. . . and the blue man group does not even use Pentiums. They use Macs for coordinating lighting, effects, and sound for their performances.
Re:SICK OF IT! Giving up moderator points to say i
on
BSD to Leapfrog Linux?
·
· Score: 2
"sort of" Linux-focused.
it's "News for Nerds". Not Linux News. What percentage of articles are even about Linux? The polls say that Linux is the most popular OS of/.-ers, but there are a LOT of W9x users who simply just hate Microsoft, but don't have the technical fortitude to venture into Linux (or *BSD). There's even a *BSD section on Slashdot, so I really don't think that this site is anymore Linux centric. It's just that lots of Nerds use Linux. Linux is more accessible than BSD, but more nerdy than Win95. Simple as that.
One of the biggest complaints I've seen on all the Mac OS X dev discussions is that old-time Mac admins are having a HELL of a time adjusting to a multi-user OS. It is a MAJOR paradigm shift. From going to an OS where you are essentially root all the time, to going to an OS where you have to su, understand chmod, figure out why the OS won't let you empty the trash (even as root), etc. Lots of complaints. Personally, I think these differences will kill Mac OS X as a consumer OS. They did a decent job of hiding it, but nowhere near enough. Apple needs to realize that OS X is a GREAT power-user OS, but it SUCKS as a home/desktop OS, because my mother-in-law will never understand having to login. Apple has a LONG way to go before they can use the base OS X to reach that market. I'm not bitching about it, I LOVE OS X, it's great, I finally have a stable OS on my PPC-based machine, that lets me use all my old software. But it's non-trivial for non-technical people. You don't ask someone to pay $1200 for a machine, then expect them to jump through hoops to run it. Not in the mass market.
As an NT, Solaris, Linux, FreeBSD, OS X, and Mac OS user, I will say that Apple has taken a step towards bringing the Unix core up to date - but it's a VERY small step.
ahhh, the DEFAULT shell in Solaris may be ksh, but among all of MY Solaris buddies, bash and zsh reign supreme. I don't think I know one person who actually uses ksh. Of course, my circle of freinds doesn't represent all Solaris users. I actually turned on most of them to bash.
ps is definately the most remarkable (and annoying) difference. gawd Solaris' ps sucks.
You cannot currently tell OS X to use a separate partition for swap - so it swaps on it's main partition, and when you start running short of memory, (and when your disk has less than a few hundred meg of contiguous disk space) it runs horribly slow.
I hope that's fixed in the final release. I have 196 megs of RAM, and I run OS X on my 300 MHz beige G3 on a 2 gig disk. First week was fun. But it's gotten very slow. I will NOT buy Norton 6. There HAS to be another solution.
cool. Another great benefit would be, few people would bother to set up a CD-snail-mail trading link with someone, if they were going to put tracks on the CD that were poorly ripped, bad bitrate, incorrect title, or corrupted - which you find a LOT of on Napster. (I think people put garbage up so they don't appear to be leeches).
Well, there's a difference between "eliminating the middle man" of the RIAA, and other, potential new forms of distribution (mp3.com?).
The RIAA companies charge a HUGE markup on CD sales, compared to their costs for that artist. They literally bill us for the artists they promote that fail. But a new artist, who signs up to distribute his music directly on the internet will be in direct competition with the RIAA on price, because they'll have a much leaner distribution model, much lower costs, no expensive lawyers and executives, and the money will go directly to the artist, and the artist will simply pay the internet hosting company, and the credit card bill for the recording studio in his basement, and possibly the licensing fees to the company that wrote the music encoding method (assuming they're gonna use SDMI instead of MP3). What's left over is pure profit for the musician. If that's not enough, they can maybe hire a promotional agency to broaden their market. True music fans will be able to tell when a musician is popular from that kind of promotion, or popular because they're good. But True music fans are few and far between. But in the end all music consumers will pay a lower price, because the competition will eliminate the costlier vendors (Traditional Record Companies) - who will likely have to trim their staff, and resort to more honest accounting practices, (more likely, they'll just buy laws to protect their monopoly).
among all of the red-herrings in this whole mess, this is about the most annoying one.
