I've been using Perforce for awhile for a personal project (their "trial version" is a perpetual 2-user free-as-in-beer license) and I have to admit, I'm hooked on the speed. CVS on the LAN at work is an order of magnitude SLOWER for edit/commit operations than Perforce on a 512K upstream DSL connection.
I've thought about moving to Subversion just so it would be cheaper if I ever had to scale my "personal project" up past two people. But honestly, I think Perforce is well worth the US$750/seat for the sheer speed it offers.
...being around to hear "last buggy-whip manufacturer goes out of business" last century. Truly the end of an era.
I remember even ten years ago, when my DJ company would get shipments of new music on vinyl, the Canadian record companies were having to bring the records in from the U.S. because there were no pressing plants left in Canada.
And now there's not even any analog tape being made in N.A.! Does anybody else smell a cottage industry opportunity?
A Bush presidency, sans Ashcroft and with Arafat dead, or as good as. That sounds just about right to me.
This being Slashdot, I'll likely get modded down for expressing heretical opinions, but I approve of Bush's hardline foreign-policy stance. It's his domestic policies I don't like -- cutting taxes while there's a war on, raising (some) trade barriers, and of course, the Patriot Act.
Actually, I should qualify that: I don't even oppose the powers given to the FBI. What I object to in the Patriot Act is the lack of transparency -- specifically, the lack of judicial oversight. If the FBI need certain powers to successfully prosecute the fight against terrorism, fine: but USE THEM IN THE OPEN. This National Security Letter bullshit is just that.
It seems to me that Ashcroft, with his "phantoms of lost liberty" speech, was the driving force behind the damn-the-torpedoes-full-speed-ahead approach that built the Patriot Act without the necessary democratic safeguards.
On the contrary, Gore lost nearly every recount by every common standard. Unlike you, I'm not making an empty assertion and don't expect people to take my word for it. The New York Times has a web page where you can do the recounts yourself. Choose your standards for hanging chads, optical ballots, observer agreement, whatever you like. It's been awhile since I did this, but IIRC all but one permutation returned Bush as the winner. Sometimes, admittedly, by a small margin. But to assert that Gore won every recount is simply not true.
I agree that it's a worthy goal to decouple the interface from the implementation as much as possible, whether we're talking human-computer interfaces or class interfaces. But in my experience, it's rare to get 100% separation between a human-computer interface and its implementation.
The examples you gave -- CD burning and filesharing -- are duly noted, but I don't think they scale well. =) In both cases, you have a library capable of all possible CD-burning options. Your GUI design consists in large measure of optimizing for different workflows (say, archiving photos vs. burning music CDs) but in the end, you're just handing off a stream to a library. It's easy to decouple that.
Now look at something like Gmail. I have to speculate a bit here, because I don't have an account yet (hard to think of a better example off the top of my head b/c I have a meeting in 5 minutes). But from what I understand, they've got an approach to sorting, searching and displaying email threads that is very different from what's currently available, especially in a web client. You can't just say "hey, you guys go off over here and write this complete set of email functions, and we'll just tinker with the interface over here until we get it right." The point is that the interface design is driving the implementation, creating new functionality that didn't exist before.
The parent poster who wants to code all day and never talk to users doesn't (in my opinion) even have a seat at the Gmail table. Other people will make all the interesting decisions for him, and hand him the completed spec. His is the easiest job to outsource!
So I suppose I didn't misunderstand the original poster so much as seriously disagree with him. I believe that people who just want to code and never want to deal with people are deluding themselves. They're a lot less useful than people with even a marginal interest in or concern for the people who ultimately cut the cheques. There may exist a certain number of programming jobs where the code-in-splendid-isolation attitude is still viable, but I think the number must be vanishingly small.
I appreciate your attitude; it makes it easy for me to steal your job. =)
Seriously, I just can't understand this kind of thinking, although I encounter it all the time. If you're writing utilities for yourself or for a group of people very much like yourself, it's no problem. But if you're writing commercial software, you're not writing for yourself. Your whole livelihood revolves around solving other people's problems. Expecting your customers to adapt their way of thinking to your way of coding is just piss-poor customer service. You want their money; that means you make it easy for them, no matter how challenging that may make the coding task for you.
