First off, if you are serious about the cafe bit, you've got a lot more work to do. You'll need a license to sell food and drink, you'll need hygeine certificates, someone to wash up, and a lot of money for the kitchen fittings, cappucino machine etc. etc.
So, think hard about if you want to offer 'real' food. You might find a refrigerated cabinet with cans of soft drinks and maybe sandwiches etc. is a whole lot easier.
Secondly, the computers. Different users have massively different needs. Take a look at easyeverything in the UK (http://www.easyeverything.com/). They have about 500 terminals in a single building, and they cater for people who want to use the Internet. No games, no paninni, no comfy chairs and sofas. They are open 24hrs. They are dirt cheap. (as in 1 UKPS / 2-3hrs at low demand times).
The cafe I worked in catered for the small time user - people who maybe needed their CV printed, or wanted to check flight prices, and didn't have a PC at home. Those people suck. They often need help to do stuff, they don't hang around long, and they aren't rich.
Game cafe's can work, but think about how much people are willing to pay. Is DSL common / cheap in your area? If so, many may be fine playing at home. Are there lots of kids in the area that maybe can't afford the latest games, but could afford to play a few hours at a time?
I never ran a game cafe (unless you count MUDs, and many of our best customers were kids playing MUDs). However I would guess:
1. Hardware turnover. Gamers tend to be brutal to keyboards, mice and joysticks, but they'll expect them to be in top condition. Likewise, they'll expect monitors in good condition. think about replacement costs.
2. Games eat bandwidth. 8 ppl playing half-life is a load more bandwidth than 8 ppl using hotmail.
3. The cafe I worked in stayed open till 11, and it wasn't a great part of town, either. We never had any trouble at all. Unless you are downtown in a bad area, and maybe placed very near a local kids hangout, you shouldn't have trouble.
4. Insurances costs were massive, and the insurers demanded very expensive locks / alarms to be fitted.
5. Dead time eats your profits very fast. You pay the same rent regardless of what your openning hours are.
6. Technology is the least of your worries, just keep it simple. I'd tell anyone who's thinking Linux and thin clients and anything sexy and clever to head over to the real world, then head over to easyeverything.com to see how to do it properly.
7. People will ask for printing/CD-Rom burning/Floppy access etc so decide in advance how/if you are going to offer it.
8. Don't invest anything in a small business like this that you can't afford to lose. 2/3 of small businesses fail within a year.:-)
I'd recommend W3Perl http://www.w3perl.com/softs/index.html which is a kind of mess of perl scripts, but is surprisingly fast (much faster than other perl-only stats packages), and is the most full featured free package I've ever come across.
Set up is kind of a pain - it's rather complex, owing to the vast array of configurable thingies, but it works pretty well once it's put together.
There are some genuinely innovative features, such as a tree view of your website weighted by the popularity of each branch from/index.html
Worth a look if you are on a feature hunt. It requires some arcane image generation program to make the pretty graphs.
Oh, and if you were hoping to explore the code - be aware that the guy who wrote it is French:-)
I was looking at implementing this. It's a big old PITA. Enough of a PITA that I doubt 'amateur' sites will bother doing it - after all, it's not like they've been the ones abusing privacy, right?
I think it will end up being just like those commercial 'approval stamps' like TrustE. It looks great, but doesn't mean too much. Almost the opposite - any site that's gone to the trouble of filling out the damn XML file that's required probably has something to hide.
I'm not wholly against it, but I just have to ask why? Create a lot of unecessary standards and technical specs and formats, get poor old webmasters to support it and keep up to date with it and tolerate browser bugs with it, and why? Because ppl are too dumb to read a privacy policy and want their web browser to auto-read an XML version of it and auto-tell them how good it is?
Sorry, but it's a standard that we don't need. Already there are commercial tools out there to generate the damn file, because the format is so verbose. Only big corporate sites are going to bother with it, so 99% of the web sites you read simply won't activate the feature, meaning users don't get into the habit of paying attention.
Maybe I'm just overworked:-).
Re:I saw one of these at the weekend
on
Self-Heating Can
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· Score: 1
Indeed, I find it a little hard to see why these are better than a thermos. In an urban environment it really is pretty easy to get hold of nicer, cheaper hot liquids.
