It's my understanding that raw tables only work if they are in the public member schema. Stored procedures look hideous. And why should I be forced to use legacy ODBC, when there are far far better ways to connect to databases these days? PostgreSQL is a great database, but it's Enterprise support really isn't there yet. Close, but not quite there.
Really? Has anyone actually gotten PostgreSQL to work with Crystal Reports? The article claims this, but I've run into all sorts of issues trying to get data from PostgreSQL into Crystal relating to types and stored procedures. Crystal Reports themselves won't tell me if they support PostgreSQL, and I've tried numerous times to call them on it.
The biggest problem I had as an Engineer straight after graduation were finding positions for entry-level jobs on job web sites. I'd get calls from various companies, and I say to them, "didn't that posting say 10 years in experience in this?" and the HR person would reply, "Oh, we just say that. We're really looking for people out of college to train." WELL IF THAT'S WHAT YOU WANTED WHY DIDN'T YOU JUST SAY SO IN THE JOB DESCRIPTION.
Most companies don't do a very good job of advertising entry-level positions. Some big companies have insane requirements for jobs, but don't actually expect anyone to meet them. Makes it tough to figure out whether they really want someone experienced, or if they're just saying they want someone experienced.
It was so difficult for me to find any actual drivers for wireless ethernet cards under Linux that I eventually gave up and just purchased an external wireless-ethernet bridge. Most computers these days have built-in ethernet, and a wireless-ethernet bridge has the added benefit of allowing additional non-wireless machines to quickly get on a network. Plus, you can get just about any operating system on wireless this way, without having to worry about driver headache.
I hope that one day I'll be able to find a wireless ethernet card that just works. Even if you do find a supported card, it's usually for a particular chipset, or a particular revision, and it's very hard to guarantee that you'll get that chipset or revision when ordering online. I just want to be able to download a stock kernel from kernel.org, check Y or M for my wireless device, and reboot and be done with it. It doesn't look like we're quite at that stage yet.
Yes, it does annoy me that much. If an author is willing to include spyware in the first place, what else are they willing to do with their software? When you download a piece of software, you expect that software, and not random bundles of non-related software.
You are correct that I have no right to say what the author can and cannot do. I can simply choose not to use the software anymore, which I have done. And in this case, since it for corporate use, I can vote with my wallet as well.
Greed. Free products like Daemon Tools, when the author suddenly decides that free doesn't pay the bills, and includes spyware. Daemon Tools is a great product, but I refuse to ever use it again. I don't care if the setup lets you uncheck the option to install the spyware; it shouldn't be there in the first place.
When you have the huge brain supply of Google and $120 billion dollars, you aren't even close to jumping the shark.
Correction: had a huge brain supply. No doubt they still have a lot of great minds, but a good number of people have left Google since it's inception. Why? Because after 5 years, Google employees are allowed to vest their stocks. And at an overpriced 400/share, can you really blame them for taking an early retirement?
I'm not saying that Google will be going belly-up in the near future, but I think that if it does go under, people will be pointing to this year as the start of their decline.
And yes, you are right in that they have huge amount of initial capital, but if you look at their SEC filings you might see something disturbing. The ratio of their income to expenses is decreasing. In a nutshell, their expenses are increasing, but their income is not increasing at the same rate. Unfortunately, Google hasn't been around long enough for us to draw any real conclusions on this short-term data. But I have a hunch that advertising can only bring in so much revenue before reaching a critical point.
Honestly, it looks to me that Google has jumped the shark. Google now reminds me of just about every other company during the DotCom bubble burst.
Don't get me wrong -- I'm glad Google is around. They're providing some much needed competition in the web area, but I fear that things are going to get much worse before they get better.
Google has a lot of great technologies, but all of their income comes from advertising. So if they want to expand, and maintain free services, their only option is basically to ramp up their advertising. Whether they can do that without annoying their users remains to be seen.
To add to this, for large corporations, Dell provides the option for customized hard disk images. Thus, any computer purchased from Dell automatically comes with the custom image, including all corporate software and settings and so on. This is usually a relatively painless process as most of Dell's parts are standardized across the line.
This is slightly off-topic, but since the WRT54G is a hackable router, is there any way to make it act like a wireless-ethernet bridge? (Much like the WET54GS5). This way, I could simply purchase one device (the WRT54G) and configure it to act one way or the other.
Microsoft just doesn't get it. The fact they consider Firefox an afterthought is a good indication that they're going to lose the online search/portal wars to Google. They still don't understand that they no longer have a monopoly on the web and that proprietary platform development will no longer cut it.
