There are a number of reasons for punishing a criminal. First of course, is revenge--make them suffer for their actions. The second though, is in fact rehabilitation. By forcing a criminal to suffer as a direct result of their crimes, they may understand the harm they've caused, and decide not to do it anymore. (Speaking hypothetically, of course.) Thirdly, we have restitution. Regardless of revenge, regardless of rehabilitation, most people would claim that criminals should be made to undo the damage they've caused, when possible. (And when not possible, they should 'repay society' by proxy, i.e. community service.)
Making a spammer clean up after himself would fit all three categories. Making them do it the hardest way possible would suit the first two, and doesn't really strike me as egregiously cruel.
It's all a question of scale, and your scale is a bit skewed.
The premium paid for higher-end storage is decidedly nonlinear. For marginally more reliable or faster storage, you pay about a factor of ten. One example I'm familiar with is Hitachi. We had a 64TB HDS array a few years ago that was worth roughly $2M. We could have purchased an equivalent amount of commodity storage for probably $200k at the time, but didn't. Why would we spend the extra money? Speed, configurability, expandability, and reliability.
First of all, speed. That thing was loaded with 73GB 15k FCAL drives. RAID was in sets of four disks, with no two disks in a set sharing the same controller, backplane, or cache segment. Speaking of cache, the rule was 1GB/TB. so we had 64GB of fast, low-latency, fully mirrored cache on the thing. It was insanely fast, and (most importantly) didn't slow down under point load. One tool automatically ran on the array itself, looking for hotspots and reallocating data on the fly.
Configurability: We could mirror data synchronously or asynchronously to our DR site, by filesystem, file, block, LUN, or byte. We could dynamically (re)allocate storage to multiple systems, and moving databases between machines was a breeze. Disk could be allocated from different pools (i.e. different performing drives could be installed), depending on requirements. Quality-of-Service restrictions could be put in place as well, although we never used them.
Expandability: The beast had 32 pairs of FC connections, could support 96GB of internal mirrored cache, and I can't remember how much actual disk. The key wasn't the amount of disk we could put on it, so much as how well the bandwidth scaled--and it scaled well.
Finally, the real key - Reliability. All connections were dual-pathed, with storage presented to a pair of smart FC switches which were zoned to present storage to various systems. We could lose three of the four power cables to the main unit (auxiliary disk cabinets only had two power connections each), and still run. We could lose any entire rack, and still run. We could lose any switch in our environment, and still run. We could lose two disks from the same RAID set and still run. When we lost a disk, the system would automatically suck up some cache to use for remirroring the data to multiple disks as fast as possible, and then after protecting it, would remirror back to a single logical device. In the event that we lost the entire device, we could run from our DR site synchronous mirror with less than a ten second failover.
This sort of thing is massive overkill for most people and companies, but when someone is doing realtime commodities trading, (or banking, or stock exchanges, etc.) the protection and support are worth the extra money. You just can't build that sort of thing on your own for any less money, at the end of the day.
The entire article was written as if were an ad for Char-Broil. The whole thing was, "Char-Broil did this, Char-Broil has adopted this feature, etc." Oh, except for the one line:
"Most leading grill makers, including Solaire, Weber and Whirlpool's Jenn-Air, also offer grills that use infrared."
No shit, sherlock. Most of them came out with it before Char-Broil, and quite possibly have done it better. Napoleon Grills has had this feature for a few years now, and makes a far better barbeque than Char-Broil.
I hate articles like this. Just enough information to make people believe they're reading news, rather than advertising.
I like my charcoal barbeque just fine (although it's going to be replaced with a Big Green Egg next year). I also like my gas grill just fine, for other purposes. The difference here is that I'm not an elitist, self-satisfied jackass.
Well, this is a much more interesting and well considered post than your original. I still don't agree with much of it, but I have a lot more respect for who I'm disagreeing with.:-)
"But USERS can't see headers. Metadata in a filename is a Good Thing."
