1.0.7? Neato, but I've been having fun playing with the 1.5 betas and 1.6 alphas. They have one great thing going for them -- they are FAST. Considerably faster than any previous release. I've tested Linux, Windows, OS X. Firefox team, you're getting there! Kudos.
Yeah, most extensions don't work. People are complaining about the new look of the menus (doesn't bother me). Definitely create a new profile and use it.
While *I* refuse to have any out of work relationships with any of my co-workers I don't believe that employers should have the right to mandate and legally enforce that behavior.
Amen! I'm part of a small minority at my workplace (think VeryLargeCorpInc) that doesn't want to interact after office hours with my coworkers. I like the separation of my work and personal lives. The intermingling sometimes confuses professional/work issues, and I've found that I simply function better without all that extra personal stuff floating around. I don't feel the need to make a bunch of new friends at every place I work, and since a large part of the IT industry changes jobs on a regular basis (layoffs, contract work, etc), it's just easier for me not to cultivate a bunch of new relationships at work. It works for me, but it's not for everyone.
I'm easy to work with, funny, get along well with others, am part of my team, vastly experienced in my field, and always deliver what I'm supposed to when I'm supposed to. I get professional respect and space to do what I need. And when I've been asked why I don't care to socialize outside of work, I simply reply "I have a very full busy life outside of work, I have lots of friends and family and pets, and I choose to spend my available free time with them." Although it sometimes comes off as a little standoffish, it's hard for others to argue with me about my reasons.
It may not me multi-city but I use it all the time: Zifty.com
They deliver food -- and much more. Cigarettes, soda, magazines, game & dvd rentals, condoms... It's a huge list of food, drink, and convenience items. The prices aren't hugely out of line with going and picking up the items yourself.
I wonder why Google skipped over the idea of doing this for music distribution? This would be a killer app for me, and I'm sure a lot of other musicians too.
1) Upload MP3 content. 2) Pick price 3) Marketing / advertising / word of mouth 4) User access, pay, download 5) Profit???
Wouldn't it have been better...
on
From Bash To Z Shell
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Uh, wouldn't it have been cooler to actually go the extra mile with the whole A to Z metaphor and call the book "From Ash to Z Shell"? There is a shell called ash.
As a lifelong Atlanta resident, I can tell you what great entertainment the Claremont has provided me. It's ghetto-fantastic. I spent 3 years living just down the street, and I went at least once a week with a buddy. We were regulars, and received excellent service as we tipped at least a dollar for each drink. That's a rarity in this place, so we were treated extremely well.
The Claremont Lounge has been around since the 60s, and they used to have a plaque on the wall that memorialized every stabbing and shooting that occured there. Then someone stole the plaque.
It's a grungy crazy place that I hope never goes away.
It's true, everyone calls their scene "the scene".
Since the late 80s / early 90s, underground electronic music, clubbing, and party people have called their scene "the scene", with the participants sometimes being called "scenesters" (not necessarily a positive term). For movie references, see 24 Hour Party People, Human Traffic, and Party Monster.
Just went and checked the prefs -- the install defaults to the IE rendering engine. You can change the rendering engine to "Netscape" (Why not Gecko?) without a restart.
Which all begs the question, what the hell is a browser based on Firefox, branded with Netscape, rendering with IE? Hey, at least it's modular!
Atlanta native here, home of Coke worldwide headquarters. I don't know how it is now, but Coca-Cola Company employees (don't EVER say you work at Coke, you work at "The Coca-Cola Company") used to be rabid about their loyalty, and their hatred of Pepsi products.
When I was in high school back in the late 80's, one of my friends' dad was their CFO or some such high-up job. One afternoon, we removed all the Coke products from the kitchen cabinets, pantry, and refrigerator. There was a lot of it! We replaced it all with Pepsi. Then we sat around and waited for her dad to get home.
Let's just say he was not amused. He was, in fact, very angry, both at his daughter and all of us. We were asked to leave the house. I still think about that afternoon all the time and I laugh my ass off.
I'm pretty sure we told him to take a chill pill (It was the 80s).
At about $7 per expedited shipment, you'd break even after about 12 orders. But it only makes sense if you order about once a month from Amazon (I do), and you're compulsive and always want your stuff quickly (I do).
I scanned my orders from 2004 and I spent $95 on expedited shipping costs, so for me, it might be a good idea.
