As depressing as it is, I remember reading the Empire Strikes Back Trivia Guide, and the suns were Tatoo I and Tatoo II.
I could have sworn that the third one was called Hervé.
Re:Won't somebody please think of the ATM machines
on
IBM Officially Kills OS/2
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Last time I checked, large numbers of ATM machines ran OS2, which is why you don't see the BSOD when you go to grab some cash.
Er, and they'll keep running exactly as they are doing today until 2045, when BoFA finally replaces the "Watch an ad while we fleece you because you are self employed and have no direct deposit" terminals.
Anyone else use BofA? I personally enjoy having to select Espanol or English every time I use a terminal...even though I've been an English-only customer since 1990 or so.
Like many others, my first reaction on reading the headline was "Epson's been doing this for ten years; what's the big deal?"
The headline implies that HP has introduced a previously unmarketed way to make picoiliter application of ink to paper, but they have not; all that's news here is the process used to build the print heads.
Piezoelectric print heads are still the method used to get the ink from the cartridge to the paper, and while HP has moved to Epson's model of separating the head and the ink reservoir. Big Whup.
I think the news here, if any, is that HP could be firing the first salvo in a serious consumables price war.
Aside from TFA:
I know it's something everyone complains about at some point, but I've really started to get frustrated at the skills (or lack thereof) that The Editors display in writing/rewriting of press releases. It would be gratifying and and incent me to subscribe if there was some quality control and critical scrutiny in place here.
The charm of a "geek news" site largely fades when the "geeks" haven't appeared to learn anything in the past eight years about "news".
As a technical writer and longtime geek, I'm disappointed by this trend, because it pulls the level of competency in the entire industry down.
I've noticed over the past eight years that the written language competency among native English speakers is actually dropping below the level of non-native English speakers.
Yes, those outsourced jobs everyone is complaining about are actually going to people on the other side of the planet who not only write code cheaper than you - they write English better than many younger engineers do, too.
Particularly on Slashdot, I've noticed that (perhaps in the rush to post), capitolization, punctuation, and quite often entire words and phrases are being left out of sentences.
Let me explain why this is a bad thing as simply as possible: your fellow English speakers cannot understand you when you fail to include basic cues about what you mean, like capitol letters, question marks, parenthesis, and other critical information.
Another contributing factor is Microsoft Word's mostly-brain dead grammar checker. It's stunning to me the number of people who blast out an incoherent string of sentences, relying on red and green squigglies to correct any mistakes. No one who uses this method of document proofreading and revision ever thinks about the suggestions Word makes, and subsequently there are huge numbers of problems with most corporate and technical documents I read.
Proofreading doesn't take long. Read what you've written back to yourself. If you "hear" something that would sound jarring in conversation, revise it! Here are some other tips:
-Brevity is important, but never sacrifice clarity to keep a document short.
-Clarity is an abstract notion, but perhaps the most important one in technical communication. I've seen the same competitive talking point restated six times on one page of a white paper about wireless technology. Any potential customer reading the white paper is wondering why they're being treated like a kindergarten-aged child by the third mention.
-Outline your work first. This is an easy way to get some structure in your document before you wade too far in, and it saves a lot of time in the long run by giving you a structure to refer to. You wouldn't test software without a test plan first - why do the same people insist on belting out an entire technical paper without writing an outline first?
Better yet, hire a professional technical writer, rather than an engineer who knows everything about the product, a little about marketing, and nothing about sentence structure, clarity or brevity. You'd be surprised how technical some of us liberal arts majors can be, and how eager to learn and adaptable we are.
From TFA:
Apple was so enamored with absolute pure, minimalist design that some designers may argue that ergonomics were compromised.
And from the parent poster:
It may not be very geeky, but it's this kind of clarity that the vast majority of novice computer users appreciate. Customization is something experience and confident users will do, and the simple truth is that the vast majority of modern computer users never reach that level of confidence and knowledge.
It's true. All the bloviating on Slashdot about feature set, Ogg playback, size, battery life and other geek checklist items means absolutely nothing to a consumer market that has decided it wants cool, minimalist playback of digitized music.
Given that:
1. Marketing is about giving people what they want.
2. People have overwhelmingly voted with their dollars for the iPod's design and functionality.
3. Most people shop with their emotional faculties rather than logical ones.
Is it any wonder the iPod has done so well? People here dismiss marketing types as blow-dried Greek has-beens from college, but Apple doesn't hire the kind of marketing people you have at your company.
