Just read that drivel, and there ARE some valid points, but it is NOT universally true.
Case in point, I was on a team that redesigned an entire large-scale system from scratch. The old system was built in lots of little parts using various languages (shell, perl, java, c++, c, python, lisp), multiple databases from various vendors, had virtually no internal documentation on how anything worked, etc. They system was quite unstable crashing multiple times a day, and very difficult to enhance without breaking shit. Kinda like Windows...
We re-built the entire system in about a year (about 750K lines of code which was about half the size of the original code.) The result was amazing. After the initial deployment period where the bugs were worked out, the system was rock solid being able to stay up for months at a time, was Very easy to enhance, had tones more features and flexability. We had a great team, and a solid commitment from senior management providing the needed resources.
Netscape's biggest problem was not starting over from scratch, but poor project management (not keeping people within original design constraints) and a lack serious commitment from senior managment. Rather than having a very tight set of requirements and design goals, things were very nebulous and got out of control very quickly. No longer were they building a new browser, but a cross-platform framework for any kind of application they could think of. When you look at projects such as Galeon, most of that bloat is ripped out.
Rather than folling a bad example of how to run a re-design project (mozilla) MS could EASILY afford a new team to start Windows from scratch, leaving the existing team in place to continue to enhance / maintain the existing code base. This is the step that Netscape missed. They only used a small fraction of their people to maintain (and NOT enhance) the old code.
Joel is making his claim by using the worst case example. Kinda like if I claimed that you should never put the gas tank in the back of a car pointing to the Pinto as my evidence, ignoring the thousands of other car designs that worked.
Nice try, but not even close. People have been asking for MS to open their file formats and api's for years. They have yet to comply. People have been asking MS to concentrate on reliability and security since the Windows 1.0 days. 10 years later we are still waiting.
Most ppl know that there is a tradeoff between functionality and security
This is just not true either. Most people that know ANYTHING AT ALL about software realize that you can have BOTH. Exactly what functionality is lost when you fix a buffer overflow problem for example? If you look at MS's security patches, they don't remove needed functionality, they fix the security problem.
MS's priorities are about marketshare and profit. That's IT. The ONLY times that they actually do anything in response to user request is when they perceive a market share loss to a competitor. Case in point: IE sucked blendered toad doo doo until MS decided to capture market share from Netscape. Users are begging for pop-up relief but it is NOT AVAILBALE from Microsoft. They have ZERO incentive to add it as there is no effective competition anymore. In fact, the ONLY changes to IE that we will see now is further departures from W3C standards and more "lock-in" to MS proprietary technology.
MS has brought this "trashing" upon themselves. As long as they continue to release garbage software (like the latest XP security patch that they had to pull when it trashed peoples machines) they will continue to earn this ire.
MS has the resources and potential to do the right thing and release good software, they just choose not to. Lip service is the only thing we are getting out of redmond.
To attempt the USELESS step of matching your signature with the one on the card. I never sign my name the same twice. Many times it's not even close. What's worse is the Home Depot "sign on the touch screen" thing that is so bad it's almost unreadable.
By the way, the swipers are not really for your credit card privacy, they are really for ATM cards so you can enter the PIN. Yeah, I know you can run a credit card through, but I don't even bother.
If you are really concerned about card theft, you can always write "see drivers license" on the signature spot. Won't stop people from buying gas at an automated pump though.
Yeah, online purchases are a problem. Amex has "one time only" card numbers that you can use when buynig stuff online and you don't trust the merchant or system.
Frankly, I'd like to see the big companies (Visa, Amex, etc.) have a paypal Like system (but without the extra "account" bullshit and paypal politics etc.) so you never need to give a merchant your card number. Verisign announced something like this years ago, but I have yet to see any merchant using it.
You obviously don't understand the executive hiring process. The bigger the failure you are, the bigger the paycheck at the next company because you MUST have learned from your mistakes.
