My house was built in 1953 and is made of brick with plaster walls. Some of the walks have chipped or cracked over the years and underneath the plaster surface is a metallic mesh.
When I'm outside my home my signal is a perfect 4 bars. The minute I step inside I drop to "No Service".
WiFi has problems too and it's transmitting within the house about 2 rooms away.
I wish there was a WiFi solution outside of microwave...
"DIRECTV and TiVo will work together to develop a version of the TiVo® service for DIRECTV's broadband-enabled HD DVR platform. The product will support the latest TiVo and DIRECTV features and services, including TiVo's Universal Swivel Search and TiVo KidZone. TiVo will develop the new HD DVR for an expected launch in the second half of 2009."
So right now we're locked out but the landscape will improve in the future.
I drive on a heavily traveled road every day to and from work (read: lots of cell towers), and every day that I make a call along these roads using my cell phone my signal drops, or the quality degrades, or I endure 15 seconds of silence followed by perfect quality. All this while I can see the cell phone towers along the sides of the road and I know that they belong to my carrier. The quality and reliability of my cell phone is probably 1/8 of my Vonage phone at home.
Regarding the power outage problems - buy a UPS. Go to Best Buy, put down $75 to buy an APC UPS, and plug ONLY your cable modem and Vonage router into the UPS. Those two devices consume so little power that even a low-end UPS can keep them running for a long time in the event of a power outage.
It strikes me as odd that people are so up in arms about paying $15 or $25 per month and hearing "echos" and nobody is kavetching about the $80 per month cell phone bills where calls are always dropped or degrade.
I know that Vonage isn't perfect by any means, but for $15 per month I'm quite happy. If they charged $50 per month then I wouldn't be so happy...:)
I'm intentionally oversimplifying an extremely complex system: a stock investment.
My purpose in saying that stock == debt was illustrative. My intention was to encourage readers to not think of stock the same way they think of cash in their wallets, but rather to think of stock as an IOU a friend wrote to them.
With stock you give money to the company (if in an IPO) in exchange for that same money back plus some interest for the risk you bear. Hopefully you get the principal back as well as some interest, but many times you do not.
That fundamental behavior is consistent with the spirit of debt.
Actually my number was off. The rate of return on Google stock assuming last year's earnings is 0.88%, which is greater than the 0.55% offered by BoA.
Additionally, BoA charges account fees of $10 a month. At the end of the year you'd eat up all your principal just in fees! ($120 fees > $100 principal).
But you are right in that there are higher rate-of-return "safe" investments. Money market funds, CDs, etc. None are FDIC insured, but other insurances exist that make loss of principal extremely unlikely.
My math is based upon historical numbers and not future speculation.
It's important to note that Google's $6 and $7 earnings statement for this year is projected. Only on Dec 31 will we know if that number is accurate.
It's also important to note that even at $7 / share, assuming the stock price is flat the remaining 6 months of the year you're still looking at a PE of 40. By historical standards, 40 seems overpriced.
There is a great article in Fortune magazine from a few months ago that talks about how PE ratios for technology stocks are still at pre-bubble levels. The message the article sends is that: tech stock prices are STILL too high in comparison to stock prices of non-tech companies.
Google's market capitalization has nothing to do with being "worth" more than AOL Time Warner. The fact that Google has issued more stock and has a higher stock price than AOL Time Warner only means that Google has more publicly held debt. That's all stock is: publicly held debt.
Like privately held debt, Google must pay interest on the stock they issued. Those are called dividends. Additionally, Google may have to buy back shares at some point. Stock != value. Stock == debt. Earnings == value. Plain and simple.
From an investment standpoint Google is a tulip bulb. Let's compare the financials of the two companies at a macroscopic level.
TWX: Price of $17.08 on $0.73 earnings per share, giving a PE of 23.41.
Google: Price of $282.30 on $2.50 earnings per share, giving a PE of 112.92.
Simply put, Google stock is 112.92 / 23.41 = 482% more expensive than AOL's stock.
If you had $100 to invest TODAY, and your investment horizon was 1 year, and you had to choose between AOL and Google, this is how it would work out:
AOL: $100 at $17.08 / share = 5.85 shares. 5.85 shares * $0.73 earnings per share = $4.27. This is a 4.27% rate of return.
Google: $100 at $282.30 / share = 0.35 shares. 0.35 shares * $2.50 earnings per share = $0.88. This is a 0.88% rate of return.
The only way that Google can "even the score" and become a comparable investment would be either for the earnings per share to rise. The price of $282.30 is not sustainable given Google's earnings, and if you think that Google's stock price will continue to reside north of $200 you're smoking crack.
