That's how I felt until I saw Big Thinkers. Holy crap that show is awesome. Now, if only I hadn't moved to a place where I don't get tech-TV last week:-/
At the last company I worked for we lost a huge number of western digital drives. I'd guess 30ish in one year. For a company with only 100-150 computers, that's an appalling failure rate. Now most of the computers they failed in were purchased at the same time from the same vendor so I suppose it's possible that they were just a bad batch or something but still, that's just insane.
In one server, we lost 4/4 western digital drives over the course of 3 months. At first we were suspicious that perhaps there was another hardware problem causing the failures but we replaced them with Seagates and when I left 3 years later, none of the Seagates had failed.
Also, coincidentally, the only drive I've ever had fail on me at home was a Quantum Bigfoot 2 gig drive.
I've worked in offices full of good coders, designers, architechts, and programmers who can't type more than 5 wpm!
I've never worked in an office where there was a single developer that couldn't type. I can't imagine how somebody could ignore such a fundamental skill in their field. In my mind, that's just unprofessional behavior. That's like a carpenter not being able to use a hammer and nail. In that case, I'm not so sure it's the software that needs fixed as much as it is the developer. That's grounds for a company to send the lot off for training or can them in my opinion.
When I decided to major in computer science, the first elective I took in school was typing. Was it fun? Not at all. Was it necessary and important? Absolutely. I could have just taught myself using shareware or whatnot but I know that I personally have a hard time learning skills that aren't challenging or interesting without an outside force motivating me (such as a class).
Also, I hope 5 wpm is an exaggeration because I was typing 25+ wpm before I learned how to touch-type.
Try to reduce key-stroke redundancy, and figure out ways to reduce errors. A friend of mine and I once considered writing a language editor which guaranteed that at any time, the program displayed in the editor window was syntactically correct.
Ok, key-stroke redundancy is a stupid thing to focus on. The real time investment in good programming has nothing to do with how fast you type the program in. You should be spending at least twice the time in analysis, planning, and documentation that you do actually entering the code. A better area to focus on would be tying code, documentation, and visualization together. I hate updating documentation after making a change to an application, I want it to just happen. Lots of recent IDE's have made nice strides in this area for a multitude of languages recently. It really has a long ways to go though.
As for not allowing code that isn't syntactically correct to be entered, forget it. Every attempt I've ever seen at this has been unbearable to work with. Practically all text entry has been done with the mouse and it's incredibly restrictive. People enter code in different ways, I might copy a piece of code from a help file or document and paste it in to my editor then modify it. I might message a friend and he might e-mail me a snippet of a program he's written for another company. I don't want to try to duplicate stuff by point and click. Now, I have seen editors that will highlight any syntax errors. That's a little annoying from time to time but it's much less restrictive. It's sort of like having a word processor underline misspelled words...
I'm trying not to be too cynical or a blantant MS basher because there are actually a small handful of MS tools that I really love, but this is the kind of crap I've grown to expect from them. From my experience, it pretty much works like this...
You buy a Microsoft product. You try to integrate it into your existing systems. You realize you can't so you start replacing your existing systems with microsoft products. You finally get everything playing nice and running smoothly. At this point, you're pretty much a pure microsoft-only shop. A new version of one the products you are using is released. You test it and discover that it breaks everything that it touches. You choose not to upgrade. Eventually security holes, the inability to get additional licenses for older software, or other issues stemming from a lack of support force you to upgrade something. You make the update and suddenly you find yourself spending insane amounts of money and developer hours updating every product to the latest version, rewriting code, editing documents to fix layout issues, etc. Lather, Rinse, Repeat every 1-2 years. It's extremely costly and a frustrating environment for developers and support techs.
This is actually a product I was looking for years ago. I only heard about it's release last week though. It would have been useful to me before last weekend but I found a cheaper solution to do pretty much the same thing.
I moved into a new place a couple of weeks ago. At my old house, my LAN was half wired and half wireless. I had wired certain rooms before 802.11b was around but then after it appeared, I stopped running new cables when I would move a PC into another room or add a PC to my LAN.
