Microsoft is pushing a lot of testing onto early and non business users. What did they expect actually?
Secondly, Microsoft has moved to a rolling release style of development, while also pushing hard on features people aren't all that excited about. What do they expect?
If they really "demand answers", maybe they can fund the internal testing, etc... needed to get them, so their "beta" program may actually then deliver more meaningful feedback.
When I full charge that thing, it can take a call or text for like two weeks. Maybe using that mode is worth a thought. It's still useful for web browsing, e-mail, text, etc...
(And yes, I tested that on a long trip, no charger. Got 10 days, no problem, took a few calls, answered a few e-mails, various SMS.
As for the speech we don't like? It's up to them. The First Amendment applies to the government. Twitter can do whatever it wants.
Personally, I like the haters using Twitter. It's making it very clear, very quickly, just who is who. Trump is making an International ass of himself. Glorious!
Also, the First Amendment does not contain a shield. The answer to free speech we don't like is more free speech. So, that means we don't or should not ask Twitter to shut Trump down, unless it's criminal. And that also means we simply use Twitter to tell everyone just how big of an asshole Trump actually is!
Passes Popcorn Bowl to the right. Crunch, crunch....
Oh, and that is a somewhat difficult skill set to find.
I have it, and guess what? I contract out for pre-sales work all the time. Enterprise B2B people are just drooling over people who can do this. No wonder the talent isn't available to the big companies.
If they are smart, they do what I'm doing, and that is leverage that ability to understand new and old tech, create visions, back them with a strategic business alignment and value, and then help the salesperson pitch that to the execs for new sales.
Isn't the CIO the generalist who is able to articulate how the business can succeed with technology?
Ok then, get after it. Your new people and old people all have perspective. Get off your arse, talk to them, make some choices and go and sell that to management or prioritize the budget.
Delegating the budget is just fine, but even that needs a basic review. I understand how it is in very large enterprises, but I also understand companies of that size can afford to hire several CIO types too. Not all techs can be business minded, young or old. That's a specific skill set, and as a tech generalist, they would and should be expected to get what they need from the hard core techs, who will gladly give it to them too.
For smaller companies, if they even have a CIO type position, the generalist there needs to do the work to understand what the strategy actually is and what it means.
This all comes down to what one has to know in order to attempt some programming. BASIC requires one know very little to get something useful done. They try the PRINT statement, and that's cool. GOTO, INPUT, strings, numbers, basic math follow.
From there, you can do pretty useful programs!
EXCEL works a similar way. You see what cells do, then you find things like autosum, then you put a little bit of math in a cell, and suddenly, you can make some really useful spreadsheets. I know people with about that level of knowledge modeling businesses to great success. It's not the most advanced use of EXCEL, but it works fine, they can change it, they get the benefit of some automation and can communicate advanced ideas to others with relative ease.
Way back in the day, before EXCEL, I had used BASIC to compute a whole pile of useful manufacturing related things. Saved me a ton of time, and I sold those and some CAD system programs to get a reasonable PC. All development was done on some 8088 clunker from a thrifty store. (yes, it ran the CAD system, having exactly the minimum requirements listed on the box)
The CAD system had a BASIC like language built in. Was cake to do this. I did know something about programming, but I also was able to teach others how to make useful programs on just little nubs of knowledge. Some of them advanced, getting into IT, systems, etc... while others just used the programs they made and were happy about it.
Indeed! The print is too small.
Best use case for new programmers, is to maximize utility while minimizing knowledge dependencies. They don't need much to get the spark. Once they get it, as they progress, they will want out of whatever little environment they started in. The ones who really have aptitude will get out and do just fine. For many others, they will just use the thing and be happy, or move on and not care so much.
We really should give everybody a go. Find out who is who.
Think of this like public speaking. We make everybody do it, or most everybody. Most people experience an ordinary, "I can do this" outcome. Some of us find out it's not for us, and still others find out they are great somehow. We lose out if we don't run everyone through.
And of course, those of us who prefer humans make basic marks on physical media are right about all of this and talked about the expense and untrustworthy nature of voting machines.
Here in Oregon, we vote by mail, and are joined by WA and CO now, with some other pockets here and there in various states. It's awesome, works, can be trusted, is difficult to fraud on a scale that would impact anything, and turnout is generally higher than the poll methods in use most everywhere else today.
We can actually manually count and evaluate every last vote if needed.
My early experiences were the old Atari VCS (2600) and VCS stood for video computer system. I was fascinated by the pixels and the idea of a TV being interactive.
I wanted control of the pixels.
Later, in school, I got to work on Apple ][ computers, and those just begged to be programmed. Gaming can initiate the desire, but so can a lot of other computer driven things these days.
It is not prep directly.
Indirectly, games can be prep. For a few friends and I, cracking copy protection got us into 6502 machine and later on, Assembly language. We would use the monitor to see what was going on. Reading the ROM listing told us a lot more.
BASIC is slow, and that too drove learning more. To get the real magic out of the old machines, one has to know stuff. We made games, played them and learned. Utility type programming was good too. One such program generated book reports with just a few picks and keyboard input.
Just playing, unless the game incorporates programming concepts, is not meaningful. The ability of games and other interactive things can spark the desire to build and control.