I've kicked this around for a LOT of years, and ultimately I disagree. Metadata should be (a) intrinsic to the file, and (b) interpreted by the computer, with the results presented to the user. Users should be told, "This is a dangerous file," not "this is a.pif" (or worse, and far more common, "this is.jpg" with a hidden extension, which misleads people with half a clue.)
"There are plenty of bad links that aren't obscured by javascript, like phishing attempts viewed in webmail."
Haven't actually come across those, so I'll take your word for it. Webmail is a fundamental mistake in my mind anyways, but that's a whole other discussion.
"Bzzt, wrong. By default, every web browser on every platform will do exactly one of exactly two things:"
You talk about web browsers, and that's still not entirely correct. First of all, IE and Firefox may save files in a different location by default. Secondly, Outlook will save it in a unique (and possibly different) spot, as will MS Office. Various add-on applications will save files in different locations. Ultimately not all of these things will be consistent in either location or interface, so the user ends up more confused.
"Most large companies give users computers with pre-mapped drives." That's generally true, but I've had more Windows admins tell me over the years, "type the following to map a drive..."
I guess our experiences are different then. I see a lot of backslashes being thrown at corporate users, and have at a lot of big companies. The number of people I know who have had to manually map a drive and/or pull up a file in a web browser (something becoming more common as more programs ship 'documentation' as lazy crappy HTML docs) outnumbers the people who haven't by a factor of probably 20:1.
Fundamentally, I disagree. I'd like smarter users too, but I think the examples you picked tend to illustrate the problems with OS and interface design more than with stupid users.
I live in a dusty climate. I've burnt out four DVD players in the last three years. After the last one, I did some research, and discovered that they all share a common feature.
The motor and lens send back telemetry data to the controller. When they say they're too dirty to read at 100%, the ENTIRE MOTOR ASSEMBLY SHUTS DOWN, rendering the entire DVD player useless.
If I could find the first marketing slob who thought of this (and then forced the implementation onto an engineer), I would slowly dismember them. Assholes.
Glad to hear a 20 year old understanding just how critical C is. (You might be interested in getting a copy of Lion's Commentary, if you don't have it already.)
As for the list, well the list makes the mistake of talking about technologies rather than skills. Knowing C or Cobol or Pascal of PL/1 or Forth will eventually forsake you, but understanding how to program will be transferable to whatever new technology comes over the horizon.
Funny, that's the first thing that I thought of too.
When I was in elementary school (before most of/. was born), I taught myself to touch-type, to impress a girl. When I was in high-school, I could easily type 70+WPM without mistakes.
Now I type less than that with typos, and MUCH less than that if I have to do it without typos. I know I could get my speed and accuracy back up to snuff with some work (and once a year or so I force myself to work on accuracy again), but as a sysadmin who types for 8+ hours/day, neither fast or accruage typing is a requirement any longer.
I had the same thought about 'network admin' being on the list, but I'm curious about precisely what they mean by 'PC network admin.'
A good network admin (hell, even a bad one) has enough equipment and required comprehension these days that they can't be too worried about the intricacies of some OS's non-standard quirks. In that sense, the PC network admin is going the way of the Appletalk admin.
On the other hand, true network admins are absolutely crucial to most companies, and I've been lucky enough to work with a good number who understand their roles very well. Sounds like you haven't, which is a pity. Rest assured, they're out there.
You manage to show that your knowledge is both narrow and shallow at the same time.
"knowing what extensions are"
Extensions are nothing whatsoever to any half-assed operating system, which can read a header to find out the contents of a file. Oh, except Windows--I guess that's all you're familiar with.
"looking at the URL in the status bar before clicking on a link"
This is usually spoofed, whenever it's actually a bad idea to click on a link.
"knowing where downloaded files go"
This is an application and OS-specified location. It could be anywhere, and often is. Hardly fair to blame the users for inconsistent computer behaviour.