No artist is being cheated by RIAA member companies. You get a contract, you read it, you sign it, you honor it. period. If a musician signs a bad contract, it's their fault for not reading it, or standing up for themselves. If they felt they're being screwed they had an alternative - don't sign the contract.
For many artists, this is the difference between making it big (buzillions of dollars, overnight success, the whole "star" deal), or not - continuing to play dives in college towns, or weddings and bar mitzvahs. Tough titties. The record companies are selling a commodity - access to the mass music market, by their oligopoly on distribution. It's probably not possible to become a "star" without help from a major music company. You young musicians out there, you have to think to yourselves, "why am I doing this?" Is it because you love music, or is it because you want to be a star? The talentless fucks out there (*cough* Courney "nobody would ever have known who I was if it wasn't for my dead hubby's rock stardom" Love *cough*) who've made it big because of the promotion machine of the RIAA, are now whining because they don't have access to the lion's share of the profits? Well, maybe they shouldn't. Maybe the unsigned bands out there with real talent who may still be playing bars, are setting the REAL value for the commodity that is "good music". A $5 cover charge. The pheonomenon that the RIAA creates, the hype, the promotion, is just a good illusion, that sets the value much higher, millions of CD's at $20 a pop. (coming to a PC near you, Pay-per-listen songs, MP3 quality, at $3 a pop.) Why MUST you have the latest Madonna album? Is she really a musical genius compared to say, Robert Fripp? Fuck no, but if you have a Madonna CD on your shelf when you have freinds over, you're FAR more likely to get those intangible "I belong to your social group" points than with Robert Fripp. Unless you have freinds who are music majors or something. Believe it or not, a whole buttload of people find this enormously valuable. This is why Backstreet Boyz is the most downloaded and pirated music on Napster. The attraction of the "social points" commodity - yeah, I got that on my Rio, let's load it on your PC and listen. I know about it, you know about it. It's not about "good music", it's about social connections - this is the commodity that the RIAA is really trying to control and sell. Culture. Which is inevitably tied to ubiquity, fame. Cake (another one hit wonder) played an interesting song a few years back; "How can you afford your Rock-n-Roll lifestyle?" Download that from Napster, listen to it, think about it.
So when an "artist" claims they're being cheated by the RIAA - don't buy that baloney. When a "star" claims that Napster is eating their lunch, they could be right - Metallica is NOT in the business of music for music's sake. They're in it for the $$. Something to think about.
The real issue here, and the only legitimate issue as far as I'm concerned, is access to music. I'll never download Backstreet Boyz from Napster. Don't worry about that. I may download Metallica, because, frankly, even though they are greedy primadonnas, I DO like a lot of their innovative earlier stuff. There's a lot of good music there. And I don't believe in paying RIAA-dictated prices for it. And I will not use Metallica as a tool to win "brownie points" with friends. Music listening is almost exclusively a private experience for me, so again, there's no reason for me to pay the RIAA "social brownie points" fee. If I want that, or if I would prefer the superior quality of a CD recording, I'll go to the record store and buy the CD. But for simple access to music, perhaps culture, the price is too much, and the law supports this: the status symbol, and the commoditized prices, of the luxury of OWNING copyrighted material is protected - but free access is also protected under fair use - as long as I'm not selling copies, not making a buck, not eating someone else's lunch, it's fair game. That's what the fair use clause is for, and I for one am fucking sick and tired of uninformed or dishonest people LYING, and telling others that this is illegal and that we should feel guilty for trading MP3's when it's protected by the 1992 American Home Recording Act.
If Metallica were starving, if the RIAA companies were going bankrupt, if CD sales were truly declining, if CD prices were going down, and sales not picking up, if the RIAA companies would provide a reasonable alternative to unrestricted MP3 trading, then I'd say a strick copyright protection scheme were warranted.