I'll continue to pick on Google financially and point out that in the state of Maryland, you can open a savings account at Bank of America where the annual interest rate for an account with $2500 is 0.55%. This is better than 0.44% and is insured money.
I love Google and think they provide wonderful services on the web. But as a financial investment I'd rather place my testicles in a vice and ask someone to squeeze rather than purchase their stock.
I wonder how hurricane season will factor into NASA's mission planning (or if it will at all). Imagine if Discovery flew on Sept 1, suffered some sort of failure, which activated the rescue contingency. If all went according to plan they'd fly the rescue mission no sooner than 33 days after Sept 1.
Imagine if during the month of September the eastern side of Florida is on the ass end of an ass-whipping from a hurricane (or multiple hurricanes as was the case last year). Can engineers safely make the long drive out to the cape to work in the vehicle assembly building?
How would the high wind and rain effect the crawler that moves the shuttle from the vehicle assembly building to pad 39?
Before Columbia NASA would've hunkered down and given folks a few days off a storm blew through. But with possibly 7 crewmen stranded in space NASA no longer has that flexibility.
The bottom line is that violent weather is a very real problem in Florida from late August to early November. I'm sure the mission planners are brighter than this SlashDot poster, but I hope that they've factored in meteorological effects into their rescue contingency.
If viewers offered to pay for specific channels, with monies collected from this service channeled back to the content producers, would this reduce/eliminate the amount of advertisements consumers are subjected to while watching TV?
When I purchase a movie on PPV I don't receive commercials. The same is true if I purchase premium channels and watch a movie (HBO). I know movies != television programs, but how different are the two beasts, and can the lessons learned from commercial free movie-viewing be applied to show-viewing?
1. I had to get the next version of ant to ask it to pass a -ea to the java compiler.
You could've used exec and ran javac, which allows you to specify any worldly command line argument you wish.
2. We had this crazy huge build.xml file that was created for our project.
Ant allows you to import other buildfiles in a namespace-aware fashion. This allows you to create multiple build files, and access them from a top-level build file that imports the smaller buildfiles.
On top of it being huge, its in XML which is way hard to read compared to a makefile.
Ant's build.xml syntax is decidedly declarative, and is not intended to be similar to make's rule-based syntax. According to Ant-in-Anger, the original authors did not intend for the build.xml syntax to be what developers read/wrote. They intended for people to develop tools that generate build.xml (perhaps using xsl?).
3. I never could figure out how to ask ant to echo the compile line.
Use the task, and exec a variable that you . You'll be able to see the full command line used to exec.
In general, I think that a lot of people mis-use Ant (or mis-apply it). They set out to create a build environment assuming that Ant == Make (except with XML syntax), and then are bitter when what they get is not exactly what they expected.
It sounds to me like your problem lies not with Ant. Rather, it seems to me like your problem is with the original author of your build.xml and their misapplication of Ant.
My question here is more along the lines of "Why doesn't management fail?"
Or even, if the people at the lower rungs of an organization are so smart, why haven't they used this superior intelligence to better their careers, and replace this inept management?
I believe that most people surround themselves with similarly minded people. Take slashdot for instance - most people that read/write to this board are left-leaning anti-patriot-act IT professionals. Why is there not a sudden influx of right-wing pro-christian anti-abortion posters/postees? Because they're off on a right-leaning website somewhere!
In my experience, the techs that understand the key interactions are not blessed with intrinsic knowledge of their project at birth. They acquire this knowledge through learning. They are expert learners, and are effective in whatever job they accept.
In contrast, the ineffective managers I've served under did not possess the same ambition as the techs. They happily led Joe the IT guy install their computer's OS, setup their email client, configure their printer, etc. They weren't interested in learning, or expanding their understanding - they were interested in managing a project. I'm not trying to speak ill of management, I'm trying to point out their fundamental difference from the techs.
Following my "like-follows-like", it makes no sense for the techs to rise up in some sort of Zion fashion. What I would predict, based upon my "like-follows-like" premise, is the following:
1.) Skilled and effective techs leave large companies for smaller ones with less management
2.) Ineffective techs, by way of more time-on-the-job, are promoted to fill the vacancies left by the skilled techs leaving.
The net result of this a transferrance of highly skilled labor out of large organizations and into small companies, where the skilled techs feel more connected to people with similar aptitude and desire. Likewise, large organizations (federal govt for example), attract the slow and dim witted. Consider the job prospect of: "Show up at 5am, leave at 2pm, read the paper for 3 hours, skip 'lunch', and attend meetings all day" and ask yourself who is more likely to take that job: Linus Torvalds or Bill Gates?
The bottom line: techs don't want to unseat management. They'd rather:
1.) Form a new company
2.) Re-establish relationships with customers from previous company
3.) Unseat the old company altogether
4.) Profit.