In an outdoors environment, the only advantage over a thermos is that you don't have to plan in advance if you want hot liquids. There are certainly situations (e.g. very bad weather) where you need hot liquids to keep warm and happy, but there's no way to heat anything using flames. I could see keeping some self-heating soup on board a yacht (where weight is not a problem) for eating when the weather is too bad to use a stove, but I can't easily think of another situation.
I suppose there are some times when it might be a safe alternative - maybe in a gas refinery or something it would be safer than any other method of heating.
This no clear boundary between art and trade. Writing code gives greater capacity for art-like behaviour, perhaps, but that is all. Code can be entirely craft like - most of it is, and code that is autogenerated is not even craft-like.
Most programmers have oversized egos as it is, and going on about how 'code is art' doesn't help the matter.
Obviously the Apache Group did not do compatibility testing with the most popular browser on the net, either. Both sides (or, IMHO, none) are at fault on this.
The fact is, this is a new standard that practically no-one is using in anger at the moment. Look at all the other incompatible implementations there have been of new RFCs. It happens all the time, not just with MS.
This is a complete non-issue. "Today, a very early adopter of a new technology notified two software companies that they'd chosen incompatible interpretations of spec. The two companies agreed to make their implementation compatible in future."
"This issue wasn't documented in RedHat's manuals but it effected a number of boxes in our office "
The correct word here is affected not effected.
Re:The GNU GPL has a clause against this
on
Abusing the GPL?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I don't think that counts for much.
What if a bunch of Burmese programmers take the Linux kernel and convert all the variable and function names and comments to Burmese (which should make it easier for them to work on). Then, after adding all sorts of whizzo features, they release UltraLinux and sell it in the US. Since it's GPL'd they obviously release the source too.
Would this contravene the GPL?
It's such a hopelessly grey area I don't see any legal weight behind that statement in the GPL. They are going to have to add something much more explicit, but good luck finding something that works.
This is all certainly against the spirit of the GPL but I don't see that it's against the letter of it.
I don't think it's too useful to have individuals with highly specific job titles. It _is_ useful to have teams with highly specific job titles.
I think it's good to keep the tools team separate from the development team, separate from the systems team and the support teams. People should be able to move with relative ease between the teams, but it's important that people don't try to do everything.
Most/. ppl I imagine like the idea of undefined roles where you can do whatever you think you're good at. I've worked in places that take the specific job titles path, and if well managed that works too. However, it does assume that the work to be done fits easily into the structure you create for doing it.
It's often a good idea to have a defined person or role in charge of speed optimisation or security, or user experience, or platform compatability. If you just tell an unstructured development team "Hey, make sure you've all read the security specs and that you meet them!" you simply won't get the same level of security as if the security guy is sitting there creating test scenarios and reviewing every code release for possible flaws.
Well, unless "It matches the spec" is your idea of a good program.
Contrary to what some people think, it is not clever or funny to funky new widgets and dialogs in place of standard ones. Does the standard windows file->open dialog need improving? Maybe. Are you the one to do it? No.
Other peeves include:
Not having tooltips. Tooltips are good. Use them. Everywhere.
Useless error messages. I know it's a pain but there's nothing worse than a regularly re-produceable error state that gives no information.
Useless help files. If you don't have time to create help documentation, then don't bother to do any. It's a waste of user time looking though unhelpful help files.
I'd re-iterate what others have said about progress bars. I'd also add:
* Threading. Be able to do two things at once. I don't care what the app is calculating, I should still be able to move the window and have it re-paint properly at all times.
* Interruption. I should be able to cancel anything the app is doing. I hate waiting around for an app to timeout on some operation.
Sorry, Yahoo. It's already been established that people won't pay for information, even when it's stuff they can't get anywhere else. Look at Salon [salon.com], for example, whose subscription-based service has been a momumental disaster.
I assume you mean 'on the Internet' since it's pretty obvious people will pay for information generally, as the inside of any book shop will make clear.
However, there are plenty of web sites where people will pay for content, it's just often very specialist content. Clinical Evidence is one such site that I'm vaguely connected with.
I know people such as sailors and event organisers will pay for detailed weather forecasts online.
There are a load of niche markets where this works. But no-one gets to be a billionaire in a niche market, so no-one is too interested.
Long ago (bout '93 I guess) I was really into POVRAY (www.povray.org). I read the usenet group every day, spent loads of time rendering, helped set up websites, yadda yadda yadda. Then one day, Dan Farmer, one of the principle developers, thought it would be cool if he could show his wife that all those hours he spent on the computer was really doing something. He figured he'd ask all the folks who enjoyed using POVRAY for free to mail him a postcard. That way when the postman turned up with a big sack of mail, his wife would understand what this 'Internet' thing was all about.
