Consumers to Adopt HyperMedia Content Via Broadband-Capable Digital Set-Top Boxes WiReD HyperMediaDigitalConvergenceSetTopShinyBitz Correspondent N. O. Klue
Disney studios released today the first version of their newly enhanced HyperMedia set-top box with broadband download capabilities and integrated "minimally invasive" Digital Rights Management and custom advertisement software. Estimated street prices was your firstborn child or your freedom to think for yourself. The newest boy band (as of 12:53pm PST), Sen. Hollings and The Brown-nosers, was on hand for the release.
EFF spokesman quoted as saying "Yeah, it's really shiny. I wonder what the privacy concerns are? Down with the man!" A wild-eyed and very smelly hobo we pulled from the dumpster outside our offices here in SanFran was quoted as saying "As a content developer I love the potential for rich user experiences conveyed in a simple manner by a plug-and-play set top box that enables the Middle America idiots to finally see what all this HyperMedia business is about. Of course, then we're going to get requests for the 5am farm report in HyperMedia format." The hobo then threw up on our shoes, as reproduced in the sidebar graphic in stunning print-based, laptop-oriented paper HyperMedia graphics.
We managed to track down an entertainment industry executive to get an industry insider's viewpoint, at San Quentin State Penitentiary. He was quoted as saying that "...[T]his product will enable a new future of one-to-one digital HyperMedia advertising. My ass hurts." The executive then got into a knife fight over whose bitch he was and died.
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Sorry, that's just the reaction I have whenever somebody starts going off about rich media and set top boxes. Please mentally read this post as if it were in silver text on an orange background with high-gloss paper.
People that want rich content or digital convergence (maybe one person in a thousand) have computers. The vast majority of the public really has no interest in anything more complex than what is already on TV (the new opiate for the masses). This is why products that are aimed at the niche inbetween full computer users and Joe Sixpack always fail, the market for people that are interested but not computer customers is just too small. So nix selling this thing as an add on. Is the value of the marketing feature enough to offset the cost of just giving away the STBs? Becuase for 99+% of television viewers, the analog broadcasts they use for the news and sports and their soap operas is enough, leaving them with essentially zero incentive to switch.
I mean really, interactive TV, video on demand, digital set-top boxes. All of these are a festering mass of hype, void of any real utility or success in the marketplace. This has been pretty evident since the early-to-mid 90s. When are we going to learn?
EBRS/HCF: little known asm opcodes for Emit Burning Resistor Smell and the more severe Halt and Catch Fire.
I actually saw these with an ECS K7S5A. I think those boards are really neat but their QA SUCKS. I can't think of any other boards that have (literally) arc welded themselves to the case as the northbridge underside underwent catastrophic failure... Lord, nothing smells worse than burning PCBs.
Hmmm, and the fact that being on a crosswalk gives them right of way doesn't bother you? As a driver you're supposed to slow down when approaching any crosswalk in case someone steps out onto it.
If the poster is in America, you're correct. Social mores and traffic laws are different in other countries, sometimes markedly so. In the United Kingdom (iirc), the situtation is actually the opposite, in that vehicles have right of way over pedestrians (the presumption is that it's easier for a pedestrian to stop than a vehicle in the same span of time). Look both ways before crossing is doubly true over there...
You're assuming that the opportunity to work on the plane hasn't been factored into the plan. In general, it has.
So it's planned to have someone doing important work in a crummy environment right up to the wire? That seems to violate what an ex-Navy friend called the 7P Principle ("Proper Prior Planning Prevents Piss-Poor Performance"). Seriously, fly over a day or two early and work from your hotel room. Or better yet... (see next block).
An example of last-minute figures might be a company's quarterly statement filed with the SEC. The client needs the analysis as quickly as possible in order to make a decision. Or maybe the figures are delayed until the last possible moment so they can be error checked more thoroughly. Maybe a competitor has just made an announcement and you need to arrive at head office the next day with a response. These are all very common scenarios.
In the case of SEC filings, I'm assuming that your organization has business staff on both sides of the pond (becuase you probably wouldn't be worrying about American paper shuffling if your.co.uk was just.uk). Why not skip the plane trip altogether and work electronically? It'd be a much better (or at least, much cheaper) collaborative environment, and then a.usian minion can be dispatched with the final output to meet the filing deadline. Ditto for the competitor's announcement. Really, the deliverance of original documents in a time-sensitive manner is the only reason I can think of for travel, and sending a bigwig to do a courier's job speaks of poor delegation skills.
What matters in business is not just accuracy, but speed. The best analysis in the world is useless if events overtake it.
