The biggest flaw in this device is that it's expected that you can plug in a plug at work for offsite backup. Do these people actually work at corporate america? It's a non-company sanctioned device connected to the corporate network consuming a non-trivial amount of bandwidth. The odds of this flying at the work place are nearly 0, and most likely the network admin would look at you like you're crazy for even suggesting it.
Telling somebody that they're ignorant about a particular topic may potentially (and more often than not) have the underlying connotation that that person should have known better in the first place. Nobody is going to tell Dr. Dawkins that he's ignorant of baseball because that's a useless statement. When somebody tells you that you're ignorant of "traffic laws", "etiquette", or "geography" you get the point.
Applied to the religious, telling them that they're ignorant of evolution, and being defensive about them getting mad about the statement because you think it's just a fact IS ignorant. The religious already believe that they've considered everything they need to know about evolution, and have discredited it in their own minds. The real strategy here is to not start with a public conclusion of them being ignorant, but to simply ask questions and answer their rebuttals. Eventually you'll hit a contradiction or hole in their misunderstanding, and the real question there is what they'll do next. Do they open their minds to truth, no matter how repugnant it is to their faith, or do they stay aggressively closed minded about the subject?
You write in your own, but you don't acknowledge the hierarchical DNS system which has a root managed by the IANA, a department of ICANN, based in Los Angeles, CA. Without providing a secure, non-centralized (those two tend to contradict each other) alternative to DNS, which every country in the world can agree to use as a replacement, your proposal can't go anywhere.
As part of the requirements for the new TLDs, DNS must support DNSSEC and IPv6 from day 1. It ups the standard of DNS quality across the entire Internet, and puts pressure on the TLDs which aren't up to date yet.
I think it's just as valid to say that Japan's earthquakes are a paid cost that the rest of the world no longer has to absorb by having earthquakes in their region. Japan takes one for the team so to say. But I'm talking out of my ass.
If there were any real models that measured likelihood of an earthquake in region X with any degree of reliability, I'd have a fucking widget for in on my phone. "The weather is 64 degrees, 10% chance of rain, and 1e-5% chance for a 6.0 magnitude or larger earthquake."
I have a pair of XFX Radeon 6870s in CrossFire at the moment. The recent Control Center rewrite combined with the performance upgrades for the 11.4 drivers (still in testing) make it seems like AMD is really caring for a quality customer experience these days.
However, the latest games that could take advantage of this hardware, aren't. "Can it play Crysis" is a fucking joke now since Crysis 2 was just released with buggy/failed CrossFire/SLI support. That and the configuration options for graphics quality have been reduced to resolution and an enumeration (high, very high, extreme). The title that had the potential to demonstrate the power of today's latest cards shows that it's just a POS console port. Crytek failed the basic customer Crysis originally catered to.
Sure there are other games out there that can stress out today's platform a touch, but they are last years games. It also seems like it's a 50/50 chance that a game released for PC this year will be another console port, and in turn have the quality and QA such a title is expected to have: piss poor.
I have a sinking feeling that being a PC gamer is nothing more than being an alpha tester for the 2015 consoles.
I've YET to come across a coffee shop that embraces having WIFI at their establishment. It's like they just add it like decoration, and then whine and complain when there's a side-effect on how customers interact with the business. Here's some ideas:
Let's me order a drink or snack from my device w/o having to stand at the counter for 10 minutes listening to the espresso grinder and steamer.
Had some type of minimums for time spent. I'm totally fine with $5/hr if I'm taking up table space.
For that $5/hr, there should be a retractable Ethernet cord and power plug on the table itself. Awesome, nobody is going to trip over my power brick.
Hell, how about the ability to change the music like juke-boxes in 50s style-cafes?
Add that quarter to change the song to my tab, and let me checkout using paypal or whatever.
That's just off the top of my head. Come on "indie" coffee shop owners, this is easy. Have your establishment embrace WIFI and the customers who want to use it! Please!
So I own both an XBox 360 and a PC. The PC has a GeForce 295GTX, Intel 980X, Intel 160GB SSD, and 12GB corsair dominator ram. Even with this configuration,
PC GAMES AREN'T ANY MORE FUN
Although I do appreciate the increased frame rates, textures, and random cool effects, it's still the same butt-kiss 3D that I've been seeing for the past 5 years, just more detailed.
The only thing game changing nowadays are games with destructible environments. Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is the most recent example. However that's still not enough. People's facial expressions and skin still looks plastic and fake. Too many hard lines everywhere. Explosions of something that generates millions of shrapnel particles still take too much CPU. I can still see the effects of draw distance, etc.