I highly doubt that MS would have bought Interix if there was any question that their product contained or was tainted by any GPL code at all. The legal threat of the GPL would hurt them MUCH more than SCO. With SCO, they could easily settle. Somehow I don't see the FSF settling for any reasonable sum. BSD is a non issue due to the license.
So nah, I don't buy it. You can't license linux code from SCO and be free of the GPL. Since the SCO case is against Linux and not BSD, and licensing SCO wouldn't help with a Linux GPL violation, it has to be something else. MS must be either using or is planning to use true SCO code, libraries, etc.
Remember SCO's fuss a while back about companies using some SCO libraries on Linux to run old SCO apps? What if MS licensed these libraries to allow companies to run old SCO binaries on NT via MSfU? That would give MS a leg up over LINUX, BSD, etc. for these companies that need to run old SCO code.
SCO is going down. Everyone knows this. Companies that need to run old apps compiled for SCO need options. My "guess" is that MS is looking to provide a legal option for these companies - for a price.
From what I understand, Apple already has a license (someone please correct me if I'm wrong...) Also, SCO claims that IBM took SCO code and put it in the Linux kernel, which would not affect BSD at all. Of course, there is nothing stoping SCO from claiming that (for example) Apple did the same thing - releasing SCO IP back into the BSD tree.
The whole thing is just SO full of crap of course that no sane person believes anything SCO says anymore.
Well, I did put a normal AC in a casement. What I did was put a bracket on the outside wall that holds the AC from falling out, and build a wood frame with a lexan pane that fills the space over the AC. Works just fine.
If you put the fan on a lower speed, then the compressor is on longer but is not being quite as effective since your are not moving as much air over the coils (but what air IS moving across the coil is getting a little colder than it would at high speed.)
It's best to just make sure the AC is sized right for the room. Most utility companies have a chart as well as the owners manuals for the AC's. I'm sure it can be found via google.
The difference in electricity used with a Massive unit in a tiny room is much bigger that a unit slightly too large. I would tend to error one size up, but not two or three.
It's not just a thought, it's the way you should do it. That big-ass AC is going to cycle on and off all the time which is NOT efficient (motors suck tons of juice at startup). For a 12x12 room, a 5000 BTU AC is perfect. That big unit is best for something like a livingroom / dining / kitchen area of at least 20x30.
Yeah, great except for the fact that it's about 7 times more expensive than a 120G hard drive that holds over 200 CD's, takes much more space, more power, and is slower than snail shit. This is that reason that jukeboxes are all but dead in the computer arena.
The question was about storing CD's, not accessing them. I keep frequently used CD's on a hard disk that I don't backup (since I can recover from originals farily easily.) For storing, I got huge packs of paper sleeves for the CD's and store them in a modified old dresser that looked nice. Basically I built new heavy duty drawer boxes out of 3/4" cabinet grade plywood for the sides, 1/2" plywood for the bottom, and heavy-duty full extension drawer slides. I put the original drawer front on the box so it looks nice.
I get about 1000 CD's in a drawer that way, which is fucking heavy - so it needs the modified drawers. I also put in some front-to-back dividers to keep things neat. I use tag-board dividers to label sections so I can find things easily.
You can also find commercial heavy duty steel units with the right sized drawers from most major office supply companies, but they cost >$1,000.
If Stallman has done all that much damage to Open source with the GNU/Linux thing, then why (from a marketing standpoint) is Linux winning so much mind share compared to BSD? If you are really looking for villains, MS and SCO are much more appropriate targets.
Rather than hate the guy, I just ignore him. In the larger scheme of things, he really is a non-player frankly. Actions by heavyweights like IBM, HP, and Sun carry SO much more weight than ramblings of Stallman.
Um, arn't MS Windows users paying MICROSOFT to figure this out? MS does have the in-house talent to come up with a solution for this, they just choose not to address the problem. They just go on pretending that everything is fine.
What Russ is attepting to do is tell MS to wake the hell up and fix it, and that if you are a Windows user that you should know that Windows Update is basically a pile of shit and that you can't trust it.