Oddly enough, I came to these convictions not through coding, but through years of work as a DJ. No kidding. When I started out, I had all these pretensions about educating the great unwashed in what good music was. And you know what? I got the conceit beaten out of me very quickly, as I cleared dancefloor after dancefloor for the first two months.
I soon realized that my job was to play what the crowd wanted to hear. And if their tastes had been informed by 30 years of top 40 radio, tough luck for me. My job was to figure out, at any given gig, what kind of crowd I was dealing with and play accordingly. And it's worked wonders.
Interestingly, I came to learn that if I do that well enough, the crowd learns to trust me. They're so happy with what I'm playing (after 13 years, I virtually never have a bad night) that if I slip in something new, they'll usually give me the benefit of the doubt enough to dance to it anyway. That's right: I have more success introducing new music now, than I ever did when I was looking down on the people who were cutting the cheques.
The same applies to software. I seem to be a rare case: someone with real interaction design chops, who has also written a C compiler. But it seems like a natural marriage, because what proper usability research does for me is confirm that I'm solving the right problem in the right way.
I think Eric Sink has an article or two about this where he distinguishes between what he calls developers and programmers, but I'm too lazy to Google for it.
If you're worried about emissions, run it on biodiesel. Now you've closed the carbon loop, and are running on a 100% renewable resource. Even hybrids can't make that claim.
In comparison, hybrids just seem to me like a solution in search of a problem.
I just discovered allofmp3.com over the weekend, thanks to others mentioning it on Slashdot, so I'm doing my part to spread the word. They have a good selection (though not as broad as Apple's), but the pricing is unbeatable -- $0.01 or $0.02 per MB.
Best of all, the encoding is almost always selectable -- you can choose MP3 (including the LAME alt-preset settings), WMA, OGG, MP4, and a couple of others I've forgotten. You can even get the tracks lossless if you want.
I can't remember getting this excited about an Internet site since the first time I streamed European radio via RealPlayer in 1997. Understand: I've been an AVLA-licensed DJ for 13 years. I rarely spend my own money on music; I get it all from the record companies (whose licensing terms, for DJs at least, are a lot better in Canada than they are in the States -- we can burn multiple copies for performance, are licensed to play directly from MP3, etc.), in exchange for a nominal fee. But last night I spent about US$17 and downloaded about 220 songs. About half of that was replacing CDs I've previously owned but that are now damaged or lost. Another 20% was probably old favorites from the 80s that I remember fondly but am not willing to spend a lot of money on (Sly Fox or Paul Hardcastle for example).
Don't want to give your credit card to the Russians? Fine -- they take PayPal. I paid $10 for 1GB of download, and when it was obvious I was going to blow past that amount, I added another $10. Simple and painless.
iTUnes and all the comparable services (PureTracks, etc.) use DRM-encumbered formats. These are unencumbered MP3s that work great on my 15GB Archos Jukebox Recorder.
In short, allofmp3 is pretty much exactly what I've been wanting in a download service. They claim it's legal in Russia (see the site and some discussion forums), and it's legal for me to download here in Canada (heck, my wife will be burning half the music to CDs that we've paid the CRIA licensing fees for -- most of our CDs are used for backups and/or digital photos), so for as long as they're around they've got my business.
The problem with having the "worker nerds" do their thing first is that the very architecture of their system may preclude (or make difficult) some necessary newbie functionality. To paraphrase Alan Cooper, code is to design like concrete is to architecture: once the concrete is poured, it's REALLY hard to change it, no matter what changes you make on the pretty blue paper.
Ideally, you let the design nerds do some user research before you start coding at all. Who is the target audience? What design metaphors are the already used to using? How much (usually, how little) experience can we assume?
Then you prototype. Prototyping isn't much different from coding: prototype your designs (on paper for starters), find out where they crash (i.e. where people get "hung"), debug, rinse, repeat. You won't work all the bugs out with a paper prototype, but you can nail an awful lot of them.