Now that I've moved, I no longer have a cable running to my old Blue & White G3 or my old beat up linux box. Adding 802.11b network cards to an old mac and an old non-USB pentium pro proved to be a little more expensive and complicated than I had expected. So I went looking for a WET 11 with no luck last weekend. Apparently retail shops haven't had a chance to get them stocked yet.
What I did end up with was a returned Belkin access point. I only ran me $70 and I was able to set up my Linksys WAP11 as a bridge. I'm having a few problems getting encryption to work right now but otherwise it works great. For now I've locked stuff down by MAC address which is probably just as good considering how easy WEP is to break.
This article had some interesting thoughts and the table with sales figures was handy. However, I've come to the realization that I no longer care how downloading affects CD sales. I am so completely fed up with the record industry, the RIAA, the MPAA, and media companies in general that I can barely stand it. Screw it, if it hurts sales, I don't care. If it helps sales, I don't care. I'm buying used cd's and supporting my local record shop instead of RIAA member companies. I'm also buying my DVD's used when possible.
I know I'm preaching to the choir here on slashdot but as long as I'm pissed off, here's a short list of the things that I'm angry about:
1) RIAA using "Artists' Rights" as an excuse for a campaign against file sharing. Yeah, the record companies have such a great history of protecting artists. Just ask any black blues artist from the 20's through 60's (or his/her surviving family) about how the record companies were champions for their rights. For that matter, ask any current signed artist what they think about their record label.
2) The standard record contract. Let me get this straight, you're going to give me an advance(that means loan btw) for a million dollars. I'm going to use it to record an album. Then I'm going to have to pay you back but you own the copyright on everything I've written and recorded? Yeah, that's fair. Thanks for the loan. I'm glad I could buy you something nice with it.
3) The increasing success of lobbying efforts. Let's see, I can't legally create a streaming radio station without owing you more than I can possibly make in revenues. If I bypass copy protection for perfectly legal acts covered under fair-use provisions, I've broken the law by bypassing the protection. Soon you'll be able to legally hack my computer and there's a chance that as a musician, I won't even be able to protect myself from debts owed to a you through bankruptcy. Given what's already passed, god knows what's coming. Half this stuff shouldn't have even made it to a vote in congress. And how do you fight back when most people are ignorant as to how their rights are being slowly bled off? Let's face it. It takes more than 100 pissed off letters to your congressman to outweigh $200,000 in campaign donations.
4) Continual extension of copyright duration Enough is enough. Mickey mouse has to be public domain sooner or later. Deal with it. As an artist, I should be able to draw on the work of another artist who's been dead for 30 years and create something new with his/her work without having to pay royalties. Copyright is supposed to protect an artist for a limited amount of time. Not an artist, the company he works for, and his great-grandchildren, forever. How is this good for society? How does it encourage innovation? Maybe if Disney had to create a new icon, we'd see more innovative material coming from them. (Not to mention the profits Disney themselves have reaped from the public domain)
5) The lock on distribution. You want airplay? You gotta have more money than you're likely to see in your entire lifetime to pay off Clear Channel. Payola is alive and well, it's just had a bit of a facelift. Want your stuff sold in most CD stores? You gotta sign away everything to a record label. Thank god the internet has opened things up a tad. However, even the internet is slowly being legislated into submission.
6) Suing companies out of business only to buy them at a discount. Ok, I can see where the myMp3.com service or whatever it was called was a bit controversial but gimme a break. It was completely sued into the ground just to be aquired . And now that Vivendi owns it, what has happened to the site? It is a big promotional vehical for bands signed to their label. I used to love going to the top 40 lists in different genres and hearing small unsigned bands. It was also a great resource for finding bands in cities I would be travelling to. Now it's terribly difficult to find those bands to do the deluge of signed acts all over the site. To some extent, you can say the same thing about Napster or Audiogalaxy though their services were obviously much more controversial.
Ok, I've ranted enough, there's not much point in going further. I know that eventually things will get to a point where the market will fight back with their pocketbooks and lawmakers will have more votes to gain by campaigning on the right side of these issues than they gain on the dirty money that they use to purchase their tv advertisements. I'm just afraid it's going to take a really long time. Until then, I'm just going to do my best to educate my friends, express myself with my pocketbook, and write the occastional e-mail/letter to my congressmen.
