This conversation [between Web developers and the IE team] seems to have been pretty much shut down...
It may not have been face-to-face, but for almost a decade, it seems that the conversation between IE devs and web devs has pretty much been... Web devs: Fuck you! IE devs: Fuck you!
Why does the IE team hate standards so much? It's not like they don't know how to make things work. IE5 for Mac came out in 2000 and was pretty awesome--it even supported transparent PNGs with nothing more than an <img> tag!
Dear IE team: thanks for inventing AJAX. Now please go make everything else work. kthxbye.
(Note: I know for a fact that the IE team has many talented and nice people. They (and we) are just victims of horrible decisions being made further up the chain. So this vitriol is really directed at management.)
I don't really get the whole ereader thing; sure the Iliad looks nice, but my Palm TX works perfectly.
Gah! Why does this have to come up every single time?!?!? It's very simple: Different people like different stuff! OK?
I've toyed with reading ebooks for over a decade--with my old Palm, with an Axim (with a gorgeous 640x480--200 DPI!!!--screen), and with my iPhone. None of them are any good for me. (Key words there--for me.) They don't show enough text at once and I just can't read it comfortably: I'm either holding it in a weird way or bending my neck in a weird way.
Why would I want to spend twice that money on a dedicated reader?
I don't know. It sounds like you don't. But that doesn't mean everyone else in the world feels the same.
Maybe it would be better if you worked this out for yourself. Consider this scenario: "I carry a paper calendar/to-do list and a $100 iPod shuffle. Why would I want to spend twice as much on a Palm TX?"
Interesting. I'm curious if your utility truly 'ripped' CDs or if it just played them and recorded them. (Do you happen to remember if it ran faster than 1x?) "Sound Recorder" that came with Win3.1 could record audio from a playing CD but it was limited to a certain amount of time and/or file size.
Having used most of those apps for years, I would say... - Photoshop 7 is fine. CS and CS2 added features, and CS3 did a UI overhaul but 90% of it is still the same... and you'd have a hard time teaching just 25% of what Photoshop can do in a semester-long class. (Not that CS3 doesn't have great features--the auto-align stuff kicks ass--but a lot of what I do day to day could be done with Photoshop 3.) If you believe "the basics are what's important," then old versions are fine. - Same for Flash 5. There's lots and lots there. The basic concepts haven't changed much. (Though the scripting language has, AFAIK. I'm not a heavy user of Flash.) - As for DreamWeaver, I'd say, teach code! You can go far with just a handful of basic HTML tags--p, b, i, br, hr, ul, ol, li, table, tr, th, td, div, span--and if you ever want to go "past" HTML into PHP or something, you'll need to know the code anyway. GUI editors have their place, but I've never seen a beginner make a site with one that didn't look like ass in most browsers. There are lots of good, shiny, feature-full free editors out there, like Crimson Editor which is even OSS. - Not sure how to replace MovieMaker.:-) And you can educate them about the programs themselves, not just teaching them how to use the apps. As an example, say "Here's Photoshop 7. Here's the GIMP, which is newer and free. Photoshop costs ~$1000. Here's a video from adobe.com showing some of the new features in Photoshop CS3. Make up your own mind."
I would pay $4 extra--but I shouldn't have to--for a DVD that works just like a CD does: - comes with no DRM so I can use super-cinchy programs like iTunes to rip into any format I damn well choose, now or in the future. Period.
I do not want the DVD creators to decide what formats they'll put onto a disc. (iPod format on a Sony/Columbia disc? PSP format on a Disney/Pixar disc? Ha! And what about future formats, like whatever the hell the gPhone2008 will play?) Besides, if you let them supply 'pre-ripped' tracks, guess what--they'll still come with ads, thou-shalt-not-steal warnings, etc. burned into the file. No thanks, I'll do it myself.
iTunes has worked for every CD I've tried that wasn't physically damaged. If DVDs had no DRM, just like CDs don't, you wouldn't need a gazillion* rippers (let alone ten) to do the job.
Historical note: CDs did originally come with DRM... kind of. Once upon a time, a CD, at 650 MB, was comparable to, if not larger than, the average hard drive. (In 1995, my dad's 486 had a CD-ROM drive and two 540 MB HDs. The rather-high-end Macs at work that year had maybe 2 GB drives.) Also, operating systems and common programs couldn't extract CD tracks--they showed up as 4k '.cda' files in Explorer or Finder--and music rippers didn't really exist yet. So it was kind of a 'natural' DRM. (And that was 1995--over 10 years after CDs came out.)
Expensive programs like SoundEdit could losslessly import CD tracks to WAV or AIFF, and later on (1997? '98 for sure) Toast could rip CD audio as well. Then in 1998-1999 MP3s became big, and rippers were kind of a grey thing, then they became less than grey, and iomega released RecordIt! which made MP2s so you could copy CDs to Zip disks but nobody cared, then iTunes came out, and the rest is history. But for quite a while there, CDs were pretty much uncopyable, except by analog methods.