I don't mean to suggest that two companies should merge based upon technical details alone. I was trying illustrate how management at ALL levels has a tendency to underestimate the difficulties (and costs) of the tasks they set out to accomplish. They have unrealistic expectations if they believe a merger will succeed without first considering how each companies accounting, HR, IT, procurement, and sales departments function.
Likewise, a project manager has unrealistic expectations that his project will integrate cleanly with another project simply because both use the word "XML" somewhere in their interface documentation.
The real message in this is that: the details make a difference. Ignore them, as many in management do, and they'll come back to haunt your project. Understand them, and that will allow you to manage them.
CEO from CompanyA approaches CEO from CompanyB to discuss a merger. Both motivated by a common goal (make more $$ for the shareholders), they agree to the merger. Now it comes time to make their systems integrate.
Upon investigation, it turns out that CompanyA uses a transaction based accounting system that updates a just-in-time inventory management system. Moreoever, CompanyA has selected CORBA as their enterprise architecture, and have specifically gone with ORB vendors A1, A2, and A3.
It also so happens that CompanyB uses a batch based accounting system that is updated every night (and twice on Saturday for some reason). They use a guy name Earl to manage their inventory of goods. CompanyB settled upon the.NET framework as their entprise architecture, and they use the latest version of Windows.
Do you see the problem?
Management makes decisions based upon meta-information about the business. Perspectus, and filings with the SEC are what CompanyA looks at when deciding if they should buy/merge with CompanyB. Rarely do companies look at internal systems for potential compatibility. They throw out an essentially random number that's supposed to represent "the cost of the merger" (this is what is supposed to be spent on integrating the two wild beasts), and for some reason everyone accepts that number.
In all due honesty, that's about as insane as trying to conjoin two independent grown adults.
I've seen this happen time and time again, up and down the management chain. At the lower levels, management thinks that SystemA can talk to SystemB because SystemA produces XML and SystemB accepts SOAP, not realizing that SOAP is a document retrieval / RPC mechanism and not a generic self-describing data language.
At the upper levels management thinks that CompanyA should purchase CompanyB because they're both in the tire manufacturing business, not realizing that the machinery used to produce truck tires (CompanyA's product) WILL NOT WORK to produce automobile tires (CompanyB's product).
It's the same thing over and over again. Management is often too disconnect from the innerworkings of an organization, and doesn't understand the key interaction mechanisms making them ineffective at evaluating whether a merger/buyout will be successful.
So is it any wonder why software projects fail?
Software is extremely specific (generalizations rarely work), requiring very careful attention to detail. Management, fundamentally, is at odds with this requirement. Unfortunately people believe that to be an effective manager, you must keep your "head above the fray" to "keep the team on task".
The truly effective program managers are those that continue programming after being promoted, and fully understand the system that they manage.
Is it illegal to take the blue "e" Internet Explorer icon and associate that icon with the Firefox binary? Do that, rename the text to "The Internet" and problem solved, no?
It's that moons *always* provide an abundance of energy. Were it not for the stripmining the Klingons performed on Praxis, the empire might well have given Starfleet a real run for their money in the game of galactic dominance.
Likewise, the Remans had enough energy mined from their planet/moon that they were able to overthrow the Romulan senate and pose a major threat to Starfleet (via Picard).
And lastly, was it not the Cardasians that put all the Bajorans to work in the ore reprocessing facility deep in the heart of Terak Nor? That ore had to come from somewhere, and I'd be dollars to donuts that it came from a moon orbiting Cardasia Prime.
So let's get off our lazy butts, resurfance the Valdez, park it in orbit around the moon, and start carving out some of that Helium-3 goodness!
I own 3 TiVO's and have modified them with larger disks, network connectivity, and video extraction capability. I've been doing this since I bought my first TiVO in Fall 2000.
One of the primary drawbacks to root'ing your TiVO was that the next time a software update was transmitted from the magic entertainment boob in the sky, all your hard work would be erased, as the update would wipe the OS install clean (usually).
While my work in the TiVO community has dwindled significantly in the past months, I did happen to take note of a warning that said something to the effect of "Disable Remote Update". I'm not certain what this feature of the hack does, but it sounds (at least from the name) that it would not allow TiVO or DTV to upgrade your TiVO's OS from 3.1 to 3.x in the future.
I'm going to go look into that option now. But I think that if you really feel strongly about TiVO and DTV whoring themselves to the ad-nipple in California, you might want to invest a Saturday afternoon in root'ing your TiVO so that you won't receive this unwanted feature.
I liked how they have a countdown meter that is counting down until 2018, when I assume they believe their first lift will occur. Very funny how precise they are.
