Taking this week as a fairly representative example, I have bought two beers, and no iPods at all.
Spare us the anecdotal evidence! Why should we assume that this is a typical iPod consumption week? Do you have any studies that show that average weekly iPod consumption is so low?
... why everybody's so infatuated with this project. It's not because it will benefit millions of third-world children, though that's a definite plus. It's that we're all so sick of the bloated, power sucking laptops we use now.
I should of thought of the road-trip application. If nothing else, you can bring along something to read. Last time I used my Palm for that, but it ran out of juice somewhere over Nevada.
But geeks or not, I don't see a lot of people using the crank when other sources of power are available. Given this thing's low draw, solar panels might be more practical.
Your friend in Mumbai (some locals still insist on calling it Bombay, or so I'm told) presumably has the benefits of infrastructure. These include semi-reliable power, and some kind of telephone system that will handle data packets. That's true of anybody you can label "middle class", almost by definition. The $100 laptop, with its grid networking and hand-cranked power supply, is not designed for such folks.
He said people might be able to buy one in the U.S. next year (paying double so half could buy a kid in another country one).
Oh lord, there will be a run on those. I mean, a serious laptop for $200? Plus $25 to retrofit it to work without the crank, which nobody in this country will want to use.
Oh, grow up. This is an interesting, useful story. Even if it were just about stupidity, it would be worth reading — there's an art to dealing with stupid people. Besides, the story is also this guy's attempts to pressure the Sidekick's new "owner" to give it back — and it's unexpected conseequences.
There's also the client-side cost. The Wii is obviously designed to support this kind of service, and that must add to their development and manufacturing costs. Presumably they think they'll make this up by selling old games that are otherwise worthless.
But yeah, I'd certainly pay $5 to $10 to play on old game on a Wii. (I often spend that much to buy old games on eBay.) Indeed, that's more of an incentive for me to buy a Wii than to play some overdesigned highrez game.
That's a pretty good summary. Some analysis is in order, though: it seems to me that the purpose of this ruling is not so much to settle the argument as to publically censure the two opposing counsel for failure to achieve adulthood.
Sure, TAoW is an important book. Unfortunately, it's the kind of book that will always be popular with dweebs who don't know the difference between true insight and just knowing a lot of epigrams. There are a lot of good books that get abused this way, and every few years the focus among the terminally shallow shifts from one book to the other. Which fits a reasonable definition of "fad", no matter how good the book is.
The reviewer managed to miss something that's pretty important: the authors are totally infatuated with Sun Tzu's The Art of War, even to the point of copying that book's chapter titles. Which is evidence either that they're educated people building on age-old wisdom — or they're half-educated dweebs copying a book that's faddish right now.
Theory not a dirty word
on
The Art of SQL
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
This book might be good for THEORY, but for actually getting useful and applicable information, the review leaves me wondering who would be a worthwhile reader.
SQL theory is useful and applicable. It's just not complete: you also need the specifics of whatever SQL implementation you're using. For that you need to go to books about the specific RDBMS you're using. You can't expect a general SQL book to cover every implementation of the language, any more than you expect Stroustrop to tell you how to work with Visual C++.
Not every programmer needs to be a computer scientist, but they do need to learn a little theory now and then. That's especially true when you're work with relational databases, which are full of weird abstractions and subtle performance issues. Not having looked at this particular book, I can't say whether its overkill for what most SQL people do. I can say that most database hackers don't seem to know as much theory as they should.
Re:BN vs Amazon
on
The Art of SQL
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
This isn't about software patents, or about prices. This is about who gives Slashdot the best deal for steering traffic to their site.
You're the one who's making assumptions. Slashdot is owned by VA, which has only had a couple of profitable quarters in their entire existence. And when you see a Slashdot editor behaving like an idiot, you assume he has some hidden agenda. My only assumption is that some who acts incompetent is incompetent — which isn't the biggest leap ever.
Hey, Slashdot is just a bunch of Perl hackers who lucked into a big following. If they hadn't appeared right when there was a lot of VC to waste on marginal enterprises, they'd be out of business by now. I value their better work — but they screw up a lot. They're the first to admit it.