In the meantime: HandBrake FTW. It handles over 95% of what I throw at it, and has lots and lots of good options. Shots out to the local library for having 24 and The Simpsons on DVD. Hell, it would be technically illegal for me to rip them even if I did buy them, so why bother to buy? (Though I did buy Season 5 of 24 because it was on sale for $20 and the library didn't have it. Once I was done watching it--and I ripped them anyway, so I could watch the episodes one after the other on my media center Mac, without having to wade through crappy menus, disc changes, etc.--I donated the DVDs to the library. The circle of life continues.)
* and I thought I was the only one who used that word.:-)
Also, I have to wonder how wise it is for C|Net to post that picture in light of this article, especially since it bears the legend "(C) CNET Networks."
Why does someone need to investigate this every few years? There's enough noise in the average cubefarm (where walls don't reach the ceiling)--do we really want to have everyone start talking to their computers too? And touchscreens, gestures, etc.--sure, RSI is bad, but keyboards and mice are flat, you can rest your arms a lot, and they work with more or less natural motions. (It's not a coincidence that a computer keyboard is like a piano keyboard but in two dimensions--you hit different rows by curling and uncurling your fingers.)
I used to have a touchscreen monitor and it was fun to touch the screen to scroll and 'click' on web links by literally touching them but holding your arms out in front of you for any period of time is not easy. I had a tablet PC and holding it, even casually while walking around doing inventory with it and a barcode scanner, was a huge PITA. (Ha--"A" could stand for "arm" in this case.) Looking at the tablet-holding guy brought back all the bad memories: all the fun of walking around with a clipboard, but it's five pounds or so instead of a few ounces. Yeah. Super. Sign me up.
They talk about a "formal approach to code scavenging" without even coming close to explaining what exactly that MEANS.
Agreed. Reading TFS, I thought it was going to be yet another "we can make programming like Lego!" thing. (Which it ain't, and probably never will be. Bonus reference: "Lego" is mentioned in the second paragraph of this article about Steve Jobs/NeXT/WebObjects from Wired. God bless Wired and their eternally fucked-up CMS that can't serve images for any story in the archive and, this week, shows the actual HTML code that should be formatting the Question-and-Answer portion of the article.)
Reading TFA, I really don't know much more than I did before. This is the best I could come up with:
Code scavenging is seen as the most frequent and least complex way of re-using code and has been common practice at an informal level since programming first began. Programming is difficult to teach and most programmers learn their chops by looking at working code and using it as the basis for building their own programs. In other words, they "scavenge" the good bits and tweak them to a new purpose.
The term scavenging appears to have first surfaced as a formal concept in a 1992 paper by Charles Krueger of Carnegie Mellon University. It was tested by academics in the 1990s but rejected because it yielded few gains for a lot of effort.
According to Hackett, code scavenging is worth re-visiting because the Web makes it easier to find code and re-use it. He points to sites where massive amounts of existing code are available for potential scavenging such as Google code search, Sourceforge, Code Project, Microsoft's Codeplex, and O'Reilly's Code Search. Others include the Free Software Foundation (FSF), FreeVBcode.com, Freecountry and Freshmeat.
So, code scavenging is... um, re-use? Can anyone make better sense of that than I can?
"In other words, they 'scavenge' the good bits and tweak them to a new purpose."
Um, no. You scavenge the pieces you need, not necessarily the good bits. Have you ever been looking for some code to do parse phone numbers, and while looking at source, said "Hey! This looks like a great way to compare two lists!" Probably not. You're only looking for formatting code, so that's all you see, so that's all you get. Looking at source is not like looking at produce at the food store, where you can walk by the tomatoes and they catch your eye because they're perfectly ripe and really, really nice-looking.
Rather than searching Google, I think every good programmer should take the time to create a really good library. I don't mean take the time writing great code, I mean take the time to organize it into a proper library: make one, clean, well-commented version; put things into variables, ($tableName in queries instead of the actual table name, etc.) and pull code from that when you need it, rather than just copying-and-pasting from the last place you remember using it and then changing all the variable names, table names, etc.
I plan to make mine Real Soon Now.:-)
>> So, how quickly would you run afoul of Intellectual Property laws doing this?
> That's a great knee-jerk reaction.
No, that's just the first thing that popped into his head. (Pardon me if I'm putting words in your mouth, Mr. Gambit.) With that one sentence, he did not say (or imply) "The only people who would use this are thieves." He just put out that question for people to discuss. That topic came up here just a couple days ago. I highly recommend reading that discussion. There are some very good points; among them, that if you publish something with no licensing info, it is copyrighted to you by default. (In the US at least,
It's bad enough that there's one retard on Slashdot who didn't get this joke, but I would love to meet the TWO--not one, but TWO--retards who modded him "+1, Informative"
Yes, you won't get Aero without a graphics card that supports DX9+ hardware acceleration...