Now, at this time POVRAY was pretty much the only 3D graphics app available for free to most people. It had a huge user base, it was a regular give-away on the coverdisks of PC mags. By anyone's reckoning it's still a major bit of free software.
Now, guess how many postcards he got...
I do believe the final total was around 10.
People who would spend hours staring at their screens while their 486z rendered stuff, or who would spend hours posting to usenet, could not be arsed to go and buy a postcard and a stamp and scribble an address on it.
That's just the way online stuff seems to be. Kind of sad, but true.
I bet if Slashdot posted an article saying "Let's show how much we like Linux - everyone go send Linus a card at this address" the total response would barely be much higher.
One tiny difference:
WinAmp, WinZip, etc are applications
LindowsOS is an operating system
Windows is an operating system
Can you see why Microsoft care more about the use of their _OS_'s name in ANOTHER OS than they do about their _OS_'s name in an application that happens to run on their OS.
If Microsoft release an application called LinuxPassport that seems OK to me.
If they release a modified version of Windows with a few Cygnus things pre-installed and call it MSLinux, that might strike some of us as a little unreasonable, hmm?
Whoa. I tried doing that in 1996 and it was sure a pain in the arse. Netatalk was effectively unsupported by then. It looks like some people have started work on it again, so maybe you'll have better luck.
My advice would be to have a thorough look at it before making your boss and big promises though!:)
Normally, I need 8-9 hours sleep a night. I rarely get it, which sucks. But a unique sleep pattern, and one that can be maintained, is the watch system used when long distance sailing. Basically, it's equal, alternating periods of wake and sleep. The periods might be 2 or four hours (not usually more). It's hard to get used to but then surprisingly effective. You become able to sleep very quickly and wake completely refreshed. However, you then start to become tired again very fast, and are soon ready to sleep again 2 or 4 hours later.
As someone who can't well tolerate even a single 5 hour night and be functional the next day, I'm amazed that I can quite happily slip into the watch system. Odd.
Hmmm, let me see, we vote for an EU parliament, which then chooses a president that then chooses a commission. So, the comission is already two steps away from democratic accountability.
Now, if the commission were a purely operational body that would be fine, but IT IS NOT. The EU commission is THE MOST POWERFULL PART OF THE EU POLITICAL MACHINE. Isn't that scary? Doesn't it worry you that ALL EU policy initiatives must originate in the Commission, a body which, in case you've forgotten, had EVERY SINGLE ONE of it's commissioners resign a few years ago over a corruption scandal.
That's a bit like every single head civil servant and the entire cabinet of a country resigning simultaneously. Isn't that scary? Doesn't it terrify you that we (Britain) are handing more and more power to these people?
I find full spectrum light incredibly harsh and cold. I did a project years ago in a lab that was lit by full spectrum lights and it made my head hurt. Maybe things have improved in the last 10 year, I don't know.
The best lighting is indirect incandescent, or from things like candles and oil lamps (although that's too dim to read by). Indirect Halogen (OK, so Halogen is a kind of incandescent..) lighting is OK too. Fluorescent lighting is evil and must be stopped, but every office in the universe uses it for cost reasons.
I notice that there's a new and extra-bright kind of headlight in production with a slight bluish tint. That's pretty unpleasant too - I think they are metal halide based, but no-ones trying to light a room with them yet as far as I know.
Old yellow sodium lighting is disgusting too unless you go for that deserted carpark feel.
I was walking through Hyde park last night an noticing how nice gaslight is....
The security officer in most companies is primarily responsible for the security of the company, its assets and employees. Not its customers, and not the quality of its products.
The product managers should have primary responsibility for their products being secure and bug free, perhaps in consultation with the company security officer.
For instance, at my company, the security officer has a big interest in how good the locks on the server room door are. He has a high level contribution to make about firewall policy and employee RAS access. He has no concern with what solaris patches are currently installed at our customer's sites, any more than he cares what door locks are used at our customer sites.
.NET is very important. Java was in many ways a move backwards. The language itself is great, and makes a useful alternative to C++ in many situations. But the ideology behind Java was (at first anyway) "Write all your software in Java and have the freedom to use whatever hardware/OS you like".