The latter leads to activities that do serve as prep.
I participated in a forum with Lessig, having my question selected for somebody from RIAA legal to be answered:
What are we buying when we buy entertainment media? Is it a license to view/listen to the product, or is it just a copy of the title that we have limited rights to? That is, do we own the license to view/listen to the content in any format -- or when we buy a CD, are we just purchasing the format of the content?
Matt Oppenheim responds.
(C) [What are we buying when we buy entertainment media?]
When you buy a CD, you should feel free to consume the music. That means you should listen to that disc, and feel free to make a copy of that disc for your own use so that you can have a copy in your home and your office. You should feel free to copy it onto other formats, such as.mp3, so that you can listen to it on your computer. You should feel free to copy it to cassette.
The only time you run into problems is if you begin to distribute your copies to others.
The original event is no longer online. However, it appears to be archived at the forum I just linked. We get to transcode and backup our media, and we've always been able to do that. Of course, the DMCA makes circumvention an issue, but CD's really don't have that problem as they are essentially an open, raw audio format to begin with. In practical terms, they are not much different from tapes.
So we make mix CD's, we back up our masters, so the heat from the car doesn't ruin albums we might not be able to buy again, we transcode for our portable media player, or frankly the media player we made ourselves! Mix CD's to express our love for somebody else? Yeah, doing that is OK too.
What this means is we've always been able to make copies for friends. The answer above from the RIAA actually doesn't state this, and for obvious reasons, but the reality of things is clear. What that answer does state clearly is that we are just fine making a copy for the car. In fact, this is nicer than the backup CD, in that it's not really portable like a backup CD is.
Here's a notable question for you:
Say you archive your CD collection. Then you give the originals away. Ethics would have you get rid of the backups. But the law? No requirement at all. Doing this is shitty, but not something one is going to jail for.
Your term limit issue is secondary, as are many other issues.
Whether or not we have term limits is a matter of reasoned public debate. Right now, we can't have that due to the money in politics problem.
It is unreasonable for you to connect your issue to the core, systemic problem of how elections are funded.
That is perhaps the biggest misconception and hangup people have. This isn't transactional politics. It's not like you get something in return, or trade-offs get made. We do that now, and the money biases it away from the overall best interests of the people.
Really, if we reform money in politics, a fair, reasoned discussion will happen. Or, at least a much better one will happen.
Term limits, and other things get decided then, not now.
This is a single issue effort. It is systemic, not partisan, and not intended to remedy anything other than the basic issue of money in politics.
Yes. We really need to take a hard look at network transparent displays in the context of what we can really do today as well as the future.
When I did this, 10T networks were common, and just a little slow for something like CAD. 100T networks were growing in popularity, and then we sort of jumped to 1000T.
Also during that time, I started on dialup, moved to DSL, and then more came.
Know what? The fiber connection I have in my home is fast enough to run X with few worries today.
And it's going to improve more. My 4G cell phone can run X too. Amazing!
Honestly, I miss the vision our early innovators had. In a way, the field was more open and people could build without so many legacy ties. The need to incorporate those into the next step is holding people back. Legacy "screen scrapers" should get attention. They are useful, and they do have advantages for application developers.
Network transparent, multi-user, concurrent multi-processor, networked computing is the bar to cross, and if we don't maximize it, we risk losing out on a lot of the potental.
Sad really.
All I know, is I won arguments back then, and I did it on UNIX when the dominant move was to Windows and the PC, and all that distributed software bullshit we face today. Won solid. No fucking contest.
The difference was really understanding how things worked and applying that instead of following the cookie cutter stuff we see being done so often today.
With X, one can distribute or centralize as needed!
Fonts on one machine, window manager on another, application on another, storage on yet another, graphics server on yet another, or even better, how about a few displays, each capable of serving a user?
Or, pile it all on one box somebody can carry with them!
Doesn't matter with X. It's all trade-offs, and this leaves people to structure things how it makes best sense to them. For some, having very strong local compute / storage / graphics / I/O is best. For others, centralizing that pays off the best.
Only X does this. Nothing else does, or has.
The screen scrapers are impressive, but they really aren't multi-user in the sense that X is, and that requires a lot of kludges, system resources, etc... to manage things.
I remember the day I read about X in BYTE. It changed how I viewed computing, and when I got my chance, I went for it whole hog and it paid off very well.
Also IMHO, part of this vision really should be to provide developers with dead simple tools to get things done. It is true that building an efficient network aware application takes some work. SGI, BTW, did educate people. If you developed on IRIX, you got the tools to make it all happen, and you get the education and consulting of a vendor who knew their shit cold.
Today, we don't have that surrounding X, and it's hurting development pretty big.
Back in the 90's, I was doing video conferencing, running things all over the place on lots of machines, melding Linux, IRIX, Windows, etc... together in powerful ways, often using machines secured from a dumpster. No joke.
We've managed to cobble that together again, but it's a far cry from what could have been, and could still be with people thinking this stuff through like it was the first time.
IMHO, the other real problem is as I've stated. We have a whole generation of people doing this stuff now who basically have no clue! They were never introduced to multi-user computing properly, never got to experience X as intended, etc...
When I explain some of this to people, they make comments like, "sounds like Star Trek" and "amazing", "wish I were there..."