Actually, IE has always been bad at printing. Netscape was very good at printing long before Mozilla. I remember when I was working for a company that used WebTrends for all of our log analysis. If you printed a report in IE 4x it looked horrible. Words would get cut off, graphs and other images would span between pages if they happened to fall at the page break. It was unreadable.
With Netscape 3.x or 4.x the reports looked fine. At one point, printing was the last thing I kept Netscape on my desktop for.
...I really do, but so long as that little IE icon is sitting on the Windows boxes that ship, I'm not sure Mozilla will gain enough foothold to beat down Microsoft. Not yet, anyway.
There is an easy solution to this. Most geeks know about Mozilla. Lots of us really like it a lot. Most non-geeks have never heard of mozilla (and if they have heard of it, they'd never bother to switch anyhow because they're afraid of their own computers).
Here's the great part though. Who do those non-geeks call to fix their computers when something goes wrong? Us geeks. Why pay for tech support when you've got some weirdo that will come over just about anytime 24/7 to fix your computer for a 6 pack of decent beer? Everytime I fix somebody's computer, I download Mozilla, install it, remove their desktop and task bar icons for IE and replace them with mozilla icons. I then tell them a little bit about it, show them how it kills popups, and show them where their last remaining IE icon is in Start->Programs in case they need it.
My dad, brother, aunt, mom, neighbor, and most of my high school friends that are still around are now all happy running Mozilla 1.0 or 1.1. Half of them are running OpenOffice now too:)
They are not charging you the consumer this royalty. Lots of people seem to be confused over that. They're charging software developers and hardware manufacturers. Winamp will continue to be free. iTunes will continue to be free. Windows Media Player will continue to be free (as long as winamp exists anyhow).
I could understand an open source developer working on a player being upset over the fees. I'd be pissed if I were in the process of writing a player and suddenly I couldn't release it. However, most of the comments here seem to be from misguided consumers and ogg vorbis zealots.
As for whether or not this will help ogg vorbis gain adoption... it can't hurt but it probably won't help much either. There is a lot of marketting power and name recognition behind the mp3 format. Somebody who manufactures a hardware mp3 player is going to pay these fees. No biggie - $3 added to the price tag of a $100-$600 device. Who cares? And while we'll likely see a player or two support the ogg format (in addition to.mp3 not in lieu of), it's going to take a lot more than an equal quality but free version to compete for market share at this point.
I'm sure Steinberg and DigiDesign are working on OS X versions of their software/drivers. MOTU has only just recently released OS X beta drivers for some of their hardware and announced an OS X release of Digital Performer (due this fall).
I don't think I would have wanted to run any of my audio software under 10.0.x or 10.1.x anyhow. I'm generally squeezing every cycle out of my cpu that it has to spare and OS 9 is noticably lighter even if it's less stable.
Hopefully I'll be seeing how 10.2 fares tonight...
Looks kind of impractical and outright silly to me from the one or two pictures I was able to view.
1) Chair wheels and power cords don't mix. Unless he was hiding battery packs, this sucks. You now have to unplug if you want to move your chair, you're constantly rolling over the cord, etc.
2) Your case is on the back of the chair. How are you supposed to reach it to put in a cd, dvd, etc.? You gotta stand up...
3) There didn't look to be enough mousing space and the mouse was on an incline meaning it would roll down every time you take your hand off it.
4) With the mouse and the keyboard at that angle, typing and using the mouse has to be incredibly awkward. Probably painful in short time...
I could probably go on but it seems pointless... bad design...
If you really want something cool, get one of those big arms that looks like a desk lamp and drop a nice big monitor onto it. Then get one of the smaller ones with a keyboard tray and mousing surface. Now you can position your monitor and keyboard in 3D space to whatever is comfortable for you. This is the setup that my old boss used. Not only did it look "cool" but it was extremely functional.
Well, I watched the flash demo and I have to say it looks like a very slick environment. Without using it, it's hard to say, but I think this is the kind of thing I could give to my mom to use.