Given that all the images in their gallery are of Lego crawlers, I think they have a lot of work to do...
I doubt that Technic Lego's are going to get us into space. Could be wrong tho....
I think equally important in the discussion is the number of channels that will realisticly be offered in the near future.
While I'm not OTA, cable, or dish network expert (neither am I a DirecTV expert!), I do know that the launch of DirecTV 7S earlier this year represented a monumental leap forward in bandwidth capability. It's my understanding that the purpose of 7S is to relieve the other birds from their coast-to-coast broacasts (using it's spot-beam technology), thereby freeing up the frequencies for HD content.
From what I read (sorry I can't provide links), the amount of bandwidth 7S brings to the skies above us is enormous, and the intended purpose of the bandwidth is the carrying of HD content.
DirecTV knows that Cable is ramping up HD offerings. Not wanting to fall behind, I'm sure DirecTV will offer more HD channels in the future.
Personally, I'll hold off until 7S starts broadcasting, and wait for DirecTV to offer ESPN, CNN, FOX, etc in HD before I actually sink my credits into a HDTV. Hopefully by that time, prices of HD-TiVO's will have come down (hopefully to $500).
But, I think that contemplating what future offerings will be provided is certainly relevant when discussing which company to go with.... especially when you're talking about $1000 for the PVR!
The late 90's tech boom served to employ anybody and everybody that had even looked at a computer (or knew how to spell 'computer'). This was unnatural. The money pumped into the tech market in the late 90s attracted unqualified workers motivated by greed more than anything else.
Think about how many people you looked to in the late 90s, early 2000's and thought "how have you managed to stay employed?!".
Part of the contracting phase of the business cycle involves the shake-out of the inefficient firms from the market. Those are the firms that waited for the early-adopters to get the results of their litmus test of the market, and upon seeing positive results, entered the market and tried to capitalize on their status as late early-adopters. When their particular market turns south, the early-adopters of technologies remain (mostly because they really believe in their technology) while the late early-adopters are shaken out (by the lack of demand for product) and move on to another field. This is normal!
I view the decrease of tech jobs in a positive light. I know construction workers, electricians, and even day care specialists that went into the computer industry in the last 7 or so years. They made some cash, didn't really bring much value (because they lacked expertise), and now that the market is harder, they're going back to their old jobs. This is good! What you want is a computer industry with highly skilled workers. You don't want a computer industry where every person in the US is a candidate.
Yes, jobs have decreased 18.8% since 2001. But if the job count was 2000% higher than what the market could support, 18.8% doesn't seem so large anymore.
On a side note - look what happened to NASA in the past 40 years. NASA used to be a place where only the best-of-the-best were employed (back in the 60s). Very few people could go work for NASA, and terms like "rocket science" were used as a form of respect. Nowadays, NASA is a cross-section of the US population, unmotivated, bloated, and over-weight. NASA is stupid these days, and can be looked at as a laughing stock. Why? Because NASA opened their doors to everyone (not just the elite) and the influx of stupidity forever dumbened the culture. Now we have shuttles that fall out of the sky, satellites that burn up on entry into orbit due to metric to english conversion, and 3 years worth of science "wobbling" and "tumbling" it's way back to Utah.
Do you want the computer industry to become what NASA has become?
Compare how our software works to Microsoft's. Have you ever tried to "uninstall" Windows Media Player? All Windows does, in its own words, is "removes access to Windows Media Player from the Start Menu and Desktop," yet it doesn't actually get rid of the software.
Using that same logic, you could say "Since the driver in front of me ran the red light, I'm going to run the red light as well." Would you jump off a bridge because another person did?
Real may have gotten better at uninstalling in version 10. But why oh why are we at version 10 before the thing uninstalls cleanly? Why are we at version 10 before the adware in the "free" version (what a misnomer) is less offensive? Why are we at version 10 before the mime-type land-rush has stopped? That should have never gone into the product in version 1.0.
Pisses me off when software won't completely uninstall itself. There's nothing a good rm -rf shouldn't undo.
The one thing that makes me happy about Real is watching it succumb to the same forces that destroyed Netscape. Look at the parallels - a small company formed around a pretty innovative product. It awakens the sleeping Giant (in Netscape's case that was MS; in this case it's Apple and MS). Freaks out and spawns an "open source initiative" (Mozilla vs HelixCommunity's hxplay). Get ready to go the way of the DoDo bird, Real.
Slashdot Mirror
Use OpenVPN in TCP mode (rather than it's default UDP mode).
Then set up local ssh port forwards through a bounce host you know works well.
Instead of going from Peru --> UK instead go from Peru --> Localhost --> SSH bounce host in Germany --> UK.