I'm well aware of that fact, which is one of the reasons why I think air travel for business purpases in an age of a globe spanning, nearly zero-lag telecommunications network is singularly paleolitihic thought. Last time I checked, electrons traveled faster than planes.
So you haven't, then. [business traveled]
Thus far I've structured my business transactions to never require the horrid stop-gap measure you seem to hold as the definition of "business travel". The way I see it, if I'm working on a project on the way to delivering it, somebody screwed up. It's a profligurately wasteful use of resources to ferry all 1.85 meters/100 kilos of me around when the important part of me (my mind, my thought) is cheaper and faster to transmit over an electronic medium. Are there times when, pardon the crude language, shit happens and as the one holding the bag you get to hop the plane? Yeah, sure. That doesn't mean it's a good idea or something you'd want to plan for.
It's not the same thing at all.
It was an allegorical statement. I see that you disagree with my premise, that's ok. You people also eat things called "spotted dick", so obviously we're going to diverge in spots...;-) [sidenote for those unaware of it, spotted dick is a kind of pudding with raisins in it. pretty good actually, if you can ignore the name...]
The material you work on onboard a plane often doesn't exist in a usable form beforehand.
Where you see efficient working, I see incredibly poor planning. Again, I maintain that if you're patching things together on the way to a deliverable, odds are the final result is going to be crap, steaming and cubed on a silver platter.
Really, let's get to the heart of the matter, the core of my objection to "business travel." I see it as inefficient expenditure of resources. The central thought behind it seems to be that the person traveling is so important that only they can do something, and only in person. It seems to be a very "Theory X" management theory sort of conjecture, that if some random C-level employee isn't personally there to get his/her hands on something, it won't turn out right. More corporate warriorism, rather pointless self-importance displayed in the war-paint of "The company must spend Lots of Money to get me to the action, becuase only I can Save The Day!!! Bow before m3, for I am B1FF, the Super-CEO!!1!" More, to be blunt, bullshit the corporate suits and shiny shoes set thinks smells like roses.
At this point in time, I see no real technical barriers to telecommuting for white-collar jobs. It's all social. And I don't think that telecommuting will be common until today's teenagers and Gen-X-ers are grey haired executives becuase nobody older than them has grown up with near-infinite permiability of the infosphere they (we) have. They see loss of self, loss of importance, with the lack of need for any one person to be in a particular geophysical place at a particular time.
I'll draw an analogy back to the world of physical travel: CEO A takes a private jet and a helicopter to arrive at an event. CEO B flies coach and takes a cab or rents a car. If they both arrive on time, who is the better CEO? I'd argue that CEO B is a better CEO becuase they have been better stewards of their stockholder's money by planning better to acheive the same result at lower cost. But people, sadly, rely on symbols for too much of their self-worth. This is why, I feel, most of the orignial responses to my post were very emotions-based (one fool going so far as to label it the stupidest thing they'd read on slashdot, an allegation with the punch of a feather coming from an Anonymous Coward).
But hey, if you're convinced business travel as you define it is a good thing, have at it and good luck. Maybe I'll feel the same way when I've established my globe-spanning liberal army of darkness (oops, did I say that out loud? lies, all of it, i'm as meek as a church mouse! 0:-]).
When I was still in college a professor once said to us (a CS course, not that it matters): "If your project isn't done by midnight the day it's due, you're not going to get it done." The meaning being, if you don't have everything done by then the intervening eight or so hours will make little difference. The message is: have everything done at least a day before you need to, that way your preparation immeadiately before the event will just be relaxing. I've tried to follow this philosophy, and I've noticed that by and large it works pretty well.
To draw a specific example, "the very latest figures" are probably either hastily done or haven't been error checked or both. Or, worse, VLF(0) has a bug, bug is discovered after you are in flight (semi-inaccessible), so you go into the meeting with a fistful of VLF(0) rather than what you really need: VLF(1).
Yes, I've done business travel. Of course, that assumes you count my ssh packets going from Sendai, Japan to Houston, TX, USA as "travel". I really just don't think that a plane is a good working environment or that wise people would do vital work on the way to an engagement... seems too much like studying for the final as you walk to the exam. Save your company money, fly coach, and do your work in advance.
... [I]n the real world... geeks rarely inspire terror...
Oh, I don't know about that. Ever watched undegraduates getting handed (back) exams from a physics/math/CS/EE TA?
(Someone who not only spent 4-5 years of their life muttering equations to get a B.Sc./B.Eng., then decided to spend 2 to 7 more years doing the same for low pay... By any definition, a geek^H^H^H^H somebody who loves their field.)