Workgroup Server 95 ran A/UX
on
Top 10 Apple Flops
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I never ran A/UX on a regular desktop Mac, but I used to administer a Mac network at the ad agency I worked at just out of college. We had a Workgroup Server 95, basically a souped-up Quadra 950 designed specifically to run A/UX. It was our file server, connected not via Ethernet, but via oh-so-ungodly-slow AppleTalk, served over plain old twisted-pair phone cables via PhoneNet connectors.
The server was rock-solid, we never had a single problem with it, whereas our old file servers (running System 7.something I think) would crash all the time. I do wonder what I would have done had it broken, because I sure didn't know much about UNIX in those days (1993-1994).
Get a better business model. Or better yet, just go away. Just because people want something, doesn't mean they have to pay YOU to get it. More and more, they may not have to pay at all (open WiFi access points, Linux, etc).
This analysis completely ignores a very important point: some number of people who try and get a free ipod won't ever get one. But they will have signed up for one of these offers themselves, and they may have signed up others, but not reached the required 5 new people. Referral fees get paid out to Gratis Internet for the initial responder + whoever this person has got to sign up for offers as well.
These "incomplete" transactions probably account for most of their profit. They may be offering a legitimate service, but the profit for them lies in people trying to get their free ipod and not quite getting there.
Not very likely. And not a very good idea either. Until you show me something in the open-source world that can do 1000+ transactions per second, with complete atomicity, and ability to pull the plug on that system and then seamlessly roll it back to the exact moment in time that it was at when it died... Well, you're not replacing Oracle with anything less in the enterprise space.
By the way -- the "painful" part of converting from an OSS database to Oracle isn't the data conversion, export import, etc. That part is dead easy. The hard part comes when you start customizing your solution to take advantage of some of the huge performance-gaining features that Oracle provides. You have to start figuing out what parts of your application-layer code can be moved to your database, and making those changes at the second and third tier accordingly. You can create massively fast, very complex database systems with Oracle, but it's a very specialized area.
I'd be all for complete transparency of database from any application, but when you do that you encourage, no, you force, the least common denominator solution.
Warning: I am an Oracle DBA. I have been working as an Oracle DBA / developer for 10 years.
I absolutely believe that the open-source database choices out there today (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Sleepycat) are more than adequate for 90% of all development being done, especially the small- and medium-scale stuff. I'm glad that we've moved away from flat-file systems for small-time web work. It has forced developers to understand their data structures, which is a huge step forward for everyone. Developers today have a far greater understanding of their data, and databases in general, than they did 10 years ago. They understand relational models better, they understand abstraction better. That said: there are two things everyone should understand about the way Oracle thinks about databases (and its customers):
1) Oracle exists solely to serve the top end of the market. They're not really interested in anything else.
2) If you can afford it, it pays to start with Oracle first. For small installations, it's not as expensive as you think, especially if you forego the support. Why do this? Because if you find out later that you needed a serious database solution and need to make a back-end change from something like MySQL, you are in for a world of pain.
This is Oracle's bread and butter. I don't expect to be hurting for work for a VERY long time.
I'm a new Steam customer. I paid my $50, pre-downloaded Half-Life 2, started playing immediately upon release.
It's mostly been OK, but I've had issues running my single-player game. It is annoying that you have to connect to Steam each time you want to play the game. I mean, come on -- check for updates IF I ASK FOR IT but give me a simple checkbox that allows me to turn off the per-use authentication. I paid for it, you've authorized it, now leave me alone for a while to enjoy my game! PS: I logged into Steam last night for a little HL2 play, got some automatic Steam updates and HL2 Deathmatch (cool!), and my HL2 was totally borked up. Wouldn't play at all, DLL errors. Ouch! I think I had extra copies of the DLLs and EXE sitting in an inappropirate directory, I copied/replaced all with the newest versions and it seems to have fixed the problem, but wow, how bad does that suck to get an automatic update and then not be able to play at all?
PPS: Still getting some sound stuttering and random crashes to desktop A LOT. Grrrrr...
If you have some talent in the area of music, go make use of it!
It is very fulfilling to go play guitar for an audience, or spin records at a club, after a long gruelling week of IT hell.
You don't even have to be that talented. DJing, for example, has very low barriers for entry. You may suck, but most people won't know the difference. DJing is a musical art just like any other, but you can learn more as you go. Pick up a used sound system and pimp yourself out for house parties. Charge at least $100-$200 for a gig. Remind them that you're bringing thousands of dollars worth of music (records, CDs, whatever) + a sound system worth X dollars.