"the difference between \ and /...these people saw a backslash ONCE in their lives while using DOS about twenty years ago"
Um...nope. They see backslashes all the time, in Windows share paths, in Windows file paths, and (as a subset), in URIs that are Windows file paths. file:\\\path\to\file.htm is pretty damned common in the Windows world. Apparently you aren't aware of this.
You don't like being an admin and having to deal with users? Then get the hell out of the field. The reality is this: computers are anti-intuitive, ubiquitous, and understood to be easy. If you can't live with those criteria, then GET THE HELL OUT! You're not helping anyone.
OK, we all know that this is only May, and that many of these products are well over a year old already, but even so, I'm not sure that there are a hundred products in the last 'while' that are worth being on a list. Well, a good list at any rate.
I've seen very very few products worth raising an approving eyebrow over in the last few years. The wii is one, OSX is one, Solaris 10 is one, and... I'm not sure what else. The iPod, I suppose. Either iTunes or WMP 10, but neither is without faults. Firefox 2.
Video cards? No chance--someone will come out with a significantly newer, faster, better video card every six months or so, but the evolutionary phase is over. Same with printers--nothing new since cheap lasers and reliable photo-quality inkjets. Certain segments of computing are starting to mature, to the point that there isn't any significant gain in new products. (Hence why vendors are forcing obsolescence on their older products more aggressively all the time.)
Then we have the downright bad products that make these lists. The blackberry provides one feature of questionable utility (mobile email--but it's a phone too, and that's already mobile!) and does it badly, dragging down its other functions at the same time. Office 2007, which was created for no reason other than (a) to sell an unneccessary product to people who already have a sufficient product, and (b) to disrupt the converging competitive standards. Google Groups. The list goes on.
So what genuinely new and innovative (and also good!) products are out there? Without an artificial number to reach (10, 20, 100, etc.) I wonder how many have come out in each of the last five years.
Audacity? That's a product that belongs on the 'worst products of all time list, not this one.
I want to love Audacity. In fact, I just spent two weeks chopping up some recorded audio into named tracks. With some minor quirks, the interface and techniques are very well laid out (Not necessarily intuitive, but intelligent after you've learned them). This is a Good Thing. However, Audacity can't record in real time on moderately old gear, even though older versions had no problem with it. Furthermore, it cannot properly import to WAV on a machine that gets bogged down. When writing a file, it should be able to buffer and hold the input, but doesn't.
Then there's the memory model. More than 15 tracks, and you're screwed. With 22 tracks, I had to wait 15 seconds after a mouse click for playback to start. (at 23 tracks, the program crashed for good.)
It's almost a great program, but it's currently being developed by team who don't know proper programming practices. Pity.
Other's here have commented on the nature of mistakes in a person's typing vs. errors from speech recognition. I'd just like to point out that 95% is a (current) technical limit and nearly constant, regardless of the speed of the program, whereas personal typing accuracy can be improved by practice and slowing down.
You're so close to significantly better coffee here. Let me offer a few suggestions.
1) Don't keep coffee in the freezer. It's been a huge bone of contention in the coffee community for decades now, but the condensation generally stales the coffee faster in the freezer than the warmer air does on the counter. (This is especially true with darker roasts, as they get more oil on the surface.)
2) Get a burr grinder. For french press you can probably get away with a cheap one, although I'd recommend splurging on the Solis Maestro Plus, which could also server as an entry into espresso if you're interested.
Getting a burr grinder will definitely make a difference--reducing the amount of 'fines' in the cup will eliminate a muddy, dull flavour that masks the bean. Definitely worthwhile.
As for percolating, it's not a matter of temperature extracting more tannins (or other), but actually of excessive heat breaking down the flavenoids. Once coffee hits boiling temperature, it starts to rot faster than you can imagine.
(Speaking as a retired chemist, coffee nut, and occasional homebrewer.)