True--but ALMOST EVERY SINGLE AD for Vista shows it with Aero. You CAN NOT GET things like the often-showcased 'Flip 3D' effect without Aero.* (Right? I'm pretty sure, but I don't actually run Vista, so I can't say for vertain and I'm too lazy to look it up right now. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.) So people are buying computers and not getting what they see in the ads. Period.
In most people's minds, Aero == Vista. This impression comes 100% from the Marketing folks. Serves them right. I'd love to take some Marketing folks, wipe their minds, and make them live life and make decisions based on what they see advertised. "But McDonalds said this food was healthy! And this pill was supposed to fix what's wrong with me! And this cologne was supposed to make women fall all over me! And this $399 laptop was supposed to have Flip 3D! Why is the world not what I was told?!?!? Ah, the government is at my door! Surely they're here to help."
* I don't have a circular in front of me, but IIRC, many of the ads in the Sunday paper show all the cheap computers with the same "Flip 3D in action!" screenshot. I'd love to buy a non-Aero computer and bring it back, saying "This computer can't produce the effect shown in it's advertisement."
I remember that prediction well. And the funny thing is, MS really could make a difference--not cure, but make a big dent--in spam if they wanted to. Not the way they planned, but this would help a LOT: all they would have to do would be to let everyone with a copy of XP--valid or not, even if it had a famously pirated key--update to XP SP 2. Then publicize the fact: "All copies of XP, legit or not, can now be XP SP2 boxes. No one is buying Vista anyway, so we'll take an immeasurably small loss to make the world a better place. You will have eternal amnesty for pirating XP. We will never come after anyone who updates."
In fact, if it were possible to measure, they might actually make MORE money by doing this: people with MS computers would have a better experience and would be less likely to buy a Mac the next time they're out shopping, and MS would gain some much-needed good press and goodwill from the community for once.
Apple sold just under a million iPhones in the 74 days between their introduction and the price drop. They offered a $100 refund to all those people. (Store credit, whatever.) If just half of their customers took, that, that's 500,000 x 100 = 50 MILLION DOLLARS they gave away. If Apple can give away $50,000,000 in 74 days, surely MS could stand a tiny ding in Vista sales.
I've heard this pipe dream literally dozens of times in the last decade. (Note: I'd love for it to come true--I just doubt it will.) "This new open, standardized (OS, browser, office suite, calendar, file format, network protocol) will FINALLY wrest power away from Microsoft!" The fact that companies like IBM and Oracle are behind it gives it NO weight. The effect isn't even limited to software--remember when CHRP was going to give us a great, fast, cheap, flexible PowerPC-based architecture and free us from the crappy world of x86? HA! (Not that MS makes hardware, but it's the same kind of thing.) Didn't we just discuss a couple weeks ago that industry alliances never work?
MS isn't absolutely undefeated. TCP/IP, HTML, and Internet email are notable exceptions. But overall, they've got a pretty good record of taking a small market, becoming a dominant provider, and keeping their lead. The markets where they fail most spectacularly--music players, game consoles--are when they decide they want a piece of an already-filled market. But their three biggest products--a cheap OS for cheap computers, an office suite, and Exchange servers--just continue to dominate. They make money in two ways: they sell a product (Windows) that most consumers buy, and they sell two products (Office and Exchange) that most companies buy.
Basic fact: Microsoft is the 800-lb gorilla in calendaring. No other "open" calendar system will interoperate with Exchange--Microsoft will see to that. Therefore it won't build up a critical mass of users. Therefore MS's dominance will not be unseated.
PS Microsoft is finally a member but their commitment level is not that of the other partners.
Ha! Yeah. MS also deeply cares about HTML, SVG, XML office formats, etc etc etc. </sarcasm>
And 386s with 32MB of RAM? Maybe there were some, but they hardly grew on trees.
I don't know if there were any. EVER. Really. Outside of some exotic server boards, I think 32 MB was a couple generations away. My roommate had a 486 in 1994 with a staggering 20 MB RAM. Two years later I bought a P75 that came with 8 MB; a quick trip to Fry's brought that up to 24 MB, which was quite a bit at the time. The first PCs to sell for under $1000 were Compaqs with Cyrix low-level Pentium-like chips (MediaGX) and they came with 16 MB. That was early 1997, when 486s were pretty much gone and the Pentium had been around for a year or two. So yeah, I'm pretty sure the GP is mis-remembering.
I also took an old IBM PS/1 off a friend's hands and it had a 386, ? RAM, and a 40 MB Maxtor HDD. I'd bet my next paycheck that 32 MB RAM never existed alongside a common, mainstream 386.
