Ok to be honest I didn't have the patience to read this whole thing but I did post it as a Quick Link on Plastic, one of the sites referenced (and of which I am a frequent user)
Now I am sitting in Plastic Chat, watching people comment on the paper. It seems as if the author has barely spent any time on Plastic, and he seems to have missed the forrest for the trees (as in, he looked at details, decided he didn't like them. Meanwhile all these features added up together make for a pretty nice, relatively diverse community/discussion)
Not that I am encouraging you people to give Plastic a try. More like, I am commenting on the lack of thoroughness in the paper. Which, admitedly, I did not read.
... that google has more than 500 shareholders currently. Who are they?
The Google page advertising positions says that employees get stock options. I guess that means that every Google employee is a (potential) shareholder.
If this is the case, then Google corporate knew what they were getting into. They did not have to give stock options, and if it's stock options* that pushed Google over the 500 shareholders threshold (if not that, then why are there over half a thousand owners?) there's no doubt they were prepared to find themselves in this situation. Whether this is because they're ready for an IPO or not, hard to say. But either way they were not blindsided by this.
* I work for a private company which avoids stock options (and therefore having to file SEC statements) while giving employees a sense of ownership by giving bonuses directly proportional to company performance.
When a potential customer is at your site, you know they just came from one competitor, and will probably be at another in a second...
Usually when making large purchases from online businesses, people like to complete the deal on the phone. To find out more information, seal the deal with another human being, etc.
They usually call up one retailer out of the few they had already investigated. By having live chat on websites, customers will be able to have this type of "next level" discussion more easily with several retailers, therefore, hopefully, leading to a more informed buying decision.
Perhaps popups are too much, but having live chat available on retailer sites is great.
Well maybe not bad news, but read anyway. I am a terrible person...
Why does your wife "need" to get away to a rural area? Is she crazy? Easily distracted? Do YOU want to live the rest of your life in the middle of nowhere? What the hell is that? You have a job, you're working. You probably enjoy going out once in a while at night. WTF is it w. moving to the "boonies?"
When I was younger, I had all the time in the word to research hardware to get the biggest possible bang for my buck.
This is no longer the case.
I was shopping for a replacement CPU for my motherboard in order to replace a dead one. The old CPU was a Celeron, the new one could be either a Celeron or a P4, as the motherboard could take either.
I went to Pricewatch and saw that for $X I could buy a Y GhZ Celeron, or Z GhZ Pentium 4, with Z always being smaller than Y for any price-point X.
So how the hell do I, without having to research for hours, figure out which CPU (higer GhZ Celeron or lower GhZ P4) is better for what I need to do?
It would be very valuable to me if all of these CPUs were just ranked on some performance scale. That would, at least, be a much better starting point for future research.
Now, you can tell from my attitude above, that I want my computer to "just work!." If I was really interested, I'd do my research and figure out the best CPU for me regardless of the naming convention. If I was buying in bulk (ie for busienss purposes) I'd research more, too.
But hell, for people who don't really care to research that much (like me, and average consumer) it's good to have CPUs ranked in terms of performance in an obvious and visible way.
some weeks/months ago we had a discussion about programmers having desks on an open floor vs. having private offices or semi-private cubes. I was one of the few voices in support of open floors, at the time, for the reasons of fasciliating team communication.
Well here's another argument for open floor plans. Yes, you get distracted more, when someone comes over and asks you something. This also makes you look away from the PC, look at a person, roll your eyes as a joke, look down in thought, et cetera.
I noticed this because a few times I had spent the whole day at work listening to music through headphones and noticed my eyes were getting tired. Why? I think it's because the headphones shielded me from the little distractions (like when someone walked near me or my manager wondered aloud about something.) Usually these events warrant a little turn of the head, which breaks up your tunnel vision.
I often ask myself the same question (and not because people tell me I am brilliant).
This is because now that I work I am not learning much. Back in school, I didn't have this problem, as my brain was always crunching something.
There's a library near my job. I go there sometime and walk by shelves, and when I see a book that does not sound totally boring while being on a subject I have no idea about, I grab it. In fact, I grab a few of them.