Practice a lot! Make friends with other DJs. Generally we DJs are a very friendly bunch and not at all hesitant to offer some helpful tips for those just starting out. After you get pretty good and confident with your skills, take your house party show to a club -- clubs are great for lots of reasons... You generally won't have to bring your own equipment, just records/CDs. You will make between $50-$500 for a 1-4 hour set. You will generally get a VIP guest list so your friends don't have to pay or wait in line at the door. You will get a free bar tab or free drink tickets. And for those Slashdotters who aren't familiar with the fairer sex -- there is an endless supply of beautiful girls at these clubs, too.
I've made a ton of extra money this way over the last 5 years. It's pretty easy to earn $500/month without even trying hard. Plus it's always cash money, which is nice.
Side benefit: Being a musician is, without a doubt, the best way ever invented to meet women. It doesn't even matter if you're shy, the women will come to you while you're playing.
I miss the old days where I enjoyed using the "I Feel Lucky" button on Google. They should rename it to say "I Feel Lucky That I Landed On A Link Farm Page".
Grammatical peeve: There are no degrees of unique. It's a binary condition. Something can't be VERY unique, or FAIRLY unique. It is unique or it isn't.
It's not a small problem. There are lots of us with very workable, older Series 1 DirecTV Tivos. The Series 2 (which are almost identical) don't seem to be having the issue.
It's a big deal. I have hardware that's been working effectively and reliably for me for close to 3 years. Now it's broken and just saying "it's not a big deal" because you THINK that there aren't a lot of people affected; well, that's just wrong. I have valid supported hardware, it's supposed to work, I pay $5 per month for the service. It's still supported and it's not working. That's a big deal to me.
Slashdot Mirror
1.0.7? Neato, but I've been having fun playing with the 1.5 betas and 1.6 alphas. They have one great thing going for them -- they are FAST. Considerably faster than any previous release. I've tested Linux, Windows, OS X. Firefox team, you're getting there! Kudos.
Yeah, most extensions don't work. People are complaining about the new look of the menus (doesn't bother me). Definitely create a new profile and use it.
I work for a big telecom that encourages customers to get DSL service so they can telecommute.
Our own telecommute policy? We're not allowed to telecommute. Yeah, we suck that way.
While *I* refuse to have any out of work relationships with any of my co-workers I don't believe that employers should have the right to mandate and legally enforce that behavior.
Amen! I'm part of a small minority at my workplace (think VeryLargeCorpInc) that doesn't want to interact after office hours with my coworkers. I like the separation of my work and personal lives. The intermingling sometimes confuses professional/work issues, and I've found that I simply function better without all that extra personal stuff floating around. I don't feel the need to make a bunch of new friends at every place I work, and since a large part of the IT industry changes jobs on a regular basis (layoffs, contract work, etc), it's just easier for me not to cultivate a bunch of new relationships at work. It works for me, but it's not for everyone.
I'm easy to work with, funny, get along well with others, am part of my team, vastly experienced in my field, and always deliver what I'm supposed to when I'm supposed to. I get professional respect and space to do what I need. And when I've been asked why I don't care to socialize outside of work, I simply reply "I have a very full busy life outside of work, I have lots of friends and family and pets, and I choose to spend my available free time with them." Although it sometimes comes off as a little standoffish, it's hard for others to argue with me about my reasons.
It may not me multi-city but I use it all the time: Zifty.com
They deliver food -- and much more. Cigarettes, soda, magazines, game & dvd rentals, condoms... It's a huge list of food, drink, and convenience items. The prices aren't hugely out of line with going and picking up the items yourself.
I wonder why Google skipped over the idea of doing this for music distribution? This would be a killer app for me, and I'm sure a lot of other musicians too.
1) Upload MP3 content.
2) Pick price
3) Marketing / advertising / word of mouth
4) User access, pay, download
5) Profit???
Uh, wouldn't it have been cooler to actually go the extra mile with the whole A to Z metaphor and call the book "From Ash to Z Shell"? There is a shell called ash.
As a lifelong Atlanta resident, I can tell you what great entertainment the Claremont has provided me. It's ghetto-fantastic. I spent 3 years living just down the street, and I went at least once a week with a buddy. We were regulars, and received excellent service as we tipped at least a dollar for each drink. That's a rarity in this place, so we were treated extremely well.