You're correct. I meant operating safety, namely the normal and reasonable amount of safety one would assume required in the course of the given action. (In other words, the safety one would take for granted when you're traveling hundreds of miles an hour, miles above the Earth's surface, in a hollow aluminum can filled with pressurized oxygen and awash in jet fuel.)
Just today I noticed an article somewhere that was talking about the airlines hurting becuase business travel has gone down a good bit since Sept. 11 last year. (Business travelers are apparently the highest margin passenger class becuase they tend to book nicer seats and fly on shorter notices so they're higher up the essentially exponentail cost function correlating time-to-flight-from-ticket-booking and ticket price.) And now they want to eliminate laptop usage... Sure, I bet the suits and shiny shoes crowd will just looooove that.
Not that I care though. If it's good for safety it's beyond question. And honestly, if you don't have your work done by the time you catch the plane to your distant meeting, the chances of you being ready are slim-to-none anyway. Hopefully this might be another wedge in the organizational door being held shut against the wide adoption of telecommuting.
Do you realize what a negative effect on your school records having ALL of the tamu.edu sysnet adminery after your blood will have?!?;-) "Strange, according to this you're both dead and on academic probation. Oh, and your thirty grand in library overdue fees are due..."
There isn't a clear standard certification. RHCE? LPI? Linux+? Weren't there at least two more? This kind of confusion hurts employer buy-in.
The linux (and to a certain extent Unix) community is not very "cert" oriented. There are, in my mind, myriad reasons for this. Essentially, in this arena, certifications are not how skills are shown.
So, basically with no clear standard and weak community buy-in, it's no wonder that it's harder to find material than it is for the MCS*/CCN* cert tests. My advice would be to focus on practical tasks and hands-on lab work, becuase this will prepare them for any cert worth having.
Not that I'm really all that plugged in to the cutting edge of GCC development, but I thought all the ABI changes from 2.95.x to 3.x were in the C++ area? I would think that most of the OSX CLI utils are either C (most likely in my mind, unless Apple decided to spend engineering time porting ls(1) to ObjC, heh) or ObjC? Would ObjC be affected by C++ changes? I don't know...
Becuase frankly, utopias are fucking boring. Novels that tell a story of triumph against all odds, winning out against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune... those are the stories that speak to the real human condition of fighting adversity. As evidence, consider Dante's writing series. Paradiso is pages and pages of crap about how wonderful heaven is. Boooooring. Inferno is much more interesting reading. (I guess you could say that Inferno is a contra-example to my thesis since the focus of the story is really more on the suffering of the damned than the travel of the main character, but otoh the narrator does travel through the bowels of hell, no doubt a frightening journey, only to return unharmed.)
So in the field of uplifting stories, stories that, like Shawshank Redemption, are of people crawling through a river of shit to come out clean on the other side, I'll toss in Bryce Courtenay's The Power of One. I read it when I was 14, and honestly I think it's had more of a lasting impact on me than any other written work, Bible included. When the times get tough (and I've had my share of tough times in the decade since then), I think it's that books message of self-reliance and determination that carried me through. (Or at least, like a boxer, I would have gone down swinging if I had...)
I was in Tokyo earlier this year (late april/early may) and in one of the subways I saw something that sounds like a similar concept:
a long stretch of LEDs programmed to keep the advert they were displaying (in four colors no less) in sync with the train window... So as we speed by the thing the ad (for Fujifilm iirc) was constant position outside the window... Pretty neat, really. (I don't remember where I was at the time, I want to say we were on our way to shinjuku).
I was a little distracted at the time by a different class of box-related physical research involving the concealment properties of tubular meat products in an ethanol-catalyzed mixed gender environment. (No reaction products were observed.)
It all depends on how tightly you pack the car, you see?;-) Even a 1971 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme can be fit into a mailbox, for a suitably large mailbox and suitably compacted Detroit Beast.
That's really very admirable, but... GO OUTSIDE! RIGHT NOW! Grab a beer on the way out the door, speed backwards in a school zone, and pick up some chicks to do illicit titillating things with. Pretty soon you'll be an adult paying taxes and all that boring shit. Enjoy your childhood now, becuase computers will still be here for the remainder of your working life... If you don't wake up drunk on your parent's living room floor with their car rammed into your mailbox, with women's underwear on your head at least once before you go to college, things are grim... You can't do that shit when you're 30, becuase our permanent records really are sorta permanent.
But yeah. The best IT jobs are not the ones that have the highest salaries, but the ones where you learn the most and/or derive the most emotional satisfaction from (of course if they stuff money into your pocket...) I work doing IT consulting for clients that sometimes suck pretty bad. My boss(es) can be super-double-plus-annoying ("Finish those TPS reports yet?"). But I get to learn something new pretty much every day. Maybe once a week or so I can step back and look at what I built and say "Wow, that's just some code to me but it's going to make hundreds of office people's lives easier over at Fortune 500 FooCorp." It's not bad to look at your IT job as a meal ticket, but it is if you see it as *only* a meal ticket...