But none of that is happening. They're still making hugely unprecedented profits. The point is, MP3 trading does not threaten sales, only market dominance and control. MP3 trading is an inferior product to a physical CD copy. There is still great demand for that product, and many MP3 traders will tell you honestly that they buy more CDs because of their MP3 trading. The problem with this is that it relies on something called "the honor system". Yes, it's the same exact system by which Newspapers are sold throught the world, and have been sold for decades. You put a dime into a machine, and you pull out one newspaper - you could pull out a stack of em, and pass them out to your friends if you wanted, but who does that? The minority of dishonest people out there. Not enough to cause the Newspaper companies to get their panties in a bunch. So what's the percentage you think of MP3 traders who never buy CDs? Who "would have otherwise paid $20 for the CD"? Very low, and the numbers (RIAA members profits) prove it. So take your stiff nazi rhetoric (IT'S THEFT! YOU'RE EVIL! YOU MUST BE STOPPED NOW! MP3 TRADUNG IST VERBOTEN!), and shove it up your ass, because in America, the 1992 AHRA states that copyrighted material can be copied and shared freely for noncommercial purposes. That's FAIR USE, and there is NO language that says sharing a CD with your wife, is any different than ripping it and letting 2 million of your close friends download it. And that's the fact jack.
That's why you have to experiment and chose the right IR code, not the first code that works. And, surely your
Satellite reveiver had a serial port??? Most do; no need to use an IR blaster at all.
I experimented, the technician on the phone experimented. They finally admitted that TiVo just doesn't have good support for Echostar boxen. My 5000 didn't have a serial port. But I traded it in for the DishPlayer, of course, I use the 5000 as a second receiver in another room now.
That's a pretty lame excuse. Just check your "To Do" list to make sure a show will be recorded. It's very easy.
First off, I have to criticize the UI design; how it's rather a pain in the ass to get to the To Do list from the Now Showing screen. It was two clicks to get to the list of options that To Do was on, and To Do was near the bottom, so you had to scroll down. For DishPlayer, the recorded programs, and recording schedule are on the same page. Second of all, I'm talking about the AI, where you three thumbs up something, but the machine chooses not to record it for some reason, so you have to go in, track it down, and schedule it yourself. Well, I just didn't appreciate the fuzzy logic. It was neeto for about a week, then it got tiresome. But there were also occasions where it would NOT record something that I scheduled - I believe these were instances of IR Blaster failure. Finally, there was an extremely annoying "bug" that cut off a recording at a maximum of 2 hours. I was trying to coax my wife into watching Yojimbo, black and white, subtitled, not very appealing to non-cinema affictionadoes. I recorded it on TiVo, but with commercials, it exceeded 2 hours. So we started watching it, she was very skeptical at first, then actually started to enjoy it, and got into it, and TiVo had cut off the last 15 minutes of the movie. Should I now go run out and rent it? Buy a DVD copy? BULLSHIT! I paid $400 for the box, $200 for lifetime "service", and I had to watch the commercials I ff-ed through, then I have to pay to rent the material again? That was the last straw.
or, find a willing test subject, who would volunteer to have artificial cone cells sensitive to say 800nm light, implanted in his retina, and connected to nerve fibers newly grown in his optic nerve, then figure out how to train his brain to perceive the signals.
Seems safer to me, than messing with my chromosomes. (presuming that the surgical and biotechnical techniques necessary for such a procedure means that techniques for undoing or repairing damage would also necessarily exist).
I *love* my DishPlayer. I haven't upgraded my 12-hour model - I didn't know there was a way. REALLY? You just swap it with a hard drive? formatted or what?
I had a TiVo, and I bought lifetime, and it wasn't working well, the IR Blaster didn't correctly or reliably change channels with my DishNetwork receiver. So I returned it, got all my money back, spent less than 1/4 the money to upgrade to the DishPlayer.