The ideology behind.NET is more like "Use the.net framework and have the freedom to use whatever language you like (p.s. only runs on Windows)"
The second is, IMHO, slightly more attractive. Being forced to use one programming language as the price for hardware/OS abstraction is just plain dumb.
There have since been many virtual stars already. Ventriloquist dummies are often stars in their own right, but Basil brush, Emu, and Roland Rat are all virtual characters that have not only had their own shows, but been interviewed as stars and so on.
The move from puppets and models to CGI is not that important.
Roland Rat was especially interesting because he didn't have a clearly identifiable human partner, but was very much a creation of the TV company.
At the end of the day, these things are all fiction. I can't really see people getting more excited about a CGI model than a furry puppet. It's also _much_ harder to use the CGI model. An interview with the virtual star would require weeks of computer work and post processing just to fit the CGI model into the normal studio shot of the interview. Not exactly spontaneous and realistic.
At least with Roland rat the guy operating him could ad-lib.
LORAN? I was pretty sure LORAN only covered coastal areas, and even then the coverage is not complete. LORAN is quite accurate, but it's a pain to use, and for full accuracy you do (or did) need special charts showing variations in the system.
What would be really cool would be a machine capable of doing fully automatic celestial navigation.
SOAP is transport independant. That's one of its (theoretical) virtues. You can implement SOAP over SMTP, HTTP, whatever.
Practically, it does seem fair to say that HTTP is what an awful lot of SOAP tools are going to be expecting, and given that SOAP is still quite bleeding edge, I wouldn't want to try using another transport protocol unless I could afford time and skill to do a lot of fixing up.
However, HTTP doesn't have to run on port 80. Furthermore, most SOAP implementations will be (well, claim to be) happy on HTTPS too, so that's an easy way to do encryption.
As for the 'web page vs functional' thing, well that's not so simple. A request for a page produced by a CGI script is a functional request coming from strangers over the web. SOAP need not be different.
At the moment, if I want to make an XML version of my content available to folks, I might tell them to use HTTP GET with a URL that invokes a CGI program that returns some XML.
In the future, I might want to make the same XML available via the getXML method my Website class, and then SOAP enable my Website class.
I'm not really sure that it is particularly the job of the government to invest. Had Babbage been seen as less of a loose cannon and his engines as more practical devices, there would have been plenty of entrepreneurs willing to fund commercial development. The notion of centralised investment in theoretical science was some way off, and most theoretical advances in science were made by wealthly individuals working largely alone, or funded by wealthy patrons.
It is certianly true that later in British history a giant damp cloth was put on commerical exploitation of technological innovation, stemming from:
1. General skepticism being part of the British psyche.
2. Powerful vested interests, particularly Unions opposing it.
3. A weak, restricted free enterprise system.
4. A long running shift to more socialist government that lasted from the 20's to the 80's
Harrison (the clock maker) was unfortunate in that he had one select special interest group (astronomers) set against him, and that he was a victim of predjudice against the middle classes (as said before, advances in science were meant to come from wealthy gentleman scientists with labs in their country houses).
But, in general, Britain from 1700 - 1850 was a thriving, almost entirely unregulated, capitalist country, where a great many new machines were invented and sold all over the world (milling machines, weaving machines, steam engines, stuff like that).
pop3 is a _very_ simple protocol that allows mail to be read, retrieved, or deleted from a server by a client. It's a had a few features added in later days, and might support simple management like password changing, but that's about it.
The main weakness of pop3 is that it treats the server end as a dumb, unorganised list of messages, and expects all cleverness (mailboxes, sorting, filtering, etc) to be done client side. This means it is a pain to change clients, and nearly impossible to manage one mail account from two clients (e.g. one at home, one at work).
The main strength of pop3 is that it works.
IMAP is a protocol that allows a client to manipulate a server side data store. All the useful information (what messages are read, which folders they are in etc) is on the server, so if you change IMAP clients, all the data is just read of the server, and away you go.
However, AFAIK IMAP is a rather complex protocol. I have never come across a client that implements it very well, all of them struggle with large numbers of messages, handling of attachments and so on. In addition, it's still possible for a client to implement client-side only add-on features that are then incompatibile with other IMAP clients.
Outlook is the only client I've used that seems to handle server-centric email well, and it probably does with in proprietary extensions. Of course Outlook's handling of SMTP is rather dire, but hey.
Slashdot Mirror
Hi,
:-)
I worked at in Internet cafe in 1994-5.