We're lucky, in that the stuff we love to do society has deemed worthy of compensation beyond the norm. Most artists are starving artists, but not too many programmers or sysadmins are even if we aren't making as much now as we were in '99.
undying need to profit and destroy its competitors
Puh-leeeeeez. That's what corporations do. It is the corporate officer's duty to undertake whatever actions maximize stockholder benefit. Period, end of sentence. Offering health insurance? Stock options? Good pay? Those are all tools to maximize worker productivity. Understand, this is neither a good nor a bad thing in the moral/ethical sense. In the world of business, there is no right and wrong in the moral sense, only "right" as in following the law and making money. Look at it this way, if Dell did the "right" thing by standing up to MSFT and lost money or went out of business, is it morally correct that this action hurts Dell's stockholders and employees? Gordon Gecko may have been a loathsome character, but his "Greed is Good" speech is closer to the truth (in the ethical sphere of corporate reality) than many would like to admit.
If you don't like the way business is run, then don't get a job at one. Start your own, give it the college try, and hope that you can look yourself in the mirror after ten years has turned you into that which you railed against as a young turk.
I really don't see this as being a bad thing on Dell's part. MSFT is doing something crappy to the hardware folks (big suprise, they've done it before). Dell is, in case nobody noticed, planning on an alternative for folks that don't want MS OSen installed (see point 2 in the memo).
Frankly, I'm more disappointed with Dell as a potential customer for not offering AMD-based solutions than I am for them this.
Also, this is only in reference to their consumer product line (if you define the precisions to be semi-consumer). You'll notice if you go to their site that "No Factory Installed Operating System" is the default for their server products... I'd be waaaaay more pissed to be forced into paying ~ 800 usd for win2k server than I would be about ~100 usd for xp. Also, the consumer line is where it's most likely the customer is going to want windows, it's a much more ambiguous situation on the server end of the spectrum (NT? NetWare? Unix?) so Dell is listening to their customers by offering a wide range of choice there.
This is all purely anecdotal, but in 2000 I worked at a startup for about six months that was ultra-shoestring (even by the standards of most startups). Our developer workstations used these super7 motherboards with everything integrated on them (sound, modem, etc. pretty much everything but an ethernet card, for those we had $7 realtek cards). The graphics subsystem was by SiS (I want to say 635?), using 8mb of shared memory. *That was the crappiest system and video performance I have ever seen.* Hands down. How bad? Baaaaad. Like, move a window and it'd pick up blitting errors as it moved across the screen bad. Scroll text in a browser and the sound stream off the cd drive skips caliber-of-suck. To this day I'll travel miles out of my way to avoid shared memory video. Ever since then I've mentally expanded SiS to "Shitty, intensely Shitty".
Then, in the past three months or so, I've actually run across some pretty nice bits of hardware than were SiS-branded (one was a SiS 6236 (or was it 6326?) 8m pci card in a server, I was impressed that it's x11 performance didn't compeletely suck; the other is the SiS 735 chipset that gave a computer I built for somebody decent/good athlon performance and an integrated nic for the price of an expensive dinner). I was very suprised. Not that the products in question were earth shattering on an absolute scale, but when you compare them to what they'd been producing a few years back, the difference was just night and day. Sort of like running into the wastoid stoner dude you knew in high school, only now he's a high school physics teacher...
So I guess the moral of this is that past performance is not a reliable indicator of future behavior. (c.f. any mutual fund prospectus to see a graphic illustration of that;-p)
Most sites aren't even HTML 4 compliant, let alone XHTML 1.x compliant. That's ok, becuase most (as in, probably 75 percent or more) of all browsers out there have broken HTML 4 compliance (I include CSS support with that), so even if the sites did use Completely Correct XHTML, the fucking clients wouldn't render it as the new standard dictated. For all practical purposes, the only thing sure to work right now is HTML 3.2. It was only relatively recenly that we could sort of begin to forget about the 216-web-safe colors resulting from widespread 8bpp video adaptors and the layout restrictions of 640x480 mainstream moniter sizings. I wish I was wrong, I really do. New, logical standards are good, and I'm glad somebody's doing the work. But honestly, does anyone really expect for this to be available as a real-world development option any time in the next four-plus years? I'm sorry to be harshly realistic, but somebody please wake me up when the web's layout code is logical, clean, and supported by all the clients we have to worry about...