THEN you start coding. And you test and refine as you go, since some things (scrolling, for example) can be hard to simulate with paper. But you can get so much information if you just take a couple of weeks at the beginning and put some thought into your design, and then find some people who are representative of your target audience, and say "You have a printer attached to a different computer on your home network. You want to be able to print from this computer to the printer on the other machine. Here is the first screen..."
(Spoken, by the way, as someone with a foot in both worlds -- a design nerd who has also co-written a C compiler).
Actually, most single-vision prescription eyeglasses that you buy at Lenscrafters can be done in about 5-10 minutes; only really strong prescriptions (or bifocals or progressives -- any lens you actually have to grind and polish in the lab) take an hour, and even those usually only take 40 minutes or so.
One-hour labs carry a huge stock of pre-ground, polished and coated single-vision lens blanks around 75mm in diameter. All the lab techs have to do is edge the lens so it fits the frame of your choice.
I was a lab tech at EyeMasters (a short-lived, unregretted Canadian Lenscrafters competitor) for two years. My record was two minutes, twelve seconds from the moment we got the order to the moment the glasses were out the door. These were $500 eyeglasses (and this was ten years ago), with very nice Pentax lenses. It was a lazy Sunday afternoon, and the lab manager and I (the most experienced non-management tech at the time) were the only ones working. Ian grinned at me and said "Let's see how fast we can get this done."
We worked in tandem, he pulled the lenses, I marked them up, he traced the frame, I edged the lenses, he fined the sharp edges off, I had the frame heated up and popped the lenses in, and he did the final prescription, axis and PD checks. Not surprisingly given our experience level, they were absolutely bang on (the law here in Canada, at least at the time, allowed for a maximum quarter-diopter variance; these were perfect).
The customer had chatted with the optician out front for a moment after she'd handed in our job. Ian caught him just as he was walking out the door:
"Sir. Sir! Your glasses are ready."
"I'm sorry; there must be some mistake. I just barely submitted my order."
"I know, sir. They're done. Why don't you let the optician fit them for you?"
Jen double-checked everything (by law, the dispensing optician must) and gave us an "OK, I'm impressed" look and a thumbs-up.
We always used to laugh at those Lenscrafters commercials that would show a stopwatch stopping at, say, 54 minutes. Try a tenth of that. The one-hour promise just gives enough buffer time to redo 95%+ of all jobs (sometimes twice) if you screw up.
"The university is nothing more nor less than a place to show off: if it ceased to be that, it would cease to exist." -- Hugh Nibley (himself a lifelong scholar and academic!)
Computer illiterates are my best source of favors. You need all that spyware removed and windows reinstalled? Yeah, well I need some vodka.
This works for me too -- although I don't drink. =)
My most frequent tech-support calls come from good friends who happen to own a cabin at a nice resort area. Not a timeshare -- a sleeps-12 chalet of their own that they rent out.
Two weeks ago it was our five-year wedding anniversary, so we took them up on an offer that had been standing for a year: the use of their cabin. They'd offered it for a weekend a year ago; we asked for four days and three nights and got it, gladly, at no charge. With the money we saved, I pampered my wife with a shopping spree and a trip to the spa.
If you don't let yourself get overworked, bartering for tech support can be very worthwhile.
The scary thing is how many Slashdotters will agree with you, while many will be the same people who just excoriated HP (only four stories ago!) for exporting tech jobs overseas.
"HP is fscking over American IT employees because we let them. Our government won't even.... Ooooh, iPods!"
The term "Slashdot Effect" is now one of only three clickable (i.e. searchable) links under their search box, suggesting that these folks at least have a sense of humour. Brownie points for that.
Well, it seems they're right about that one. Found on jwz's LiveJournal is this company, manufacturers of the LoveLump.
I haven't followed the link myself, because judging from the lj commentary it is definitely NSFW and I'm at the office, but most people seem highly disturbed.
"The messages [Winston] had received referred to articles or news items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to alter, or, as the official phrase had it, to rectify.... As soon as all the corrections which happened to be necessary in any particular number of The Times had been assembled and collated, that number would be reprinted, the original copy destroyed, and the corrected copy placed on the files in its stead. This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs -- to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance. Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct, nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record."