You can argue about the technical merits of their implementation all day long but look at how elegant and aesthetically pleasing the interface is compared to say the screen shots on the website of say... your favorite window manager...
(1) Pink lemonade doesn't have caffiene, or at least didn't the last time I checked.;)
(2) Yeah, the dry heat does make it feel cooler, 120 only feels like 110 would here. Plus, I'm pretty sure the dry heat dehydrates you quicker... Sweat evaportaes pretty damned fast out there.
Deignan says the company is considering producing an 80-ounce cold drink cup - that's 5 pints, folks. Christ, how much do these companies think people need to drink, anyway?"
Actually, I lived in Phoenix for two and a half years. Try commuting 45 minutes a day in a 1970 volkswagon beetle with black vinyl interior in 120 degrees and 0% humidity. You can't even imagine how much water you lose. I would suck down big gulps like nothing.
Of course, here in the midwest, I can't imagine finishing 5 pints of anything other than beer.
It's funny that you mention Denver because we just flew in half a dozen BEA consultants from Denver. Several of them left BEA for java jobs with a startup in Denver and pulled a bunch of guys working on the project with them... I'm in Columbus, OH.
You might want to consider sending a resume to BEA, they have at least 5 openings in Denver, if they're replacing the guys that left.;)
For one, kicking out people working here on visas is an ignorant, knee-jerk reaction from people who are stressed out over the current economic downturn. I wouldn't go as far as to call it racism. But it could definitely slide into that territory were it to persist. Two of the sharpest people on my team are working here on visas trying to get their citizenship. They're deserving and brilliant people who I would be much prouder to have as a fellow citizen and neighbor than the drug dealing freeloader that currently lives next door to me.
Secondly, what's up with all of these java developers that supposedly are out of work? I can't speak for other markets, but here there are about 10 J2EE jobs for every VB or MFC job. And even if it weren't that way, how smart is it to put your career into the hands of one programming language (even if it is one of the two best languages ever created... C++ being the best of course;). Investing in your skills is just like anything else. Ya can't put all your eggs in one basket. Even in these nasty times, the people I know with a diverse skillset are not having trouble finding jobs.
Finding a job with a company that isn't about to fold or lay off 10,000 employees, now that's another issue...
Um, we've got by far the coolest OS in existance right now.
1. Open source, BSD-based, core 2. Beautiful, Apple-designed user interface 3. Compiles most open source unix apps. 4. Runs tons of retail software - Including every game I've bought in the last year actually (dunno why I've been buying PC versions). 5. Includes a few killer apps (can we say iTunes?) right out of the box.
How 'bout we pony up and pay the man? I mean, hell, it's better than giving cash to Micro$oft for something far crappier right?
You could probably run Quicken fine under Virtual PC. If you would be trashing your old machine, you could buy the version of VPC without an OS and install the os from your desktop.
Or keep around your old pc for that app. It's not exactly the most demanding software.
I don't know what you mean by "Remote Desktop Display". I also don't know anything about video conferencing standards.
Well, seeing as Sony is part of the RIAA, I don't think news flash 2 will come to pass. Kinda sucks suing yourself. I'd predict something more like:
"Sony releases new holo-disc technology capable of storing 250,000 mp3's on a single disc"
"RIAA lobby pushes through legislature requring a tax on all blank holo-disc media sold due to rampant piracy. All proceeds will go to RIAA member labels to be 'distributed to artists.'"
I'm a programmer under the age of 25. I don't look for an office with a foosball table. I don't care if I've got a P4 1.4 GHz machine or a 486DX 66 sitting on my desk. I look for companies that are well organized, use technologies that I like to work with, and have challenging work.
However, I do periodically get pissed over the fact that the 40 year old COBOL programmer sitting next to me is making twice my salary when I'm writing half their code and teaching them everything they know about the platform they were hired to code on.
I look forward to the day when I'm old enough for fucks like yourself to set my pay based on my skills and not my age. Maybe then I'll have the pull to get one or two of you fired if you haven't all retired.
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That's how I felt until I saw Big Thinkers. Holy crap that show is awesome. Now, if only I hadn't moved to a place where I don't get tech-TV last week :-/
I know exactly why I bash WD drives.