This is not to say that XML is not useful as a web development tool, quite the contrary. Nothing else comes close to giving you the multiple-generated-format flexibility (parse it to WML, parse it to HTML, parse it to PDF, parse it to VoxML, parse it to...) needed to support all the crazy things people are using to access http resources these days. (The irony here is that as mainstream browsers have stabilized/stagnated, a combinatorial explosion of types of clients has taken place. The idyllic world of infinite permiability of information promised, in essence, by XML is a long way off... but it's close enough to be tantalizing. I can't wait for the day when I can really do just about anything from a web terminal that is my cellphone that I can do now sitting here in front of my workstation.)
Re:The stats are most interesting
on
Hacker Survey
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· Score: 2
Has anyone ever found a rea[lly]-solid argument to keep sourceocde locked up and a super secret? other than lining your own pockets?
Feeding your kids? Paying your rent? Eating?
Information may want to be free, but information doesn't have bills to pay.
I think he meant the swf file format itself, which is, like PostScript, as much a programming language as file format (although it is, iirc, a binary format... the instructions are just encoded much like an object file in the C world). In other words, it doesn't really encode the data for a presentation so much as how to generate a display of that data. The simple example would be the swf file having in it the *way to make* a red circle rather than N many red pixels encoded in a certain way to be rendered as a circle...
Slashdot Mirror
Consumers to Adopt HyperMedia Content Via Broadband-Capable Digital Set-Top Boxes
WiReD HyperMediaDigitalConvergenceSetTopShinyBitz Correspondent N. O. Klue
Disney studios released today the first version of their newly enhanced HyperMedia set-top box with broadband download capabilities and integrated "minimally invasive" Digital Rights Management and custom advertisement software. Estimated street prices was your firstborn child or your freedom to think for yourself. The newest boy band (as of 12:53pm PST), Sen. Hollings and The Brown-nosers, was on hand for the release.
EFF spokesman quoted as saying "Yeah, it's really shiny. I wonder what the privacy concerns are? Down with the man!" A wild-eyed and very smelly hobo we pulled from the dumpster outside our offices here in SanFran was quoted as saying "As a content developer I love the potential for rich user experiences conveyed in a simple manner by a plug-and-play set top box that enables the Middle America idiots to finally see what all this HyperMedia business is about. Of course, then we're going to get requests for the 5am farm report in HyperMedia format." The hobo then threw up on our shoes, as reproduced in the sidebar graphic in stunning print-based, laptop-oriented paper HyperMedia graphics.
We managed to track down an entertainment industry executive to get an industry insider's viewpoint, at San Quentin State Penitentiary. He was quoted as saying that "...[T]his product will enable a new future of one-to-one digital HyperMedia advertising. My ass hurts." The executive then got into a knife fight over whose bitch he was and died.
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Sorry, that's just the reaction I have whenever somebody starts going off about rich media and set top boxes. Please mentally read this post as if it were in silver text on an orange background with high-gloss paper.
People that want rich content or digital convergence (maybe one person in a thousand) have computers. The vast majority of the public really has no interest in anything more complex than what is already on TV (the new opiate for the masses). This is why products that are aimed at the niche inbetween full computer users and Joe Sixpack always fail, the market for people that are interested but not computer customers is just too small. So nix selling this thing as an add on. Is the value of the marketing feature enough to offset the cost of just giving away the STBs? Becuase for 99+% of television viewers, the analog broadcasts they use for the news and sports and their soap operas is enough, leaving them with essentially zero incentive to switch.
I mean really, interactive TV, video on demand, digital set-top boxes. All of these are a festering mass of hype, void of any real utility or success in the marketplace. This has been pretty evident since the early-to-mid 90s. When are we going to learn?
EBRS/HCF: little known asm opcodes for Emit Burning Resistor Smell and the more severe Halt and Catch Fire.
I actually saw these with an ECS K7S5A. I think those boards are really neat but their QA SUCKS. I can't think of any other boards that have (literally) arc welded themselves to the case as the northbridge underside underwent catastrophic failure... Lord, nothing smells worse than burning PCBs.
Unless you went to college. ;-)
Dead employees tend to present management problems. They don't argue much but you can't say much good about their results... ;-)
So it's planned to have someone doing important work in a crummy environment right up to the wire? That seems to violate what an ex-Navy friend called the 7P Principle ("Proper Prior Planning Prevents Piss-Poor Performance"). Seriously, fly over a day or two early and work from your hotel room. Or better yet... (see next block).
In the case of SEC filings, I'm assuming that your organization has business staff on both sides of the pond (becuase you probably wouldn't be worrying about American paper shuffling if yourI'm well aware of that fact, which is one of the reasons why I think air travel for business purpases in an age of a globe spanning, nearly zero-lag telecommunications network is singularly paleolitihic thought. Last time I checked, electrons traveled faster than planes.