Patrick Lee, the scientist behind all of this, has been researching the reovirus for over twenty years. We (that's the University of Calgary, my alma mater) just lost him to Dalhousie University, and they haven't stopped bragging since.
When the first word of this treatment hit the papers five years ago in 1998, his colleagues at other universities (read: his competitors) were quoted saying (I'm paraphrasing) that if Patrick Lee has published, you know the science has to be solid. The peer-reviewed journals agree: he's been published in Cell, Nature, Science and Nature Cell Biology, among others.
This is the real deal. I've put my money where my mouth is, too: several thousand dollars of my own money is banking on this.
And you can BET that Oncolytics has done their due diligence when it comes to IP protection. Check out their press releases -- many of them concern issued patents covering not only the modified reovirus (which, IMO, they have a right to patent sine they engineered it) but also the commercialization process that will allow them to produce this virus in the quantities required.
Yahoo! now has under its own roof all the elements of the business model that made Google such a success. It cannot be long before Yahoo! turns from a lucrative customer of Google's into a powerful rival.
Yes, except the one element that matters most: the relevance of the search results it returns. It's what makes Google's paid AdWords useful instead of annoying: at Google, even the ad results are (usually) relevant! If Yahoo can't match Google's relevance, people will still have a better experience going to Google. No matter that Yahoo has a competitive "pay to place relevant ads" service.
Actually, they'll probably have to do significantly better than Google. Teoma, as someone pointed out here yesterday(?), is nearly as good as Google at returning relevant results, yet it remains a niche player because "almost as good" or even "just as good" doesn't give people a compelling reason to switch.
Why exactly is it nobody is respecting these teens who are the cause and generators of the school funding again?
Because they don't vote. Even the ones old enough to, don't.
Were I a politician I would NEVER worry about pissing off the 18-to-29 demographic because there are simply no consequences (unless the issue has broader traction among older voters).
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed, it may simply come down to the integrity of the journalist.
I've been using Perforce for awhile for a personal project (their "trial version" is a perpetual 2-user free-as-in-beer license) and I have to admit, I'm hooked on the speed. CVS on the LAN at work is an order of magnitude SLOWER for edit/commit operations than Perforce on a 512K upstream DSL connection.
I've thought about moving to Subversion just so it would be cheaper if I ever had to scale my "personal project" up past two people. But honestly, I think Perforce is well worth the US$750/seat for the sheer speed it offers.
Anybody have any idea how SVN compares?
... long live the Apple ][gs!
...being around to hear "last buggy-whip manufacturer goes out of business" last century. Truly the end of an era.
I remember even ten years ago, when my DJ company would get shipments of new music on vinyl, the Canadian record companies were having to bring the records in from the U.S. because there were no pressing plants left in Canada.
And now there's not even any analog tape being made in N.A.! Does anybody else smell a cottage industry opportunity?
A Bush presidency, sans Ashcroft and with Arafat dead, or as good as. That sounds just about right to me.
This being Slashdot, I'll likely get modded down for expressing heretical opinions, but I approve of Bush's hardline foreign-policy stance. It's his domestic policies I don't like -- cutting taxes while there's a war on, raising (some) trade barriers, and of course, the Patriot Act.
Actually, I should qualify that: I don't even oppose the powers given to the FBI. What I object to in the Patriot Act is the lack of transparency -- specifically, the lack of judicial oversight. If the FBI need certain powers to successfully prosecute the fight against terrorism, fine: but USE THEM IN THE OPEN. This National Security Letter bullshit is just that.
It seems to me that Ashcroft, with his "phantoms of lost liberty" speech, was the driving force behind the damn-the-torpedoes-full-speed-ahead approach that built the Patriot Act without the necessary democratic safeguards.
I'm heartily glad he's gone.
Now, if Arafat would only hurry up and die...
...is Slashdot just going to bite the bullet and make a Cringely icon?
On the contrary, Gore lost nearly every recount by every common standard. Unlike you, I'm not making an empty assertion and don't expect people to take my word for it. The New York Times has a web page where you can do the recounts yourself. Choose your standards for hanging chads, optical ballots, observer agreement, whatever you like. It's been awhile since I did this, but IIRC all but one permutation returned Bush as the winner. Sometimes, admittedly, by a small margin. But to assert that Gore won every recount is simply not true.