That exact scenario. Know what? It kicked some very serious ass. Still to this day we don't really have a software combination quite as potent. Here's the setup:
SGI Origin multiple CPU, lots of RAM, one or more 1000T interfaces. I started the thing on 100T, which was more than acceptable for most users, but I ended up with a lot of users.
ONE COPY of the software, ONE shared data repository, and the software contained data management, revision control, etc...
That machine hosted 30+ users via the X window system. Users could run another SGI, a PC, Linux, whatever they felt like running.
A simple script logged them onto the CAD system, where they could build solid models, make drawings, perform analysis, and many other things.
No user ever touched the data store. It was owned by the account that ran the application (SUID), and no user ever touched the application data either. All remote display.
Admin on this thing was fucking cake. Never had it so good. Still don't. And systems today that either run "cloud" or copy data all over the place are a mess by comparison.
The network model of the X Window System had some very serious advantages. Today we are missing out on a few options in most cases due to the lack of network transparent display capability. That lack is costing us a lot of time and money too. Thing is, nobody actually knows, so it's all A-OK.
At the time this was done, I competed with traditional setups and kicked their ass solid on every single metric. Cost, administration, performance, etc... It wasn't even a contest.
Today, with the networking we have and overall compute power available, it's hard to imagine how freaking good a similar setup would run.
Shop floor, various departments... no worries.
For the odd user at home, X required too much and we didn't have things like NX yet. That was a case for "screen scraping" type tech, to which I just setup a VNC like thing, let them access that over the home network, and life was good.
I could, and did, administer that thing from all over the place, often using one of those "Free JUNO" accounts, just to get a dialup and a few K/sec needed to run a command line or two.
Brilliant!
Truth is, the direction we took from those times, the decline of UNIX for this kind of thing, etc... was so much more labor intensive and expensive, I moved on to other things, occasionally consulting and mostly laughing when nobody sees the clusterfuck for what it is.
I agree with you about 4K and some other cases being more optimal without network transparency, but that's not the point. We also have other resource issues associated with those.
The protocol needs to have it all baked in, so that as we gain capability, smart people can apply it and actually get the benefit of it, not some diluted down thing we wish were as good as planned.
X did that. The protocol was there for when things grew, and some of us applied it all, and it rocked hard. A whole lot of us don't get it, and are still slogging around doing so many extra things we don't need to, it's a wonder there are any gains at all.
UNIX + X is multi-user computing. It's the bar, and most of the industry has forgotten what multi-user really means and how it can be used. Their loss.
I will, from time to time, fire up my Apple//e and write in AppleWorks for a while. It's kind of awesome. There are not many features, and the simple text display keeps me focused.
The other thing I like is how the interface, the clackety feel of the keyboard, etc... all take me back to an earlier time. When I connect in that way, with that time, what I write will be different in subtle ways.
Let's just cut to the chase. Thomas Paine in "Age Of Reason", which you can read online sorted this all out very nicely: the entire body of our religious works is hearsay.
New Testament, old, whatever. We've got little more than, "somebody says god says...", which isn't jack shit in a court of law, where the big kids actually make the rules.
No wonder it's embarrassing! Really, the most common ugly social issue arguments boil down to "somebody says god says...." and that somebody can be from the Bible, or Pastor Corn Hole Bob, who has it on good authority, or some other garbage.
All of it carries exactly the authority you grant it, and for all of us, it's entirely optional too, meaning none of us really have to care what "somebody says God says."
It's like trying to split the baby. Dig too deep into the problem and it gets really messy. Better to just move on and treat other people the same way you would like to be treated.
Racism, bigotry and theocracy are always wrong. Doesn't matter who says God says whatever. It's just wrong.
There, now we all can get along, New Testament or old, whatever.
Seriously. You can get some coverage OTA. No worries. If that's not compelling, it's not our job to pay NBC more. It's theirs to make the best of the material they signed a deal on.
Seems to me, writing an exclusive means they can deliver. What they are doing is trying to make the most money, not actually delivering the games.
And that's fair, but not my or your problem. And it's up to them to present value to the Olympics. If we don't watch, the games get less relevant, and at the end of the day, NBC didn't deliver.
Besides, the Russian stand on homophobia really doesn't add a lot of value there either. Tons of people aren't going to pay up, but they would watch and support athletes who worked hard to participate.
I'll gladly watch the games and view the ADS they deliver OTA. If they can't do that, they don't have me as a product to sell and I recommend you do the same.
...I am technical by nature have been transitioning to this kind of role because I'm at a place in life where it makes sense to do that. My experiences have been fairly good, and I've a couple of basic observations below:
For the last 5 years, I've moved into pre-sales and from there have been project management for extended periods of time. The interesting thing I found is by NOT getting as technical as the developers / implementers are, my ability to keep them out of trouble, ask the right questions, clear barriers have all been significantly improved. One very significant element of that is securing help or resources for them when needed.
They won't always ask and they won't always know because of how close to whatever it is they are. Being able to see this condition and deal with it early is worth gold and they are often very appreciative. As an analogy, you are driving somewhere and refuse to get directions, running the risk of being late. You think, just another coupla minutes and I'll recognize something... while your co-pilot doesn't experience this and brings up the phone nav system to bail you out, or they call in to get precise directions...