Woe be the man who makes a minor technical mistake amongst the ranks of Slashdot.:-) But at least it gives us all an excuse to reminisce.
Ben--thanks for the review. I'm considering getting one of these, either to use as a small server (like this guy describes) or to take out the guts and put them into a more size-efficient case. I would *love* to see some pics of the inside of this machine to see how small the components are and/or how much free space there is inside. Have you taken any?
I'm the exact opposite--I never go to google.com anymore. My two main browsers--Safari and Firefox--both have search boxes built in and it's the front page of google that I never see.
And on a related note--you know all those GPSs and all the other tech that is being used in the war? Very little of it would exist if it weren't for scientists and the space program. So c'mon, Uncle Sam--throw'em a bone. Just pull out of Iraq 90 minutes early and you'll break even.
Overall, I wouldn't put "seamless" above story in ANY case, in any medium.
It is funny (if I were snootier I might say 'ironic') but on a really, really good book I don't even notice the new chapters starting. There have been several books I've read that really hit the ground running and the first time I'd notice a new chapter was around 7 or 8.
Re:Don't get in over your head...
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Head First SQL
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Reminds me of the old joke: "Last week I couldn't even spell 'engineer', now I are one."
Who needs books? You can learn as much as you need to know for basic web apps from Philip G. (That's a great online book, and there's another here.) And he, too, is entertaining. Here's a bit comparing flat files and databases:
What's wrong with a file system (and also what's right)
Despite its unobtrusiveness, the file system on a Macintosh, Unix, or Windows machine is capable of storing any data that may be represented in digital form. For example, suppose that you are storing a mailing list in a file system file. If you accept the limitation that no e-mail address or person's name can contain a newline character, you can store one entry per line. Then you could decide that no e-mail address or name may contain a vertical bar. That lets you separate e-mail address and name fields with the vertical bar character.... [When inserting two addresses at once, ] Depending on how you wrote your program, the particular kind of file system that you have, and luck, you could get any of the following behaviors:
Both inserts succeed. One of the inserts is lost. Information from the two inserts is mixed together so that both are corrupted....
So what? Emacs may be ancient but it is still the best text editor in the world. You love using it so you might as well spend your weekends and evenings manually fixing up your flat file databases with Emacs. Who needs concurrency control?
It all depends on what kind of stove you have.
Yes, that's right, your stove. Suppose that you buy a $268,500 condo in Harvard Square. You think to yourself, "Now my friends will really be impressed with me" and invite them over for brunch. Not because you like them, but just to make them envious of your large lifestyle. Imagine your horror when all they can say is "What's this old range doing here? Don't you have a Viking stove?"
A Viking stove?!? They cost $5000. The only way you are going to come up with this kind of cash is to join the growing ranks of on-line entrepreneurs. So you open an Internet bank. An experienced Perl script/flat-file wizard by now, you confidently build a system in which all the checking account balances are stored in one file, checking.text, and all the savings balances are stored in another file, savings.text.
A few days later, an unlucky combination of events occurs. Joe User is transferring $10,000 from his savings to his checking account. Judy User is simultaneously depositing $5 into her savings account. One of your Perl scripts successfully writes the checking account flat file with Joe's new, $10,000 higher, balance. It also writes the savings account file with Joe's new, $10,000 lower, savings balance. However, the script that is processing Judy's deposit started at about the same time and began with the version of the savings file that had Joe's original balance. It eventually finishes and writes Judy's $5 higher balance but also overwrites Joe's new lower balance with the old high balance. Where does that leave you? $10,000 poorer, cooking on an old GE range, and wishing you had Concurrency Control.
Like everyone else here will probably say, you can build a pretty basic NAS with any old PC. I like the old corporate Compaq Deskpros--those things last forever. Load it up with a distro you are familiar with (I used to use RedHat, now I use Ubuntu, others will probably suggest FreeNAS) and two big drives. My old one has two 120 GB drives--one has the OS and data, it runs rsync each night to copy/home/ to the other drive.
The computer you buy will be dictated by how much space you need--if you want multiple 500s, 750s, or 1 TB drives, you'll need something newer. AFAIK the Everex that WalMart now offers has two SATA connectors. If I were to build one today I'd go that route. A comment on the product page describes using one as a FreeNAS server and booting from a USB thumb drive.
... I wish Google would collect/show/use checksums of files in search results. It would be a great way to find identical files.* Thousands of uses:
I found this file on my computer and I forgot where it came from.
I downloaded this file but I forget where I got it. It's too big to email so I would like to send a friend a link to the original file.
I want to see if anyone has taken this pic from my site and posted it elsewhere.