First off, if you are serious about the cafe bit, you've got a lot more work to do. You'll need a license to sell food and drink, you'll need hygeine certificates, someone to wash up, and a lot of money for the kitchen fittings, cappucino machine etc. etc.
So, think hard about if you want to offer 'real' food. You might find a refrigerated cabinet with cans of soft drinks and maybe sandwiches etc. is a whole lot easier.
Secondly, the computers. Different users have massively different needs. Take a look at easyeverything in the UK (http://www.easyeverything.com/). They have about 500 terminals in a single building, and they cater for people who want to use the Internet. No games, no paninni, no comfy chairs and sofas. They are open 24hrs. They are dirt cheap. (as in 1 UKPS / 2-3hrs at low demand times).
The cafe I worked in catered for the small time user - people who maybe needed their CV printed, or wanted to check flight prices, and didn't have a PC at home. Those people suck. They often need help to do stuff, they don't hang around long, and they aren't rich.
Game cafe's can work, but think about how much people are willing to pay. Is DSL common / cheap in your area? If so, many may be fine playing at home. Are there lots of kids in the area that maybe can't afford the latest games, but could afford to play a few hours at a time?
I never ran a game cafe (unless you count MUDs, and many of our best customers were kids playing MUDs). However I would guess:
1. Hardware turnover. Gamers tend to be brutal to keyboards, mice and joysticks, but they'll expect them to be in top condition. Likewise, they'll expect monitors in good condition. think about replacement costs.
2. Games eat bandwidth. 8 ppl playing half-life is a load more bandwidth than 8 ppl using hotmail.
3. The cafe I worked in stayed open till 11, and it wasn't a great part of town, either. We never had any trouble at all. Unless you are downtown in a bad area, and maybe placed very near a local kids hangout, you shouldn't have trouble.
4. Insurances costs were massive, and the insurers demanded very expensive locks / alarms to be fitted.
5. Dead time eats your profits very fast. You pay the same rent regardless of what your openning hours are.
6. Technology is the least of your worries, just keep it simple. I'd tell anyone who's thinking Linux and thin clients and anything sexy and clever to head over to the real world, then head over to easyeverything.com to see how to do it properly.
7. People will ask for printing/CD-Rom burning/Floppy access etc so decide in advance how/if you are going to offer it.
8. Don't invest anything in a small business like this that you can't afford to lose. 2/3 of small businesses fail within a year.
Mail me if you want more info.
Well, if you are looking for free stuff...
/index.html
:-)
I'd recommend W3Perl http://www.w3perl.com/softs/index.html which is a kind of mess of perl scripts, but is surprisingly fast (much faster than other perl-only stats packages), and is the most full featured free package I've ever come across.
Set up is kind of a pain - it's rather complex, owing to the vast array of configurable thingies, but it works pretty well once it's put together.
There are some genuinely innovative features, such as a tree view of your website weighted by the popularity of each branch from
Worth a look if you are on a feature hunt. It requires some arcane image generation program to make the pretty graphs.
Oh, and if you were hoping to explore the code - be aware that the guy who wrote it is French
I was looking at implementing this. It's a big old PITA. Enough of a PITA that I doubt 'amateur' sites will bother doing it - after all, it's not like they've been the ones abusing privacy, right?
:-).
I think it will end up being just like those commercial 'approval stamps' like TrustE. It looks great, but doesn't mean too much. Almost the opposite - any site that's gone to the trouble of filling out the damn XML file that's required probably has something to hide.
I'm not wholly against it, but I just have to ask why? Create a lot of unecessary standards and technical specs and formats, get poor old webmasters to support it and keep up to date with it and tolerate browser bugs with it, and why? Because ppl are too dumb to read a privacy policy and want their web browser to auto-read an XML version of it and auto-tell them how good it is?
Sorry, but it's a standard that we don't need. Already there are commercial tools out there to generate the damn file, because the format is so verbose. Only big corporate sites are going to bother with it, so 99% of the web sites you read simply won't activate the feature, meaning users don't get into the habit of paying attention.
Maybe I'm just overworked
Indeed, I find it a little hard to see why these are better than a thermos. In an urban environment it really is pretty easy to get hold of nicer, cheaper hot liquids.