I can say that I miss the "Season Pass" and the AI - a little bit. But the third time you think it's going to record something for you, and it doesn't, you get really pissed off. I find that I value the 30-second skip of the DishPlayer unit FAR more. Also, the UI for recording is much simpler. You do tend to run into situations where complex recording scenarios arise with no solution (like recording a program that's on every day, and one day a week, you have a conflict with another channel) - also the DishPlayers seem to be buggy as all hell.
I had to RMA the first unit because it was just not recording shows (recording would say 1 minute duration, and screen was black). The second unit had something different wrong, it would tune channels in and out, and drop them. The THIRD unit has spontaneously dropped all of my recording programming, twice, and I've had to set it all up again. And, I saw it crash - but it rebooted on it's own with no problem - unfortunately, it interrupted the recording of a show, and only saved the last ten minutes - so I'm about to call Dish and ask for another RMA number. The techs seem to know that there's an endemic problem with the 7200. (they groan when I tell them what model it is) - and they don't seem to have a clue about what I seem to have discovered; most of these problems seem to be heat/ventilation related.
The pervasive "WebTV" advertising throught the UI screens is a total pain in the ass, and I wish I could just say that I'm not interested, and switch it the fuck off.
But still, overall, the DishPlayer has been more reliable, and easier to use than the TiVo was. That 30-second skip is really useful. The TiVo - fast-forward hack was still flaky, and stress-inducing. (not to mention, you still have to see the commercials in fast-motion - with DishPlayer, they could be advertising naked Natalie Portman statues, and I'd have no clue).
after the prerequisite 2-30 seconds waiting for the hard-drive to chug the data into memory.
On mouseover? That's great. When I can get a CM to appear in NT with a right mouse click in under 30 seconds, (On a 600Mhz PIII with 256 Meg of RAM), I'll be impressed. No, less unimpressed. Really, a CM should appear instantly, as should mouseovers. But that wouldn't sell the latest hottest intel chippies now, would it?
Who gets final say though, on a proposed UI change in Windows.
The highly paid UI people, geeks down in the code mines? Or the much more highly paid marketing guys, whose livelyhood depends on their ability to schmooze and talk people into things, and who like glitzy gadgets regardless of functionality, and who play golf with/go on corporate retreats with/swap wives with the head honchos, executive staff, board members of Microsoft.
Windows has NEVER struck me as a piece of software whose feature-set was driven by engineers. You can hire the smartest people on the planet, but if your corporate decisions are not made by those people, it will not be reflected in your product. On the other hand, if you turn your product over to the engineers, geeks will think its cool, but the product is almost guaranteed to not succeed in the marketplace.
of course not everyone will be running win2k - at first. But if MS makes it a REAL pain in the ass to upgrade on an NT machine, that's more incentive for the customer to buy a win2k license. AND, a new box, of course, which keeps their buddies at Intel happy.
The Exchange in Office Mac, IIRC, is actually a rewritten version of another popular Mac email program that got discontinued (the name escapes me), and the guys who wrote that got hired by Microsoft's Mac software division.
on our network, so many Exchange users have lost messages, that we now mostly keep our messages in.pst files and back those up to our user drives on the server.
Everyone has painfully learned that messages left in your inbox are messages you don't want to keep long-term.
Now, think of all the extra network traffic this practice generates. ..
Slashdot Mirror
. . . and the blue man group does not even use Pentiums. They use Macs for coordinating lighting, effects, and sound for their performances.
"sort of" Linux-focused.
/.-ers, but there are a LOT of W9x users who simply just hate Microsoft, but don't have the technical fortitude to venture into Linux (or *BSD). There's even a *BSD section on Slashdot, so I really don't think that this site is anymore Linux centric. It's just that lots of Nerds use Linux. Linux is more accessible than BSD, but more nerdy than Win95. Simple as that.
it's "News for Nerds". Not Linux News. What percentage of articles are even about Linux? The polls say that Linux is the most popular OS of
You are absolutely right.