So I guess don't quite understand you beef. Is MS paying Russ to solve Windows Update problems and he isn't doing the job or something?
As an end-user to commercial software, your job when it comes to bugs is to report them. Not fix them.
Unfortunately, this isn't true. It's only a matter of time before spam is sent as email worms / viruses, or spammers start hacking into moron's computers with script-kiddie tools and spam away. Spammers have no ethics, and breaking the law is like eating french fries.
That's a bogus argument. Are you telling me that you have a hard time telling spam apart from real email? Right... EVERYONE knows exactly what spam is. It has been defined quite well, repeatedly. Search google.
Well, that's fine. You know about all the clients willing to jump through hoops to get to you. You do NOT know about all the clients who said "fuck that" and went to your competitor.
If ANY company put me through a TDMA like system, I wouldn't deal with them. You see, it puts forth the impression that their time is more valuable than my time. This is the same attitude I have for aweful phone menu systems. If I can't hit Zero and get a human, I go somewhere else.
Now if you combine something like spamassasin with TDMA and ONLY run messages tagged as spam though TDMA, THEN you may have something. Running ALL mail through TDMA outright is just too annoying.
That said, spamassasin isn't perfect either. I've had a few non-spam messages tagged, and more and more real spam is starting to get through as spammers adapt to filters (as they will do with ANY technological solution.)
Yeah, I admit that this is somewhat of a flamebait, (but so was the original/. question) but that's the problem with closed source and a abusive monopoly. If MS had been forced to open all API's and file formats like some of us were hoping, you wouldn't be having this problem.
For some strange reason, people think that Outlook is a stand-alone product. This is somewhat true, but you (like the poster found out) lose most of the compelling features if you fail to use Exchange. Look mom! I have a shirt with no pants!
Some people will probably point out that you may be able to use OpenMail or Insight Server (Insight Connector?), but these are also expensive products that don't fully integrate with Outlook either. If you are going to go high-end commercial, you might as well go with exchange (but put the damn thing behind a firewall / UNIX mail relay server fer christs sakes.)
Of course typing "shared outlook contact lists" in google comes up with a page with lots of info on the subject, but I didn't see anything that exactly matched the poster's requirements. Lot's of kludgy stuff, mostly commercial, all trying to make the closed source pile of crap a little more usable.
I wouldn't use NiMH for this application due to the batteries characteristics. NiMH lose somewhere around 5% of their charge every day just sitting there. High capacity NiCads work just fine and the voltage is lower yet. They are also cheaper. Using them in an application like this you shouldn't have a "memory effect" problem either. NiMH, like Li-ion, are great for high-drain devices.
Sanding machine? Oh you mean the puck that I put the cable in that I move in a figure 8 pattern on the sanding pads? It actually goes quite fast once you get used to it.
Other than that though, you are right. Fiber is MUCH more expensive to work with on all angles. Cable installation into an existing building that isn't designed to allow for it (dropped ceilings) is a PITA. Wireless just sucks though. Even in a normal house I have dead areas or low-bit rate areas. Depending on the layout of the complex you would need a shitload of AP's. You are also sharing the 2.4G band with tons of other crap that in a high-density environment would make 802.x unworkable (and the newer faster stuff has even WORSE range.)
So if you aren't certified and you break their ribs (and you will break their ribs if you are doing CPR right), you will not be protected.
Getting a bit off topic arn't we?
Anyway, my Scuba dive instructor put it this way. If someone needs CPR, they are dead. If you screw up, they are still dead, you didn't make them "deader". If you don't screw up, they may live. Which is better? I would suspect that the info you received during certification was specific to your state (which must be really fucked up considering...) or just plain wrong. It's not uncommon for instrutors to give out bogus legal info - they are not laywers or judges generally.
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You're thinking of the OTHER Bill.
Just read that drivel, and there ARE some valid points, but it is NOT universally true.