In an outdoors environment, the only advantage over a thermos is that you don't have to plan in advance if you want hot liquids. There are certainly situations (e.g. very bad weather) where you need hot liquids to keep warm and happy, but there's no way to heat anything using flames. I could see keeping some self-heating soup on board a yacht (where weight is not a problem) for eating when the weather is too bad to use a stove, but I can't easily think of another situation.
I suppose there are some times when it might be a safe alternative - maybe in a gas refinery or something it would be safer than any other method of heating.
This no clear boundary between art and trade. Writing code gives greater capacity for art-like behaviour, perhaps, but that is all. Code can be entirely craft like - most of it is, and code that is autogenerated is not even craft-like.
Most programmers have oversized egos as it is, and going on about how 'code is art' doesn't help the matter.
Hey, that works both ways!!
Obviously the Apache Group did not do compatibility testing with the most popular browser on the net, either. Both sides (or, IMHO, none) are at fault on this.
The fact is, this is a new standard that practically no-one is using in anger at the moment. Look at all the other incompatible implementations there have been of new RFCs. It happens all the time, not just with MS.
This is a complete non-issue. "Today, a very early adopter of a new technology notified two software companies that they'd chosen incompatible interpretations of spec. The two companies agreed to make their implementation compatible in future."
Yeah, big story.
"This issue wasn't documented in RedHat's manuals but it effected a number of boxes in our office "
The correct word here is affected not effected.
I don't think that counts for much.
What if a bunch of Burmese programmers take the Linux kernel and convert all the variable and function names and comments to Burmese (which should make it easier for them to work on). Then, after adding all sorts of whizzo features, they release UltraLinux and sell it in the US. Since it's GPL'd they obviously release the source too.
Would this contravene the GPL?
It's such a hopelessly grey area I don't see any legal weight behind that statement in the GPL. They are going to have to add something much more explicit, but good luck finding something that works.
This is all certainly against the spirit of the GPL but I don't see that it's against the letter of it.
I don't think it's too useful to have individuals with highly specific job titles. It _is_ useful to have teams with highly specific job titles.
/. ppl I imagine like the idea of undefined roles where you can do whatever you think you're good at. I've worked in places that take the specific job titles path, and if well managed that works too. However, it does assume that the work to be done fits easily into the structure you create for doing it.
I think it's good to keep the tools team separate from the development team, separate from the systems team and the support teams. People should be able to move with relative ease between the teams, but it's important that people don't try to do everything.
Most
It's often a good idea to have a defined person or role in charge of speed optimisation or security, or user experience, or platform compatability. If you just tell an unstructured development team "Hey, make sure you've all read the security specs and that you meet them!" you simply won't get the same level of security as if the security guy is sitting there creating test scenarios and reviewing every code release for possible flaws.
Well, unless "It matches the spec" is your idea of a good program.
Hmmmm, this was a thinking-aloud-post.
Contrary to what some people think, it is not clever or funny to funky new widgets and dialogs in place of standard ones. Does the standard windows file->open dialog need improving? Maybe. Are you the one to do it? No.
Other peeves include:
Not having tooltips. Tooltips are good. Use them. Everywhere.
Useless error messages. I know it's a pain but there's nothing worse than a regularly re-produceable error state that gives no information.
Useless help files. If you don't have time to create help documentation, then don't bother to do any. It's a waste of user time looking though unhelpful help files.
I'd re-iterate what others have said about progress bars. I'd also add:
* Threading. Be able to do two things at once. I don't care what the app is calculating, I should still be able to move the window and have it re-paint properly at all times.
* Interruption. I should be able to cancel anything the app is doing. I hate waiting around for an app to timeout on some operation.
I assume you mean 'on the Internet' since it's pretty obvious people will pay for information generally, as the inside of any book shop will make clear.
However, there are plenty of web sites where people will pay for content, it's just often very specialist content. Clinical Evidence is one such site that I'm vaguely connected with.
I know people such as sailors and event organisers will pay for detailed weather forecasts online.
There are a load of niche markets where this works. But no-one gets to be a billionaire in a niche market, so no-one is too interested.
That's true.
Long ago (bout '93 I guess) I was really into POVRAY (www.povray.org). I read the usenet group every day, spent loads of time rendering, helped set up websites, yadda yadda yadda. Then one day, Dan Farmer, one of the principle developers, thought it would be cool if he could show his wife that all those hours he spent on the computer was really doing something. He figured he'd ask all the folks who enjoyed using POVRAY for free to mail him a postcard. That way when the postman turned up with a big sack of mail, his wife would understand what this 'Internet' thing was all about.