Would that be "Howdy Doody" Tim Dreisbach, or Paul Allen's inept hatchet man from Seattle, Ralph Derrickson? I don't count any of the post-bankruptcy guys as CEO - all they did was buy a fully-built network and switch the power on in the markets they thought could be operated at a profit.
Ricochet - ahead of it's time. You have no idea how far ahead of it's time. To increase bandwidth, all one had to do was add more of the inexpensive poletop radios. Frequency reuse was automatic once radio density was increased, and the poletop units were under $1000.00 each - even in 2001. To increase bandwidth for their customers, the cellcos have to install more transcievers on the tower, run cabling, provision more bandwidth, etc.
Instead of large cell towers ever few square miles, Ricochet's unobtrusive approach was called a microcellular architecture. More tiny, inexpensive cells menat more efficient spectrum reuse, and therefore lower overall operating costs and easier network capacity expansion.
The Ricochet network is in tatters now. While Derrickson tried to raise additional money in 2001, cities like Milpitas were already demanding that Metricom begin taking radios off the light poles. In Campbell, Santa Clara, and other places in the Bay Area, the network already has large holes in it - when lightbulbs are replaced, municipal workers are unplugging or removing the microcellular radios. Relighting the network would take a massive investment in time and labor in the dark markets.
I had 3-400kbps wireless access all over the Bay Area in 2001.
It was called Ricochet...and no, it didn't succeed, because they charged too much for the all-you-can eat plan. How much, you ask?
$80.00 per month.
Another reason Ricochet failed was the FUD spread by the cellcos. They told everyone who would listen that 3G access at 300-500kbps would be ready in 2002 at $25.00/month.
CNN's "Free" Windows-only video and crap web site aside, they're contributing to the trivialization of news.
Please stop linking to them. I can't stand seeing another damned story about a missing white woman while there are real news stories that go unreported.
THANK YOU for ingnoring the temptation to talk about politics and focussing on the real problem; CNN's new "Free" video seems to have beeen dumped out there as an afterthought. They apparently gave no thought to the Mac or Linux users of the world.
Fuck them. It's another example of the fading relevance of CNN. Rather than concentrate on real news, they threw their hat in with the sensationalist crowd during the OJ trial and they never looked back.
I would prefer that they'd used a universally available, free format like MPEG4, but the folks in Atlanta are too busy chasing Fox's coattails to offer any real differentiation. It's too bad the Slashdot headline will never read: "CNN levels the playing field by offering free, universally compatible online video feeds!"
Sometimes I think slashdot saves the jucier stories for busier times of the day/week. It's no fun to join a discussion that fissled out 4 hours ago. The news sites don't have this problem.
Timing, unfortunately, has become a major component of the news release cycle. Here's how news timing works:
1. If a pretty white woman goes missing, (or is dying) it's instant news all the time on the U.S. cable news channels. The news channels will instantly increase the cost of advertising on a sliding scale based on how white, how pretty, and how rich the missing woman is.
2. If Amnesty International's accusations about torture and desecration of religious objects at U.S. "held without charges" camps are borne out by internal government documents, then the news is broken at 7:30 p.m. on a Friday night, briefly discussed on Sunday while everyone is at church, and forgotten by Monday morning.
3. If a popular Democratic president gets a blowjob, it's all blowjobs, all the time on every news network.
4. If there is reasonably clear evidence that a Republican president trumped up intelligence to get us involved in a $300 Billion war, it'll never be seen in print or heard on TV.
Now you know how the U.S. "liberal" news media cycle works.
Exercise: Using what you've learned, what can you tell us about the MasterCard breach story? Do you think MasterCard released the news on a Friday night for any particular reason?
We will see a real change in the security policies only after one of the companies has an enormous financial loss.
Ha ha ha! This is the United States, man. You seriously think MasterCard, Visa, Amex or anyone besides the middle management "responsible" for the defrauded property of these companies is going to be held accountable?
There will be no "enormous financial loss". Your point about complexity is completely true, but the companies that build such terrrible infrastructure in such a hurry will never take it in the shorts. They'll just fire somebosy and band-aid the situation.