At the last company I worked for we lost a huge number of western digital drives. I'd guess 30ish in one year. For a company with only 100-150 computers, that's an appalling failure rate. Now most of the computers they failed in were purchased at the same time from the same vendor so I suppose it's possible that they were just a bad batch or something but still, that's just insane.
In one server, we lost 4/4 western digital drives over the course of 3 months. At first we were suspicious that perhaps there was another hardware problem causing the failures but we replaced them with Seagates and when I left 3 years later, none of the Seagates had failed.
Also, coincidentally, the only drive I've ever had fail on me at home was a Quantum Bigfoot 2 gig drive.
I've worked in offices full of good coders, designers, architechts, and programmers who can't type more than 5 wpm!
I've never worked in an office where there was a single developer that couldn't type. I can't imagine how somebody could ignore such a fundamental skill in their field. In my mind, that's just unprofessional behavior. That's like a carpenter not being able to use a hammer and nail. In that case, I'm not so sure it's the software that needs fixed as much as it is the developer. That's grounds for a company to send the lot off for training or can them in my opinion.
When I decided to major in computer science, the first elective I took in school was typing. Was it fun? Not at all. Was it necessary and important? Absolutely. I could have just taught myself using shareware or whatnot but I know that I personally have a hard time learning skills that aren't challenging or interesting without an outside force motivating me (such as a class).
Also, I hope 5 wpm is an exaggeration because I was typing 25+ wpm before I learned how to touch-type.
Try to reduce key-stroke redundancy, and figure out ways to reduce errors. A friend of mine and I once considered writing a language editor which guaranteed that at any time, the program displayed in the editor window was syntactically correct.
Ok, key-stroke redundancy is a stupid thing to focus on. The real time investment in good programming has nothing to do with how fast you type the program in. You should be spending at least twice the time in analysis, planning, and documentation that you do actually entering the code. A better area to focus on would be tying code, documentation, and visualization together. I hate updating documentation after making a change to an application, I want it to just happen. Lots of recent IDE's have made nice strides in this area for a multitude of languages recently. It really has a long ways to go though.
As for not allowing code that isn't syntactically correct to be entered, forget it. Every attempt I've ever seen at this has been unbearable to work with. Practically all text entry has been done with the mouse and it's incredibly restrictive. People enter code in different ways, I might copy a piece of code from a help file or document and paste it in to my editor then modify it. I might message a friend and he might e-mail me a snippet of a program he's written for another company. I don't want to try to duplicate stuff by point and click. Now, I have seen editors that will highlight any syntax errors. That's a little annoying from time to time but it's much less restrictive. It's sort of like having a word processor underline misspelled words...
I'm trying not to be too cynical or a blantant MS basher because there are actually a small handful of MS tools that I really love, but this is the kind of crap I've grown to expect from them. From my experience, it pretty much works like this...
You buy a Microsoft product. You try to integrate it into your existing systems. You realize you can't so you start replacing your existing systems with microsoft products. You finally get everything playing nice and running smoothly. At this point, you're pretty much a pure microsoft-only shop. A new version of one the products you are using is released. You test it and discover that it breaks everything that it touches. You choose not to upgrade. Eventually security holes, the inability to get additional licenses for older software, or other issues stemming from a lack of support force you to upgrade something. You make the update and suddenly you find yourself spending insane amounts of money and developer hours updating every product to the latest version, rewriting code, editing documents to fix layout issues, etc. Lather, Rinse, Repeat every 1-2 years. It's extremely costly and a frustrating environment for developers and support techs.
This is actually a product I was looking for years ago. I only heard about it's release last week though. It would have been useful to me before last weekend but I found a cheaper solution to do pretty much the same thing.
I moved into a new place a couple of weeks ago. At my old house, my LAN was half wired and half wireless. I had wired certain rooms before 802.11b was around but then after it appeared, I stopped running new cables when I would move a PC into another room or add a PC to my LAN.