Given this, and the need to develop a game, then PCs should take second seat to consoles, and if and only if there's enough of a justified budget should a port be written. Maybe in 5 years things will be different, but by then consoles will have had a hardware refresh, and PCs will be back at square 0 trying to compete.
Horse and Buggy, hmm, what about a grand theft auto (I know auto doesn't make sense here anymore), set in old western times? Riding with a gang of thieves to take down a stage coach full of gold on fast horses actually sounds pretty fun. The entire skill of quick shooting could be pretty interesting when paired with today's twichy mousers. The wild west in a video game?
All of the old movies could be brought in. The good, the bad, and the ugly. The unforgiven. Sounds awesome.
OT, but if you have the chance to go out and see a movie soon, try to find a movie house with "There Will be Blood." Critics and movie goers alike have been stunned. Caveat: it's 2 hours 40 minutes long, and not really a date movie (unless you significant other can appreciate good film).
As a data point, I personally want to survive a house fire or theft. Nature or thieves can take my hardware, but I have an external hard drive that I do weekly backups on and then take offsite. This covers the entire set of my data: music, pictures, code,/etc &/boot directories, etc.
Now for data I touch on a day to day basis, that's stored in a subversion repository. I really recommend this for anybody that doesn't want to lose data because of their own mistakes. Next, the subversion repository is nightly backed up onto another hard drive via cron script so that between offsite backups, I still never lose more than a day's worth of work, even with an HD failure.
This is one of the reason why getting a CS degree is important, despite what the ignorant masses say in the IT industry. Sure writing lame CRUD applications will satisfy your average customer's needs, but sophisticated algorithms are what provide value beyond a simple shopping cart.
If you're still entrenched in the thought that a CS degree "isn't needed for what I do," then let me propose a somewhat common problem. Suppose your client wants the built in reporting in your web application to minimize the amount of noise introduced by users who forget their password and create a new account rather than resetting it. It's up to you to write code to detect these duplicate accounts. How do you begin doing this beyond simple string comparisons?
So, my wife has Edgy installed on her laptop alongside Windows (jealous?). She recently wanted to upgrade to Fiesty, but I indicated that Gusty is about to ship in October, and that you can just apt-get update your way to final when it's released, ahead of everybody else. She thought this sounded great, and so we installed it, and everything was working without a hitch, except for two small problems:
* The restricted bcm43xx driver wasn't loading via the restricted driver manager no matter what. (Fixed by "cutting" the firmware ourselves). * Compviz was pretty, but too slow (simply went in and disabled it).
The specs on her laptop are P4M 1.4Ghz, 1GB ram, ATI 9000 video card, and 80gb hd. This more than Linux worthy machine was having a noticeably hard time with the graphics. Doing simple day to day tasks were noticeably slowed down. Every window operation now took a few seconds instead of being instant, and this wasn't acceptable for my wife.
My suggestion for the Gutsy team is to put together a benchmark for systems, and advise users regarding 3D window management (ala Vista). Barring that, I wouldn't have Compviz enabled by default, but there's nothing preventing stuffing an icon on the desktop asking for users to click on it and try it out.
I really hope Microsoft adopts an iterative development and release cycle on the order of around every six months for Windows some time in the future.
Bugs like this get noticed sooner and are easier to fix since they are fresh.
QA cycles are more focused.
Customer feedback helps drive the product to something the customers actually want to use.
Customers can have an easier time adapting to smaller changes.
Please note that OS X has proven that a faster iterative development model can work for a desktop operating system. They're releasing every year or so http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X#Mac_OS_X_10. 0_.28Cheetah.29/, which might be the sweet spot, but I bet they could do better.
Big-bang software releases, ala Vista taking years to develop, are destined for bugs and customer rejection like this. If you, as a software developer are stuck in a project with a release date longer than a year away, please take the time to set your project manager straight.
Men are lazy, and when they need to take a leak, they might decide to try out their aim with the seat down rather than take the effort to raise it. Sometimes they miss, leaving urine for you to sit on. Leave the toilet seat up. It's in your best hygienic interest to do so.
The Russians aren't idiots. I'm sure they're collecting loads of scientific data with each flight to help then design and implement future space programs. In the long run, practice will make perfect.
Personally though, I'd just scrap NASA entirely as it's entirely too encumbered by red-tape to do anything worthwhile and replace it with commercial space programs. Competing interests will result in increased innovation and cost reduction.