I would tend to disagree; the shuttle sends several booms when within a few hundred miles of landing. The engines are not powered during this phase of flight - the sonic booms are caused simply by the shuttle's airframe compressing air along it's edges as it passes through the atmosphere, causing a sonic boom.
While engine noise may be related to the sonic boom somehow, I would tend to think only in an aerodynamic sense in that a boom may be louder or stronger because of the shape of the airframe.
Does it really [represent a shift away from the U.S. by Japan] or are they just trying to benefit from France's experiences with the concorde for this project?
I'm sure it's for both reasons; a big deal was made of Japan's growing skill and interest in building their own large aircraft parts during the '90s.
Boeing executives were little bit wary about outsourcing so much of the 777's fine machine work and wing structural work to Japanese firms - partially because they knew Japan would one day be ready to build large aircraft on their own.
Japanese firms have learned a lot about how to build an aircraft from us over the past ten or so years, and now they're shifting toward working with the French, who have experience in the specific type of comercial travel they're interested in building for.
California, to my knowledge, has no Northern Coast. So watch out for them land-bound tsunamis or the terrorists have won.
California has about 840 miles of coastline.
You bet we've got a north (Oregon sorth to roughly the Golden Gate), central (Godlen Gate south to Santa Barbara) and south (Santa Barbara on down) coast. North, central, and southern sections represent the general north-south location of that west-facing coastline.
While the coastline in southern california faces southwest and Los Angeles is east of Reno (the state is distinctly boomerang-shaped), most Californians think of the coast as a westerly-facing one.
Granted, iPhoto wasn't and isn't avilable for Windows, but it's what Acrylic and Picasa are both patterned on. For three years, Windows users who see iPhoto on my PowerBook have been asking..."How do I get that?"
Nice to see that Microsoft is still at the forefront of innovation. This, along with the music store article from earlier today only proves that they're the best in town when it comes to rethinking great ideas in slightly-better-than-mediocre execution.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple sold more iPods during the last quarter than ever.
6.1 million iPods in three months.
I'm glad you have a PowerBook, and while you may not be trolling, it would be prudent to check your facts next time.
I could have sworn that the third one was called Hervé.
Er, and they'll keep running exactly as they are doing today until 2045, when BoFA finally replaces the "Watch an ad while we fleece you because you are self employed and have no direct deposit" terminals.
Anyone else use BofA? I personally enjoy having to select Espanol or English every time I use a terminal...even though I've been an English-only customer since 1990 or so.
Thanks, BofA, for making my life easier!
People and fragile scientific projects.
But I agree; the reality of the space plane/truck doesn't work nearly as well as the original concept.
Like many others, my first reaction on reading the headline was "Epson's been doing this for ten years; what's the big deal?"
The headline implies that HP has introduced a previously unmarketed way to make picoiliter application of ink to paper, but they have not; all that's news here is the process used to build the print heads.
Piezoelectric print heads are still the method used to get the ink from the cartridge to the paper, and while HP has moved to Epson's model of separating the head and the ink reservoir. Big Whup.
I think the news here, if any, is that HP could be firing the first salvo in a serious consumables price war.
Aside from TFA:
I know it's something everyone complains about at some point, but I've really started to get frustrated at the skills (or lack thereof) that The Editors display in writing/rewriting of press releases. It would be gratifying and and incent me to subscribe if there was some quality control and critical scrutiny in place here.
The charm of a "geek news" site largely fades when the "geeks" haven't appeared to learn anything in the past eight years about "news".
I'd rather eat a pine cone than his commercialized versions of his already-bad food. So it's got a nifty heater. Still tastes like Yuck. Wolfgag Yuck!
As a technical writer and longtime geek, I'm disappointed by this trend, because it pulls the level of competency in the entire industry down.
I've noticed over the past eight years that the written language competency among native English speakers is actually dropping below the level of non-native English speakers.
Yes, those outsourced jobs everyone is complaining about are actually going to people on the other side of the planet who not only write code cheaper than you - they write English better than many younger engineers do, too.
Particularly on Slashdot, I've noticed that (perhaps in the rush to post), capitolization, punctuation, and quite often entire words and phrases are being left out of sentences.
Let me explain why this is a bad thing as simply as possible: your fellow English speakers cannot understand you when you fail to include basic cues about what you mean, like capitol letters, question marks, parenthesis, and other critical information.