One of the biggest complaints I've seen on all the Mac OS X dev discussions is that old-time Mac admins are having a HELL of a time adjusting to a multi-user OS. It is a MAJOR paradigm shift. From going to an OS where you are essentially root all the time, to going to an OS where you have to su, understand chmod, figure out why the OS won't let you empty the trash (even as root), etc. Lots of complaints. Personally, I think these differences will kill Mac OS X as a consumer OS. They did a decent job of hiding it, but nowhere near enough. Apple needs to realize that OS X is a GREAT power-user OS, but it SUCKS as a home/desktop OS, because my mother-in-law will never understand having to login. Apple has a LONG way to go before they can use the base OS X to reach that market. I'm not bitching about it, I LOVE OS X, it's great, I finally have a stable OS on my PPC-based machine, that lets me use all my old software. But it's non-trivial for non-technical people. You don't ask someone to pay $1200 for a machine, then expect them to jump through hoops to run it. Not in the mass market.
As an NT, Solaris, Linux, FreeBSD, OS X, and Mac OS user, I will say that Apple has taken a step towards bringing the Unix core up to date - but it's a VERY small step.
ahhh, the DEFAULT shell in Solaris may be ksh, but among all of MY Solaris buddies, bash and zsh reign supreme. I don't think I know one person who actually uses ksh. Of course, my circle of freinds doesn't represent all Solaris users. I actually turned on most of them to bash.
ps is definately the most remarkable (and annoying) difference. gawd Solaris' ps sucks.
OS X suffers HORRIBLY from disk fragmentation.
You cannot currently tell OS X to use a separate partition for swap - so it swaps on it's main partition, and when you start running short of memory, (and when your disk has less than a few hundred meg of contiguous disk space) it runs horribly slow.
I hope that's fixed in the final release. I have 196 megs of RAM, and I run OS X on my 300 MHz beige G3 on a 2 gig disk. First week was fun. But it's gotten very slow. I will NOT buy Norton 6. There HAS to be another solution.
cool. Another great benefit would be, few people would bother to set up a CD-snail-mail trading link with someone, if they were going to put tracks on the CD that were poorly ripped, bad bitrate, incorrect title, or corrupted - which you find a LOT of on Napster. (I think people put garbage up so they don't appear to be leeches).
Well, there's a difference between "eliminating the middle man" of the RIAA, and other, potential new forms of distribution (mp3.com?).
The RIAA companies charge a HUGE markup on CD sales, compared to their costs for that artist. They literally bill us for the artists they promote that fail. But a new artist, who signs up to distribute his music directly on the internet will be in direct competition with the RIAA on price, because they'll have a much leaner distribution model, much lower costs, no expensive lawyers and executives, and the money will go directly to the artist, and the artist will simply pay the internet hosting company, and the credit card bill for the recording studio in his basement, and possibly the licensing fees to the company that wrote the music encoding method (assuming they're gonna use SDMI instead of MP3). What's left over is pure profit for the musician. If that's not enough, they can maybe hire a promotional agency to broaden their market. True music fans will be able to tell when a musician is popular from that kind of promotion, or popular because they're good. But True music fans are few and far between. But in the end all music consumers will pay a lower price, because the competition will eliminate the costlier vendors (Traditional Record Companies) - who will likely have to trim their staff, and resort to more honest accounting practices, (more likely, they'll just buy laws to protect their monopoly).
among all of the red-herrings in this whole mess, this is about the most annoying one.
No artist is being cheated by RIAA member companies. You get a contract, you read it, you sign it, you honor it. period. If a musician signs a bad contract, it's their fault for not reading it, or standing up for themselves. If they felt they're being screwed they had an alternative - don't sign the contract.