To be honest I rarely finish any of these books, but it constantly gives me more and more data in my head, as I at least become aware of the subjects.
In particular, there's a great book called something like Century of Mind, or something like that, about all the great thinkers of the 20th century, from Picasso and Freud, and Wright Brothers to.. well, I didn't finish the book but you get the point... it was great to get into the heads and the environment during which these great thinkers did their thinking.
Oh, and I didn't finish it because someone put it on reserve when I came to renew it and they took it from me.
I've read the linked article (really!) and I think Subversion sounds like a good idea. Primarily, I like the fact that everything you can do with CVS you can do with Subversion in the same way as with CVS.
I am really curious how much demand there is for Subversion's new features, however.
Do developers out there voice the need to store binaries? I can imagine this being needed for web developers and such, but I think programmers can just build their binaries from CVS.
Also, have there been many problems that required atomic commits? Can someone explain why this is important? I mean, the idea is you'll need to merge one way or another. I can see the point being in that what you commit at any given time will compile (presuming you're commiting completed code) but realistically, does anyone not fix their up-to-date checks as soon as they happen?
Also, Subversions says that it is much faster at things like tagging, but tagging is not a very frequent operation...
To me it sounds like a great product but I am not able to see a compelling reason why most development shops out there who are currently in CVS would rush to switch.
If you run a small business, particularly one that serves the general public rather than other businesses, one of your biggest problems is lawsuits. You own a store, some clutz slips. You're sued. You own a laundry, someone pours bleech in their eye, you're sued.
We think of doctors as being very wealthy but they're esentially small business owners. Some, like pediatrics, don't even make much more than a senior developer. I believe that doctors are mandated to have malpractice insurance. If a doctor can say that she screens her patients for known suers, not only can she protect her business from suits, she can also negotiate a discount on her insurance premium.
This is not some faceless HMO cutting corners on care it provides. The HMOs can get the information on their customers anyway, they've got resources for that without the website. The website allows small private practices to know who they're dealing with. Looking at it that way, I think it's great, as it allows a person to know who they're about to enter into a business relationship with. This does not affect emergency care or hospital care. It only helps non-emergency private doctors.
"It is rather ironic that Microsoft and other closed model companies rather resemble the Stalinist or Maoist model of a command economy with complete centralised control."
No it's Linux that's communism. Sure, you've got "power of the people." But the quality of life is inferior to those living under imperialist opression;-)
This is a surprise to me. Remember the prediction (from an IBM exec IIRC) that the only reason he could imagine for a home PC is maybe for the wife to store her recipes on;-)
A normal person, if they open their hood at all, do it for one of the few reasons below:
1. Check fluids (breaks, oil, trans, window-washer, coolant) 2. Do a jumpstart / maybe change battery 3. Change light bulbs in headlights 4. Change spark plugs 5. Change air filter.
Most of these things are considered "advanced" as is, and most people pay someone else to do it.
Now, there's nothing that says that any of these things should be inaccessible if the hood is welded shut.
1. All these levels can be checked electronically, altering you well in advance of any impending problem. In which case you can go get it toped off.
2. There maybe a special plug somewhere in the car for doing jump starts. Or better yet some coputerized logic that prevents your stupid ass from walking away while the lights are on.
3. Light bulbs can be left changeable without forcing you to reach around from the engine. *
4. Modern spark plugs don't need to be changed all the time anyway.
5. The airfilter can be left externally changeable as well *
* Perhaps by allowing access from underneath...
Other than that, there's really no reason for you to go under the hood. If you're a real advanced home mechanic, just keep your 1969 Mustang running forever;-) If you're not a mechanic, you're not even going to care whether you can physically open the hood or not.
Isn't it funny that something like this, in the past, would have not been considered terrorism? This was just a prank that went too far. It wasn't fair to the police for getting the prank to their 911 line. Their business line, yes, but not the emergency line. Does anyone think this have a different outcome if he had it go to their "business" line instead?