Now that I've moved, I no longer have a cable running to my old Blue & White G3 or my old beat up linux box. Adding 802.11b network cards to an old mac and an old non-USB pentium pro proved to be a little more expensive and complicated than I had expected. So I went looking for a WET 11 with no luck last weekend. Apparently retail shops haven't had a chance to get them stocked yet.
What I did end up with was a returned Belkin access point. I only ran me $70 and I was able to set up my Linksys WAP11 as a bridge. I'm having a few problems getting encryption to work right now but otherwise it works great. For now I've locked stuff down by MAC address which is probably just as good considering how easy WEP is to break.
This article had some interesting thoughts and the table with sales figures was handy. However, I've come to the realization that I no longer care how downloading affects CD sales. I am so completely fed up with the record industry, the RIAA, the MPAA, and media companies in general that I can barely stand it. Screw it, if it hurts sales, I don't care. If it helps sales, I don't care. I'm buying used cd's and supporting my local record shop instead of RIAA member companies. I'm also buying my DVD's used when possible.
I know I'm preaching to the choir here on slashdot but as long as I'm pissed off, here's a short list of the things that I'm angry about:
1) RIAA using "Artists' Rights" as an excuse for a campaign against file sharing.
Yeah, the record companies have such a great history of protecting artists. Just ask any black blues artist from the 20's through 60's (or his/her surviving family) about how the record companies were champions for their rights. For that matter, ask any current signed artist what they think about their record label.
2) The standard record contract.
Let me get this straight, you're going to give me an advance(that means loan btw) for a million dollars. I'm going to use it to record an album. Then I'm going to have to pay you back but you own the copyright on everything I've written and recorded? Yeah, that's fair. Thanks for the loan. I'm glad I could buy you something nice with it.
3) The increasing success of lobbying efforts.
Let's see, I can't legally create a streaming radio station without owing you more than I can possibly make in revenues. If I bypass copy protection for perfectly legal acts covered under fair-use provisions, I've broken the law by bypassing the protection. Soon you'll be able to legally hack my computer and there's a chance that as a musician, I won't even be able to protect myself from debts owed to a you through bankruptcy. Given what's already passed, god knows what's coming. Half this stuff shouldn't have even made it to a vote in congress. And how do you fight back when most people are ignorant as to how their rights are being slowly bled off? Let's face it. It takes more than 100 pissed off letters to your congressman to outweigh $200,000 in campaign donations.
4) Continual extension of copyright duration
Enough is enough. Mickey mouse has to be public domain sooner or later. Deal with it. As an artist, I should be able to draw on the work of another artist who's been dead for 30 years and create something new with his/her work without having to pay royalties. Copyright is supposed to protect an artist for a limited amount of time. Not an artist, the company he works for, and his great-grandchildren, forever. How is this good for society? How does it encourage innovation? Maybe if Disney had to create a new icon, we'd see more innovative material coming from them. (Not to mention the profits Disney themselves have reaped from the public domain)
5) The lock on distribution.
You want airplay? You gotta have more money than you're likely to see in your entire lifetime to pay off Clear Channel. Payola is alive and well, it's just had a bit of a facelift. Want your stuff sold in most CD stores? You gotta sign away everything to a record label. Thank god the internet has opened things up a tad. However, even the internet is slowly being legislated into submission.
6) Suing companies out of business only to buy them at a discount.
Ok, I can see where the myMp3.com service or whatever it was called was a bit controversial but gimme a break. It was completely sued into the ground just to be aquired . And now that Vivendi owns it, what has happened to the site? It is a big promotional vehical for bands signed to their label. I used to love going to the top 40 lists in different genres and hearing small unsigned bands. It was also a great resource for finding bands in cities I would be travelling to. Now it's terribly difficult to find those bands to do the deluge of signed acts all over the site. To some extent, you can say the same thing about Napster or Audiogalaxy though their services were obviously much more controversial.
Ok, I've ranted enough, there's not much point in going further. I know that eventually things will get to a point where the market will fight back with their pocketbooks and lawmakers will have more votes to gain by campaigning on the right side of these issues than they gain on the dirty money that they use to purchase their tv advertisements. I'm just afraid it's going to take a really long time. Until then, I'm just going to do my best to educate my friends, express myself with my pocketbook, and write the occastional e-mail/letter to my congressmen.