For many artists, this is the difference between making it big (buzillions of dollars, overnight success, the whole "star" deal), or not - continuing to play dives in college towns, or weddings and bar mitzvahs. Tough titties. The record companies are selling a commodity - access to the mass music market, by their oligopoly on distribution. It's probably not possible to become a "star" without help from a major music company. You young musicians out there, you have to think to yourselves, "why am I doing this?" Is it because you love music, or is it because you want to be a star? The talentless fucks out there (*cough* Courney "nobody would ever have known who I was if it wasn't for my dead hubby's rock stardom" Love *cough*) who've made it big because of the promotion machine of the RIAA, are now whining because they don't have access to the lion's share of the profits? Well, maybe they shouldn't. Maybe the unsigned bands out there with real talent who may still be playing bars, are setting the REAL value for the commodity that is "good music". A $5 cover charge. The pheonomenon that the RIAA creates, the hype, the promotion, is just a good illusion, that sets the value much higher, millions of CD's at $20 a pop. (coming to a PC near you, Pay-per-listen songs, MP3 quality, at $3 a pop.) Why MUST you have the latest Madonna album? Is she really a musical genius compared to say, Robert Fripp? Fuck no, but if you have a Madonna CD on your shelf when you have freinds over, you're FAR more likely to get those intangible "I belong to your social group" points than with Robert Fripp. Unless you have freinds who are music majors or something. Believe it or not, a whole buttload of people find this enormously valuable. This is why Backstreet Boyz is the most downloaded and pirated music on Napster. The attraction of the "social points" commodity - yeah, I got that on my Rio, let's load it on your PC and listen. I know about it, you know about it. It's not about "good music", it's about social connections - this is the commodity that the RIAA is really trying to control and sell. Culture. Which is inevitably tied to ubiquity, fame. Cake (another one hit wonder) played an interesting song a few years back; "How can you afford your Rock-n-Roll lifestyle?" Download that from Napster, listen to it, think about it.
So when an "artist" claims they're being cheated by the RIAA - don't buy that baloney. When a "star" claims that Napster is eating their lunch, they could be right - Metallica is NOT in the business of music for music's sake. They're in it for the $$. Something to think about.
The real issue here, and the only legitimate issue as far as I'm concerned, is access to music. I'll never download Backstreet Boyz from Napster. Don't worry about that. I may download Metallica, because, frankly, even though they are greedy primadonnas, I DO like a lot of their innovative earlier stuff. There's a lot of good music there. And I don't believe in paying RIAA-dictated prices for it. And I will not use Metallica as a tool to win "brownie points" with friends. Music listening is almost exclusively a private experience for me, so again, there's no reason for me to pay the RIAA "social brownie points" fee. If I want that, or if I would prefer the superior quality of a CD recording, I'll go to the record store and buy the CD. But for simple access to music, perhaps culture, the price is too much, and the law supports this: the status symbol, and the commoditized prices, of the luxury of OWNING copyrighted material is protected - but free access is also protected under fair use - as long as I'm not selling copies, not making a buck, not eating someone else's lunch, it's fair game. That's what the fair use clause is for, and I for one am fucking sick and tired of uninformed or dishonest people LYING, and telling others that this is illegal and that we should feel guilty for trading MP3's when it's protected by the 1992 American Home Recording Act.
How 'bout, FAIR USE. And the HONOR SYSTEM.
If Metallica were starving, if the RIAA companies were going bankrupt, if CD sales were truly declining, if CD prices were going down, and sales not picking up, if the RIAA companies would provide a reasonable alternative to unrestricted MP3 trading, then I'd say a strick copyright protection scheme were warranted.