I said the same thing when Windows XP came out and I was running Windows 2000. So did numerous amounts of my friends. The problem comes with hardware, drivers, and platform libraries (such as Direct X). Eventually you either stick to the equipment you already have, move to Linux, or upgrade Windows. Now I'm running Ubuntu on my laptop for use as a work/dev machine, and I have a desktop running XP to support Games, AV software, and Quicken.
I held out for about a year after XP was released. Let's see how long we all last this time around. Who knows, maybe I'll do as one of my colleagues did and take the Apple plunge with one awesome Mac Pro system.
The only way I see this being successful is if you had the entire class participate, and gave all of them roles with competing interests. You need to have Business Analysts, Software Engineers, Offshore Consultants (heh), Tech Leads, Architects, Project Managers, Product Managers, Owners and Customers. Preferably each role should be assigned a budget and one's grade should reflect on how well that budget is spent on an individual basis, how much the entire group spent, and the overall success of the project.
If the roles and budgets are setup correctly, the initial project will probably end up taking twice as long or more as much as the alloted for project work for the class. For example, if the class is a 3 credit class, then the initial project should be comparable to a project for a hypothetical 6 credit death march. This is because the owner sees the $$$, the product manager says yes to nearly every feature requested, and the goal of the customers is to get as many features while paying as little as possible.
Then pick a software methodology; it doesn't matter one bit if it's Waterfall, XP, Scrum, (E)UP, whatever, because it's my bet is that 19 times out of 20, the project will end in miserable failure. What will be exposed will be the politics of everybody, and how these competing politics completely destroyed the project. Have the final be a post-mortem analysis.
I went through the whole apt-get dist-upgrade procedure expecting the upgrade to be a complete mess. It was:) 30 or so packages, including "ubuntu-minimal" were held back, my wireless card wasn't working anymore, and it kept the old kernel I was using on Dapper (2.6.15).
At that point I decided it was easier to do a fresh install rather than spend the hours or it would take to fix it. The fresh install was a success, and everything has been working seamlessly since.
What would be interesting if each package implemented a unit test of sorts that tested for expected state after it was installed. This way, people with borked installations could send their unit tests report to Ubuntu, and fixes could be targeted in a quicker manner.
Slashdot Mirror
The biggest flaw in this device is that it's expected that you can plug in a plug at work for offsite backup. Do these people actually work at corporate america? It's a non-company sanctioned device connected to the corporate network consuming a non-trivial amount of bandwidth. The odds of this flying at the work place are nearly 0, and most likely the network admin would look at you like you're crazy for even suggesting it.
Telling somebody that they're ignorant about a particular topic may potentially (and more often than not) have the underlying connotation that that person should have known better in the first place. Nobody is going to tell Dr. Dawkins that he's ignorant of baseball because that's a useless statement. When somebody tells you that you're ignorant of "traffic laws", "etiquette", or "geography" you get the point.
Applied to the religious, telling them that they're ignorant of evolution, and being defensive about them getting mad about the statement because you think it's just a fact IS ignorant. The religious already believe that they've considered everything they need to know about evolution, and have discredited it in their own minds. The real strategy here is to not start with a public conclusion of them being ignorant, but to simply ask questions and answer their rebuttals. Eventually you'll hit a contradiction or hole in their misunderstanding, and the real question there is what they'll do next. Do they open their minds to truth, no matter how repugnant it is to their faith, or do they stay aggressively closed minded about the subject?
You write in your own, but you don't acknowledge the hierarchical DNS system which has a root managed by the IANA, a department of ICANN, based in Los Angeles, CA. Without providing a secure, non-centralized (those two tend to contradict each other) alternative to DNS, which every country in the world can agree to use as a replacement, your proposal can't go anywhere.
As part of the requirements for the new TLDs, DNS must support DNSSEC and IPv6 from day 1. It ups the standard of DNS quality across the entire Internet, and puts pressure on the TLDs which aren't up to date yet.
Agreed.
I think it's just as valid to say that Japan's earthquakes are a paid cost that the rest of the world no longer has to absorb by having earthquakes in their region. Japan takes one for the team so to say. But I'm talking out of my ass.
If there were any real models that measured likelihood of an earthquake in region X with any degree of reliability, I'd have a fucking widget for in on my phone. "The weather is 64 degrees, 10% chance of rain, and 1e-5% chance for a 6.0 magnitude or larger earthquake."