This download is taking FOREVER. Is anyone else hosting this exact file?
and many, many more. I had this idea years ago and sent it in to them but haven't heard anything since. I don't want any credit**, just implement it and let me know when it's up and running! And the funny thing is, I'm sure Google is already checksumming every file as part of how they do all their magic. All they have to do is post the data!
* and, since collisions are possible, it would provide a nice corpus to study collisions, etc. in the real world.
** this isn't an entirely original idea. Linux distros have been posting checksums for years as a way to let users verify that their downloads were not corrupted; as a bonus, I (and I'm sure some others) have done searches of those values to find sites hosting that particular release.
Somehow, I knew when I clicked on "Read more" I'd get people bitching about the headlines instead of actually discussing the article.
Which is exactly why Slashdot's editors are doing their readership such a huge disservice by not EDITING. I've read PLENTY of threads that were about some minor point instead of being about the story. I've seen stories where literally every +5 comment in the discussion was NOT about the content of the story but rather an error in the reporting or something else tangential--usually the stupid throwaway line the editors tack on to the end of a submission.
If you want Slashdot discussions to be about the stories, you should be just as mad as I am.
Life's too short to get so upset about this kind of stuff.
Slashdot is something I enjoy, and I'm trying to make it better. How is that a waste?
You realize that we've been the Department of Veterans Affairs since 1989, right?... Though, despite the change, "the VA" (the Veterans Affairs?) has managed to stick around, even in official literature.
You know how it is. Names stick. To those who were born at a certain time, the VA will always be the VA. Hell, even their website is still va.gov--despite the name change coming two years before TBL invented the WWW. (Though they might have had the domain name before then.)
Slashdot Mirror
This conversation [between Web developers and the IE team] seems to have been pretty much shut down...
It may not have been face-to-face, but for almost a decade, it seems that the conversation between IE devs and web devs has pretty much been...
Web devs: Fuck you!
IE devs: Fuck you!
Why does the IE team hate standards so much? It's not like they don't know how to make things work. IE5 for Mac came out in 2000 and was pretty awesome--it even supported transparent PNGs with nothing more than an <img> tag!
Dear IE team: thanks for inventing AJAX. Now please go make everything else work. kthxbye.
(Note: I know for a fact that the IE team has many talented and nice people. They (and we) are just victims of horrible decisions being made further up the chain. So this vitriol is really directed at management.)
I don't really get the whole ereader thing; sure the Iliad looks nice, but my Palm TX works perfectly.
Gah! Why does this have to come up every single time?!?!? It's very simple: Different people like different stuff! OK?
I've toyed with reading ebooks for over a decade--with my old Palm, with an Axim (with a gorgeous 640x480--200 DPI!!!--screen), and with my iPhone. None of them are any good for me. (Key words there--for me.) They don't show enough text at once and I just can't read it comfortably: I'm either holding it in a weird way or bending my neck in a weird way.
Why would I want to spend twice that money on a dedicated reader?
I don't know. It sounds like you don't. But that doesn't mean everyone else in the world feels the same.
Maybe it would be better if you worked this out for yourself. Consider this scenario: "I carry a paper calendar/to-do list and a $100 iPod shuffle. Why would I want to spend twice as much on a Palm TX?"
See? Different people... different things.
Interesting. I'm curious if your utility truly 'ripped' CDs or if it just played them and recorded them. (Do you happen to remember if it ran faster than 1x?) "Sound Recorder" that came with Win3.1 could record audio from a playing CD but it was limited to a certain amount of time and/or file size.
Having used most of those apps for years, I would say... :-)
- Photoshop 7 is fine. CS and CS2 added features, and CS3 did a UI overhaul but 90% of it is still the same... and you'd have a hard time teaching just 25% of what Photoshop can do in a semester-long class. (Not that CS3 doesn't have great features--the auto-align stuff kicks ass--but a lot of what I do day to day could be done with Photoshop 3.) If you believe "the basics are what's important," then old versions are fine.
- Same for Flash 5. There's lots and lots there. The basic concepts haven't changed much. (Though the scripting language has, AFAIK. I'm not a heavy user of Flash.)
- As for DreamWeaver, I'd say, teach code! You can go far with just a handful of basic HTML tags--p, b, i, br, hr, ul, ol, li, table, tr, th, td, div, span--and if you ever want to go "past" HTML into PHP or something, you'll need to know the code anyway. GUI editors have their place, but I've never seen a beginner make a site with one that didn't look like ass in most browsers. There are lots of good, shiny, feature-full free editors out there, like Crimson Editor which is even OSS.
- Not sure how to replace MovieMaker.
And you can educate them about the programs themselves, not just teaching them how to use the apps. As an example, say "Here's Photoshop 7. Here's the GIMP, which is newer and free. Photoshop costs ~$1000. Here's a video from adobe.com showing some of the new features in Photoshop CS3. Make up your own mind."