Or try an onion network like Tor.
hedronist is 100% right.
My house was built in 1953 and is made of brick with plaster walls. Some of the walks have chipped or cracked over the years and underneath the plaster surface is a metallic mesh.
When I'm outside my home my signal is a perfect 4 bars. The minute I step inside I drop to "No Service".
WiFi has problems too and it's transmitting within the house about 2 rooms away.
I wish there was a WiFi solution outside of microwave...
From a press release several weeks/months ago:
"DIRECTV and TiVo will work together to develop a version of the TiVo® service for DIRECTV's broadband-enabled HD DVR platform. The product will support the latest TiVo and DIRECTV features and services, including TiVo's Universal Swivel Search and TiVo KidZone. TiVo will develop the new HD DVR for an expected launch in the second half of 2009."
So right now we're locked out but the landscape will improve in the future.
I drive on a heavily traveled road every day to and from work (read: lots of cell towers), and every day that I make a call along these roads using my cell phone my signal drops, or the quality degrades, or I endure 15 seconds of silence followed by perfect quality. All this while I can see the cell phone towers along the sides of the road and I know that they belong to my carrier. The quality and reliability of my cell phone is probably 1/8 of my Vonage phone at home.
:)
Regarding the power outage problems - buy a UPS. Go to Best Buy, put down $75 to buy an APC UPS, and plug ONLY your cable modem and Vonage router into the UPS. Those two devices consume so little power that even a low-end UPS can keep them running for a long time in the event of a power outage.
It strikes me as odd that people are so up in arms about paying $15 or $25 per month and hearing "echos" and nobody is kavetching about the $80 per month cell phone bills where calls are always dropped or degrade.
I know that Vonage isn't perfect by any means, but for $15 per month I'm quite happy. If they charged $50 per month then I wouldn't be so happy...
Hahahah.
I was dismayed to learn that "PG County" is actually a word in the Urban Dictionary:
http://tinyurl.com/bnjb4
*Nods*.
I'm intentionally oversimplifying an extremely complex system: a stock investment.
My purpose in saying that stock == debt was illustrative. My intention was to encourage readers to not think of stock the same way they think of cash in their wallets, but rather to think of stock as an IOU a friend wrote to them.
With stock you give money to the company (if in an IPO) in exchange for that same money back plus some interest for the risk you bear. Hopefully you get the principal back as well as some interest, but many times you do not.
That fundamental behavior is consistent with the spirit of debt.
Actually my number was off. The rate of return on Google stock assuming last year's earnings is 0.88%, which is greater than the 0.55% offered by BoA.
Additionally, BoA charges account fees of $10 a month. At the end of the year you'd eat up all your principal just in fees! ($120 fees > $100 principal).
But you are right in that there are higher rate-of-return "safe" investments. Money market funds, CDs, etc. None are FDIC insured, but other insurances exist that make loss of principal extremely unlikely.
My math is based upon historical numbers and not future speculation.
It's important to note that Google's $6 and $7 earnings statement for this year is projected. Only on Dec 31 will we know if that number is accurate.
It's also important to note that even at $7 / share, assuming the stock price is flat the remaining 6 months of the year you're still looking at a PE of 40. By historical standards, 40 seems overpriced.
There is a great article in Fortune magazine from a few months ago that talks about how PE ratios for technology stocks are still at pre-bubble levels. The message the article sends is that: tech stock prices are STILL too high in comparison to stock prices of non-tech companies.
Google's market capitalization has nothing to do with being "worth" more than AOL Time Warner. The fact that Google has issued more stock and has a higher stock price than AOL Time Warner only means that Google has more publicly held debt. That's all stock is: publicly held debt.
Like privately held debt, Google must pay interest on the stock they issued. Those are called dividends. Additionally, Google may have to buy back shares at some point. Stock != value. Stock == debt. Earnings == value. Plain and simple.
From an investment standpoint Google is a tulip bulb. Let's compare the financials of the two companies at a macroscopic level.
TWX: Price of $17.08 on $0.73 earnings per share, giving a PE of 23.41.
Google: Price of $282.30 on $2.50 earnings per share, giving a PE of 112.92.
Simply put, Google stock is 112.92 / 23.41 = 482% more expensive than AOL's stock.
If you had $100 to invest TODAY, and your investment horizon was 1 year, and you had to choose between AOL and Google, this is how it would work out:
AOL: $100 at $17.08 / share = 5.85 shares. 5.85 shares * $0.73 earnings per share = $4.27. This is a 4.27% rate of return.
Google: $100 at $282.30 / share = 0.35 shares. 0.35 shares * $2.50 earnings per share = $0.88. This is a 0.88% rate of return.