Case in point, I was on a team that redesigned an entire large-scale system from scratch. The old system was built in lots of little parts using various languages (shell, perl, java, c++, c, python, lisp), multiple databases from various vendors, had virtually no internal documentation on how anything worked, etc. They system was quite unstable crashing multiple times a day, and very difficult to enhance without breaking shit. Kinda like Windows...
We re-built the entire system in about a year (about 750K lines of code which was about half the size of the original code.) The result was amazing. After the initial deployment period where the bugs were worked out, the system was rock solid being able to stay up for months at a time, was Very easy to enhance, had tones more features and flexability. We had a great team, and a solid commitment from senior management providing the needed resources.
Netscape's biggest problem was not starting over from scratch, but poor project management (not keeping people within original design constraints) and a lack serious commitment from senior managment. Rather than having a very tight set of requirements and design goals, things were very nebulous and got out of control very quickly. No longer were they building a new browser, but a cross-platform framework for any kind of application they could think of. When you look at projects such as Galeon, most of that bloat is ripped out.
Rather than folling a bad example of how to run a re-design project (mozilla) MS could EASILY afford a new team to start Windows from scratch, leaving the existing team in place to continue to enhance / maintain the existing code base. This is the step that Netscape missed. They only used a small fraction of their people to maintain (and NOT enhance) the old code.
Joel is making his claim by using the worst case example. Kinda like if I claimed that you should never put the gas tank in the back of a car pointing to the Pinto as my evidence, ignoring the thousands of other car designs that worked.
MS has always given users what they want
Nice try, but not even close. People have been asking for MS to open their file formats and api's for years. They have yet to comply. People have been asking MS to concentrate on reliability and security since the Windows 1.0 days. 10 years later we are still waiting.
Most ppl know that there is a tradeoff between functionality and security
This is just not true either. Most people that know ANYTHING AT ALL about software realize that you can have BOTH. Exactly what functionality is lost when you fix a buffer overflow problem for example? If you look at MS's security patches, they don't remove needed functionality, they fix the security problem.
MS's priorities are about marketshare and profit. That's IT. The ONLY times that they actually do anything in response to user request is when they perceive a market share loss to a competitor. Case in point: IE sucked blendered toad doo doo until MS decided to capture market share from Netscape. Users are begging for pop-up relief but it is NOT AVAILBALE from Microsoft. They have ZERO incentive to add it as there is no effective competition anymore. In fact, the ONLY changes to IE that we will see now is further departures from W3C standards and more "lock-in" to MS proprietary technology.
MS has brought this "trashing" upon themselves. As long as they continue to release garbage software (like the latest XP security patch that they had to pull when it trashed peoples machines) they will continue to earn this ire.
MS has the resources and potential to do the right thing and release good software, they just choose not to. Lip service is the only thing we are getting out of redmond.
To attempt the USELESS step of matching your signature with the one on the card. I never sign my name the same twice. Many times it's not even close. What's worse is the Home Depot "sign on the touch screen" thing that is so bad it's almost unreadable.
By the way, the swipers are not really for your credit card privacy, they are really for ATM cards so you can enter the PIN. Yeah, I know you can run a credit card through, but I don't even bother.
If you are really concerned about card theft, you can always write "see drivers license" on the signature spot. Won't stop people from buying gas at an automated pump though.
Yeah, online purchases are a problem. Amex has "one time only" card numbers that you can use when buynig stuff online and you don't trust the merchant or system.
Frankly, I'd like to see the big companies (Visa, Amex, etc.) have a paypal Like system (but without the extra "account" bullshit and paypal politics etc.) so you never need to give a merchant your card number. Verisign announced something like this years ago, but I have yet to see any merchant using it.
You obviously don't understand the executive hiring process. The bigger the failure you are, the bigger the paycheck at the next company because you MUST have learned from your mistakes.
Just a thought, but SCO most likely has it's own patents independant of anything they got (or didn't REALLY get) from Novell.