I agree that it's a worthy goal to decouple the interface from the implementation as much as possible, whether we're talking human-computer interfaces or class interfaces. But in my experience, it's rare to get 100% separation between a human-computer interface and its implementation.
The examples you gave -- CD burning and filesharing -- are duly noted, but I don't think they scale well. =) In both cases, you have a library capable of all possible CD-burning options. Your GUI design consists in large measure of optimizing for different workflows (say, archiving photos vs. burning music CDs) but in the end, you're just handing off a stream to a library. It's easy to decouple that.
Now look at something like Gmail. I have to speculate a bit here, because I don't have an account yet (hard to think of a better example off the top of my head b/c I have a meeting in 5 minutes). But from what I understand, they've got an approach to sorting, searching and displaying email threads that is very different from what's currently available, especially in a web client. You can't just say "hey, you guys go off over here and write this complete set of email functions, and we'll just tinker with the interface over here until we get it right." The point is that the interface design is driving the implementation, creating new functionality that didn't exist before.
The parent poster who wants to code all day and never talk to users doesn't (in my opinion) even have a seat at the Gmail table. Other people will make all the interesting decisions for him, and hand him the completed spec. His is the easiest job to outsource!
So I suppose I didn't misunderstand the original poster so much as seriously disagree with him. I believe that people who just want to code and never want to deal with people are deluding themselves. They're a lot less useful than people with even a marginal interest in or concern for the people who ultimately cut the cheques. There may exist a certain number of programming jobs where the code-in-splendid-isolation attitude is still viable, but I think the number must be vanishingly small.
I appreciate your attitude; it makes it easy for me to steal your job. =)
Seriously, I just can't understand this kind of thinking, although I encounter it all the time. If you're writing utilities for yourself or for a group of people very much like yourself, it's no problem. But if you're writing commercial software, you're not writing for yourself. Your whole livelihood revolves around solving other people's problems. Expecting your customers to adapt their way of thinking to your way of coding is just piss-poor customer service. You want their money; that means you make it easy for them, no matter how challenging that may make the coding task for you.
Oddly enough, I came to these convictions not through coding, but through years of work as a DJ. No kidding. When I started out, I had all these pretensions about educating the great unwashed in what good music was. And you know what? I got the conceit beaten out of me very quickly, as I cleared dancefloor after dancefloor for the first two months.
I soon realized that my job was to play what the crowd wanted to hear. And if their tastes had been informed by 30 years of top 40 radio, tough luck for me. My job was to figure out, at any given gig, what kind of crowd I was dealing with and play accordingly. And it's worked wonders.
Interestingly, I came to learn that if I do that well enough, the crowd learns to trust me. They're so happy with what I'm playing (after 13 years, I virtually never have a bad night) that if I slip in something new, they'll usually give me the benefit of the doubt enough to dance to it anyway. That's right: I have more success introducing new music now, than I ever did when I was looking down on the people who were cutting the cheques.
The same applies to software. I seem to be a rare case: someone with real interaction design chops, who has also written a C compiler. But it seems like a natural marriage, because what proper usability research does for me is confirm that I'm solving the right problem in the right way.
I think Eric Sink has an article or two about this where he distinguishes between what he calls developers and programmers, but I'm too lazy to Google for it.
Honestly, I just don't get the hype over hybrids. A Jetta turbo diesel gets comparable mileage, is a larger, more comfortable, more powerful car, and presents no extraordinary risk to emergency services trying to free you in an accident.
If you're worried about emissions, run it on biodiesel. Now you've closed the carbon loop, and are running on a 100% renewable resource. Even hybrids can't make that claim.
In comparison, hybrids just seem to me like a solution in search of a problem.
I just discovered allofmp3.com over the weekend, thanks to others mentioning it on Slashdot, so I'm doing my part to spread the word. They have a good selection (though not as broad as Apple's), but the pricing is unbeatable -- $0.01 or $0.02 per MB.
Best of all, the encoding is almost always selectable -- you can choose MP3 (including the LAME alt-preset settings), WMA, OGG, MP4, and a couple of others I've forgotten. You can even get the tracks lossless if you want.