They don't have the "in the bubble" mindset the driver does, and this frees them to consider things on a macro level. All of that results in more efficient project work and a generally happier team.
Another comment above mentioned the type who can bring different skill sets together to get something done. That has high value as well and I have worked on teams where we had that person. Amazing really. I concur.
When it comes down to silly metrics, non-value added kinds of management things, sometimes those need attention and the good managers will deal with those in creative ways while their team gets it done for real. The poor ones will highlight those things cover your ass style.
And that brings me to my last general comment. Those that own the project and back their team take heat and personal risk. They are very highly valued and they contribute with the common goal of everybody seeing success on the effort. Where they insulate themselves from all of that, again cover your ass style, the team remains at risk, while the manager really doesn't, and that mess generally leads to a low value, high resentment, high friction environment nobody wants.
Make sure each call you are the Hannibal Lecter of prospects. Just get psycho with them, and work your hardest to place the most morbid, fear inducing, ugly, horrible impressions in their mind you can. Mix it up with near constant pleas to their humanity as you get them to empathize with the poor souls they prey on each day. From time to time, earnest pleas to get them to quit that job while you hold the line for them as they walk out is a nice, often finishing touch.
Do this a few times and mean it and don't break any laws and they will remove you from the dialer of their own free will.
My last call ended with "Oh Fuck! It's you." and that was the last I ever heard from those clowns.
I worked them hard, even getting a few of them to admit they are just running a script for easy cash.
This wave is different. My usual "hey, let's fuck with them on the phone" techniques have been accounted for. They hang up much quicker and do not reveal much of anything. Most importantly, they will not entertain basic human conversation easily. It's either advancing the script, or they play dumb hoping you are too and things can proceed anyway, or they are gone.
I damn near got one of them to quit on the spot last wave. Had him on the ropes feeling very shitty about the whole thing. One of these days, I'll get one to go, right then, just leave the phone hanging and walk out.
My thoughts too. Seems a reasonable outcome considering a nice hunk of metal came into serious contact with his car.
I like the low battery, maybe do some serious analysis on the armor plate and beef it all up. Or, like you say, move the whole works. Something. The FEA structural software can do amazing things these days. This problem can be engineered away.
Nice outcome for the driver. He got informed and could proceed to take appropriate action.
Gas cars just catch fire and escalate quickly for comparison. I'll bet he does get another one.
All kinds of stuff happens and sometimes you don't have time or options to deal with it. So, it's a drive over and hope. Sucks, but there isn't too much we can do about the problem.
Here's a nice one:
It's a torrential rain kind of night. About 11:00 PM, on a rural highway, two lane, cars regularly passing in opposing lane. My brother in law was driving an old 70's Toyota Corolla. The engine in that thing was great, but the body was crapping out here and there. This was the mid 90's. Toyota has since beefed things up some, but their 70's era cars were awful thin in places. The Corolla was thin in the trunk.
This brother in law saw a few rust patches, but didn't think too much of it having driven some Chevy thing or other before. No worries. Well, he had a nice, big, heavy floor jack in the back of that Corolla because he lost the stock one. Besides, the floor jack could lift one end of the car in a pinch, which made tire rotation quicker. That, and a 4-way lug wrench, various cans of oil, etc... were all in this razor thin, rusted out trunk, just waiting to exit the car, which they did.
When it happened, he was moving about 60, nobody in front, headed to meet the rest of the family. Two or three vehicles were behind him, following close as people in my neck of the woods will often do. Out comes that jack. It probably weighed 25 pounds. He heard the clunk, and it actually wedged in a way that moved the rear of the car some, he saw sparks and then one of the lights behind him went out.
Now he's a dick, and just floored it. All he knows is that way too close tailgater got up close and very personal with that floor jack, and had to pull off the road. Some other cars in the other lane darted about and a few had pulled over that he could see in the rear mirror, while speeding away as quickly as he could.
When he arrived to tell the story, we opened the trunk, and he basically didn't have one anymore. All the stuff was gone, and the metal bits were bent this way and that along the edges. We think the trunk floor just dropped out and onto the road. The news featured the event and he worried about it for years. That jack took the first car right out! Bashed the drivers side light out, pierced the radiator, and ruined the drivers side tire before bouncing into traffic going the other direction where other fun 'n games proceeded to occur where it bounced into another one doing enough damage to the muffler and side panel to be ugly, and ended up pinned under a third where it ground to a stop.
Shit happens.
Probably that thing was not secured and just ended up on the road. So this guy is driving along, somebody changes lanes or something and there it is! He probably didn't have options. If he did, he would have not driven over it, unless it just dropped in such a way that left him no time.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft is pushing a lot of testing onto early and non business users. What did they expect actually?
Secondly, Microsoft has moved to a rolling release style of development, while also pushing hard on features people aren't all that excited about. What do they expect?
If they really "demand answers", maybe they can fund the internal testing, etc... needed to get them, so their "beta" program may actually then deliver more meaningful feedback.
...an insane long standby time.
When I full charge that thing, it can take a call or text for like two weeks. Maybe using that mode is worth a thought. It's still useful for web browsing, e-mail, text, etc...