The Claremont Lounge has been around since the 60s, and they used to have a plaque on the wall that memorialized every stabbing and shooting that occured there. Then someone stole the plaque.
It's a grungy crazy place that I hope never goes away.
It's true, everyone calls their scene "the scene".
Since the late 80s / early 90s, underground electronic music, clubbing, and party people have called their scene "the scene", with the participants sometimes being called "scenesters" (not necessarily a positive term). For movie references, see 24 Hour Party People, Human Traffic, and Party Monster.
Just went and checked the prefs -- the install defaults to the IE rendering engine. You can change the rendering engine to "Netscape" (Why not Gecko?) without a restart.
Which all begs the question, what the hell is a browser based on Firefox, branded with Netscape, rendering with IE? Hey, at least it's modular!
Atlanta native here, home of Coke worldwide headquarters. I don't know how it is now, but Coca-Cola Company employees (don't EVER say you work at Coke, you work at "The Coca-Cola Company") used to be rabid about their loyalty, and their hatred of Pepsi products.
When I was in high school back in the late 80's, one of my friends' dad was their CFO or some such high-up job. One afternoon, we removed all the Coke products from the kitchen cabinets, pantry, and refrigerator. There was a lot of it! We replaced it all with Pepsi. Then we sat around and waited for her dad to get home.
Let's just say he was not amused. He was, in fact, very angry, both at his daughter and all of us. We were asked to leave the house. I still think about that afternoon all the time and I laugh my ass off.
I'm pretty sure we told him to take a chill pill (It was the 80s).
Awesome for you!
Do you live in a warehouse??
At about $7 per expedited shipment, you'd break even after about 12 orders. But it only makes sense if you order about once a month from Amazon (I do), and you're compulsive and always want your stuff quickly (I do).
I scanned my orders from 2004 and I spent $95 on expedited shipping costs, so for me, it might be a good idea.
I never ran A/UX on a regular desktop Mac, but I used to administer a Mac network at the ad agency I worked at just out of college. We had a Workgroup Server 95, basically a souped-up Quadra 950 designed specifically to run A/UX. It was our file server, connected not via Ethernet, but via oh-so-ungodly-slow AppleTalk, served over plain old twisted-pair phone cables via PhoneNet connectors.
The server was rock-solid, we never had a single problem with it, whereas our old file servers (running System 7.something I think) would crash all the time. I do wonder what I would have done had it broken, because I sure didn't know much about UNIX in those days (1993-1994).
Get a better business model. Or better yet, just go away. Just because people want something, doesn't mean they have to pay YOU to get it. More and more, they may not have to pay at all (open WiFi access points, Linux, etc).
This analysis completely ignores a very important point: some number of people who try and get a free ipod won't ever get one. But they will have signed up for one of these offers themselves, and they may have signed up others, but not reached the required 5 new people. Referral fees get paid out to Gratis Internet for the initial responder + whoever this person has got to sign up for offers as well.
These "incomplete" transactions probably account for most of their profit. They may be offering a legitimate service, but the profit for them lies in people trying to get their free ipod and not quite getting there.
very public open sourced death
Not very likely. And not a very good idea either. Until you show me something in the open-source world that can do 1000+ transactions per second, with complete atomicity, and ability to pull the plug on that system and then seamlessly roll it back to the exact moment in time that it was at when it died... Well, you're not replacing Oracle with anything less in the enterprise space.
By the way -- the "painful" part of converting from an OSS database to Oracle isn't the data conversion, export import, etc. That part is dead easy. The hard part comes when you start customizing your solution to take advantage of some of the huge performance-gaining features that Oracle provides. You have to start figuing out what parts of your application-layer code can be moved to your database, and making those changes at the second and third tier accordingly. You can create massively fast, very complex database systems with Oracle, but it's a very specialized area.
I'd be all for complete transparency of database from any application, but when you do that you encourage, no, you force, the least common denominator solution.
Warning: I am an Oracle DBA. I have been working as an Oracle DBA / developer for 10 years.