I can't remember getting this excited about an Internet site since the first time I streamed European radio via RealPlayer in 1997. Understand: I've been an AVLA-licensed DJ for 13 years. I rarely spend my own money on music; I get it all from the record companies (whose licensing terms, for DJs at least, are a lot better in Canada than they are in the States -- we can burn multiple copies for performance, are licensed to play directly from MP3, etc.), in exchange for a nominal fee. But last night I spent about US$17 and downloaded about 220 songs. About half of that was replacing CDs I've previously owned but that are now damaged or lost. Another 20% was probably old favorites from the 80s that I remember fondly but am not willing to spend a lot of money on (Sly Fox or Paul Hardcastle for example).
Don't want to give your credit card to the Russians? Fine -- they take PayPal. I paid $10 for 1GB of download, and when it was obvious I was going to blow past that amount, I added another $10. Simple and painless.
iTUnes and all the comparable services (PureTracks, etc.) use DRM-encumbered formats. These are unencumbered MP3s that work great on my 15GB Archos Jukebox Recorder.
In short, allofmp3 is pretty much exactly what I've been wanting in a download service. They claim it's legal in Russia (see the site and some discussion forums), and it's legal for me to download here in Canada (heck, my wife will be burning half the music to CDs that we've paid the CRIA licensing fees for -- most of our CDs are used for backups and/or digital photos), so for as long as they're around they've got my business.
...are more durable than their servers!
Five comments, and already slashdotted. Sigh.
=)
The problem with having the "worker nerds" do their thing first is that the very architecture of their system may preclude (or make difficult) some necessary newbie functionality. To paraphrase Alan Cooper, code is to design like concrete is to architecture: once the concrete is poured, it's REALLY hard to change it, no matter what changes you make on the pretty blue paper.
Ideally, you let the design nerds do some user research before you start coding at all. Who is the target audience? What design metaphors are the already used to using? How much (usually, how little) experience can we assume?
Then you prototype. Prototyping isn't much different from coding: prototype your designs (on paper for starters), find out where they crash (i.e. where people get "hung"), debug, rinse, repeat. You won't work all the bugs out with a paper prototype, but you can nail an awful lot of them.
THEN you start coding. And you test and refine as you go, since some things (scrolling, for example) can be hard to simulate with paper. But you can get so much information if you just take a couple of weeks at the beginning and put some thought into your design, and then find some people who are representative of your target audience, and say "You have a printer attached to a different computer on your home network. You want to be able to print from this computer to the printer on the other machine. Here is the first screen..."
(Spoken, by the way, as someone with a foot in both worlds -- a design nerd who has also co-written a C compiler).
Actually, most single-vision prescription eyeglasses that you buy at Lenscrafters can be done in about 5-10 minutes; only really strong prescriptions (or bifocals or progressives -- any lens you actually have to grind and polish in the lab) take an hour, and even those usually only take 40 minutes or so.
One-hour labs carry a huge stock of pre-ground, polished and coated single-vision lens blanks around 75mm in diameter. All the lab techs have to do is edge the lens so it fits the frame of your choice.
I was a lab tech at EyeMasters (a short-lived, unregretted Canadian Lenscrafters competitor) for two years. My record was two minutes, twelve seconds from the moment we got the order to the moment the glasses were out the door. These were $500 eyeglasses (and this was ten years ago), with very nice Pentax lenses. It was a lazy Sunday afternoon, and the lab manager and I (the most experienced non-management tech at the time) were the only ones working. Ian grinned at me and said "Let's see how fast we can get this done."
We worked in tandem, he pulled the lenses, I marked them up, he traced the frame, I edged the lenses, he fined the sharp edges off, I had the frame heated up and popped the lenses in, and he did the final prescription, axis and PD checks. Not surprisingly given our experience level, they were absolutely bang on (the law here in Canada, at least at the time, allowed for a maximum quarter-diopter variance; these were perfect).
The customer had chatted with the optician out front for a moment after she'd handed in our job. Ian caught him just as he was walking out the door:
"Sir. Sir! Your glasses are ready."