No, it's not funny. And yes, it would have been different if the script dialed a non-emergency number. He's being charged with endangering lives because having a punch of people rediling 911 with their modems could do just that. He's not charged with murder because obviously his activities didn't lead to some frantic call for help being ignored. 911 is serious business and the authorities are right about beeing serious about prosecuting it severely.
Also, I have seen others say the script relied on the stupidity of the person's foes. The guy had no motive to do anything after the fact, so how did it endanger public safety? Shouldn't the police be able to handle a few false calls to their emergency system? You think that prank calls to 911, as sad as they are, would be built into the equation of deciding how many people they need on shift in order to cover their district.
And this is probably the case. However, I am willing to bet that 911 has followup policies, ie, when someone calls them and doesn't speak (like a modem that doesn't hear another modem) they probably have to call back to investigate, log it in some special way, or whatever. Maybe there's even some script that says "if you get calls from a certain number a few times but the person is not speaking, assume they are having a hear attack and send an ambulance" or something like that. The bottom line is that messing with 911 is stupid and dangerous.
I guess this is just another overreaction by our lovely government.
What would you like them to do? Give this guy candy and pat him on the back saying "we know you're a good guy. we really don't mind a few hundred random phonecalls. those guys are dicks anyway"
Block p2p apps by default, but anyone who asks can have those ports unblocked.... You can't really stop P2P, but this way you have done something.
Well if you don't let them have ports unblocked at all, then you've stopped P2P, right? So I guess you can do it by omiting the "can have those ports unblocked part"
Anyone here from SUNY Stony Brook? I don't think anyone can download shit on campus from any of the P2Ps (something did work last year but not anymore, so I hear)
Slashdot Mirror
Ok to be honest I didn't have the patience to read this whole thing but I did post it as a Quick Link on Plastic, one of the sites referenced (and of which I am a frequent user)
Now I am sitting in Plastic Chat, watching people comment on the paper. It seems as if the author has barely spent any time on Plastic, and he seems to have missed the forrest for the trees (as in, he looked at details, decided he didn't like them. Meanwhile all these features added up together make for a pretty nice, relatively diverse community/discussion)
Not that I am encouraging you people to give Plastic a try. More like, I am commenting on the lack of thoroughness in the paper. Which, admitedly, I did not read.
What's wrong with Cocaine?
Cocaine or ritalin are probably whay you're looking for. They will both provide you with energy and motivate you to do something.
Probably not as bonkers as you'd go without your *.mpegs
Unfortunately not. Our bonuses represent no equity.
... that google has more than 500 shareholders currently. Who are they?
The Google page advertising positions says that employees get stock options. I guess that means that every Google employee is a (potential) shareholder.
If this is the case, then Google corporate knew what they were getting into. They did not have to give stock options, and if it's stock options* that pushed Google over the 500 shareholders threshold (if not that, then why are there over half a thousand owners?) there's no doubt they were prepared to find themselves in this situation. Whether this is because they're ready for an IPO or not, hard to say. But either way they were not blindsided by this.
* I work for a private company which avoids stock options (and therefore having to file SEC statements) while giving employees a sense of ownership by giving bonuses directly proportional to company performance.
not yet
Yes. By century ago I meant "roughly 100 years ago" :)
The indians have reinvented the concept of a telegraph, except they replaced morse code with e-mail.
Americans were doing this stuff in the last century. Western Union, American Telephone & Telegraph, etc.
This is great, and it should be a trend.
When a potential customer is at your site, you know they just came from one competitor, and will probably be at another in a second...
Usually when making large purchases from online businesses, people like to complete the deal on the phone. To find out more information, seal the deal with another human being, etc.
They usually call up one retailer out of the few they had already investigated. By having live chat on websites, customers will be able to have this type of "next level" discussion more easily with several retailers, therefore, hopefully, leading to a more informed buying decision.
Perhaps popups are too much, but having live chat available on retailer sites is great.
Why didn't they just make a new baby? It's fun, and cheao.
Well maybe not bad news, but read anyway. I am a terrible person...