I would pay $4 extra--but I shouldn't have to--for a DVD that works just like a CD does:
:-)
- comes with no DRM so I can use super-cinchy programs like iTunes to rip into any format I damn well choose, now or in the future. Period.
I do not want the DVD creators to decide what formats they'll put onto a disc. (iPod format on a Sony/Columbia disc? PSP format on a Disney/Pixar disc? Ha! And what about future formats, like whatever the hell the gPhone2008 will play?) Besides, if you let them supply 'pre-ripped' tracks, guess what--they'll still come with ads, thou-shalt-not-steal warnings, etc. burned into the file. No thanks, I'll do it myself.
iTunes has worked for every CD I've tried that wasn't physically damaged. If DVDs had no DRM, just like CDs don't, you wouldn't need a gazillion* rippers (let alone ten) to do the job.
Historical note: CDs did originally come with DRM... kind of. Once upon a time, a CD, at 650 MB, was comparable to, if not larger than, the average hard drive. (In 1995, my dad's 486 had a CD-ROM drive and two 540 MB HDs. The rather-high-end Macs at work that year had maybe 2 GB drives.) Also, operating systems and common programs couldn't extract CD tracks--they showed up as 4k '.cda' files in Explorer or Finder--and music rippers didn't really exist yet. So it was kind of a 'natural' DRM. (And that was 1995--over 10 years after CDs came out.)
Expensive programs like SoundEdit could losslessly import CD tracks to WAV or AIFF, and later on (1997? '98 for sure) Toast could rip CD audio as well. Then in 1998-1999 MP3s became big, and rippers were kind of a grey thing, then they became less than grey, and iomega released RecordIt! which made MP2s so you could copy CDs to Zip disks but nobody cared, then iTunes came out, and the rest is history. But for quite a while there, CDs were pretty much uncopyable, except by analog methods.
In the meantime: HandBrake FTW. It handles over 95% of what I throw at it, and has lots and lots of good options. Shots out to the local library for having 24 and The Simpsons on DVD. Hell, it would be technically illegal for me to rip them even if I did buy them, so why bother to buy? (Though I did buy Season 5 of 24 because it was on sale for $20 and the library didn't have it. Once I was done watching it--and I ripped them anyway, so I could watch the episodes one after the other on my media center Mac, without having to wade through crappy menus, disc changes, etc.--I donated the DVDs to the library. The circle of life continues.)
* and I thought I was the only one who used that word.
A picture of Harvey Keitel from Pulp Fuction? What, no Dr. Strangelove pics available?
Also, I have to wonder how wise it is for C|Net to post that picture in light of this article, especially since it bears the legend "(C) CNET Networks."
Why does someone need to investigate this every few years? There's enough noise in the average cubefarm (where walls don't reach the ceiling)--do we really want to have everyone start talking to their computers too? And touchscreens, gestures, etc.--sure, RSI is bad, but keyboards and mice are flat, you can rest your arms a lot, and they work with more or less natural motions. (It's not a coincidence that a computer keyboard is like a piano keyboard but in two dimensions--you hit different rows by curling and uncurling your fingers.)
I used to have a touchscreen monitor and it was fun to touch the screen to scroll and 'click' on web links by literally touching them but holding your arms out in front of you for any period of time is not easy. I had a tablet PC and holding it, even casually while walking around doing inventory with it and a barcode scanner, was a huge PITA. (Ha--"A" could stand for "arm" in this case.) Looking at the tablet-holding guy brought back all the bad memories: all the fun of walking around with a clipboard, but it's five pounds or so instead of a few ounces. Yeah. Super. Sign me up.
Agreed. Reading TFS, I thought it was going to be yet another "we can make programming like Lego!" thing. (Which it ain't, and probably never will be. Bonus reference: "Lego" is mentioned in the second paragraph of this article about Steve Jobs/NeXT/WebObjects from Wired. God bless Wired and their eternally fucked-up CMS that can't serve images for any story in the archive and, this week, shows the actual HTML code that should be formatting the Question-and-Answer portion of the article.)
Reading TFA, I really don't know much more than I did before. This is the best I could come up with:
So, code scavenging is... um, re-use? Can anyone make better sense of that than I can?
:-)
"In other words, they 'scavenge' the good bits and tweak them to a new purpose."
Um, no. You scavenge the pieces you need, not necessarily the good bits. Have you ever been looking for some code to do parse phone numbers, and while looking at source, said "Hey! This looks like a great way to compare two lists!" Probably not. You're only looking for formatting code, so that's all you see, so that's all you get. Looking at source is not like looking at produce at the food store, where you can walk by the tomatoes and they catch your eye because they're perfectly ripe and really, really nice-looking.
Rather than searching Google, I think every good programmer should take the time to create a really good library. I don't mean take the time writing great code, I mean take the time to organize it into a proper library: make one, clean, well-commented version; put things into variables, ($tableName in queries instead of the actual table name, etc.) and pull code from that when you need it, rather than just copying-and-pasting from the last place you remember using it and then changing all the variable names, table names, etc.