The only way that Google can "even the score" and become a comparable investment would be either for the earnings per share to rise. The price of $282.30 is not sustainable given Google's earnings, and if you think that Google's stock price will continue to reside north of $200 you're smoking crack.
I'll continue to pick on Google financially and point out that in the state of Maryland, you can open a savings account at Bank of America where the annual interest rate for an account with $2500 is 0.55%. This is better than 0.44% and is insured money.
I love Google and think they provide wonderful services on the web. But as a financial investment I'd rather place my testicles in a vice and ask someone to squeeze rather than purchase their stock.
-c
I wonder how hurricane season will factor into NASA's mission planning (or if it will at all). Imagine if Discovery flew on Sept 1, suffered some sort of failure, which activated the rescue contingency. If all went according to plan they'd fly the rescue mission no sooner than 33 days after Sept 1.
Imagine if during the month of September the eastern side of Florida is on the ass end of an ass-whipping from a hurricane (or multiple hurricanes as was the case last year). Can engineers safely make the long drive out to the cape to work in the vehicle assembly building?
How would the high wind and rain effect the crawler that moves the shuttle from the vehicle assembly building to pad 39?
Before Columbia NASA would've hunkered down and given folks a few days off a storm blew through. But with possibly 7 crewmen stranded in space NASA no longer has that flexibility.
The bottom line is that violent weather is a very real problem in Florida from late August to early November. I'm sure the mission planners are brighter than this SlashDot poster, but I hope that they've factored in meteorological effects into their rescue contingency.
-c
Two words:
Dabo Girls.
They always hang around the roulette table and when your number comes up they yell "Dabo!!!!"
That, and that alone, is why we must find Ferenginar and all the Dabo girls that work there..
-c
If viewers offered to pay for specific channels, with monies collected from this service channeled back to the content producers, would this reduce/eliminate the amount of advertisements consumers are subjected to while watching TV?
When I purchase a movie on PPV I don't receive commercials. The same is true if I purchase premium channels and watch a movie (HBO). I know movies != television programs, but how different are the two beasts, and can the lessons learned from commercial free movie-viewing be applied to show-viewing?
With beastie logo: yum .
Without beastie logo: ick.
Don't take away the beastie...
-c
You could've used exec and ran javac, which allows you to specify any worldly command line argument you wish.
Ant allows you to import other buildfiles in a namespace-aware fashion. This allows you to create multiple build files, and access them from a top-level build file that imports the smaller buildfiles.
Ant's build.xml syntax is decidedly declarative, and is not intended to be similar to make's rule-based syntax. According to Ant-in-Anger, the original authors did not intend for the build.xml syntax to be what developers read/wrote. They intended for people to develop tools that generate build.xml (perhaps using xsl?).
Use the task, and exec a variable that you . You'll be able to see the full command line used to exec.
In general, I think that a lot of people mis-use Ant (or mis-apply it). They set out to create a build environment assuming that Ant == Make (except with XML syntax), and then are bitter when what they get is not exactly what they expected.
It sounds to me like your problem lies not with Ant. Rather, it seems to me like your problem is with the original author of your build.xml and their misapplication of Ant.
Just a thought,
I believe that most people surround themselves with similarly minded people. Take slashdot for instance - most people that read/write to this board are left-leaning anti-patriot-act IT professionals. Why is there not a sudden influx of right-wing pro-christian anti-abortion posters/postees? Because they're off on a right-leaning website somewhere!
In my experience, the techs that understand the key interactions are not blessed with intrinsic knowledge of their project at birth. They acquire this knowledge through learning. They are expert learners, and are effective in whatever job they accept.
In contrast, the ineffective managers I've served under did not possess the same ambition as the techs. They happily led Joe the IT guy install their computer's OS, setup their email client, configure their printer, etc. They weren't interested in learning, or expanding their understanding - they were interested in managing a project. I'm not trying to speak ill of management, I'm trying to point out their fundamental difference from the techs.
Following my "like-follows-like", it makes no sense for the techs to rise up in some sort of Zion fashion. What I would predict, based upon my "like-follows-like" premise, is the following:
1.) Skilled and effective techs leave large companies for smaller ones with less management
2.) Ineffective techs, by way of more time-on-the-job, are promoted to fill the vacancies left by the skilled techs leaving.
The net result of this a transferrance of highly skilled labor out of large organizations and into small companies, where the skilled techs feel more connected to people with similar aptitude and desire. Likewise, large organizations (federal govt for example), attract the slow and dim witted. Consider the job prospect of: "Show up at 5am, leave at 2pm, read the paper for 3 hours, skip 'lunch', and attend meetings all day" and ask yourself who is more likely to take that job: Linus Torvalds or Bill Gates?