Why does your wife "need" to get away to a rural area? Is she crazy? Easily distracted? Do YOU want to live the rest of your life in the middle of nowhere? What the hell is that? You have a job, you're working. You probably enjoy going out once in a while at night. WTF is it w. moving to the "boonies?"
When I was younger, I had all the time in the word to research hardware to get the biggest possible bang for my buck.
This is no longer the case.
I was shopping for a replacement CPU for my motherboard in order to replace a dead one. The old CPU was a Celeron, the new one could be either a Celeron or a P4, as the motherboard could take either.
I went to Pricewatch and saw that for $X I could buy a Y GhZ Celeron, or Z GhZ Pentium 4, with Z always being smaller than Y for any price-point X.
So how the hell do I, without having to research for hours, figure out which CPU (higer GhZ Celeron or lower GhZ P4) is better for what I need to do?
It would be very valuable to me if all of these CPUs were just ranked on some performance scale. That would, at least, be a much better starting point for future research.
Now, you can tell from my attitude above, that I want my computer to "just work!." If I was really interested, I'd do my research and figure out the best CPU for me regardless of the naming convention. If I was buying in bulk (ie for busienss purposes) I'd research more, too.
But hell, for people who don't really care to research that much (like me, and average consumer) it's good to have CPUs ranked in terms of performance in an obvious and visible way.
Don't you fill out "occupation" on your tax form?
some weeks/months ago we had a discussion about programmers having desks on an open floor vs. having private offices or semi-private cubes. I was one of the few voices in support of open floors, at the time, for the reasons of fasciliating team communication.
Well here's another argument for open floor plans. Yes, you get distracted more, when someone comes over and asks you something. This also makes you look away from the PC, look at a person, roll your eyes as a joke, look down in thought, et cetera.
I noticed this because a few times I had spent the whole day at work listening to music through headphones and noticed my eyes were getting tired. Why? I think it's because the headphones shielded me from the little distractions (like when someone walked near me or my manager wondered aloud about something.) Usually these events warrant a little turn of the head, which breaks up your tunnel vision.
I often ask myself the same question (and not because people tell me I am brilliant).
This is because now that I work I am not learning much. Back in school, I didn't have this problem, as my brain was always crunching something.
There's a library near my job. I go there sometime and walk by shelves, and when I see a book that does not sound totally boring while being on a subject I have no idea about, I grab it. In fact, I grab a few of them.
To be honest I rarely finish any of these books, but it constantly gives me more and more data in my head, as I at least become aware of the subjects.
In particular, there's a great book called something like Century of Mind, or something like that, about all the great thinkers of the 20th century, from Picasso and Freud, and Wright Brothers to.. well, I didn't finish the book but you get the point... it was great to get into the heads and the environment during which these great thinkers did their thinking.
Oh, and I didn't finish it because someone put it on reserve when I came to renew it and they took it from me.
Good point, I didn't know people do that.Why build upon every submit? To see if what you've got in the repository is compilable at all times?
I've read the linked article (really!) and I think Subversion sounds like a good idea. Primarily, I like the fact that everything you can do with CVS you can do with Subversion in the same way as with CVS.
I am really curious how much demand there is for Subversion's new features, however.
Do developers out there voice the need to store binaries? I can imagine this being needed for web developers and such, but I think programmers can just build their binaries from CVS.
Also, have there been many problems that required atomic commits? Can someone explain why this is important? I mean, the idea is you'll need to merge one way or another. I can see the point being in that what you commit at any given time will compile (presuming you're commiting completed code) but realistically, does anyone not fix their up-to-date checks as soon as they happen?
Also, Subversions says that it is much faster at things like tagging, but tagging is not a very frequent operation...
To me it sounds like a great product but I am not able to see a compelling reason why most development shops out there who are currently in CVS would rush to switch.
Not a flame btw, just an opinion.
If you run a small business, particularly one that serves the general public rather than other businesses, one of your biggest problems is lawsuits. You own a store, some clutz slips. You're sued. You own a laundry, someone pours bleech in their eye, you're sued.