Another contributing factor is Microsoft Word's mostly-brain dead grammar checker. It's stunning to me the number of people who blast out an incoherent string of sentences, relying on red and green squigglies to correct any mistakes. No one who uses this method of document proofreading and revision ever thinks about the suggestions Word makes, and subsequently there are huge numbers of problems with most corporate and technical documents I read.
Proofreading doesn't take long. Read what you've written back to yourself. If you "hear" something that would sound jarring in conversation, revise it! Here are some other tips:
-Brevity is important, but never sacrifice clarity to keep a document short.
-Clarity is an abstract notion, but perhaps the most important one in technical communication. I've seen the same competitive talking point restated six times on one page of a white paper about wireless technology. Any potential customer reading the white paper is wondering why they're being treated like a kindergarten-aged child by the third mention.
-Outline your work first. This is an easy way to get some structure in your document before you wade too far in, and it saves a lot of time in the long run by giving you a structure to refer to. You wouldn't test software without a test plan first - why do the same people insist on belting out an entire technical paper without writing an outline first?
Better yet, hire a professional technical writer, rather than an engineer who knows everything about the product, a little about marketing, and nothing about sentence structure, clarity or brevity. You'd be surprised how technical some of us liberal arts majors can be, and how eager to learn and adaptable we are.
Do the editors even check anymore?
From TFA: Apple was so enamored with absolute pure, minimalist design that some designers may argue that ergonomics were compromised. And from the parent poster: It may not be very geeky, but it's this kind of clarity that the vast majority of novice computer users appreciate. Customization is something experience and confident users will do, and the simple truth is that the vast majority of modern computer users never reach that level of confidence and knowledge. It's true. All the bloviating on Slashdot about feature set, Ogg playback, size, battery life and other geek checklist items means absolutely nothing to a consumer market that has decided it wants cool, minimalist playback of digitized music. Given that: 1. Marketing is about giving people what they want. 2. People have overwhelmingly voted with their dollars for the iPod's design and functionality. 3. Most people shop with their emotional faculties rather than logical ones. Is it any wonder the iPod has done so well? People here dismiss marketing types as blow-dried Greek has-beens from college, but Apple doesn't hire the kind of marketing people you have at your company.
Guess what the CEO of Ricochet is doing now..
Would that be "Howdy Doody" Tim Dreisbach, or Paul Allen's inept hatchet man from Seattle, Ralph Derrickson? I don't count any of the post-bankruptcy guys as CEO - all they did was buy a fully-built network and switch the power on in the markets they thought could be operated at a profit.
Ricochet - ahead of it's time. You have no idea how far ahead of it's time. To increase bandwidth, all one had to do was add more of the inexpensive poletop radios. Frequency reuse was automatic once radio density was increased, and the poletop units were under $1000.00 each - even in 2001. To increase bandwidth for their customers, the cellcos have to install more transcievers on the tower, run cabling, provision more bandwidth, etc.
Instead of large cell towers ever few square miles, Ricochet's unobtrusive approach was called a microcellular architecture. More tiny, inexpensive cells menat more efficient spectrum reuse, and therefore lower overall operating costs and easier network capacity expansion.
The Ricochet network is in tatters now. While Derrickson tried to raise additional money in 2001, cities like Milpitas were already demanding that Metricom begin taking radios off the light poles. In Campbell, Santa Clara, and other places in the Bay Area, the network already has large holes in it - when lightbulbs are replaced, municipal workers are unplugging or removing the microcellular radios. Relighting the network would take a massive investment in time and labor in the dark markets.
I had 3-400kbps wireless access all over the Bay Area in 2001.
It was called Ricochet...and no, it didn't succeed, because they charged too much for the all-you-can eat plan. How much, you ask?
$80.00 per month.
Another reason Ricochet failed was the FUD spread by the cellcos. They told everyone who would listen that 3G access at 300-500kbps would be ready in 2002 at $25.00/month.
Guess that didn't happen, hunh?
CNN's "Free" Windows-only video and crap web site aside, they're contributing to the trivialization of news.
Please stop linking to them. I can't stand seeing another damned story about a missing white woman while there are real news stories that go unreported.
1. Embrace.
2. Extend.
3. Exclude.
4. Extinguish.
5. ???
6. Profit!
Since I don't have mod points today...
Very funny. +2. Good on ya'.