The bottom line: techs don't want to unseat management. They'd rather:
1.) Form a new company
2.) Re-establish relationships with customers from previous company
3.) Unseat the old company altogether
4.) Profit.
I don't mean to suggest that two companies should merge based upon technical details alone. I was trying illustrate how management at ALL levels has a tendency to underestimate the difficulties (and costs) of the tasks they set out to accomplish. They have unrealistic expectations if they believe a merger will succeed without first considering how each companies accounting, HR, IT, procurement, and sales departments function.
Likewise, a project manager has unrealistic expectations that his project will integrate cleanly with another project simply because both use the word "XML" somewhere in their interface documentation.
The real message in this is that: the details make a difference. Ignore them, as many in management do, and they'll come back to haunt your project. Understand them, and that will allow you to manage them.
CEO from CompanyA approaches CEO from CompanyB to discuss a merger. Both motivated by a common goal (make more $$ for the shareholders), they agree to the merger. Now it comes time to make their systems integrate.
.NET framework as their entprise architecture, and they use the latest version of Windows.
Upon investigation, it turns out that CompanyA uses a transaction based accounting system that updates a just-in-time inventory management system. Moreoever, CompanyA has selected CORBA as their enterprise architecture, and have specifically gone with ORB vendors A1, A2, and A3.
It also so happens that CompanyB uses a batch based accounting system that is updated every night (and twice on Saturday for some reason). They use a guy name Earl to manage their inventory of goods. CompanyB settled upon the
Do you see the problem?
Management makes decisions based upon meta-information about the business. Perspectus, and filings with the SEC are what CompanyA looks at when deciding if they should buy/merge with CompanyB. Rarely do companies look at internal systems for potential compatibility. They throw out an essentially random number that's supposed to represent "the cost of the merger" (this is what is supposed to be spent on integrating the two wild beasts), and for some reason everyone accepts that number.
In all due honesty, that's about as insane as trying to conjoin two independent grown adults.
I've seen this happen time and time again, up and down the management chain. At the lower levels, management thinks that SystemA can talk to SystemB because SystemA produces XML and SystemB accepts SOAP, not realizing that SOAP is a document retrieval / RPC mechanism and not a generic self-describing data language.
At the upper levels management thinks that CompanyA should purchase CompanyB because they're both in the tire manufacturing business, not realizing that the machinery used to produce truck tires (CompanyA's product) WILL NOT WORK to produce automobile tires (CompanyB's product).
It's the same thing over and over again. Management is often too disconnect from the innerworkings of an organization, and doesn't understand the key interaction mechanisms making them ineffective at evaluating whether a merger/buyout will be successful.
So is it any wonder why software projects fail?
Software is extremely specific (generalizations rarely work), requiring very careful attention to detail. Management, fundamentally, is at odds with this requirement. Unfortunately people believe that to be an effective manager, you must keep your "head above the fray" to "keep the team on task".
The truly effective program managers are those that continue programming after being promoted, and fully understand the system that they manage.
Is it illegal to take the blue "e" Internet Explorer icon and associate that icon with the Firefox binary? Do that, rename the text to "The Internet" and problem solved, no?
It's that moons *always* provide an abundance of energy. Were it not for the stripmining the Klingons performed on Praxis, the empire might well have given Starfleet a real run for their money in the game of galactic dominance.
Likewise, the Remans had enough energy mined from their planet/moon that they were able to overthrow the Romulan senate and pose a major threat to Starfleet (via Picard).
And lastly, was it not the Cardasians that put all the Bajorans to work in the ore reprocessing facility deep in the heart of Terak Nor? That ore had to come from somewhere, and I'd be dollars to donuts that it came from a moon orbiting Cardasia Prime.
So let's get off our lazy butts, resurfance the Valdez, park it in orbit around the moon, and start carving out some of that Helium-3 goodness!
-c
I own 3 TiVO's and have modified them with larger disks, network connectivity, and video extraction capability. I've been doing this since I bought my first TiVO in Fall 2000.
One of the primary drawbacks to root'ing your TiVO was that the next time a software update was transmitted from the magic entertainment boob in the sky, all your hard work would be erased, as the update would wipe the OS install clean (usually).
While my work in the TiVO community has dwindled significantly in the past months, I did happen to take note of a warning that said something to the effect of "Disable Remote Update". I'm not certain what this feature of the hack does, but it sounds (at least from the name) that it would not allow TiVO or DTV to upgrade your TiVO's OS from 3.1 to 3.x in the future.
I'm going to go look into that option now. But I think that if you really feel strongly about TiVO and DTV whoring themselves to the ad-nipple in California, you might want to invest a Saturday afternoon in root'ing your TiVO so that you won't receive this unwanted feature.