(And yes, I tested that on a long trip, no charger. Got 10 days, no problem, took a few calls, answered a few e-mails, various SMS.
And that's the usual, threats, etc...
As for the speech we don't like? It's up to them. The First Amendment applies to the government. Twitter can do whatever it wants.
Personally, I like the haters using Twitter. It's making it very clear, very quickly, just who is who. Trump is making an International ass of himself. Glorious!
Also, the First Amendment does not contain a shield. The answer to free speech we don't like is more free speech. So, that means we don't or should not ask Twitter to shut Trump down, unless it's criminal. And that also means we simply use Twitter to tell everyone just how big of an asshole Trump actually is!
Passes Popcorn Bowl to the right. Crunch, crunch....
Oh, and that is a somewhat difficult skill set to find.
I have it, and guess what? I contract out for pre-sales work all the time. Enterprise B2B people are just drooling over people who can do this. No wonder the talent isn't available to the big companies.
If they are smart, they do what I'm doing, and that is leverage that ability to understand new and old tech, create visions, back them with a strategic business alignment and value, and then help the salesperson pitch that to the execs for new sales.
(take the CIO out to lunch for bonus points)
Oh, that's a raw spanking! Well played.
Really, this piece should be titled, "Old execs can't find anyone young that is able to talk to them like their older buddies talk to them..."
Isn't the CIO the generalist who is able to articulate how the business can succeed with technology?
Ok then, get after it. Your new people and old people all have perspective. Get off your arse, talk to them, make some choices and go and sell that to management or prioritize the budget.
Delegating the budget is just fine, but even that needs a basic review. I understand how it is in very large enterprises, but I also understand companies of that size can afford to hire several CIO types too. Not all techs can be business minded, young or old. That's a specific skill set, and as a tech generalist, they would and should be expected to get what they need from the hard core techs, who will gladly give it to them too.
For smaller companies, if they even have a CIO type position, the generalist there needs to do the work to understand what the strategy actually is and what it means.
...grok programming more quickly and easily.
This all comes down to what one has to know in order to attempt some programming. BASIC requires one know very little to get something useful done. They try the PRINT statement, and that's cool. GOTO, INPUT, strings, numbers, basic math follow.
From there, you can do pretty useful programs!
EXCEL works a similar way. You see what cells do, then you find things like autosum, then you put a little bit of math in a cell, and suddenly, you can make some really useful spreadsheets. I know people with about that level of knowledge modeling businesses to great success. It's not the most advanced use of EXCEL, but it works fine, they can change it, they get the benefit of some automation and can communicate advanced ideas to others with relative ease.
Way back in the day, before EXCEL, I had used BASIC to compute a whole pile of useful manufacturing related things. Saved me a ton of time, and I sold those and some CAD system programs to get a reasonable PC. All development was done on some 8088 clunker from a thrifty store. (yes, it ran the CAD system, having exactly the minimum requirements listed on the box)
The CAD system had a BASIC like language built in. Was cake to do this. I did know something about programming, but I also was able to teach others how to make useful programs on just little nubs of knowledge. Some of them advanced, getting into IT, systems, etc... while others just used the programs they made and were happy about it.
Indeed! The print is too small.
Best use case for new programmers, is to maximize utility while minimizing knowledge dependencies. They don't need much to get the spark. Once they get it, as they progress, they will want out of whatever little environment they started in. The ones who really have aptitude will get out and do just fine. For many others, they will just use the thing and be happy, or move on and not care so much.
We really should give everybody a go. Find out who is who.
Think of this like public speaking. We make everybody do it, or most everybody. Most people experience an ordinary, "I can do this" outcome. Some of us find out it's not for us, and still others find out they are great somehow. We lose out if we don't run everyone through.
And of course, those of us who prefer humans make basic marks on physical media are right about all of this and talked about the expense and untrustworthy nature of voting machines.
Here in Oregon, we vote by mail, and are joined by WA and CO now, with some other pockets here and there in various states. It's awesome, works, can be trusted, is difficult to fraud on a scale that would impact anything, and turnout is generally higher than the poll methods in use most everywhere else today.
We can actually manually count and evaluate every last vote if needed.
Back in the Napster days, a flat license of something like 2+ Billion dollars was offered to get this same sort of thing started...
My early experiences were the old Atari VCS (2600) and VCS stood for video computer system. I was fascinated by the pixels and the idea of a TV being interactive.
I wanted control of the pixels.
Later, in school, I got to work on Apple ][ computers, and those just begged to be programmed. Gaming can initiate the desire, but so can a lot of other computer driven things these days.
It is not prep directly.
Indirectly, games can be prep. For a few friends and I, cracking copy protection got us into 6502 machine and later on, Assembly language. We would use the monitor to see what was going on. Reading the ROM listing told us a lot more.
BASIC is slow, and that too drove learning more. To get the real magic out of the old machines, one has to know stuff. We made games, played them and learned. Utility type programming was good too. One such program generated book reports with just a few picks and keyboard input.
Just playing, unless the game incorporates programming concepts, is not meaningful. The ability of games and other interactive things can spark the desire to build and control.
The latter leads to activities that do serve as prep.
C64 used a non-sequential scheme that mirrored it's character display.
8 bytes sequential on most machines means a linear series of pixels on the same scan line.