Oh yeah, forgot to mention installing the orbit theme - my personal favorite :)
Actually, IE has always been bad at printing. Netscape was very good at printing long before Mozilla. I remember when I was working for a company that used WebTrends for all of our log analysis. If you printed a report in IE 4x it looked horrible. Words would get cut off, graphs and other images would span between pages if they happened to fall at the page break. It was unreadable.
With Netscape 3.x or 4.x the reports looked fine. At one point, printing was the last thing I kept Netscape on my desktop for.
There is an easy solution to this. Most geeks know about Mozilla. Lots of us really like it a lot. Most non-geeks have never heard of mozilla (and if they have heard of it, they'd never bother to switch anyhow because they're afraid of their own computers).
Here's the great part though. Who do those non-geeks call to fix their computers when something goes wrong? Us geeks. Why pay for tech support when you've got some weirdo that will come over just about anytime 24/7 to fix your computer for a 6 pack of decent beer? Everytime I fix somebody's computer, I download Mozilla, install it, remove their desktop and task bar icons for IE and replace them with mozilla icons. I then tell them a little bit about it, show them how it kills popups, and show them where their last remaining IE icon is in Start->Programs in case they need it.
My dad, brother, aunt, mom, neighbor, and most of my high school friends that are still around are now all happy running Mozilla 1.0 or 1.1. Half of them are running OpenOffice now too
Ok, people need to relax a bit.
.mp3 not in lieu of), it's going to take a lot more than an equal quality but free version to compete for market share at this point.
They are not charging you the consumer this royalty. Lots of people seem to be confused over that. They're charging software developers and hardware manufacturers. Winamp will continue to be free. iTunes will continue to be free. Windows Media Player will continue to be free (as long as winamp exists anyhow).
I could understand an open source developer working on a player being upset over the fees. I'd be pissed if I were in the process of writing a player and suddenly I couldn't release it. However, most of the comments here seem to be from misguided consumers and ogg vorbis zealots.
As for whether or not this will help ogg vorbis gain adoption... it can't hurt but it probably won't help much either. There is a lot of marketting power and name recognition behind the mp3 format. Somebody who manufactures a hardware mp3 player is going to pay these fees. No biggie - $3 added to the price tag of a $100-$600 device. Who cares? And while we'll likely see a player or two support the ogg format (in addition to
I'm sure Steinberg and DigiDesign are working on OS X versions of their software/drivers. MOTU has only just recently released OS X beta drivers for some of their hardware and announced an OS X release of Digital Performer (due this fall).
I don't think I would have wanted to run any of my audio software under 10.0.x or 10.1.x anyhow. I'm generally squeezing every cycle out of my cpu that it has to spare and OS 9 is noticably lighter even if it's less stable.
Hopefully I'll be seeing how 10.2 fares tonight...
Looks kind of impractical and outright silly to me from the one or two pictures I was able to view.
1) Chair wheels and power cords don't mix. Unless he was hiding battery packs, this sucks. You now have to unplug if you want to move your chair, you're constantly rolling over the cord, etc.
2) Your case is on the back of the chair. How are you supposed to reach it to put in a cd, dvd, etc.? You gotta stand up...
3) There didn't look to be enough mousing space and the mouse was on an incline meaning it would roll down every time you take your hand off it.
4) With the mouse and the keyboard at that angle, typing and using the mouse has to be incredibly awkward. Probably painful in short time...
I could probably go on but it seems pointless... bad design...
If you really want something cool, get one of those big arms that looks like a desk lamp and drop a nice big monitor onto it. Then get one of the smaller ones with a keyboard tray and mousing surface. Now you can position your monitor and keyboard in 3D space to whatever is comfortable for you. This is the setup that my old boss used. Not only did it look "cool" but it was extremely functional.
Well, I watched the flash demo and I have to say it looks like a very slick environment. Without using it, it's hard to say, but I think this is the kind of thing I could give to my mom to use.
You can argue about the technical merits of their implementation all day long but look at how elegant and aesthetically pleasing the interface is compared to say the screen shots on the website of say... your favorite window manager...