-c
I liked how they have a countdown meter that is counting down until 2018, when I assume they believe their first lift will occur. Very funny how precise they are.
Given that all the images in their gallery are of Lego crawlers, I think they have a lot of work to do...
I doubt that Technic Lego's are going to get us into space. Could be wrong tho....
I think equally important in the discussion is the number of channels that will realisticly be offered in the near future.
... especially when you're talking about $1000 for the PVR!
While I'm not OTA, cable, or dish network expert (neither am I a DirecTV expert!), I do know that the launch of DirecTV 7S earlier this year represented a monumental leap forward in bandwidth capability. It's my understanding that the purpose of 7S is to relieve the other birds from their coast-to-coast broacasts (using it's spot-beam technology), thereby freeing up the frequencies for HD content.
From what I read (sorry I can't provide links), the amount of bandwidth 7S brings to the skies above us is enormous, and the intended purpose of the bandwidth is the carrying of HD content.
DirecTV knows that Cable is ramping up HD offerings. Not wanting to fall behind, I'm sure DirecTV will offer more HD channels in the future.
Personally, I'll hold off until 7S starts broadcasting, and wait for DirecTV to offer ESPN, CNN, FOX, etc in HD before I actually sink my credits into a HDTV. Hopefully by that time, prices of HD-TiVO's will have come down (hopefully to $500).
But, I think that contemplating what future offerings will be provided is certainly relevant when discussing which company to go with.
Hope this info helps.
The late 90's tech boom served to employ anybody and everybody that had even looked at a computer (or knew how to spell 'computer'). This was unnatural. The money pumped into the tech market in the late 90s attracted unqualified workers motivated by greed more than anything else.
Think about how many people you looked to in the late 90s, early 2000's and thought "how have you managed to stay employed?!".
Part of the contracting phase of the business cycle involves the shake-out of the inefficient firms from the market. Those are the firms that waited for the early-adopters to get the results of their litmus test of the market, and upon seeing positive results, entered the market and tried to capitalize on their status as late early-adopters. When their particular market turns south, the early-adopters of technologies remain (mostly because they really believe in their technology) while the late early-adopters are shaken out (by the lack of demand for product) and move on to another field. This is normal!
I view the decrease of tech jobs in a positive light. I know construction workers, electricians, and even day care specialists that went into the computer industry in the last 7 or so years. They made some cash, didn't really bring much value (because they lacked expertise), and now that the market is harder, they're going back to their old jobs. This is good! What you want is a computer industry with highly skilled workers. You don't want a computer industry where every person in the US is a candidate.
Yes, jobs have decreased 18.8% since 2001. But if the job count was 2000% higher than what the market could support, 18.8% doesn't seem so large anymore.
On a side note - look what happened to NASA in the past 40 years. NASA used to be a place where only the best-of-the-best were employed (back in the 60s). Very few people could go work for NASA, and terms like "rocket science" were used as a form of respect. Nowadays, NASA is a cross-section of the US population, unmotivated, bloated, and over-weight. NASA is stupid these days, and can be looked at as a laughing stock. Why? Because NASA opened their doors to everyone (not just the elite) and the influx of stupidity forever dumbened the culture. Now we have shuttles that fall out of the sky, satellites that burn up on entry into orbit due to metric to english conversion, and 3 years worth of science "wobbling" and "tumbling" it's way back to Utah.
Do you want the computer industry to become what NASA has become?
-c
Using that same logic, you could say "Since the driver in front of me ran the red light, I'm going to run the red light as well." Would you jump off a bridge because another person did?
Real may have gotten better at uninstalling in version 10. But why oh why are we at version 10 before the thing uninstalls cleanly? Why are we at version 10 before the adware in the "free" version (what a misnomer) is less offensive? Why are we at version 10 before the mime-type land-rush has stopped? That should have never gone into the product in version 1.0.
Pisses me off when software won't completely uninstall itself. There's nothing a good rm -rf shouldn't undo.
The one thing that makes me happy about Real is watching it succumb to the same forces that destroyed Netscape. Look at the parallels - a small company formed around a pretty innovative product. It awakens the sleeping Giant (in Netscape's case that was MS; in this case it's Apple and MS). Freaks out and spawns an "open source initiative" (Mozilla vs HelixCommunity's hxplay). Get ready to go the way of the DoDo bird, Real.
And take your damn spyware with you.
-c
Thanks for the update. It is much nicer now!
I was so turned off by past experiences with Real (hidden links, excessive ads, etc) that I haven't kept up-to-date with the latest news.
It's nice that it's much easier now to download the free client.
-c