In the past year, I've seen sites like Chase, Georgia Power, and others write better web code to support alternate browsers. Three years ago, these sites would barely work. Firefox isn't a predominant player yet, but it can't easily be ignored either.
Probably, but there are a lot of open source projects like WINE, who are effectively always playing Catch-Up with Windows, which is a similar analogy. That doesn't make trying any less important. In my opinion, the point is not to win straight out, but to chisel away bit by bit until the other side yields or gives up. Sure, China may block this, but with each technique that bypasses the firewall, just a few more people in China have the ability to learn just a little bit more about what's out there.
I think the idea of using 'g-mail' style invites might be a good idea here. Legitimate users won't want to risk getting their accounts disabled, so they will be more careful about who they invite. And unscrupulous users can easily be founded and eliminated at the root by assuming that they and all children of the user are invalid. It doesn't work well for small sites, but for high-visiblity sites like Blogger, it could be very effective.
RSS can be quite useful for IT and other administrative notifications. My ISP, Pair, for example, uses RSS maintenance feeds to notify customers about about outages, maintenance, or other known problems.
RSS is serving as a vehicle for other communication mediums as well, like mailing lists and newsgroups. Gmane, another service that I use quite frequently, provides RSS feeds for their technical newsgroups.
And finally, RSS is already used by most major news agencies, such as Yahoo, the BBC, New Scientist, New York Times, and so on.
I had this problem yesterday, a routine update lists the following:
5 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 80 to remove and 9 not upgraded. Need to get 4152kB of archives.
80 packages to remove? If I proceed with this upgrade, it would just nuke evolution, gnome, nautilus, and a bunch of other important packages that I use on a daily basis.
While the article is a primer, I was a little disappointed in the algorithmic treatment given in the article itself. Right now I know of two excellent free publications: Introduction to Sound Processing and The Sounding Object, which both treat the theoretical, DSP side of things. Any other resources that Slashdot readers can recommend for those who are interested in the subject of audio compression and representation?
If that's really true, then, why not have strictly friends-only journals? A large number of journals have private, personal, every day details, but are provided for all the world to see.
All I can say is good riddance. I hope that LiveJournal gets bought, sold, transformed, hacked to death, and turned into something useful. Right now. LiveJournal is nothing more than a forum for immature emotional wankery, coupled with exhibitionist users who think that they should post every mundane detail of their life in order to validate their existence. Think I'm kidding? Just pick any random LiveJournal user, and then click on their friends. Here's one:
"I realize that pork doesn't smell great when slow cooked unless it has stuff all over it. But why does the house reek of...gas or something? It's foul, and I just had to open the porch door with the fear that I'd keel over from some sort of poisoning."
Wow, way to enlighten to us there, kid.
But what's really annoying about all this is that it seems to be, largely, a LiveJournal phenomena. Blogger actually has some intelligent blogs hosted on it. Bloggers who host their own domains, by far, have something more substantial to contribute to the community. So what makes LiveJournal the pile of crap that it is?
I think what's really made blogs (and now other outlets) take off is the use of RSS/ATOM feeds and RSS/ATOM readers. There's Straw for Linux, SharpReader for Windows, and even online aggregators like Bloglines for those who are always on the run.
It's easy to know when someone has updated without having to manually check every site. Reading content is also a breeze, by virtue of having a unified interface. Personally, a large number of my regular readers access my weblog through an RSS interface. And with big outlets like Yahoo News and BBC providing RSS feeds, it's not much more effort to simply add a personal blog to your daily reading list.
It seems that recently, spam has been getting better and better at avoiding my filters. All the sex-related e-mails get tossed right away, but the occasional viagra, rolex, cheap software, or vioxx messages still get through. The thing is: the messages are almost imcomprehensible. Often times they don't even have a link to order, or only have a link, or have an otherwise completely non-sensical message.
So how can people actually order this stuff? Half the time I can't tell what they're even selling. Someone has to be buying, or else spammers would at least make an effort to send e-mail that had, oh, I don't know, a way to actually order the product?
If you'd like to integrate Wiki into your website, in particular, a weblog, then take a look at Text_Wiki. I'm using this PHP class successfully on my own site and it's a great tool that allows for simpler formatting than HTML and makes formatted text entry a breeze. Wiki entry is the way of the future!
Gaim is an excellent client, and it's really come a long way in usability. But it's the little things like spellcheck and its very cool plugin architecture that keep me coming back to it.
I recently noticed that SpamAssassin has been able to detect these common random dictionary words as well, so it's not that much of a problem anymore:
X-Spam-Report: 1.0 NO_PUNC BODY: Large groupings of dictionary words without punctuation. *
As usual, the game of spam and spam blocking is a constant game of cat and mouse. When spammers realize this, I'm sure they'll start using random words with intermittent punctuation.
