for those of us who wouldn't budge on the new iMac.
I'm on a 1998 B/W G3 450mhz box, so I'm watching these releases intensely. I need a new computer to play Wolfenstein. I want to record DVDs. With only 32 megs on the Geforce2, I'm holding out for the new PowerMacs. I bet they'll have Geforce3s with 64 like the current ones do.
I agree. I was surprised that the TiVo upgrade was described as painful. I upgraded mine about a year ago and as clumsy as I am, I just breezed through it. Complicating matters was the fact that I did it on my Mac no less. My 14 hr Tivo, purchased for $179, now is a 91 hour TiVo. I didn't back up my original Tivo HD, so perhaps that's why my experience was so painless....
To make it seem as if they lost some sort of non-existant competetion is rather silly.
While this is precisely the argument that microsoft will try to entice more developers with, I agree with Mr. Fred here. The developers are going to look at REAL sales numbers when deciding which platforms deserve their attention with future releases. This was a critical period for xBOx to get traction against an already 1-year-dug-in enemy. It slipped.
easier than everyone is recognizing..
on
al Qaeda Hacks XP?
·
· Score: 2
I fully agree with you when you say
'something more subtle in the logic could easily get through'.
While this person is likely a loon (the article does mention his dad's lawyer's request for a psychiatric evaluation of the suspect), I have to agree with the notion that a malicious programmer at a software company could prove incredibly dangerous to the security of their products.
While it is very unlikely that a code saboteur would go unnoticed for long, a person working intimately with a product like WinXP could gain knowledge of its internal weaknesses and take advantage of their existence without adding a single line of code that could be traced back to them.
This person wouldn't even need to be a programmer. A QA engineer, a support engineer, or whoever. As a support engineer for my company's software, I've had customers point out security defects that I could have sat on instead of reporting to engineering. The people in QA know how a product works better than many of the people who code the thing. Often they may be aware of security flaws that engineering has chosen to put on the back burner because a fix would require a significant change of architecture.
Perhaps this observation could be construed as an argument for Open Source. Actually, I'd like to just see companies strive to keep their employees happy.
I think Tazzy gives a pretty detailed answer to this. I just wanted to make the observation that perhaps the developers leave the 'testing' cheat codes in to add playability / replayability. This would be especially true for difficult games.
The one odd thing I encountered with developer-provided cheat codes (as opposed to the reverse-engineered ones created by GameShark) was that Carmaggedon had some very interesting named codes to be typed into the Macintosh keyboard. Of these, the ultimate code (strength, time, life, etc) was "IBETYOUCANTPRINTCUNT". It seemed like they were putting forth an editorial challenge to the games magazines with this one... hmm.
While others will debunk your mobster analogy by saying, "This is a CIVIL case, not a criminal case," I would like to say you've nailed this. The analogy finds its strength in that the money being used to pay the 'punishment' tax is money that was ill-gotten.
In US criminal drug cases, the accused is not allowed to use money from drug sales to pay a fine. It must be proven that the money came from legal sources.
Obviously, it would be impossible to determine how much money microsoft has made through 'legal' competition, so this won't work here (and again, this is a civil case). But this is similar to the mobster scenario. If a mobster swindles someone out of a bunch of money, and thr victim files a lawsuit (as the states have against microsoft), how just is it for the perpetrator to be punished by returning some of the money earned through swindling? Isn't the goal here to undo the value that has been added to the swindler's life and prevent the swindler from perpetrating fraud against other people? I don't see any of that happening with the proposed settlements.
I agree with you that from a consumer / coder perspective, it would be great if copyrights on software only lasted as long as support for that software continued.
I think the deal here is that companies don't want to let go of a future potential to make money off these assets. Not that it would really happen with Microsoft, but it's feasible that a company in three or four years might say, "We're going to release this little piece of shit 'network computer'. We need a suck-ass OS that everyone's used to. Can we license Win95 from you?" (that's not me attempting to slam microsoft- in this scenario years have passed, so the licensee is intentionally looking for something dated to recycle).
fter five years they better come up with something new.
I fear that with this sort of system, companies would intentionally make their stuff crummy so that the 'come up with something new in 5 years' challenge isn't so difficult. I guess that's already happening now as marketing goons plan obsolecense in products and also hold features back from 1.0 in order to sell 2.0. Oh well, nevermind.
I used to do tech support for Apple Computer's laser printers. One time I was helping a fellow troubleshoot why his laserprinter wasn't printing even though he wasn't receiving any errors on his computer. I was walking him through the software-side of the problem and had him check the 'setup' in the chooser. The printer was broadcasting fine. I asked him to shut off the printer. He did and it still showed up in the chooser. Hmmm. So then I asked him how he was connecting to the printer. Turned out that he was in some apartment building that had an ethernet network running through the whole place. Then it all clicked. He was printing to some other guy's printer in the building. Apparently some of the stuff he had been printing during the course of the week had been of a 'sensitive' nature because he got extremely concerned and got off the phone quick so he could go find that printer...
Like you suggest, with wireless networking, this type of thing is going to happen more frequently...
Like that other respondent, I'd like to point out that although ePaper may be thrown away, it may mean less paper is thrown away.
Take magazines as an example. A lot of those womens' magazines on the newstand are as thick as the Manhattan yellowpages. If they were made with ePaper, they'd only be one sheet thick. We'd benefit from that many trees not getting turned into paper and then thrown away due to the human laziness you cited. We'd also benefit from reduced transportation costs.. Instead of a big diesel truck hauling those magazines to the grocery store, they could be hauled behind one of those Segway scooters (heh-heh).Or perhaps they could be 'recycled' by bringing them back to the store and paying to load up some other magazine. Or, of course, the transaction could occur over the internet.
In any case, I am betting that Adobe is creaming its shorts over this technology.
Slashdot Mirror
So, what is all the extra performance for?
I agree. I was surprised that the TiVo upgrade was described as painful. I upgraded mine about a year ago and as clumsy as I am, I just breezed through it. Complicating matters was the fact that I did it on my Mac no less. My 14 hr Tivo, purchased for $179, now is a 91 hour TiVo. I didn't back up my original Tivo HD, so perhaps that's why my experience was so painless....
To make it seem as if they lost some sort of non-existant competetion is rather silly.