... 'cause then you'd be... um.... reading your villagers and um.... slaughtering your e-mail... yeah... that makes sense.....
(1) Pink lemonade doesn't have caffiene, or at least didn't the last time I checked. ;)
(2) Yeah, the dry heat does make it feel cooler, 120 only feels like 110 would here. Plus, I'm pretty sure the dry heat dehydrates you quicker... Sweat evaportaes pretty damned fast out there.
Deignan says the company is considering producing an 80-ounce cold drink cup - that's 5 pints, folks. Christ, how much do these companies think people need to drink, anyway?"
Actually, I lived in Phoenix for two and a half years. Try commuting 45 minutes a day in a 1970 volkswagon beetle with black vinyl interior in 120 degrees and 0% humidity. You can't even imagine how much water you lose. I would suck down big gulps like nothing.
Of course, here in the midwest, I can't imagine finishing 5 pints of anything other than beer.
It's funny that you mention Denver because we just flew in half a dozen BEA consultants from Denver. Several of them left BEA for java jobs with a startup in Denver and pulled a bunch of guys working on the project with them... I'm in Columbus, OH.
;)
You might want to consider sending a resume to BEA, they have at least 5 openings in Denver, if they're replacing the guys that left.
Mine has a place to set your beer.
For one, kicking out people working here on visas is an ignorant, knee-jerk reaction from people who are stressed out over the current economic downturn. I wouldn't go as far as to call it racism. But it could definitely slide into that territory were it to persist. Two of the sharpest people on my team are working here on visas trying to get their citizenship. They're deserving and brilliant people who I would be much prouder to have as a fellow citizen and neighbor than the drug dealing freeloader that currently lives next door to me.
;). Investing in your skills is just like anything else. Ya can't put all your eggs in one basket. Even in these nasty times, the people I know with a diverse skillset are not having trouble finding jobs.
Secondly, what's up with all of these java developers that supposedly are out of work? I can't speak for other markets, but here there are about 10 J2EE jobs for every VB or MFC job. And even if it weren't that way, how smart is it to put your career into the hands of one programming language (even if it is one of the two best languages ever created... C++ being the best of course
Finding a job with a company that isn't about to fold or lay off 10,000 employees, now that's another issue...
Unfortunately for me, my representative just got kicked out today (Traficant). Or maybe that's fortunate... but not good for writing him...
Um, we've got by far the coolest OS in existance right now.
1. Open source, BSD-based, core
2. Beautiful, Apple-designed user interface
3. Compiles most open source unix apps.
4. Runs tons of retail software - Including every game I've bought in the last year actually (dunno why I've been buying PC versions).
5. Includes a few killer apps (can we say iTunes?) right out of the box.
How 'bout we pony up and pay the man? I mean, hell, it's better than giving cash to Micro$oft for something far crappier right?
You could probably run Quicken fine under Virtual PC. If you would be trashing your old machine, you could buy the version of VPC without an OS and install the os from your desktop.
Or keep around your old pc for that app. It's not exactly the most demanding software.
I don't know what you mean by "Remote Desktop Display". I also don't know anything about video conferencing standards.
Well, seeing as Sony is part of the RIAA, I don't think news flash 2 will come to pass. Kinda sucks suing yourself. I'd predict something more like:
"Sony releases new holo-disc technology capable of storing 250,000 mp3's on a single disc"
"RIAA lobby pushes through legislature requring a tax on all blank holo-disc media sold due to rampant piracy. All proceeds will go to RIAA member labels to be 'distributed to artists.'"
I'm a programmer under the age of 25. I don't look for an office with a foosball table. I don't care if I've got a P4 1.4 GHz machine or a 486DX 66 sitting on my desk. I look for companies that are well organized, use technologies that I like to work with, and have challenging work. However, I do periodically get pissed over the fact that the 40 year old COBOL programmer sitting next to me is making twice my salary when I'm writing half their code and teaching them everything they know about the platform they were hired to code on. I look forward to the day when I'm old enough for fucks like yourself to set my pay based on my skills and not my age. Maybe then I'll have the pull to get one or two of you fired if you haven't all retired.