Slashdot Mirror
It's my understanding that raw tables only work if they are in the public member schema. Stored procedures look hideous. And why should I be forced to use legacy ODBC, when there are far far better ways to connect to databases these days? PostgreSQL is a great database, but it's Enterprise support really isn't there yet. Close, but not quite there.
Really? Has anyone actually gotten PostgreSQL to work with Crystal Reports? The article claims this, but I've run into all sorts of issues trying to get data from PostgreSQL into Crystal relating to types and stored procedures. Crystal Reports themselves won't tell me if they support PostgreSQL, and I've tried numerous times to call them on it.
The biggest problem I had as an Engineer straight after graduation were finding positions for entry-level jobs on job web sites. I'd get calls from various companies, and I say to them, "didn't that posting say 10 years in experience in this?" and the HR person would reply, "Oh, we just say that. We're really looking for people out of college to train." WELL IF THAT'S WHAT YOU WANTED WHY DIDN'T YOU JUST SAY SO IN THE JOB DESCRIPTION.
Most companies don't do a very good job of advertising entry-level positions. Some big companies have insane requirements for jobs, but don't actually expect anyone to meet them. Makes it tough to figure out whether they really want someone experienced, or if they're just saying they want someone experienced.
It was so difficult for me to find any actual drivers for wireless ethernet cards under Linux that I eventually gave up and just purchased an external wireless-ethernet bridge. Most computers these days have built-in ethernet, and a wireless-ethernet bridge has the added benefit of allowing additional non-wireless machines to quickly get on a network. Plus, you can get just about any operating system on wireless this way, without having to worry about driver headache.
I hope that one day I'll be able to find a wireless ethernet card that just works. Even if you do find a supported card, it's usually for a particular chipset, or a particular revision, and it's very hard to guarantee that you'll get that chipset or revision when ordering online. I just want to be able to download a stock kernel from kernel.org, check Y or M for my wireless device, and reboot and be done with it. It doesn't look like we're quite at that stage yet.
What are you talking about? Daemon Tools is only free for personal use. It's not like they don't make money on it.
Yes, it does annoy me that much. If an author is willing to include spyware in the first place, what else are they willing to do with their software? When you download a piece of software, you expect that software, and not random bundles of non-related software.
You are correct that I have no right to say what the author can and cannot do. I can simply choose not to use the software anymore, which I have done. And in this case, since it for corporate use, I can vote with my wallet as well.
Greed. Free products like Daemon Tools, when the author suddenly decides that free doesn't pay the bills, and includes spyware. Daemon Tools is a great product, but I refuse to ever use it again. I don't care if the setup lets you uncheck the option to install the spyware; it shouldn't be there in the first place.
When you have the huge brain supply of Google and $120 billion dollars, you aren't even close to jumping the shark.
Correction: had a huge brain supply. No doubt they still have a lot of great minds, but a good number of people have left Google since it's inception. Why? Because after 5 years, Google employees are allowed to vest their stocks. And at an overpriced 400/share, can you really blame them for taking an early retirement?
I'm not saying that Google will be going belly-up in the near future, but I think that if it does go under, people will be pointing to this year as the start of their decline.
And yes, you are right in that they have huge amount of initial capital, but if you look at their SEC filings you might see something disturbing. The ratio of their income to expenses is decreasing. In a nutshell, their expenses are increasing, but their income is not increasing at the same rate. Unfortunately, Google hasn't been around long enough for us to draw any real conclusions on this short-term data. But I have a hunch that advertising can only bring in so much revenue before reaching a critical point.
Honestly, it looks to me that Google has jumped the shark. Google now reminds me of just about every other company during the DotCom bubble burst.
Don't get me wrong -- I'm glad Google is around. They're providing some much needed competition in the web area, but I fear that things are going to get much worse before they get better.
Google has a lot of great technologies, but all of their income comes from advertising. So if they want to expand, and maintain free services, their only option is basically to ramp up their advertising. Whether they can do that without annoying their users remains to be seen.
To add to this, for large corporations, Dell provides the option for customized hard disk images. Thus, any computer purchased from Dell automatically comes with the custom image, including all corporate software and settings and so on. This is usually a relatively painless process as most of Dell's parts are standardized across the line.
This is slightly off-topic, but since the WRT54G is a hackable router, is there any way to make it act like a wireless-ethernet bridge? (Much like the WET54GS5). This way, I could simply purchase one device (the WRT54G) and configure it to act one way or the other.