I absolutely believe that the open-source database choices out there today (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Sleepycat) are more than adequate for 90% of all development being done, especially the small- and medium-scale stuff. I'm glad that we've moved away from flat-file systems for small-time web work. It has forced developers to understand their data structures, which is a huge step forward for everyone. Developers today have a far greater understanding of their data, and databases in general, than they did 10 years ago. They understand relational models better, they understand abstraction better. That said: there are two things everyone should understand about the way Oracle thinks about databases (and its customers):
1) Oracle exists solely to serve the top end of the market. They're not really interested in anything else.
2) If you can afford it, it pays to start with Oracle first. For small installations, it's not as expensive as you think, especially if you forego the support. Why do this? Because if you find out later that you needed a serious database solution and need to make a back-end change from something like MySQL, you are in for a world of pain.
This is Oracle's bread and butter. I don't expect to be hurting for work for a VERY long time.
I'm a new Steam customer. I paid my $50, pre-downloaded Half-Life 2, started playing immediately upon release.
It's mostly been OK, but I've had issues running my single-player game. It is annoying that you have to connect to Steam each time you want to play the game. I mean, come on -- check for updates IF I ASK FOR IT but give me a simple checkbox that allows me to turn off the per-use authentication. I paid for it, you've authorized it, now leave me alone for a while to enjoy my game!
PS: I logged into Steam last night for a little HL2 play, got some automatic Steam updates and HL2 Deathmatch (cool!), and my HL2 was totally borked up. Wouldn't play at all, DLL errors. Ouch! I think I had extra copies of the DLLs and EXE sitting in an inappropirate directory, I copied/replaced all with the newest versions and it seems to have fixed the problem, but wow, how bad does that suck to get an automatic update and then not be able to play at all?
PPS: Still getting some sound stuttering and random crashes to desktop A LOT. Grrrrr...
If you have some talent in the area of music, go make use of it!
It is very fulfilling to go play guitar for an audience, or spin records at a club, after a long gruelling week of IT hell.
You don't even have to be that talented. DJing, for example, has very low barriers for entry. You may suck, but most people won't know the difference. DJing is a musical art just like any other, but you can learn more as you go. Pick up a used sound system and pimp yourself out for house parties. Charge at least $100-$200 for a gig. Remind them that you're bringing thousands of dollars worth of music (records, CDs, whatever) + a sound system worth X dollars.
Practice a lot! Make friends with other DJs. Generally we DJs are a very friendly bunch and not at all hesitant to offer some helpful tips for those just starting out. After you get pretty good and confident with your skills, take your house party show to a club -- clubs are great for lots of reasons... You generally won't have to bring your own equipment, just records/CDs. You will make between $50-$500 for a 1-4 hour set. You will generally get a VIP guest list so your friends don't have to pay or wait in line at the door. You will get a free bar tab or free drink tickets. And for those Slashdotters who aren't familiar with the fairer sex -- there is an endless supply of beautiful girls at these clubs, too.
I've made a ton of extra money this way over the last 5 years. It's pretty easy to earn $500/month without even trying hard. Plus it's always cash money, which is nice.
Side benefit: Being a musician is, without a doubt, the best way ever invented to meet women. It doesn't even matter if you're shy, the women will come to you while you're playing.
About bloody time. Sony's portable music players (even their new hard-drive player) are a joke.
It takes a special kind of asshat to make a portable music player with no MP3 support.
Sony, welcome to 1999!!!
I miss the old days where I enjoyed using the "I Feel Lucky" button on Google. They should rename it to say "I Feel Lucky That I Landed On A Link Farm Page".
Ugh.
God these keyboards are sweet indeed. I'm typing this post on one right now. And they're not THAT hard to find. Try Ebay.
Search Ebay for IBM Model M
The prices have gone up, so I suspect they're getting more popular. But there are plenty to be had for well under $20 US.
I bought a lot of 5 Model M keyboards for $26 including shipping about 2 years ago. Your mileage may vary.
Grammatical peeve: There are no degrees of unique. It's a binary condition. Something can't be VERY unique, or FAIRLY unique. It is unique or it isn't.
It's not a small problem. There are lots of us with very workable, older Series 1 DirecTV Tivos. The Series 2 (which are almost identical) don't seem to be having the issue.
It's a big deal. I have hardware that's been working effectively and reliably for me for close to 3 years. Now it's broken and just saying "it's not a big deal" because you THINK that there aren't a lot of people affected; well, that's just wrong. I have valid supported hardware, it's supposed to work, I pay $5 per month for the service. It's still supported and it's not working. That's a big deal to me.
Certainly, almost probably 100% for sure. I think.