But none of that is happening. They're still making hugely unprecedented profits. The point is, MP3 trading does not threaten sales, only market dominance and control. MP3 trading is an inferior product to a physical CD copy. There is still great demand for that product, and many MP3 traders will tell you honestly that they buy more CDs because of their MP3 trading. The problem with this is that it relies on something called "the honor system". Yes, it's the same exact system by which Newspapers are sold throught the world, and have been sold for decades. You put a dime into a machine, and you pull out one newspaper - you could pull out a stack of em, and pass them out to your friends if you wanted, but who does that? The minority of dishonest people out there. Not enough to cause the Newspaper companies to get their panties in a bunch. So what's the percentage you think of MP3 traders who never buy CDs? Who "would have otherwise paid $20 for the CD"? Very low, and the numbers (RIAA members profits) prove it. So take your stiff nazi rhetoric (IT'S THEFT! YOU'RE EVIL! YOU MUST BE STOPPED NOW! MP3 TRADUNG IST VERBOTEN!), and shove it up your ass, because in America, the 1992 AHRA states that copyrighted material can be copied and shared freely for noncommercial purposes. That's FAIR USE, and there is NO language that says sharing a CD with your wife, is any different than ripping it and letting 2 million of your close friends download it. And that's the fact jack.
That's why you have to experiment and chose the right IR code, not the first code that works. And, surely your
Satellite reveiver had a serial port??? Most do; no need to use an IR blaster at all.
I experimented, the technician on the phone experimented. They finally admitted that TiVo just doesn't have good support for Echostar boxen. My 5000 didn't have a serial port. But I traded it in for the DishPlayer, of course, I use the 5000 as a second receiver in another room now.
That's a pretty lame excuse. Just check your "To Do" list to make sure a show will be recorded. It's very easy.
First off, I have to criticize the UI design; how it's rather a pain in the ass to get to the To Do list from the Now Showing screen. It was two clicks to get to the list of options that To Do was on, and To Do was near the bottom, so you had to scroll down. For DishPlayer, the recorded programs, and recording schedule are on the same page. Second of all, I'm talking about the AI, where you three thumbs up something, but the machine chooses not to record it for some reason, so you have to go in, track it down, and schedule it yourself. Well, I just didn't appreciate the fuzzy logic. It was neeto for about a week, then it got tiresome. But there were also occasions where it would NOT record something that I scheduled - I believe these were instances of IR Blaster failure. Finally, there was an extremely annoying "bug" that cut off a recording at a maximum of 2 hours. I was trying to coax my wife into watching Yojimbo, black and white, subtitled, not very appealing to non-cinema affictionadoes. I recorded it on TiVo, but with commercials, it exceeded 2 hours. So we started watching it, she was very skeptical at first, then actually started to enjoy it, and got into it, and TiVo had cut off the last 15 minutes of the movie. Should I now go run out and rent it? Buy a DVD copy? BULLSHIT! I paid $400 for the box, $200 for lifetime "service", and I had to watch the commercials I ff-ed through, then I have to pay to rent the material again? That was the last straw.
. . . or mabye you're writing on a broken API like MFC, and due to project constraints, doing otherwise isn't an option.
Maybe programmers spend the other 318 days a year working around MFC bugs.
so you're saying (with that title) that programmers aren't *WORKING* when they're testing, debugging, coding projects that end up shitcanned, etc.?
A more proper title for this article:
Programmers Code for projects that eventually see the light of day, 47 days per year.
The other 318 18-hour days, they're working their ass off doing the other stuff.
Do programmers only code? News flash, duh, they don't. gee whiz, I think I'll change my major now that I've learned this startling revelation.
No, actually they spend the other 318 days reading "Visual Basic For Dummies" books.
or, find a willing test subject, who would volunteer to have artificial cone cells sensitive to say 800nm light, implanted in his retina, and connected to nerve fibers newly grown in his optic nerve, then figure out how to train his brain to perceive the signals.
Seems safer to me, than messing with my chromosomes. (presuming that the surgical and biotechnical techniques necessary for such a procedure means that techniques for undoing or repairing damage would also necessarily exist).
I *love* my DishPlayer. I haven't upgraded my 12-hour model - I didn't know there was a way. REALLY? You just swap it with a hard drive? formatted or what?
I had a TiVo, and I bought lifetime, and it wasn't working well, the IR Blaster didn't correctly or reliably change channels with my DishNetwork receiver. So I returned it, got all my money back, spent less than 1/4 the money to upgrade to the DishPlayer.