I have a pair of XFX Radeon 6870s in CrossFire at the moment. The recent Control Center rewrite combined with the performance upgrades for the 11.4 drivers (still in testing) make it seems like AMD is really caring for a quality customer experience these days.
However, the latest games that could take advantage of this hardware, aren't. "Can it play Crysis" is a fucking joke now since Crysis 2 was just released with buggy/failed CrossFire/SLI support. That and the configuration options for graphics quality have been reduced to resolution and an enumeration (high, very high, extreme). The title that had the potential to demonstrate the power of today's latest cards shows that it's just a POS console port. Crytek failed the basic customer Crysis originally catered to.
Sure there are other games out there that can stress out today's platform a touch, but they are last years games. It also seems like it's a 50/50 chance that a game released for PC this year will be another console port, and in turn have the quality and QA such a title is expected to have: piss poor.
I have a sinking feeling that being a PC gamer is nothing more than being an alpha tester for the 2015 consoles.
I've YET to come across a coffee shop that embraces having WIFI at their establishment. It's like they just add it like decoration, and then whine and complain when there's a side-effect on how customers interact with the business. Here's some ideas:
That's just off the top of my head. Come on "indie" coffee shop owners, this is easy. Have your establishment embrace WIFI and the customers who want to use it! Please!
You don't need three advanced degrees (And the debt load that comes with it) to each ANY high school class.
Except maybe the proofreading part of English courses. (FRAGMENT)
So I own both an XBox 360 and a PC. The PC has a GeForce 295GTX, Intel 980X, Intel 160GB SSD, and 12GB corsair dominator ram. Even with this configuration,
PC GAMES AREN'T ANY MORE FUN
Although I do appreciate the increased frame rates, textures, and random cool effects, it's still the same butt-kiss 3D that I've been seeing for the past 5 years, just more detailed.
The only thing game changing nowadays are games with destructible environments. Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is the most recent example. However that's still not enough. People's facial expressions and skin still looks plastic and fake. Too many hard lines everywhere. Explosions of something that generates millions of shrapnel particles still take too much CPU. I can still see the effects of draw distance, etc.
Given this, and the need to develop a game, then PCs should take second seat to consoles, and if and only if there's enough of a justified budget should a port be written. Maybe in 5 years things will be different, but by then consoles will have had a hardware refresh, and PCs will be back at square 0 trying to compete.
Oh Thufir, I see they've installed your heart plug already.... Don't be angry. Everyone gets one here.
How about GTA "I'm going to get you sucka" edition. You could get too much cash and over gold.
Horse and Buggy, hmm, what about a grand theft auto (I know auto doesn't make sense here anymore), set in old western times? Riding with a gang of thieves to take down a stage coach full of gold on fast horses actually sounds pretty fun. The entire skill of quick shooting could be pretty interesting when paired with today's twichy mousers. The wild west in a video game?
All of the old movies could be brought in. The good, the bad, and the ugly. The unforgiven. Sounds awesome.
OT, but if you have the chance to go out and see a movie soon, try to find a movie house with "There Will be Blood." Critics and movie goers alike have been stunned. Caveat: it's 2 hours 40 minutes long, and not really a date movie (unless you significant other can appreciate good film).
I'm finished.
Great advice.
/etc & /boot directories, etc.
As a data point, I personally want to survive a house fire or theft. Nature or thieves can take my hardware, but I have an external hard drive that I do weekly backups on and then take offsite. This covers the entire set of my data: music, pictures, code,
Now for data I touch on a day to day basis, that's stored in a subversion repository. I really recommend this for anybody that doesn't want to lose data because of their own mistakes. Next, the subversion repository is nightly backed up onto another hard drive via cron script so that between offsite backups, I still never lose more than a day's worth of work, even with an HD failure.
This is one of the reason why getting a CS degree is important, despite what the ignorant masses say in the IT industry. Sure writing lame CRUD applications will satisfy your average customer's needs, but sophisticated algorithms are what provide value beyond a simple shopping cart.
If you're still entrenched in the thought that a CS degree "isn't needed for what I do," then let me propose a somewhat common problem. Suppose your client wants the built in reporting in your web application to minimize the amount of noise introduced by users who forget their password and create a new account rather than resetting it. It's up to you to write code to detect these duplicate accounts. How do you begin doing this beyond simple string comparisons?
If you identify one "Math" for me, then I'll identify one snow for you.
I'll have to try the new driver then. Thanks mendred!