Now, at this time POVRAY was pretty much the only 3D graphics app available for free to most people. It had a huge user base, it was a regular give-away on the coverdisks of PC mags. By anyone's reckoning it's still a major bit of free software.
Now, guess how many postcards he got...
I do believe the final total was around 10.
People who would spend hours staring at their screens while their 486z rendered stuff, or who would spend hours posting to usenet, could not be arsed to go and buy a postcard and a stamp and scribble an address on it.
That's just the way online stuff seems to be. Kind of sad, but true.
I bet if Slashdot posted an article saying "Let's show how much we like Linux - everyone go send Linus a card at this address" the total response would barely be much higher.
Ummmm...
One tiny difference:
WinAmp, WinZip, etc are applications
LindowsOS is an operating system
Windows is an operating system
Can you see why Microsoft care more about the use of their _OS_'s name in ANOTHER OS than they do about their _OS_'s name in an application that happens to run on their OS.
If Microsoft release an application called LinuxPassport that seems OK to me.
If they release a modified version of Windows with a few Cygnus things pre-installed and call it MSLinux, that might strike some of us as a little unreasonable, hmm?
Whoa. I tried doing that in 1996 and it was sure a pain in the arse. Netatalk was effectively unsupported by then. It looks like some people have started work on it again, so maybe you'll have better luck.
:)
My advice would be to have a thorough look at it before making your boss and big promises though!
Normally, I need 8-9 hours sleep a night. I rarely get it, which sucks. But a unique sleep pattern, and one that can be maintained, is the watch system used when long distance sailing. Basically, it's equal, alternating periods of wake and sleep. The periods might be 2 or four hours (not usually more). It's hard to get used to but then surprisingly effective. You become able to sleep very quickly and wake completely refreshed. However, you then start to become tired again very fast, and are soon ready to sleep again 2 or 4 hours later.
As someone who can't well tolerate even a single 5 hour night and be functional the next day, I'm amazed that I can quite happily slip into the watch system. Odd.
Hmmm, let me see, we vote for an EU parliament, which then chooses a president that then chooses a commission. So, the comission is already two steps away from democratic accountability.
Now, if the commission were a purely operational body that would be fine, but IT IS NOT. The EU commission is THE MOST POWERFULL PART OF THE EU POLITICAL MACHINE. Isn't that scary? Doesn't it worry you that ALL EU policy initiatives must originate in the Commission, a body which, in case you've forgotten, had EVERY SINGLE ONE of it's commissioners resign a few years ago over a corruption scandal.
That's a bit like every single head civil servant and the entire cabinet of a country resigning simultaneously. Isn't that scary? Doesn't it terrify you that we (Britain) are handing more and more power to these people?
Jeez.
I find full spectrum light incredibly harsh and cold. I did a project years ago in a lab that was lit by full spectrum lights and it made my head hurt. Maybe things have improved in the last 10 year, I don't know.
The best lighting is indirect incandescent, or from things like candles and oil lamps (although that's too dim to read by). Indirect Halogen (OK, so Halogen is a kind of incandescent..) lighting is OK too. Fluorescent lighting is evil and must be stopped, but every office in the universe uses it for cost reasons.
I notice that there's a new and extra-bright kind of headlight in production with a slight bluish tint. That's pretty unpleasant too - I think they are metal halide based, but no-ones trying to light a room with them yet as far as I know.
Old yellow sodium lighting is disgusting too unless you go for that deserted carpark feel.
I was walking through Hyde park last night an noticing how nice gaslight is....
Actually, no.
The security officer in most companies is primarily responsible for the security of the company, its assets and employees. Not its customers, and not the quality of its products.
The product managers should have primary responsibility for their products being secure and bug free, perhaps in consultation with the company security officer.
For instance, at my company, the security officer has a big interest in how good the locks on the server room door are. He has a high level contribution to make about firewall policy and employee RAS access. He has no concern with what solaris patches are currently installed at our customer's sites, any more than he cares what door locks are used at our customer sites.
.NET is very important. Java was in many ways a move backwards. The language itself is great, and makes a useful alternative to C++ in many situations. But the ideology behind Java was (at first anyway) "Write all your software in Java and have the freedom to use whatever hardware/OS you like".