Thus far I've structured my business transactions to never require the horrid stop-gap measure you seem to hold as the definition of "business travel". The way I see it, if I'm working on a project on the way to delivering it, somebody screwed up. It's a profligurately wasteful use of resources to ferry all 1.85 meters/100 kilos of me around when the important part of me (my mind, my thought) is cheaper and faster to transmit over an electronic medium. Are there times when, pardon the crude language, shit happens and as the one holding the bag you get to hop the plane? Yeah, sure. That doesn't mean it's a good idea or something you'd want to plan for.It was an allegorical statement. I see that you disagree with my premise, that's ok. You people also eat things called "spotted dick", so obviously we're going to diverge in spots... ;-) [sidenote for those unaware of it, spotted dick is a kind of pudding with raisins in it. pretty good actually, if you can ignore the name...]
Where you see efficient working, I see incredibly poor planning. Again, I maintain that if you're patching things together on the way to a deliverable, odds are the final result is going to be crap, steaming and cubed on a silver platter.
Really, let's get to the heart of the matter, the core of my objection to "business travel." I see it as inefficient expenditure of resources. The central thought behind it seems to be that the person traveling is so important that only they can do something, and only in person. It seems to be a very "Theory X" management theory sort of conjecture, that if some random C-level employee isn't personally there to get his/her hands on something, it won't turn out right. More corporate warriorism, rather pointless self-importance displayed in the war-paint of "The company must spend Lots of Money to get me to the action, becuase only I can Save The Day!!! Bow before m3, for I am B1FF, the Super-CEO!!1!" More, to be blunt, bullshit the corporate suits and shiny shoes set thinks smells like roses.
At this point in time, I see no real technical barriers to telecommuting for white-collar jobs. It's all social. And I don't think that telecommuting will be common until today's teenagers and Gen-X-ers are grey haired executives becuase nobody older than them has grown up with near-infinite permiability of the infosphere they (we) have. They see loss of self, loss of importance, with the lack of need for any one person to be in a particular geophysical place at a particular time. I'll draw an analogy back to the world of physical travel: CEO A takes a private jet and a helicopter to arrive at an event. CEO B flies coach and takes a cab or rents a car. If they both arrive on time, who is the better CEO? I'd argue that CEO B is a better CEO becuase they have been better stewards of their stockholder's money by planning better to acheive the same result at lower cost. But people, sadly, rely on symbols for too much of their self-worth. This is why, I feel, most of the orignial responses to my post were very emotions-based (one fool going so far as to label it the stupidest thing they'd read on slashdot, an allegation with the punch of a feather coming from an Anonymous Coward).
But hey, if you're convinced business travel as you define it is a good thing, have at it and good luck. Maybe I'll feel the same way when I've established my globe-spanning liberal army of darkness (oops, did I say that out loud? lies, all of it, i'm as meek as a church mouse! 0:-]).
When I was still in college a professor once said to us (a CS course, not that it matters): "If your project isn't done by midnight the day it's due, you're not going to get it done." The meaning being, if you don't have everything done by then the intervening eight or so hours will make little difference. The message is: have everything done at least a day before you need to, that way your preparation immeadiately before the event will just be relaxing. I've tried to follow this philosophy, and I've noticed that by and large it works pretty well.
To draw a specific example, "the very latest figures" are probably either hastily done or haven't been error checked or both. Or, worse, VLF(0) has a bug, bug is discovered after you are in flight (semi-inaccessible), so you go into the meeting with a fistful of VLF(0) rather than what you really need: VLF(1).
Yes, I've done business travel. Of course, that assumes you count my ssh packets going from Sendai, Japan to Houston, TX, USA as "travel". I really just don't think that a plane is a good working environment or that wise people would do vital work on the way to an engagement... seems too much like studying for the final as you walk to the exam. Save your company money, fly coach, and do your work in advance.
Oh, I don't know about that. Ever watched undegraduates getting handed (back) exams from a physics/math/CS/EE TA?
(Someone who not only spent 4-5 years of their life muttering equations to get a B.Sc./B.Eng., then decided to spend 2 to 7 more years doing the same for low pay... By any definition, a geek^H^H^H^H somebody who loves their field.)
}:-)
You're correct. I meant operating safety, namely the normal and reasonable amount of safety one would assume required in the course of the given action. (In other words, the safety one would take for granted when you're traveling hundreds of miles an hour, miles above the Earth's surface, in a hollow aluminum can filled with pressurized oxygen and awash in jet fuel.)