THANK YOU for ingnoring the temptation to talk about politics and focussing on the real problem; CNN's new "Free" video seems to have beeen dumped out there as an afterthought. They apparently gave no thought to the Mac or Linux users of the world.
Fuck them. It's another example of the fading relevance of CNN. Rather than concentrate on real news, they threw their hat in with the sensationalist crowd during the OJ trial and they never looked back.
I would prefer that they'd used a universally available, free format like MPEG4, but the folks in Atlanta are too busy chasing Fox's coattails to offer any real differentiation. It's too bad the Slashdot headline will never read: "CNN levels the playing field by offering free, universally compatible online video feeds!"
Timing, unfortunately, has become a major component of the news release cycle. Here's how news timing works:
1. If a pretty white woman goes missing, (or is dying) it's instant news all the time on the U.S. cable news channels. The news channels will instantly increase the cost of advertising on a sliding scale based on how white, how pretty, and how rich the missing woman is.
2. If Amnesty International's accusations about torture and desecration of religious objects at U.S. "held without charges" camps are borne out by internal government documents, then the news is broken at 7:30 p.m. on a Friday night, briefly discussed on Sunday while everyone is at church, and forgotten by Monday morning.
3. If a popular Democratic president gets a blowjob, it's all blowjobs, all the time on every news network.
4. If there is reasonably clear evidence that a Republican president trumped up intelligence to get us involved in a $300 Billion war, it'll never be seen in print or heard on TV.
Now you know how the U.S. "liberal" news media cycle works.
Exercise: Using what you've learned, what can you tell us about the MasterCard breach story? Do you think MasterCard released the news on a Friday night for any particular reason?
Ha ha ha! This is the United States, man. You seriously think MasterCard, Visa, Amex or anyone besides the middle management "responsible" for the defrauded property of these companies is going to be held accountable?
There will be no "enormous financial loss". Your point about complexity is completely true, but the companies that build such terrrible infrastructure in such a hurry will never take it in the shorts. They'll just fire somebosy and band-aid the situation.
I wish we had something like Lotus Jazz on Mac OS X.
Jazz was the best integrated suite I'd ever used. Required a 512k Mac in 1985, used every bit of RAM and processor power, and it shined.
Hell, if Lotus was still making great software, maybe we would - but we all know what happened to them.
Yes, I've heard they'll introduce two new widgets to go along with this application. They're called "The Vig" and "Points".
"Say Bob, izzat the new Apple Spreadsheet?"
Yep", I'm running Numbers on my desktop!"
I would tend to disagree; the shuttle sends several booms when within a few hundred miles of landing. The engines are not powered during this phase of flight - the sonic booms are caused simply by the shuttle's airframe compressing air along it's edges as it passes through the atmosphere, causing a sonic boom.
While engine noise may be related to the sonic boom somehow, I would tend to think only in an aerodynamic sense in that a boom may be louder or stronger because of the shape of the airframe.
I'm sure it's for both reasons; a big deal was made of Japan's growing skill and interest in building their own large aircraft parts during the '90s.
Boeing executives were little bit wary about outsourcing so much of the 777's fine machine work and wing structural work to Japanese firms - partially because they knew Japan would one day be ready to build large aircraft on their own.
Japanese firms have learned a lot about how to build an aircraft from us over the past ten or so years, and now they're shifting toward working with the French, who have experience in the specific type of comercial travel they're interested in building for.
California has about 840 miles of coastline.
You bet we've got a north (Oregon sorth to roughly the Golden Gate), central (Godlen Gate south to Santa Barbara) and south (Santa Barbara on down) coast. North, central, and southern sections represent the general north-south location of that west-facing coastline.
While the coastline in southern california faces southwest and Los Angeles is east of Reno (the state is distinctly boomerang-shaped), most Californians think of the coast as a westerly-facing one.
Wow...Picasa has been out how long now?
And iPhoto was out for how long before that?
Granted, iPhoto wasn't and isn't avilable for Windows, but it's what Acrylic and Picasa are both patterned on. For three years, Windows users who see iPhoto on my PowerBook have been asking..."How do I get that?"
Nice to see that Microsoft is still at the forefront of innovation. This, along with the music store article from earlier today only proves that they're the best in town when it comes to rethinking great ideas in slightly-better-than-mediocre execution.
I wonder what will happen when overclockers get wind of this.
I wrote a post about this similarity to the auto industry a few days ago.