.NET is more like "Use the .net framework and have the freedom to use whatever language you like (p.s. only runs on Windows)"
The ideology behind
The second is, IMHO, slightly more attractive. Being forced to use one programming language as the price for hardware/OS abstraction is just plain dumb.
(highly UK specific post....)
There have since been many virtual stars already. Ventriloquist dummies are often stars in their own right, but Basil brush, Emu, and Roland Rat are all virtual characters that have not only had their own shows, but been interviewed as stars and so on.
The move from puppets and models to CGI is not that important.
Roland Rat was especially interesting because he didn't have a clearly identifiable human partner, but was very much a creation of the TV company.
At the end of the day, these things are all fiction. I can't really see people getting more excited about a CGI model than a furry puppet. It's also _much_ harder to use the CGI model. An interview with the virtual star would require weeks of computer work and post processing just to fit the CGI model into the normal studio shot of the interview. Not exactly spontaneous and realistic.
At least with Roland rat the guy operating him could ad-lib.
http://www.forteinc.com/
It was good enough for me to give up nn (and rn, and trn).
LORAN? I was pretty sure LORAN only covered coastal areas, and even then the coverage is not complete. LORAN is quite accurate, but it's a pain to use, and for full accuracy you do (or did) need special charts showing variations in the system.
What would be really cool would be a machine capable of doing fully automatic celestial navigation.
Hi,
SOAP is transport independant. That's one of its (theoretical) virtues. You can implement SOAP over SMTP, HTTP, whatever.
Practically, it does seem fair to say that HTTP is what an awful lot of SOAP tools are going to be expecting, and given that SOAP is still quite bleeding edge, I wouldn't want to try using another transport protocol unless I could afford time and skill to do a lot of fixing up.
However, HTTP doesn't have to run on port 80. Furthermore, most SOAP implementations will be (well, claim to be) happy on HTTPS too, so that's an easy way to do encryption.
As for the 'web page vs functional' thing, well that's not so simple. A request for a page produced by a CGI script is a functional request coming from strangers over the web. SOAP need not be different.
At the moment, if I want to make an XML version of my content available to folks, I might tell them to use HTTP GET with a URL that invokes a CGI program that returns some XML.
In the future, I might want to make the same XML available via the getXML method my Website class, and then SOAP enable my Website class.
The differences isn't that great.
I'm not really sure that it is particularly the job of the government to invest. Had Babbage been seen as less of a loose cannon and his engines as more practical devices, there would have been plenty of entrepreneurs willing to fund commercial development. The notion of centralised investment in theoretical science was some way off, and most theoretical advances in science were made by wealthly individuals working largely alone, or funded by wealthy patrons.
It is certianly true that later in British history a giant damp cloth was put on commerical exploitation of technological innovation, stemming from:
1. General skepticism being part of the British psyche.
2. Powerful vested interests, particularly Unions opposing it.
3. A weak, restricted free enterprise system.
4. A long running shift to more socialist government that lasted from the 20's to the 80's
Harrison (the clock maker) was unfortunate in that he had one select special interest group (astronomers) set against him, and that he was a victim of predjudice against the middle classes (as said before, advances in science were meant to come from wealthy gentleman scientists with labs in their country houses).
But, in general, Britain from 1700 - 1850 was a thriving, almost entirely unregulated, capitalist country, where a great many new machines were invented and sold all over the world (milling machines, weaving machines, steam engines, stuff like that).
pop3 is a _very_ simple protocol that allows mail to be read, retrieved, or deleted from a server by a client. It's a had a few features added in later days, and might support simple management like password changing, but that's about it.
The main weakness of pop3 is that it treats the server end as a dumb, unorganised list of messages, and expects all cleverness (mailboxes, sorting, filtering, etc) to be done client side. This means it is a pain to change clients, and nearly impossible to manage one mail account from two clients (e.g. one at home, one at work).
The main strength of pop3 is that it works.
IMAP is a protocol that allows a client to manipulate a server side data store. All the useful information (what messages are read, which folders they are in etc) is on the server, so if you change IMAP clients, all the data is just read of the server, and away you go.
However, AFAIK IMAP is a rather complex protocol. I have never come across a client that implements it very well, all of them struggle with large numbers of messages, handling of attachments and so on. In addition, it's still possible for a client to implement client-side only add-on features that are then incompatibile with other IMAP clients.
Outlook is the only client I've used that seems to handle server-centric email well, and it probably does with in proprietary extensions. Of course Outlook's handling of SMTP is rather dire, but hey.