I highly doubt that MS would have bought Interix if there was any question that their product contained or was tainted by any GPL code at all. The legal threat of the GPL would hurt them MUCH more than SCO. With SCO, they could easily settle. Somehow I don't see the FSF settling for any reasonable sum. BSD is a non issue due to the license.
So nah, I don't buy it. You can't license linux code from SCO and be free of the GPL. Since the SCO case is against Linux and not BSD, and licensing SCO wouldn't help with a Linux GPL violation, it has to be something else. MS must be either using or is planning to use true SCO code, libraries, etc.
Remember SCO's fuss a while back about companies using some SCO libraries on Linux to run old SCO apps? What if MS licensed these libraries to allow companies to run old SCO binaries on NT via MSfU? That would give MS a leg up over LINUX, BSD, etc. for these companies that need to run old SCO code.
SCO is going down. Everyone knows this. Companies that need to run old apps compiled for SCO need options. My "guess" is that MS is looking to provide a legal option for these companies - for a price.
From what I understand, Apple already has a license (someone please correct me if I'm wrong...) Also, SCO claims that IBM took SCO code and put it in the Linux kernel, which would not affect BSD at all. Of course, there is nothing stoping SCO from claiming that (for example) Apple did the same thing - releasing SCO IP back into the BSD tree.
The whole thing is just SO full of crap of course that no sane person believes anything SCO says anymore.
Of course humidifiers put out a fair amount of heat. They are basically air conditioners where the heat is not vented out.
Well, I did put a normal AC in a casement. What I did was put a bracket on the outside wall that holds the AC from falling out, and build a wood frame with a lexan pane that fills the space over the AC. Works just fine.
If you put the fan on a lower speed, then the compressor is on longer but is not being quite as effective since your are not moving as much air over the coils (but what air IS moving across the coil is getting a little colder than it would at high speed.)
It's best to just make sure the AC is sized right for the room. Most utility companies have a chart as well as the owners manuals for the AC's. I'm sure it can be found via google.
The difference in electricity used with a Massive unit in a tiny room is much bigger that a unit slightly too large. I would tend to error one size up, but not two or three.
It's not just a thought, it's the way you should do it. That big-ass AC is going to cycle on and off all the time which is NOT efficient (motors suck tons of juice at startup). For a 12x12 room, a 5000 BTU AC is perfect. That big unit is best for something like a livingroom / dining / kitchen area of at least 20x30.
Yeah, great except for the fact that it's about 7 times more expensive than a 120G hard drive that holds over 200 CD's, takes much more space, more power, and is slower than snail shit. This is that reason that jukeboxes are all but dead in the computer arena.
The question was about storing CD's, not accessing them. I keep frequently used CD's on a hard disk that I don't backup (since I can recover from originals farily easily.) For storing, I got huge packs of paper sleeves for the CD's and store them in a modified old dresser that looked nice. Basically I built new heavy duty drawer boxes out of 3/4" cabinet grade plywood for the sides, 1/2" plywood for the bottom, and heavy-duty full extension drawer slides. I put the original drawer front on the box so it looks nice.
I get about 1000 CD's in a drawer that way, which is fucking heavy - so it needs the modified drawers. I also put in some front-to-back dividers to keep things neat. I use tag-board dividers to label sections so I can find things easily.
You can also find commercial heavy duty steel units with the right sized drawers from most major office supply companies, but they cost >$1,000.
If you fit in a CD hole, you NEED all the penis enlargement spams.
If Stallman has done all that much damage to Open source with the GNU/Linux thing, then why (from a marketing standpoint) is Linux winning so much mind share compared to BSD? If you are really looking for villains, MS and SCO are much more appropriate targets.
Rather than hate the guy, I just ignore him. In the larger scheme of things, he really is a non-player frankly. Actions by heavyweights like IBM, HP, and Sun carry SO much more weight than ramblings of Stallman.
Um, arn't MS Windows users paying MICROSOFT to figure this out? MS does have the in-house talent to come up with a solution for this, they just choose not to address the problem. They just go on pretending that everything is fine.