Well, there are two types of lights under discussion here: status and decorative. There's really no reason that a person shouldn't be able to selectively turn off either type, depending on their needs. When my external hard drives are being accessed, the appropriate LED flashes. Sometimes that's useful (if I'm doing a resync/resilver I can see when it's done), most of the time it's not. In fact, I'd be happier to see LEDs that go out when a drive is connected, and come on if access is lost to it.
Power lights are moderately annoying on most devices. Why do you need to tell me that the computer I'm currently using is on? Why not put an option in the bios so that a short press of a power switch will dim or power-off the power light?
That said, status information through LEDs CAN be very useful. When you have three racks of disks and want to confirm the bad one, making it's LED blink at 1Hz is brilliant. Pulse sequences can easily indicate dozens of error codes in a minimum of space and effort.
The key is in the filtering, and the manufacturers haven't done a damned thing about this yet.
This is exceedingly relevant, and something that should interest most slashdot readers.
On the one hand, industrial design is a very interesting and geeky field. Discussion about good product design is worthy of/. in and of itself. However, this article brings together two even more relevant issues: Computer/electronic gadget design, and communication design, of which interface design is a subset.
What makes an informational product good or bad is significantly driven by how effectively that device communicates its information to the user. Lights that don't tell you anything worthwhile are decorations, and it should be possible to disable them. Lights that tell you something you may not care about should be filterable as well.
Case in point: Our old DVD player (the one hooked up to an actual TV!) had an insanely bright blue display--bright enough to distract from the movie if it was near the screen. There was an option to dim or disable it, but the setting wasn't persistent. Every time you hit the power switch, it came back on at full brightness.
Smart product design should be the next wave of computing. Unfortunately, both hardware and software interfaces have been getting worse rather than better, as gee-whiz technology has expanded. Pointless flashing LEDs is just a symptom of it.
That's actually a very astute and thoughtful point.
"Our" way of thinking implies an 'us vs. them' mentality, which is what leads to many problems in the world--perhaps most of them, in fact.
(As an aside, I'd suggest that the invasion of Iraq was a carefully planned bit of empire-building wrapped in 'us vs. them' for the sake of garnering popular support. You can judge for yourself just how far in advance this was planned by reading the Project for a New American Century.)
In this case, it's a fairly simple proposition, though: Censorship is bad. IF you accept that claim, then yes--turning down an anti-censorship policy for the sake of corporate profits is bad. In fact, turning down even a provisionally good policy (i.e., based on the idea that censorship is generally bad for most cases) for profit-driven reasons can be argued as bad.
Does this rejection stink? My feeling is yes. However, that is a single-case and somewhat informed opinion. Your point that "China==censorship==bad!!!" is a stupid and thoughtless attitude still stands strongly. I hope more people consider it.
Agreed on the path to download--many in the Solaris community have been after Sun to work on streamlining their webpages.
Solaris is Sun's official release. It can be patched with Sun patches, and can be supported under a support contract if you so desire. OpenSolaris is a few different things. First of all, it's the Solaris source code, released under the CDDL. It's also the community development platform, where things get tried out. (Stuff that gets developed in OpenSolaris may make it back into Solaris). It can also be considered the 'jumping-off point' for any Solaris derivatives and distributions, such as Nexenta (GNU/Solaris) and Schillx. Basically, it's the open source project centre and fork point. The interesting thing about it vs. Linux is that Open Solaris is continually getting refreshed from Solaris, as well as contributing to it, so it won't drift away from Solaris over time. Consequently, other distributions that are based on OpenSolaris should maintain a static distance from Solaris proper over time as well. Less fragmentation should be the result.
Slashdot Mirror
There are a number of reasons for punishing a criminal. First of course, is revenge--make them suffer for their actions. The second though, is in fact rehabilitation. By forcing a criminal to suffer as a direct result of their crimes, they may understand the harm they've caused, and decide not to do it anymore. (Speaking hypothetically, of course.) Thirdly, we have restitution. Regardless of revenge, regardless of rehabilitation, most people would claim that criminals should be made to undo the damage they've caused, when possible. (And when not possible, they should 'repay society' by proxy, i.e. community service.)