"I'm sorry; there must be some mistake. I just barely submitted my order."
"I know, sir. They're done. Why don't you let the optician fit them for you?"
Jen double-checked everything (by law, the dispensing optician must) and gave us an "OK, I'm impressed" look and a thumbs-up.
We always used to laugh at those Lenscrafters commercials that would show a stopwatch stopping at, say, 54 minutes. Try a tenth of that. The one-hour promise just gives enough buffer time to redo 95%+ of all jobs (sometimes twice) if you screw up.
Indeed.
"The university is nothing more nor less than a place to show off: if it ceased to be that, it would cease to exist." -- Hugh Nibley (himself a lifelong scholar and academic!)
=)
This works for me too -- although I don't drink. =)
My most frequent tech-support calls come from good friends who happen to own a cabin at a nice resort area. Not a timeshare -- a sleeps-12 chalet of their own that they rent out.
Two weeks ago it was our five-year wedding anniversary, so we took them up on an offer that had been standing for a year: the use of their cabin. They'd offered it for a weekend a year ago; we asked for four days and three nights and got it, gladly, at no charge. With the money we saved, I pampered my wife with a shopping spree and a trip to the spa.
If you don't let yourself get overworked, bartering for tech support can be very worthwhile.
The scary thing is how many Slashdotters will agree with you, while many will be the same people who just excoriated HP (only four stories ago!) for exporting tech jobs overseas.
"HP is fscking over American IT employees because we let them. Our government won't even.... Ooooh, iPods!"
The term "Slashdot Effect" is now one of only three clickable (i.e. searchable) links under their search box, suggesting that these folks at least have a sense of humour. Brownie points for that.
Well, it seems they're right about that one. Found on jwz's LiveJournal is this company, manufacturers of the LoveLump.
I haven't followed the link myself, because judging from the lj commentary it is definitely NSFW and I'm at the office, but most people seem highly disturbed.
"The messages [Winston] had received referred to articles or news items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to alter, or, as the official phrase had it, to rectify.... As soon as all the corrections which happened to be necessary in any particular number of The Times had been assembled and collated, that number would be reprinted, the original copy destroyed, and the corrected copy placed on the files in its stead. This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs -- to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance. Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct, nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record."
Patrick Lee, the scientist behind all of this, has been researching the reovirus for over twenty years. We (that's the University of Calgary, my alma mater) just lost him to Dalhousie University, and they haven't stopped bragging since.
When the first word of this treatment hit the papers five years ago in 1998, his colleagues at other universities (read: his competitors) were quoted saying (I'm paraphrasing) that if Patrick Lee has published, you know the science has to be solid. The peer-reviewed journals agree: he's been published in Cell, Nature, Science and Nature Cell Biology, among others.
This is the real deal. I've put my money where my mouth is, too: several thousand dollars of my own money is banking on this.
And you can BET that Oncolytics has done their due diligence when it comes to IP protection. Check out their press releases -- many of them concern issued patents covering not only the modified reovirus (which, IMO, they have a right to patent sine they engineered it) but also the commercialization process that will allow them to produce this virus in the quantities required.
From the article:
Yes, except the one element that matters most: the relevance of the search results it returns. It's what makes Google's paid AdWords useful instead of annoying: at Google, even the ad results are (usually) relevant! If Yahoo can't match Google's relevance, people will still have a better experience going to Google. No matter that Yahoo has a competitive "pay to place relevant ads" service.
Actually, they'll probably have to do significantly better than Google. Teoma, as someone pointed out here yesterday(?), is nearly as good as Google at returning relevant results, yet it remains a niche player because "almost as good" or even "just as good" doesn't give people a compelling reason to switch.
...who don't know it's spelled "Technics" ;-)
Chuck McKinnon
(for the record: 12 years as a mobile DJ, using 1200s, Denon DN-2000, Pioneer CDJ-500 and -100...)
Why exactly is it nobody is respecting these teens who are the cause and generators of the school funding again?
Because they don't vote. Even the ones old enough to, don't.
Were I a politician I would NEVER worry about pissing off the 18-to-29 demographic because there are simply no consequences (unless the issue has broader traction among older voters).