What Russ is attepting to do is tell MS to wake the hell up and fix it, and that if you are a Windows user that you should know that Windows Update is basically a pile of shit and that you can't trust it.
So I guess don't quite understand you beef. Is MS paying Russ to solve Windows Update problems and he isn't doing the job or something?
As an end-user to commercial software, your job when it comes to bugs is to report them. Not fix them.
and "apt-get update;apt-get upgrade" is hard?
Unfortunately, this isn't true. It's only a matter of time before spam is sent as email worms / viruses, or spammers start hacking into moron's computers with script-kiddie tools and spam away. Spammers have no ethics, and breaking the law is like eating french fries.
That's a bogus argument. Are you telling me that you have a hard time telling spam apart from real email? Right... EVERYONE knows exactly what spam is. It has been defined quite well, repeatedly. Search google.
Well, that's fine. You know about all the clients willing to jump through hoops to get to you. You do NOT know about all the clients who said "fuck that" and went to your competitor.
If ANY company put me through a TDMA like system, I wouldn't deal with them. You see, it puts forth the impression that their time is more valuable than my time. This is the same attitude I have for aweful phone menu systems. If I can't hit Zero and get a human, I go somewhere else.
Now if you combine something like spamassasin with TDMA and ONLY run messages tagged as spam though TDMA, THEN you may have something. Running ALL mail through TDMA outright is just too annoying.
That said, spamassasin isn't perfect either. I've had a few non-spam messages tagged, and more and more real spam is starting to get through as spammers adapt to filters (as they will do with ANY technological solution.)
Yeah, I admit that this is somewhat of a flamebait, (but so was the original /. question) but that's the problem with closed source and a abusive monopoly. If MS had been forced to open all API's and file formats like some of us were hoping, you wouldn't be having this problem.
For some strange reason, people think that Outlook is a stand-alone product. This is somewhat true, but you (like the poster found out) lose most of the compelling features if you fail to use Exchange. Look mom! I have a shirt with no pants!
Some people will probably point out that you may be able to use OpenMail or Insight Server (Insight Connector?), but these are also expensive products that don't fully integrate with Outlook either. If you are going to go high-end commercial, you might as well go with exchange (but put the damn thing behind a firewall / UNIX mail relay server fer christs sakes.)
Of course typing "shared outlook contact lists" in google comes up with a page with lots of info on the subject, but I didn't see anything that exactly matched the poster's requirements. Lot's of kludgy stuff, mostly commercial, all trying to make the closed source pile of crap a little more usable.
I wouldn't use NiMH for this application due to the batteries characteristics. NiMH lose somewhere around 5% of their charge every day just sitting there. High capacity NiCads work just fine and the voltage is lower yet. They are also cheaper. Using them in an application like this you shouldn't have a "memory effect" problem either. NiMH, like Li-ion, are great for high-drain devices.
But I like your idea. That's the way to go!
Sanding machine? Oh you mean the puck that I put the cable in that I move in a figure 8 pattern on the sanding pads? It actually goes quite fast once you get used to it.
Other than that though, you are right. Fiber is MUCH more expensive to work with on all angles. Cable installation into an existing building that isn't designed to allow for it (dropped ceilings) is a PITA. Wireless just sucks though. Even in a normal house I have dead areas or low-bit rate areas. Depending on the layout of the complex you would need a shitload of AP's. You are also sharing the 2.4G band with tons of other crap that in a high-density environment would make 802.x unworkable (and the newer faster stuff has even WORSE range.)
So if you aren't certified and you break their ribs (and you will break their ribs if you are doing CPR right), you will not be protected.
Getting a bit off topic arn't we?
Anyway, my Scuba dive instructor put it this way. If someone needs CPR, they are dead. If you screw up, they are still dead, you didn't make them "deader". If you don't screw up, they may live. Which is better? I would suspect that the info you received during certification was specific to your state (which must be really fucked up considering...) or just plain wrong. It's not uncommon for instrutors to give out bogus legal info - they are not laywers or judges generally.