On the C64, those bytes got stacked up to form a character, each byte on a sequential scan line, assuming one starts at a character boundary.
To make the high for their joy to come out.
...informations to better builds the good!
Bad informations with for the good people so making of the understanding isn't!
I participated in a forum with Lessig, having my question selected for somebody from RIAA legal to be answered:
What are we buying when we buy entertainment media? Is it a license to view/listen to the product, or is it just a copy of the title that we have limited rights to? That is, do we own the license to view/listen to the content in any format -- or when we buy a CD, are we just purchasing the format of the content?
Matt Oppenheim responds.
(C) [What are we buying when we buy entertainment media?]
When you buy a CD, you should feel free to consume the music. That means you should listen to that disc, and feel free to make a copy of that disc for your own use so that you can have a copy in your home and your office. You should feel free to copy it onto other formats, such as .mp3, so that you can listen to it on your computer. You should feel free to copy it to cassette.
The only time you run into problems is if you begin to distribute your copies to others.
http://www.murc.ws/showthread....
The original event is no longer online. However, it appears to be archived at the forum I just linked. We get to transcode and backup our media, and we've always been able to do that. Of course, the DMCA makes circumvention an issue, but CD's really don't have that problem as they are essentially an open, raw audio format to begin with. In practical terms, they are not much different from tapes.
So we make mix CD's, we back up our masters, so the heat from the car doesn't ruin albums we might not be able to buy again, we transcode for our portable media player, or frankly the media player we made ourselves! Mix CD's to express our love for somebody else? Yeah, doing that is OK too.
What this means is we've always been able to make copies for friends. The answer above from the RIAA actually doesn't state this, and for obvious reasons, but the reality of things is clear. What that answer does state clearly is that we are just fine making a copy for the car. In fact, this is nicer than the backup CD, in that it's not really portable like a backup CD is.
Here's a notable question for you:
Say you archive your CD collection. Then you give the originals away. Ethics would have you get rid of the backups. But the law? No requirement at all. Doing this is shitty, but not something one is going to jail for.
Hope these clowns choke on a dick.
Your term limit issue is secondary, as are many other issues.
Whether or not we have term limits is a matter of reasoned public debate. Right now, we can't have that due to the money in politics problem.
It is unreasonable for you to connect your issue to the core, systemic problem of how elections are funded.
That is perhaps the biggest misconception and hangup people have. This isn't transactional politics. It's not like you get something in return, or trade-offs get made. We do that now, and the money biases it away from the overall best interests of the people.
Really, if we reform money in politics, a fair, reasoned discussion will happen. Or, at least a much better one will happen.
Term limits, and other things get decided then, not now.
This is a single issue effort. It is systemic, not partisan, and not intended to remedy anything other than the basic issue of money in politics.
Yes. We really need to take a hard look at network transparent displays in the context of what we can really do today as well as the future.
When I did this, 10T networks were common, and just a little slow for something like CAD. 100T networks were growing in popularity, and then we sort of jumped to 1000T.
Also during that time, I started on dialup, moved to DSL, and then more came.
Know what? The fiber connection I have in my home is fast enough to run X with few worries today.
And it's going to improve more. My 4G cell phone can run X too. Amazing!
Honestly, I miss the vision our early innovators had. In a way, the field was more open and people could build without so many legacy ties. The need to incorporate those into the next step is holding people back. Legacy "screen scrapers" should get attention. They are useful, and they do have advantages for application developers.
Network transparent, multi-user, concurrent multi-processor, networked computing is the bar to cross, and if we don't maximize it, we risk losing out on a lot of the potental.
Sad really.
All I know, is I won arguments back then, and I did it on UNIX when the dominant move was to Windows and the PC, and all that distributed software bullshit we face today. Won solid. No fucking contest.
The difference was really understanding how things worked and applying that instead of following the cookie cutter stuff we see being done so often today.
With X, one can distribute or centralize as needed!
Fonts on one machine, window manager on another, application on another, storage on yet another, graphics server on yet another, or even better, how about a few displays, each capable of serving a user?
Or, pile it all on one box somebody can carry with them!
Doesn't matter with X. It's all trade-offs, and this leaves people to structure things how it makes best sense to them. For some, having very strong local compute / storage / graphics / I/O is best. For others, centralizing that pays off the best.
Only X does this. Nothing else does, or has.
The screen scrapers are impressive, but they really aren't multi-user in the sense that X is, and that requires a lot of kludges, system resources, etc... to manage things.
I remember the day I read about X in BYTE. It changed how I viewed computing, and when I got my chance, I went for it whole hog and it paid off very well.
Also IMHO, part of this vision really should be to provide developers with dead simple tools to get things done. It is true that building an efficient network aware application takes some work. SGI, BTW, did educate people. If you developed on IRIX, you got the tools to make it all happen, and you get the education and consulting of a vendor who knew their shit cold.
Today, we don't have that surrounding X, and it's hurting development pretty big.
Back in the 90's, I was doing video conferencing, running things all over the place on lots of machines, melding Linux, IRIX, Windows, etc... together in powerful ways, often using machines secured from a dumpster. No joke.
We've managed to cobble that together again, but it's a far cry from what could have been, and could still be with people thinking this stuff through like it was the first time.