Just today I noticed an article somewhere that was talking about the airlines hurting becuase business travel has gone down a good bit since Sept. 11 last year. (Business travelers are apparently the highest margin passenger class becuase they tend to book nicer seats and fly on shorter notices so they're higher up the essentially exponentail cost function correlating time-to-flight-from-ticket-booking and ticket price.) And now they want to eliminate laptop usage... Sure, I bet the suits and shiny shoes crowd will just looooove that.
Not that I care though. If it's good for safety it's beyond question. And honestly, if you don't have your work done by the time you catch the plane to your distant meeting, the chances of you being ready are slim-to-none anyway. Hopefully this might be another wedge in the organizational door being held shut against the wide adoption of telecommuting.
Do you realize what a negative effect on your school records having ALL of the tamu.edu sysnet adminery after your blood will have?!? ;-) "Strange, according to this you're both dead and on academic probation. Oh, and your thirty grand in library overdue fees are due..."
So, basically with no clear standard and weak community buy-in, it's no wonder that it's harder to find material than it is for the MCS*/CCN* cert tests. My advice would be to focus on practical tasks and hands-on lab work, becuase this will prepare them for any cert worth having.
Not that I'm really all that plugged in to the cutting edge of GCC development, but I thought all the ABI changes from 2.95.x to 3.x were in the C++ area? I would think that most of the OSX CLI utils are either C (most likely in my mind, unless Apple decided to spend engineering time porting ls(1) to ObjC, heh) or ObjC? Would ObjC be affected by C++ changes? I don't know...
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can'd summer ham in box
many bad jokes
Becuase frankly, utopias are fucking boring. Novels that tell a story of triumph against all odds, winning out against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune... those are the stories that speak to the real human condition of fighting adversity. As evidence, consider Dante's writing series. Paradiso is pages and pages of crap about how wonderful heaven is. Boooooring. Inferno is much more interesting reading. (I guess you could say that Inferno is a contra-example to my thesis since the focus of the story is really more on the suffering of the damned than the travel of the main character, but otoh the narrator does travel through the bowels of hell, no doubt a frightening journey, only to return unharmed.)
So in the field of uplifting stories, stories that, like Shawshank Redemption, are of people crawling through a river of shit to come out clean on the other side, I'll toss in Bryce Courtenay's The Power of One . I read it when I was 14, and honestly I think it's had more of a lasting impact on me than any other written work, Bible included. When the times get tough (and I've had my share of tough times in the decade since then), I think it's that books message of self-reliance and determination that carried me through. (Or at least, like a boxer, I would have gone down swinging if I had...)
I was in Tokyo earlier this year (late april/early may) and in one of the subways I saw something that sounds like a similar concept: a long stretch of LEDs programmed to keep the advert they were displaying (in four colors no less) in sync with the train window... So as we speed by the thing the ad (for Fujifilm iirc) was constant position outside the window... Pretty neat, really. (I don't remember where I was at the time, I want to say we were on our way to shinjuku).
I was a little distracted at the time by a different class of box-related physical research involving the concealment properties of tubular meat products in an ethanol-catalyzed mixed gender environment. (No reaction products were observed.)
It all depends on how tightly you pack the car, you see? ;-) Even a 1971 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme can be fit into a mailbox, for a suitably large mailbox and suitably compacted Detroit Beast.
But yeah. The best IT jobs are not the ones that have the highest salaries, but the ones where you learn the most and/or derive the most emotional satisfaction from (of course if they stuff money into your pocket...) I work doing IT consulting for clients that sometimes suck pretty bad. My boss(es) can be super-double-plus-annoying ("Finish those TPS reports yet?"). But I get to learn something new pretty much every day. Maybe once a week or so I can step back and look at what I built and say "Wow, that's just some code to me but it's going to make hundreds of office people's lives easier over at Fortune 500 FooCorp." It's not bad to look at your IT job as a meal ticket, but it is if you see it as *only* a meal ticket...
We're lucky, in that the stuff we love to do society has deemed worthy of compensation beyond the norm. Most artists are starving artists, but not too many programmers or sysadmins are even if we aren't making as much now as we were in '99.
Puh-leeeeeez. That's what corporations do. It is the corporate officer's duty to undertake whatever actions maximize stockholder benefit. Period, end of sentence. Offering health insurance? Stock options? Good pay? Those are all tools to maximize worker productivity. Understand, this is neither a good nor a bad thing in the moral/ethical sense. In the world of business, there is no right and wrong in the moral sense, only "right" as in following the law and making money. Look at it this way, if Dell did the "right" thing by standing up to MSFT and lost money or went out of business, is it morally correct that this action hurts Dell's stockholders and employees? Gordon Gecko may have been a loathsome character, but his "Greed is Good" speech is closer to the truth (in the ethical sphere of corporate reality) than many would like to admit.