Microsoft just doesn't get it. The fact they consider Firefox an afterthought is a good indication that they're going to lose the online search/portal wars to Google. They still don't understand that they no longer have a monopoly on the web and that proprietary platform development will no longer cut it.
In the past year, I've seen sites like Chase, Georgia Power, and others write better web code to support alternate browsers. Three years ago, these sites would barely work. Firefox isn't a predominant player yet, but it can't easily be ignored either.
Probably, but there are a lot of open source projects like WINE, who are effectively always playing Catch-Up with Windows, which is a similar analogy. That doesn't make trying any less important. In my opinion, the point is not to win straight out, but to chisel away bit by bit until the other side yields or gives up. Sure, China may block this, but with each technique that bypasses the firewall, just a few more people in China have the ability to learn just a little bit more about what's out there.
I think the idea of using 'g-mail' style invites might be a good idea here. Legitimate users won't want to risk getting their accounts disabled, so they will be more careful about who they invite. And unscrupulous users can easily be founded and eliminated at the root by assuming that they and all children of the user are invalid. It doesn't work well for small sites, but for high-visiblity sites like Blogger, it could be very effective.
RSS can be quite useful for IT and other administrative notifications. My ISP, Pair, for example, uses RSS maintenance feeds to notify customers about about outages, maintenance, or other known problems.
RSS is serving as a vehicle for other communication mediums as well, like mailing lists and newsgroups. Gmane, another service that I use quite frequently, provides RSS feeds for their technical newsgroups.
And finally, RSS is already used by most major news agencies, such as Yahoo, the BBC, New Scientist, New York Times, and so on.
I had this problem yesterday, a routine update lists the following:
5 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 80 to remove and 9 not upgraded. Need to get 4152kB of archives.
80 packages to remove? If I proceed with this upgrade, it would just nuke evolution, gnome, nautilus, and a bunch of other important packages that I use on a daily basis.
I guess that it's probably not a good idea to apply for that new LimeWire software developer opening, then.
While the article is a primer, I was a little disappointed in the algorithmic treatment given in the article itself. Right now I know of two excellent free publications: Introduction to Sound Processing and The Sounding Object, which both treat the theoretical, DSP side of things. Any other resources that Slashdot readers can recommend for those who are interested in the subject of audio compression and representation?
If that's really true, then, why not have strictly friends-only journals? A large number of journals have private, personal, every day details, but are provided for all the world to see.
All I can say is good riddance. I hope that LiveJournal gets bought, sold, transformed, hacked to death, and turned into something useful. Right now. LiveJournal is nothing more than a forum for immature emotional wankery, coupled with exhibitionist users who think that they should post every mundane detail of their life in order to validate their existence. Think I'm kidding? Just pick any random LiveJournal user, and then click on their friends. Here's one:
"I realize that pork doesn't smell great when slow cooked unless it has stuff all over it. But why does the house reek of...gas or something? It's foul, and I just had to open the porch door with the fear that I'd keel over from some sort of poisoning."
Wow, way to enlighten to us there, kid.
But what's really annoying about all this is that it seems to be, largely, a LiveJournal phenomena. Blogger actually has some intelligent blogs hosted on it. Bloggers who host their own domains, by far, have something more substantial to contribute to the community. So what makes LiveJournal the pile of crap that it is?
I think what's really made blogs (and now other outlets) take off is the use of RSS/ATOM feeds and RSS/ATOM readers. There's Straw for Linux, SharpReader for Windows, and even online aggregators like Bloglines for those who are always on the run.
It's easy to know when someone has updated without having to manually check every site. Reading content is also a breeze, by virtue of having a unified interface. Personally, a large number of my regular readers access my weblog through an RSS interface. And with big outlets like Yahoo News and BBC providing RSS feeds, it's not much more effort to simply add a personal blog to your daily reading list.
It seems that recently, spam has been getting better and better at avoiding my filters. All the sex-related e-mails get tossed right away, but the occasional viagra, rolex, cheap software, or vioxx messages still get through. The thing is: the messages are almost imcomprehensible. Often times they don't even have a link to order, or only have a link, or have an otherwise completely non-sensical message.
So how can people actually order this stuff? Half the time I can't tell what they're even selling. Someone has to be buying, or else spammers would at least make an effort to send e-mail that had, oh, I don't know, a way to actually order the product?
If you'd like to integrate Wiki into your website, in particular, a weblog, then take a look at Text_Wiki. I'm using this PHP class successfully on my own site and it's a great tool that allows for simpler formatting than HTML and makes formatted text entry a breeze. Wiki entry is the way of the future!
Gaim is an excellent client, and it's really come a long way in usability. But it's the little things like spellcheck and its very cool plugin architecture that keep me coming back to it.