Making a spammer clean up after himself would fit all three categories. Making them do it the hardest way possible would suit the first two, and doesn't really strike me as egregiously cruel.
It's all a question of scale, and your scale is a bit skewed.
The premium paid for higher-end storage is decidedly nonlinear. For marginally more reliable or faster storage, you pay about a factor of ten. One example I'm familiar with is Hitachi. We had a 64TB HDS array a few years ago that was worth roughly $2M. We could have purchased an equivalent amount of commodity storage for probably $200k at the time, but didn't. Why would we spend the extra money? Speed, configurability, expandability, and reliability.
First of all, speed. That thing was loaded with 73GB 15k FCAL drives. RAID was in sets of four disks, with no two disks in a set sharing the same controller, backplane, or cache segment. Speaking of cache, the rule was 1GB/TB. so we had 64GB of fast, low-latency, fully mirrored cache on the thing. It was insanely fast, and (most importantly) didn't slow down under point load. One tool automatically ran on the array itself, looking for hotspots and reallocating data on the fly.
Configurability: We could mirror data synchronously or asynchronously to our DR site, by filesystem, file, block, LUN, or byte. We could dynamically (re)allocate storage to multiple systems, and moving databases between machines was a breeze. Disk could be allocated from different pools (i.e. different performing drives could be installed), depending on requirements. Quality-of-Service restrictions could be put in place as well, although we never used them.
Expandability: The beast had 32 pairs of FC connections, could support 96GB of internal mirrored cache, and I can't remember how much actual disk. The key wasn't the amount of disk we could put on it, so much as how well the bandwidth scaled--and it scaled well.
Finally, the real key - Reliability. All connections were dual-pathed, with storage presented to a pair of smart FC switches which were zoned to present storage to various systems. We could lose three of the four power cables to the main unit (auxiliary disk cabinets only had two power connections each), and still run. We could lose any entire rack, and still run. We could lose any switch in our environment, and still run. We could lose two disks from the same RAID set and still run. When we lost a disk, the system would automatically suck up some cache to use for remirroring the data to multiple disks as fast as possible, and then after protecting it, would remirror back to a single logical device. In the event that we lost the entire device, we could run from our DR site synchronous mirror with less than a ten second failover.
This sort of thing is massive overkill for most people and companies, but when someone is doing realtime commodities trading, (or banking, or stock exchanges, etc.) the protection and support are worth the extra money. You just can't build that sort of thing on your own for any less money, at the end of the day.
Well to be precise about things, I taught myself to touch-type so I could write a story for a girl that I wanted to impress.
As for accurage, all I can say is that it's the most ironic and funny typo I've made in a long time. I'm rather proud of it, in fact.
The entire article was written as if were an ad for Char-Broil. The whole thing was, "Char-Broil did this, Char-Broil has adopted this feature, etc." Oh, except for the one line:
"Most leading grill makers, including Solaire, Weber and Whirlpool's Jenn-Air, also offer grills that use infrared."
No shit, sherlock. Most of them came out with it before Char-Broil, and quite possibly have done it better. Napoleon Grills has had this feature for a few years now, and makes a far better barbeque than Char-Broil.
I hate articles like this. Just enough information to make people believe they're reading news, rather than advertising.
Unfortunately, absolutely not. These things are WAY too hot for smoking.
I like my charcoal barbeque just fine (although it's going to be replaced with a Big Green Egg next year). I also like my gas grill just fine, for other purposes. The difference here is that I'm not an elitist, self-satisfied jackass.
Well, this is a much more interesting and well considered post than your original. I still don't agree with much of it, but I have a lot more respect for who I'm disagreeing with. :-)
.pif" (or worse, and far more common, "this is .jpg" with a hidden extension, which misleads people with half a clue.)
"But USERS can't see headers. Metadata in a filename is a Good Thing."