If you don't like the way business is run, then don't get a job at one. Start your own, give it the college try, and hope that you can look yourself in the mirror after ten years has turned you into that which you railed against as a young turk.
I really don't see this as being a bad thing on Dell's part. MSFT is doing something crappy to the hardware folks (big suprise, they've done it before). Dell is, in case nobody noticed, planning on an alternative for folks that don't want MS OSen installed (see point 2 in the memo). Frankly, I'm more disappointed with Dell as a potential customer for not offering AMD-based solutions than I am for them this.
Also, this is only in reference to their consumer product line (if you define the precisions to be semi-consumer). You'll notice if you go to their site that "No Factory Installed Operating System" is the default for their server products... I'd be waaaaay more pissed to be forced into paying ~ 800 usd for win2k server than I would be about ~100 usd for xp. Also, the consumer line is where it's most likely the customer is going to want windows, it's a much more ambiguous situation on the server end of the spectrum (NT? NetWare? Unix?) so Dell is listening to their customers by offering a wide range of choice there.
This is all purely anecdotal, but in 2000 I worked at a startup for about six months that was ultra-shoestring (even by the standards of most startups). Our developer workstations used these super7 motherboards with everything integrated on them (sound, modem, etc. pretty much everything but an ethernet card, for those we had $7 realtek cards). The graphics subsystem was by SiS (I want to say 635?), using 8mb of shared memory. *That was the crappiest system and video performance I have ever seen.* Hands down. How bad? Baaaaad. Like, move a window and it'd pick up blitting errors as it moved across the screen bad. Scroll text in a browser and the sound stream off the cd drive skips caliber-of-suck. To this day I'll travel miles out of my way to avoid shared memory video. Ever since then I've mentally expanded SiS to "Shitty, intensely Shitty".
Then, in the past three months or so, I've actually run across some pretty nice bits of hardware than were SiS-branded (one was a SiS 6236 (or was it 6326?) 8m pci card in a server, I was impressed that it's x11 performance didn't compeletely suck; the other is the SiS 735 chipset that gave a computer I built for somebody decent/good athlon performance and an integrated nic for the price of an expensive dinner). I was very suprised. Not that the products in question were earth shattering on an absolute scale, but when you compare them to what they'd been producing a few years back, the difference was just night and day. Sort of like running into the wastoid stoner dude you knew in high school, only now he's a high school physics teacher...
So I guess the moral of this is that past performance is not a reliable indicator of future behavior. (c.f. any mutual fund prospectus to see a graphic illustration of that ;-p)
Most sites aren't even HTML 4 compliant, let alone XHTML 1.x compliant. That's ok, becuase most (as in, probably 75 percent or more) of all browsers out there have broken HTML 4 compliance (I include CSS support with that), so even if the sites did use Completely Correct XHTML, the fucking clients wouldn't render it as the new standard dictated. For all practical purposes, the only thing sure to work right now is HTML 3.2. It was only relatively recenly that we could sort of begin to forget about the 216-web-safe colors resulting from widespread 8bpp video adaptors and the layout restrictions of 640x480 mainstream moniter sizings. I wish I was wrong, I really do. New, logical standards are good, and I'm glad somebody's doing the work. But honestly, does anyone really expect for this to be available as a real-world development option any time in the next four-plus years? I'm sorry to be harshly realistic, but somebody please wake me up when the web's layout code is logical, clean, and supported by all the clients we have to worry about...
This is not to say that XML is not useful as a web development tool, quite the contrary. Nothing else comes close to giving you the multiple-generated-format flexibility (parse it to WML, parse it to HTML, parse it to PDF, parse it to VoxML, parse it to ...) needed to support all the crazy things people are using to access http resources these days. (The irony here is that as mainstream browsers have stabilized/stagnated, a combinatorial explosion of types of clients has taken place. The idyllic world of infinite permiability of information promised, in essence, by XML is a long way off... but it's close enough to be tantalizing. I can't wait for the day when I can really do just about anything from a web terminal that is my cellphone that I can do now sitting here in front of my workstation.)
Feeding your kids? Paying your rent? Eating?
Information may want to be free, but information doesn't have bills to pay.
I think he meant the swf file format itself, which is, like PostScript, as much a programming language as file format (although it is, iirc, a binary format... the instructions are just encoded much like an object file in the C world). In other words, it doesn't really encode the data for a presentation so much as how to generate a display of that data. The simple example would be the swf file having in it the *way to make* a red circle rather than N many red pixels encoded in a certain way to be rendered as a circle...