IMHO, the other real problem is as I've stated. We have a whole generation of people doing this stuff now who basically have no clue! They were never introduced to multi-user computing properly, never got to experience X as intended, etc...
When I explain some of this to people, they make comments like, "sounds like Star Trek" and "amazing", "wish I were there..."
Yeah. I was. Many of us here were.
Ha!
Did this in the late 90's through early 00's.
That exact scenario. Know what? It kicked some very serious ass. Still to this day we don't really have a software combination quite as potent. Here's the setup:
SGI Origin multiple CPU, lots of RAM, one or more 1000T interfaces. I started the thing on 100T, which was more than acceptable for most users, but I ended up with a lot of users.
ONE COPY of the software, ONE shared data repository, and the software contained data management, revision control, etc...
That machine hosted 30+ users via the X window system. Users could run another SGI, a PC, Linux, whatever they felt like running.
A simple script logged them onto the CAD system, where they could build solid models, make drawings, perform analysis, and many other things.
No user ever touched the data store. It was owned by the account that ran the application (SUID), and no user ever touched the application data either. All remote display.
Admin on this thing was fucking cake. Never had it so good. Still don't. And systems today that either run "cloud" or copy data all over the place are a mess by comparison.
The network model of the X Window System had some very serious advantages. Today we are missing out on a few options in most cases due to the lack of network transparent display capability. That lack is costing us a lot of time and money too. Thing is, nobody actually knows, so it's all A-OK.
At the time this was done, I competed with traditional setups and kicked their ass solid on every single metric. Cost, administration, performance, etc... It wasn't even a contest.
Today, with the networking we have and overall compute power available, it's hard to imagine how freaking good a similar setup would run.
Shop floor, various departments... no worries.
For the odd user at home, X required too much and we didn't have things like NX yet. That was a case for "screen scraping" type tech, to which I just setup a VNC like thing, let them access that over the home network, and life was good.
I could, and did, administer that thing from all over the place, often using one of those "Free JUNO" accounts, just to get a dialup and a few K/sec needed to run a command line or two.
Brilliant!
Truth is, the direction we took from those times, the decline of UNIX for this kind of thing, etc... was so much more labor intensive and expensive, I moved on to other things, occasionally consulting and mostly laughing when nobody sees the clusterfuck for what it is.
I agree with you about 4K and some other cases being more optimal without network transparency, but that's not the point. We also have other resource issues associated with those.
The protocol needs to have it all baked in, so that as we gain capability, smart people can apply it and actually get the benefit of it, not some diluted down thing we wish were as good as planned.
X did that. The protocol was there for when things grew, and some of us applied it all, and it rocked hard. A whole lot of us don't get it, and are still slogging around doing so many extra things we don't need to, it's a wonder there are any gains at all.
UNIX + X is multi-user computing. It's the bar, and most of the industry has forgotten what multi-user really means and how it can be used. Their loss.
I will, from time to time, fire up my Apple //e and write in AppleWorks for a while. It's kind of awesome. There are not many features, and the simple text display keeps me focused.
The other thing I like is how the interface, the clackety feel of the keyboard, etc... all take me back to an earlier time. When I connect in that way, with that time, what I write will be different in subtle ways.
Good for him.
...is it?
Let's just cut to the chase. Thomas Paine in "Age Of Reason", which you can read online sorted this all out very nicely: the entire body of our religious works is hearsay.
New Testament, old, whatever. We've got little more than, "somebody says god says...", which isn't jack shit in a court of law, where the big kids actually make the rules.
No wonder it's embarrassing! Really, the most common ugly social issue arguments boil down to "somebody says god says...." and that somebody can be from the Bible, or Pastor Corn Hole Bob, who has it on good authority, or some other garbage.
All of it carries exactly the authority you grant it, and for all of us, it's entirely optional too, meaning none of us really have to care what "somebody says God says."
It's like trying to split the baby. Dig too deep into the problem and it gets really messy. Better to just move on and treat other people the same way you would like to be treated.
Racism, bigotry and theocracy are always wrong. Doesn't matter who says God says whatever. It's just wrong.
There, now we all can get along, New Testament or old, whatever.
And yes, God told me. Really.
Seriously. You can get some coverage OTA. No worries. If that's not compelling, it's not our job to pay NBC more. It's theirs to make the best of the material they signed a deal on.
Seems to me, writing an exclusive means they can deliver. What they are doing is trying to make the most money, not actually delivering the games.
And that's fair, but not my or your problem. And it's up to them to present value to the Olympics. If we don't watch, the games get less relevant, and at the end of the day, NBC didn't deliver.
Besides, the Russian stand on homophobia really doesn't add a lot of value there either. Tons of people aren't going to pay up, but they would watch and support athletes who worked hard to participate.
I'll gladly watch the games and view the ADS they deliver OTA. If they can't do that, they don't have me as a product to sell and I recommend you do the same.
...I am technical by nature have been transitioning to this kind of role because I'm at a place in life where it makes sense to do that. My experiences have been fairly good, and I've a couple of basic observations below:
For the last 5 years, I've moved into pre-sales and from there have been project management for extended periods of time. The interesting thing I found is by NOT getting as technical as the developers / implementers are, my ability to keep them out of trouble, ask the right questions, clear barriers have all been significantly improved. One very significant element of that is securing help or resources for them when needed.