I've kicked this around for a LOT of years, and ultimately I disagree. Metadata should be (a) intrinsic to the file, and (b) interpreted by the computer, with the results presented to the user. Users should be told, "This is a dangerous file," not "this is a
"There are plenty of bad links that aren't obscured by javascript, like phishing attempts viewed in webmail."
Haven't actually come across those, so I'll take your word for it. Webmail is a fundamental mistake in my mind anyways, but that's a whole other discussion.
"Bzzt, wrong. By default, every web browser on every platform will do exactly one of exactly two things:"
You talk about web browsers, and that's still not entirely correct. First of all, IE and Firefox may save files in a different location by default. Secondly, Outlook will save it in a unique (and possibly different) spot, as will MS Office. Various add-on applications will save files in different locations. Ultimately not all of these things will be consistent in either location or interface, so the user ends up more confused.
"Most large companies give users computers with pre-mapped drives."
That's generally true, but I've had more Windows admins tell me over the years, "type the following to map a drive..."
I guess our experiences are different then. I see a lot of backslashes being thrown at corporate users, and have at a lot of big companies. The number of people I know who have had to manually map a drive and/or pull up a file in a web browser (something becoming more common as more programs ship 'documentation' as lazy crappy HTML docs) outnumbers the people who haven't by a factor of probably 20:1.
Fundamentally, I disagree. I'd like smarter users too, but I think the examples you picked tend to illustrate the problems with OS and interface design more than with stupid users.
I live in a dusty climate. I've burnt out four DVD players in the last three years. After the last one, I did some research, and discovered that they all share a common feature.
The motor and lens send back telemetry data to the controller. When they say they're too dirty to read at 100%, the ENTIRE MOTOR ASSEMBLY SHUTS DOWN, rendering the entire DVD player useless.
If I could find the first marketing slob who thought of this (and then forced the implementation onto an engineer), I would slowly dismember them. Assholes.
Nope. NT is a primitive of OS/2, which made the list ironically enough.
Glad to hear a 20 year old understanding just how critical C is. (You might be interested in getting a copy of Lion's Commentary, if you don't have it already.)
As for the list, well the list makes the mistake of talking about technologies rather than skills. Knowing C or Cobol or Pascal of PL/1 or Forth will eventually forsake you, but understanding how to program will be transferable to whatever new technology comes over the horizon.
Funny, that's the first thing that I thought of too.
/. was born), I taught myself to touch-type, to impress a girl. When I was in high-school, I could easily type 70+WPM without mistakes.
When I was in elementary school (before most of
Now I type less than that with typos, and MUCH less than that if I have to do it without typos. I know I could get my speed and accuracy back up to snuff with some work (and once a year or so I force myself to work on accuracy again), but as a sysadmin who types for 8+ hours/day, neither fast or accruage typing is a requirement any longer.
I had the same thought about 'network admin' being on the list, but I'm curious about precisely what they mean by 'PC network admin.'
A good network admin (hell, even a bad one) has enough equipment and required comprehension these days that they can't be too worried about the intricacies of some OS's non-standard quirks. In that sense, the PC network admin is going the way of the Appletalk admin.
On the other hand, true network admins are absolutely crucial to most companies, and I've been lucky enough to work with a good number who understand their roles very well. Sounds like you haven't, which is a pity. Rest assured, they're out there.
Wow!
...these people saw a backslash ONCE in their lives while using DOS about twenty years ago"
You manage to show that your knowledge is both narrow and shallow at the same time.
"knowing what extensions are"
Extensions are nothing whatsoever to any half-assed operating system, which can read a header to find out the contents of a file. Oh, except Windows--I guess that's all you're familiar with.
"looking at the URL in the status bar before clicking on a link"
This is usually spoofed, whenever it's actually a bad idea to click on a link.
"knowing where downloaded files go"
This is an application and OS-specified location. It could be anywhere, and often is. Hardly fair to blame the users for inconsistent computer behaviour.