I plan to make mine Real Soon Now.
>> So, how quickly would you run afoul of Intellectual Property laws doing this?
> That's a great knee-jerk reaction.
No, that's just the first thing that popped into his head. (Pardon me if I'm putting words in your mouth, Mr. Gambit.) With that one sentence, he did not say (or imply) "The only people who would use this are thieves." He just put out that question for people to discuss. That topic came up here just a couple days ago. I highly recommend reading that discussion. There are some very good points; among them, that if you publish something with no licensing info, it is copyrighted to you by default. (In the US at least,
It's bad enough that there's one retard on Slashdot who didn't get this joke, but I would love to meet the TWO--not one, but TWO--retards who modded him "+1, Informative"
Yes, you won't get Aero without a graphics card that supports DX9+ hardware acceleration...
True--but ALMOST EVERY SINGLE AD for Vista shows it with Aero. You CAN NOT GET things like the often-showcased 'Flip 3D' effect without Aero.* (Right? I'm pretty sure, but I don't actually run Vista, so I can't say for vertain and I'm too lazy to look it up right now. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.) So people are buying computers and not getting what they see in the ads. Period.
In most people's minds, Aero == Vista. This impression comes 100% from the Marketing folks. Serves them right. I'd love to take some Marketing folks, wipe their minds, and make them live life and make decisions based on what they see advertised. "But McDonalds said this food was healthy! And this pill was supposed to fix what's wrong with me! And this cologne was supposed to make women fall all over me! And this $399 laptop was supposed to have Flip 3D! Why is the world not what I was told?!?!? Ah, the government is at my door! Surely they're here to help."
* I don't have a circular in front of me, but IIRC, many of the ads in the Sunday paper show all the cheap computers with the same "Flip 3D in action!" screenshot. I'd love to buy a non-Aero computer and bring it back, saying "This computer can't produce the effect shown in it's advertisement."
I remember that prediction well. And the funny thing is, MS really could make a difference--not cure, but make a big dent--in spam if they wanted to. Not the way they planned, but this would help a LOT: all they would have to do would be to let everyone with a copy of XP--valid or not, even if it had a famously pirated key--update to XP SP 2. Then publicize the fact: "All copies of XP, legit or not, can now be XP SP2 boxes. No one is buying Vista anyway, so we'll take an immeasurably small loss to make the world a better place. You will have eternal amnesty for pirating XP. We will never come after anyone who updates."
In fact, if it were possible to measure, they might actually make MORE money by doing this: people with MS computers would have a better experience and would be less likely to buy a Mac the next time they're out shopping, and MS would gain some much-needed good press and goodwill from the community for once.
Apple sold just under a million iPhones in the 74 days between their introduction and the price drop. They offered a $100 refund to all those people. (Store credit, whatever.) If just half of their customers took, that, that's 500,000 x 100 = 50 MILLION DOLLARS they gave away. If Apple can give away $50,000,000 in 74 days, surely MS could stand a tiny ding in Vista sales.
I've heard this pipe dream literally dozens of times in the last decade. (Note: I'd love for it to come true--I just doubt it will.) "This new open, standardized (OS, browser, office suite, calendar, file format, network protocol) will FINALLY wrest power away from Microsoft!" The fact that companies like IBM and Oracle are behind it gives it NO weight. The effect isn't even limited to software--remember when CHRP was going to give us a great, fast, cheap, flexible PowerPC-based architecture and free us from the crappy world of x86? HA! (Not that MS makes hardware, but it's the same kind of thing.) Didn't we just discuss a couple weeks ago that industry alliances never work?
MS isn't absolutely undefeated. TCP/IP, HTML, and Internet email are notable exceptions. But overall, they've got a pretty good record of taking a small market, becoming a dominant provider, and keeping their lead. The markets where they fail most spectacularly--music players, game consoles--are when they decide they want a piece of an already-filled market. But their three biggest products--a cheap OS for cheap computers, an office suite, and Exchange servers--just continue to dominate. They make money in two ways: they sell a product (Windows) that most consumers buy, and they sell two products (Office and Exchange) that most companies buy.
Basic fact: Microsoft is the 800-lb gorilla in calendaring. No other "open" calendar system will interoperate with Exchange--Microsoft will see to that. Therefore it won't build up a critical mass of users. Therefore MS's dominance will not be unseated.
PS Microsoft is finally a member but their commitment level is not that of the other partners.
Ha! Yeah. MS also deeply cares about HTML, SVG, XML office formats, etc etc etc. </sarcasm>
I just moved here. Now I've gotta move back.
I agree--I've always loved this stuff. I'll have to dig out my copy of Yesterday's Tomorrows when I get home.