They won't always ask and they won't always know because of how close to whatever it is they are. Being able to see this condition and deal with it early is worth gold and they are often very appreciative. As an analogy, you are driving somewhere and refuse to get directions, running the risk of being late. You think, just another coupla minutes and I'll recognize something... while your co-pilot doesn't experience this and brings up the phone nav system to bail you out, or they call in to get precise directions...
They don't have the "in the bubble" mindset the driver does, and this frees them to consider things on a macro level. All of that results in more efficient project work and a generally happier team.
Another comment above mentioned the type who can bring different skill sets together to get something done. That has high value as well and I have worked on teams where we had that person. Amazing really. I concur.
When it comes down to silly metrics, non-value added kinds of management things, sometimes those need attention and the good managers will deal with those in creative ways while their team gets it done for real. The poor ones will highlight those things cover your ass style.
And that brings me to my last general comment. Those that own the project and back their team take heat and personal risk. They are very highly valued and they contribute with the common goal of everybody seeing success on the effort. Where they insulate themselves from all of that, again cover your ass style, the team remains at risk, while the manager really doesn't, and that mess generally leads to a low value, high resentment, high friction environment nobody wants.
The trick?
Make sure each call you are the Hannibal Lecter of prospects. Just get psycho with them, and work your hardest to place the most morbid, fear inducing, ugly, horrible impressions in their mind you can. Mix it up with near constant pleas to their humanity as you get them to empathize with the poor souls they prey on each day. From time to time, earnest pleas to get them to quit that job while you hold the line for them as they walk out is a nice, often finishing touch.
Do this a few times and mean it and don't break any laws and they will remove you from the dialer of their own free will.
My last call ended with "Oh Fuck! It's you." and that was the last I ever heard from those clowns.
I got several calls from the last wave.
I worked them hard, even getting a few of them to admit they are just running a script for easy cash.
This wave is different. My usual "hey, let's fuck with them on the phone" techniques have been accounted for. They hang up much quicker and do not reveal much of anything. Most importantly, they will not entertain basic human conversation easily. It's either advancing the script, or they play dumb hoping you are too and things can proceed anyway, or they are gone.
I damn near got one of them to quit on the spot last wave. Had him on the ropes feeling very shitty about the whole thing. One of these days, I'll get one to go, right then, just leave the phone hanging and walk out.
Fuckers.
My thoughts too. Seems a reasonable outcome considering a nice hunk of metal came into serious contact with his car.
I like the low battery, maybe do some serious analysis on the armor plate and beef it all up. Or, like you say, move the whole works. Something. The FEA structural software can do amazing things these days. This problem can be engineered away.
Nice outcome for the driver. He got informed and could proceed to take appropriate action.
Gas cars just catch fire and escalate quickly for comparison. I'll bet he does get another one.
Yes. Shit on the road.
All kinds of stuff happens and sometimes you don't have time or options to deal with it. So, it's a drive over and hope. Sucks, but there isn't too much we can do about the problem.
Here's a nice one:
It's a torrential rain kind of night. About 11:00 PM, on a rural highway, two lane, cars regularly passing in opposing lane. My brother in law was driving an old 70's Toyota Corolla. The engine in that thing was great, but the body was crapping out here and there. This was the mid 90's. Toyota has since beefed things up some, but their 70's era cars were awful thin in places. The Corolla was thin in the trunk.
This brother in law saw a few rust patches, but didn't think too much of it having driven some Chevy thing or other before. No worries. Well, he had a nice, big, heavy floor jack in the back of that Corolla because he lost the stock one. Besides, the floor jack could lift one end of the car in a pinch, which made tire rotation quicker. That, and a 4-way lug wrench, various cans of oil, etc... were all in this razor thin, rusted out trunk, just waiting to exit the car, which they did.
When it happened, he was moving about 60, nobody in front, headed to meet the rest of the family. Two or three vehicles were behind him, following close as people in my neck of the woods will often do. Out comes that jack. It probably weighed 25 pounds. He heard the clunk, and it actually wedged in a way that moved the rear of the car some, he saw sparks and then one of the lights behind him went out.
Now he's a dick, and just floored it. All he knows is that way too close tailgater got up close and very personal with that floor jack, and had to pull off the road. Some other cars in the other lane darted about and a few had pulled over that he could see in the rear mirror, while speeding away as quickly as he could.
When he arrived to tell the story, we opened the trunk, and he basically didn't have one anymore. All the stuff was gone, and the metal bits were bent this way and that along the edges. We think the trunk floor just dropped out and onto the road. The news featured the event and he worried about it for years. That jack took the first car right out! Bashed the drivers side light out, pierced the radiator, and ruined the drivers side tire before bouncing into traffic going the other direction where other fun 'n games proceeded to occur where it bounced into another one doing enough damage to the muffler and side panel to be ugly, and ended up pinned under a third where it ground to a stop.
Shit happens.
Probably that thing was not secured and just ended up on the road. So this guy is driving along, somebody changes lanes or something and there it is! He probably didn't have options. If he did, he would have not driven over it, unless it just dropped in such a way that left him no time.