"the difference between \ and /
Um...nope. They see backslashes all the time, in Windows share paths, in Windows file paths, and (as a subset), in URIs that are Windows file paths. file:\\\path\to\file.htm is pretty damned common in the Windows world. Apparently you aren't aware of this.
You don't like being an admin and having to deal with users? Then get the hell out of the field. The reality is this: computers are anti-intuitive, ubiquitous, and understood to be easy. If you can't live with those criteria, then GET THE HELL OUT! You're not helping anyone.
At least SOMEONE understands how things work.
You're absolutely right. Until near-certain death is the consequence of spam, there will be spam. No technology will prevent that.
OK, we all know that this is only May, and that many of these products are well over a year old already, but even so, I'm not sure that there are a hundred products in the last 'while' that are worth being on a list. Well, a good list at any rate.
I've seen very very few products worth raising an approving eyebrow over in the last few years. The wii is one, OSX is one, Solaris 10 is one, and... I'm not sure what else. The iPod, I suppose. Either iTunes or WMP 10, but neither is without faults. Firefox 2.
Video cards? No chance--someone will come out with a significantly newer, faster, better video card every six months or so, but the evolutionary phase is over. Same with printers--nothing new since cheap lasers and reliable photo-quality inkjets. Certain segments of computing are starting to mature, to the point that there isn't any significant gain in new products. (Hence why vendors are forcing obsolescence on their older products more aggressively all the time.)
Then we have the downright bad products that make these lists. The blackberry provides one feature of questionable utility (mobile email--but it's a phone too, and that's already mobile!) and does it badly, dragging down its other functions at the same time. Office 2007, which was created for no reason other than (a) to sell an unneccessary product to people who already have a sufficient product, and (b) to disrupt the converging competitive standards. Google Groups. The list goes on.
So what genuinely new and innovative (and also good!) products are out there? Without an artificial number to reach (10, 20, 100, etc.) I wonder how many have come out in each of the last five years.
Audacity? That's a product that belongs on the 'worst products of all time list, not this one.
I want to love Audacity. In fact, I just spent two weeks chopping up some recorded audio into named tracks. With some minor quirks, the interface and techniques are very well laid out (Not necessarily intuitive, but intelligent after you've learned them). This is a Good Thing. However, Audacity can't record in real time on moderately old gear, even though older versions had no problem with it. Furthermore, it cannot properly import to WAV on a machine that gets bogged down. When writing a file, it should be able to buffer and hold the input, but doesn't.
Then there's the memory model. More than 15 tracks, and you're screwed. With 22 tracks, I had to wait 15 seconds after a mouse click for playback to start. (at 23 tracks, the program crashed for good.)
It's almost a great program, but it's currently being developed by team who don't know proper programming practices. Pity.
Other's here have commented on the nature of mistakes in a person's typing vs. errors from speech recognition. I'd just like to point out that 95% is a (current) technical limit and nearly constant, regardless of the speed of the program, whereas personal typing accuracy can be improved by practice and slowing down.
You're so close to significantly better coffee here. Let me offer a few suggestions.
1) Don't keep coffee in the freezer. It's been a huge bone of contention in the coffee community for decades now, but the condensation generally stales the coffee faster in the freezer than the warmer air does on the counter. (This is especially true with darker roasts, as they get more oil on the surface.)
2) Get a burr grinder. For french press you can probably get away with a cheap one, although I'd recommend splurging on the Solis Maestro Plus, which could also server as an entry into espresso if you're interested.
Getting a burr grinder will definitely make a difference--reducing the amount of 'fines' in the cup will eliminate a muddy, dull flavour that masks the bean. Definitely worthwhile.
As for percolating, it's not a matter of temperature extracting more tannins (or other), but actually of excessive heat breaking down the flavenoids. Once coffee hits boiling temperature, it starts to rot faster than you can imagine.
(Speaking as a retired chemist, coffee nut, and occasional homebrewer.)
I've been involved in the coffee community longer than I've been in computing, and that number is growing faster than I care to admit.