And 386s with 32MB of RAM? Maybe there were some, but they hardly grew on trees.
:-) But at least it gives us all an excuse to reminisce.
I don't know if there were any. EVER. Really. Outside of some exotic server boards, I think 32 MB was a couple generations away. My roommate had a 486 in 1994 with a staggering 20 MB RAM. Two years later I bought a P75 that came with 8 MB; a quick trip to Fry's brought that up to 24 MB, which was quite a bit at the time. The first PCs to sell for under $1000 were Compaqs with Cyrix low-level Pentium-like chips (MediaGX) and they came with 16 MB. That was early 1997, when 486s were pretty much gone and the Pentium had been around for a year or two. So yeah, I'm pretty sure the GP is mis-remembering.
I also took an old IBM PS/1 off a friend's hands and it had a 386, ? RAM, and a 40 MB Maxtor HDD. I'd bet my next paycheck that 32 MB RAM never existed alongside a common, mainstream 386.
Woe be the man who makes a minor technical mistake amongst the ranks of Slashdot.
Ben--thanks for the review. I'm considering getting one of these, either to use as a small server (like this guy describes) or to take out the guts and put them into a more size-efficient case. I would *love* to see some pics of the inside of this machine to see how small the components are and/or how much free space there is inside. Have you taken any?
In the Black Friday sales papers, first-gen Zunes are going for $80-100.
I'm the exact opposite--I never go to google.com anymore. My two main browsers--Safari and Firefox--both have search boxes built in and it's the front page of google that I never see.
And on a related note--you know all those GPSs and all the other tech that is being used in the war? Very little of it would exist if it weren't for scientists and the space program. So c'mon, Uncle Sam--throw'em a bone. Just pull out of Iraq 90 minutes early and you'll break even.
Overall, I wouldn't put "seamless" above story in ANY case, in any medium.
It is funny (if I were snootier I might say 'ironic') but on a really, really good book I don't even notice the new chapters starting. There have been several books I've read that really hit the ground running and the first time I'd notice a new chapter was around 7 or 8.
Who needs books? You can learn as much as you need to know for basic web apps from Philip G. (That's a great online book, and there's another here.) And he, too, is entertaining. Here's a bit comparing flat files and databases:
Like everyone else here will probably say, you can build a pretty basic NAS with any old PC. I like the old corporate Compaq Deskpros--those things last forever. Load it up with a distro you are familiar with (I used to use RedHat, now I use Ubuntu, others will probably suggest FreeNAS) and two big drives. My old one has two 120 GB drives--one has the OS and data, it runs rsync each night to copy /home/ to the other drive.
The computer you buy will be dictated by how much space you need--if you want multiple 500s, 750s, or 1 TB drives, you'll need something newer. AFAIK the Everex that WalMart now offers has two SATA connectors. If I were to build one today I'd go that route. A comment on the product page describes using one as a FreeNAS server and booting from a USB thumb drive.
- I found this file on my computer and I forgot where it came from.
- I downloaded this file but I forget where I got it. It's too big to email so I would like to send a friend a link to the original file.
- I want to see if anyone has taken this pic from my site and posted it elsewhere.
- This download is taking FOREVER. Is anyone else hosting this exact file?
and many, many more. I had this idea years ago and sent it in to them but haven't heard anything since. I don't want any credit**, just implement it and let me know when it's up and running! And the funny thing is, I'm sure Google is already checksumming every file as part of how they do all their magic. All they have to do is post the data!* and, since collisions are possible, it would provide a nice corpus to study collisions, etc. in the real world.
** this isn't an entirely original idea. Linux distros have been posting checksums for years as a way to let users verify that their downloads were not corrupted; as a bonus, I (and I'm sure some others) have done searches of those values to find sites hosting that particular release.
Somehow, I knew when I clicked on "Read more" I'd get people bitching about the headlines instead of actually discussing the article.
Which is exactly why Slashdot's editors are doing their readership such a huge disservice by not EDITING. I've read PLENTY of threads that were about some minor point instead of being about the story. I've seen stories where literally every +5 comment in the discussion was NOT about the content of the story but rather an error in the reporting or something else tangential--usually the stupid throwaway line the editors tack on to the end of a submission.
If you want Slashdot discussions to be about the stories, you should be just as mad as I am.
Life's too short to get so upset about this kind of stuff.
Slashdot is something I enjoy, and I'm trying to make it better. How is that a waste?
You realize that we've been the Department of Veterans Affairs since 1989, right? ... Though, despite the change, "the VA" (the Veterans Affairs?) has managed to stick around, even in official literature.
You know how it is. Names stick. To those who were born at a certain time, the VA will always be the VA. Hell, even their website is still va.gov--despite the name change coming two years before TBL invented the WWW. (Though they might have had the domain name before then.)