We think of doctors as being very wealthy but they're esentially small business owners. Some, like pediatrics, don't even make much more than a senior developer. I believe that doctors are mandated to have malpractice insurance. If a doctor can say that she screens her patients for known suers, not only can she protect her business from suits, she can also negotiate a discount on her insurance premium.
This is not some faceless HMO cutting corners on care it provides. The HMOs can get the information on their customers anyway, they've got resources for that without the website. The website allows small private practices to know who they're dealing with. Looking at it that way, I think it's great, as it allows a person to know who they're about to enter into a business relationship with. This does not affect emergency care or hospital care. It only helps non-emergency private doctors.
No free medicine, no free software.
"It is rather ironic that Microsoft and other closed model companies rather resemble the Stalinist or Maoist model of a command economy with complete centralised control."
;-)
No it's Linux that's communism. Sure, you've got "power of the people." But the quality of life is inferior to those living under imperialist opression
This is a surprise to me. Remember the prediction (from an IBM exec IIRC) that the only reason he could imagine for a home PC is maybe for the wife to store her recipes on ;-)
Here's why.
;-) If you're not a mechanic, you're not even going to care whether you can physically open the hood or not.
A normal person, if they open their hood at all, do it for one of the few reasons below:
1. Check fluids (breaks, oil, trans, window-washer, coolant)
2. Do a jumpstart / maybe change battery
3. Change light bulbs in headlights
4. Change spark plugs
5. Change air filter.
Most of these things are considered "advanced" as is, and most people pay someone else to do it.
Now, there's nothing that says that any of these things should be inaccessible if the hood is welded shut.
1. All these levels can be checked electronically, altering you well in advance of any impending problem. In which case you can go get it toped off.
2. There maybe a special plug somewhere in the car for doing jump starts. Or better yet some coputerized logic that prevents your stupid ass from walking away while the lights are on.
3. Light bulbs can be left changeable without forcing you to reach around from the engine. *
4. Modern spark plugs don't need to be changed all the time anyway.
5. The airfilter can be left externally changeable as well *
* Perhaps by allowing access from underneath...
Other than that, there's really no reason for you to go under the hood. If you're a real advanced home mechanic, just keep your 1969 Mustang running forever
Isn't it funny that something like this, in the past, would have not been considered terrorism? This was just a prank that went too far. It wasn't fair to the police for getting the prank to their 911 line. Their business line, yes, but not the emergency line. Does anyone think this have a different outcome if he had it go to their "business" line instead?
No, it's not funny. And yes, it would have been different if the script dialed a non-emergency number. He's being charged with endangering lives because having a punch of people rediling 911 with their modems could do just that. He's not charged with murder because obviously his activities didn't lead to some frantic call for help being ignored. 911 is serious business and the authorities are right about beeing serious about prosecuting it severely.
Also, I have seen others say the script relied on the stupidity of the person's foes. The guy had no motive to do anything after the fact, so how did it endanger public safety? Shouldn't the police be able to handle a few false calls to their emergency system? You think that prank calls to 911, as sad as they are, would be built into the equation of deciding how many people they need on shift in order to cover their district.
And this is probably the case. However, I am willing to bet that 911 has followup policies, ie, when someone calls them and doesn't speak (like a modem that doesn't hear another modem) they probably have to call back to investigate, log it in some special way, or whatever. Maybe there's even some script that says "if you get calls from a certain number a few times but the person is not speaking, assume they are having a hear attack and send an ambulance" or something like that. The bottom line is that messing with 911 is stupid and dangerous.
I guess this is just another overreaction by our lovely government.
What would you like them to do? Give this guy candy and pat him on the back saying "we know you're a good guy. we really don't mind a few hundred random phonecalls. those guys are dicks anyway"
?
Block p2p apps by default, but anyone who asks can have those ports unblocked. ... You can't really stop P2P, but this way you have done something.
Well if you don't let them have ports unblocked at all, then you've stopped P2P, right? So I guess you can do it by omiting the "can have those ports unblocked part"
Anyone here from SUNY Stony Brook? I don't think anyone can download shit on campus from any of the P2Ps (something did work last year but not anymore, so I hear)