My advice: Don't buy an espresso machine. If you've saved up $250, then get a decent grinder, and start saving $500 for an espresso machine.
$250 on an espresso machine is tough to get right. $250 on an espresso machine with a $20 burr grinder is a waste of effort.
If *$ is the best you have near you, then you have my sympathy.
Well, there are two types of lights under discussion here: status and decorative. There's really no reason that a person shouldn't be able to selectively turn off either type, depending on their needs. When my external hard drives are being accessed, the appropriate LED flashes. Sometimes that's useful (if I'm doing a resync/resilver I can see when it's done), most of the time it's not. In fact, I'd be happier to see LEDs that go out when a drive is connected, and come on if access is lost to it.
Power lights are moderately annoying on most devices. Why do you need to tell me that the computer I'm currently using is on? Why not put an option in the bios so that a short press of a power switch will dim or power-off the power light?
That said, status information through LEDs CAN be very useful. When you have three racks of disks and want to confirm the bad one, making it's LED blink at 1Hz is brilliant. Pulse sequences can easily indicate dozens of error codes in a minimum of space and effort.
The key is in the filtering, and the manufacturers haven't done a damned thing about this yet.
This is exceedingly relevant, and something that should interest most slashdot readers.
/. in and of itself. However, this article brings together two even more relevant issues: Computer/electronic gadget design, and communication design, of which interface design is a subset.
On the one hand, industrial design is a very interesting and geeky field. Discussion about good product design is worthy of
What makes an informational product good or bad is significantly driven by how effectively that device communicates its information to the user. Lights that don't tell you anything worthwhile are decorations, and it should be possible to disable them. Lights that tell you something you may not care about should be filterable as well.
Case in point: Our old DVD player (the one hooked up to an actual TV!) had an insanely bright blue display--bright enough to distract from the movie if it was near the screen. There was an option to dim or disable it, but the setting wasn't persistent. Every time you hit the power switch, it came back on at full brightness.
Smart product design should be the next wave of computing. Unfortunately, both hardware and software interfaces have been getting worse rather than better, as gee-whiz technology has expanded. Pointless flashing LEDs is just a symptom of it.
Nobody likes the incumbent. Everyone loves an underdog. It's not that hard.
That's actually a very astute and thoughtful point.
"Our" way of thinking implies an 'us vs. them' mentality, which is what leads to many problems in the world--perhaps most of them, in fact.
(As an aside, I'd suggest that the invasion of Iraq was a carefully planned bit of empire-building wrapped in 'us vs. them' for the sake of garnering popular support. You can judge for yourself just how far in advance this was planned by reading the Project for a New American Century.)
In this case, it's a fairly simple proposition, though: Censorship is bad. IF you accept that claim, then yes--turning down an anti-censorship policy for the sake of corporate profits is bad. In fact, turning down even a provisionally good policy (i.e., based on the idea that censorship is generally bad for most cases) for profit-driven reasons can be argued as bad.
Does this rejection stink? My feeling is yes. However, that is a single-case and somewhat informed opinion. Your point that "China==censorship==bad!!!" is a stupid and thoughtless attitude still stands strongly. I hope more people consider it.
Agreed on the path to download--many in the Solaris community have been after Sun to work on streamlining their webpages.
Solaris is Sun's official release. It can be patched with Sun patches, and can be supported under a support contract if you so desire.
OpenSolaris is a few different things. First of all, it's the Solaris source code, released under the CDDL. It's also the community development platform, where things get tried out. (Stuff that gets developed in OpenSolaris may make it back into Solaris). It can also be considered the 'jumping-off point' for any Solaris derivatives and distributions, such as Nexenta (GNU/Solaris) and Schillx. Basically, it's the open source project centre and fork point. The interesting thing about it vs. Linux is that Open Solaris is continually getting refreshed from Solaris, as well as contributing to it, so it won't drift away from Solaris over time. Consequently, other distributions that are based on OpenSolaris should maintain a static distance from Solaris proper over time as well. Less fragmentation should be the result.