I can say that I miss the "Season Pass" and the AI - a little bit. But the third time you think it's going to record something for you, and it doesn't, you get really pissed off. I find that I value the 30-second skip of the DishPlayer unit FAR more. Also, the UI for recording is much simpler. You do tend to run into situations where complex recording scenarios arise with no solution (like recording a program that's on every day, and one day a week, you have a conflict with another channel) - also the DishPlayers seem to be buggy as all hell.
I had to RMA the first unit because it was just not recording shows (recording would say 1 minute duration, and screen was black). The second unit had something different wrong, it would tune channels in and out, and drop them. The THIRD unit has spontaneously dropped all of my recording programming, twice, and I've had to set it all up again. And, I saw it crash - but it rebooted on it's own with no problem - unfortunately, it interrupted the recording of a show, and only saved the last ten minutes - so I'm about to call Dish and ask for another RMA number. The techs seem to know that there's an endemic problem with the 7200. (they groan when I tell them what model it is) - and they don't seem to have a clue about what I seem to have discovered; most of these problems seem to be heat/ventilation related.
The pervasive "WebTV" advertising throught the UI screens is a total pain in the ass, and I wish I could just say that I'm not interested, and switch it the fuck off.
But still, overall, the DishPlayer has been more reliable, and easier to use than the TiVo was. That 30-second skip is really useful. The TiVo - fast-forward hack was still flaky, and stress-inducing. (not to mention, you still have to see the commercials in fast-motion - with DishPlayer, they could be advertising naked Natalie Portman statues, and I'd have no clue).
after the prerequisite 2-30 seconds waiting for the hard-drive to chug the data into memory.
On mouseover? That's great. When I can get a CM to appear in NT with a right mouse click in under 30 seconds, (On a 600Mhz PIII with 256 Meg of RAM), I'll be impressed. No, less unimpressed. Really, a CM should appear instantly, as should mouseovers. But that wouldn't sell the latest hottest intel chippies now, would it?
Who gets final say though, on a proposed UI change in Windows.
The highly paid UI people, geeks down in the code mines? Or the much more highly paid marketing guys, whose livelyhood depends on their ability to schmooze and talk people into things, and who like glitzy gadgets regardless of functionality, and who play golf with/go on corporate retreats with/swap wives with the head honchos, executive staff, board members of Microsoft.
Windows has NEVER struck me as a piece of software whose feature-set was driven by engineers. You can hire the smartest people on the planet, but if your corporate decisions are not made by those people, it will not be reflected in your product. On the other hand, if you turn your product over to the engineers, geeks will think its cool, but the product is almost guaranteed to not succeed in the marketplace.
Case in point:
The Talking Paperclip (TM).
by the way, how does one pronounce "Zvezda"?
let me guess, he wrote this article for his secret race of giant robots with which he plans to take over the world? (starting with the ISS).
how about cut-paste, or save-as-rtf/html?
of course not everyone will be running win2k - at first. But if MS makes it a REAL pain in the ass to upgrade on an NT machine, that's more incentive for the customer to buy a win2k license. AND, a new box, of course, which keeps their buddies at Intel happy.
Basically, it's all a big boondoggle to sell ActiveDirectory, and unseat Novell. (NDS).
Once ActiveDirectory gets established in this role, it will be nearly impossible to shake it loose - even if they split MS 8 ways till Sunday.
The Exchange in Office Mac, IIRC, is actually a rewritten version of another popular Mac email program that got discontinued (the name escapes me), and the guys who wrote that got hired by Microsoft's Mac software division.
and after a month of struggling with email viruses and unexplained crashes, you'll be out-looking for something that works!
on our network, so many Exchange users have lost messages, that we now mostly keep our messages in .pst files and back those up to our user drives on the server.
.
Everyone has painfully learned that messages left in your inbox are messages you don't want to keep long-term.
Now, think of all the extra network traffic this practice generates. .