So, my wife has Edgy installed on her laptop alongside Windows (jealous?). She recently wanted to upgrade to Fiesty, but I indicated that Gusty is about to ship in October, and that you can just apt-get update your way to final when it's released, ahead of everybody else. She thought this sounded great, and so we installed it, and everything was working without a hitch, except for two small problems:
* The restricted bcm43xx driver wasn't loading via the restricted driver manager no matter what. (Fixed by "cutting" the firmware ourselves).
* Compviz was pretty, but too slow (simply went in and disabled it).
The specs on her laptop are P4M 1.4Ghz, 1GB ram, ATI 9000 video card, and 80gb hd. This more than Linux worthy machine was having a noticeably hard time with the graphics. Doing simple day to day tasks were noticeably slowed down. Every window operation now took a few seconds instead of being instant, and this wasn't acceptable for my wife.
My suggestion for the Gutsy team is to put together a benchmark for systems, and advise users regarding 3D window management (ala Vista). Barring that, I wouldn't have Compviz enabled by default, but there's nothing preventing stuffing an icon on the desktop asking for users to click on it and try it out.
Yeah, and you even get bonus points for drinking a quart of motor oil.
- Bugs like this get noticed sooner and are easier to fix since they are fresh.
- QA cycles are more focused.
- Customer feedback helps drive the product to something the customers actually want to use.
- Customers can have an easier time adapting to smaller changes.
Please note that OS X has proven that a faster iterative development model can work for a desktop operating system. They're releasing every year or so http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X#Mac_OS_X_10Big-bang software releases, ala Vista taking years to develop, are destined for bugs and customer rejection like this. If you, as a software developer are stuck in a project with a release date longer than a year away, please take the time to set your project manager straight.
To all women out there,
Men are lazy, and when they need to take a leak, they might decide to try out their aim with the seat down rather than take the effort to raise it. Sometimes they miss, leaving urine for you to sit on. Leave the toilet seat up. It's in your best hygienic interest to do so.
The Russians aren't idiots. I'm sure they're collecting loads of scientific data with each flight to help then design and implement future space programs. In the long run, practice will make perfect.
Personally though, I'd just scrap NASA entirely as it's entirely too encumbered by red-tape to do anything worthwhile and replace it with commercial space programs. Competing interests will result in increased innovation and cost reduction.
I said the same thing when Windows XP came out and I was running Windows 2000. So did numerous amounts of my friends. The problem comes with hardware, drivers, and platform libraries (such as Direct X). Eventually you either stick to the equipment you already have, move to Linux, or upgrade Windows. Now I'm running Ubuntu on my laptop for use as a work/dev machine, and I have a desktop running XP to support Games, AV software, and Quicken.
I held out for about a year after XP was released. Let's see how long we all last this time around. Who knows, maybe I'll do as one of my colleagues did and take the Apple plunge with one awesome Mac Pro system.
The only way I see this being successful is if you had the entire class participate, and gave all of them roles with competing interests. You need to have Business Analysts, Software Engineers, Offshore Consultants (heh), Tech Leads, Architects, Project Managers, Product Managers, Owners and Customers. Preferably each role should be assigned a budget and one's grade should reflect on how well that budget is spent on an individual basis, how much the entire group spent, and the overall success of the project.
If the roles and budgets are setup correctly, the initial project will probably end up taking twice as long or more as much as the alloted for project work for the class. For example, if the class is a 3 credit class, then the initial project should be comparable to a project for a hypothetical 6 credit death march. This is because the owner sees the $$$, the product manager says yes to nearly every feature requested, and the goal of the customers is to get as many features while paying as little as possible.
Then pick a software methodology; it doesn't matter one bit if it's Waterfall, XP, Scrum, (E)UP, whatever, because it's my bet is that 19 times out of 20, the project will end in miserable failure. What will be exposed will be the politics of everybody, and how these competing politics completely destroyed the project. Have the final be a post-mortem analysis.
I went through the whole apt-get dist-upgrade procedure expecting the upgrade to be a complete mess. It was :) 30 or so packages, including "ubuntu-minimal" were held back, my wireless card wasn't working anymore, and it kept the old kernel I was using on Dapper (2.6.15).
At that point I decided it was easier to do a fresh install rather than spend the hours or it would take to fix it. The fresh install was a success, and everything has been working seamlessly since.
What would be interesting if each package implemented a unit test of sorts that tested for expected state after it was installed. This way, people with borked installations could send their unit tests report to Ubuntu, and fixes could be targeted in a quicker manner.