That's a matter of perspective. Using Word, you couldn't produce the kind of LaTeX'd documents I've seen in fields from mathematics and software engineering to linguistics, no matter how long you tried. And for that matter, someone competent with a tool like LaTeX will generally be far more productive doing a task that suits it than someone competent using a tool like Word.
Perfectly true. But, beside the point, since the person who asked the original question could give a shit. LaTeX's cool formatting features do nothing to make it better for version control.
I agree that separation of content from presentation is a good idea. Indeed, for thie purpose at hand, it's essential. But LaTeX does not do any such thing. It embeds formatting info in the document.
Plain text makes it easier to manage version control and branching. But it's not enough. You need a simple document structure that doesn't embed a lot of formatting crap in your document.
And even if you're right, you don't need to switch to LaTex to have plain text files. All word processors, including Word, have plain text formats.
LaTex may be terminally cool for creating fancy-looking documents. But it doesn't solve any problems that this guy cares about. For his purposes, it's just another word processing format.
Your big problem is your analysts. They want "ease of use" which is just another way of saying "we like working with a word processor". But the messy data maintained by a word processor is incompatible with your other goals. You need a well-structured format such as XML/Docbook. (I mention that specific format by way of example, though it's a good general-purpose solution if you want to maximize your reliance on off-the-shelf technology.) Imposing structure on your document base is moderately difficult, but well within the ability of any semi-competent software wonk. Persuading people that they have to give up their word processors is much, much harder. As the flame I'm anticipating in response to this post will certainly reveal.
The submission makes it sound like Jonathan Last is some kind of technical expert. He's just a reporter on the technology beat. He does make some good points in the article, but he also makes some of the lame mistakes ("the DVD already had one competitor, DivX" and "household gadgets needed in a war-ravaged country: rice cookers and heating pads") typical of those self-taught "experts" who doesn't know technology as well as they think they do.
Slashdot Mirror
... why everybody's so infatuated with this project. It's not because it will benefit millions of third-world children, though that's a definite plus. It's that we're all so sick of the bloated, power sucking laptops we use now.
But geeks or not, I don't see a lot of people using the crank when other sources of power are available. Given this thing's low draw, solar panels might be more practical.
Well, those go for $10, so I was only off by $15.
Sure, and the Yugo wasn't designed for Donald Trump. So what?
Your friend in Mumbai (some locals still insist on calling it Bombay, or so I'm told) presumably has the benefits of infrastructure. These include semi-reliable power, and some kind of telephone system that will handle data packets. That's true of anybody you can label "middle class", almost by definition. The $100 laptop, with its grid networking and hand-cranked power supply, is not designed for such folks.
Oh, grow up. This is an interesting, useful story. Even if it were just about stupidity, it would be worth reading — there's an art to dealing with stupid people. Besides, the story is also this guy's attempts to pressure the Sidekick's new "owner" to give it back — and it's unexpected conseequences.
But yeah, I'd certainly pay $5 to $10 to play on old game on a Wii. (I often spend that much to buy old games on eBay.) Indeed, that's more of an incentive for me to buy a Wii than to play some overdesigned highrez game.
That's a pretty good summary. Some analysis is in order, though: it seems to me that the purpose of this ruling is not so much to settle the argument as to publically censure the two opposing counsel for failure to achieve adulthood.
Sure, TAoW is an important book. Unfortunately, it's the kind of book that will always be popular with dweebs who don't know the difference between true insight and just knowing a lot of epigrams. There are a lot of good books that get abused this way, and every few years the focus among the terminally shallow shifts from one book to the other. Which fits a reasonable definition of "fad", no matter how good the book is.
The reviewer managed to miss something that's pretty important: the authors are totally infatuated with Sun Tzu's The Art of War, even to the point of copying that book's chapter titles. Which is evidence either that they're educated people building on age-old wisdom — or they're half-educated dweebs copying a book that's faddish right now.
Not every programmer needs to be a computer scientist, but they do need to learn a little theory now and then. That's especially true when you're work with relational databases, which are full of weird abstractions and subtle performance issues. Not having looked at this particular book, I can't say whether its overkill for what most SQL people do. I can say that most database hackers don't seem to know as much theory as they should.
This isn't about software patents, or about prices. This is about who gives Slashdot the best deal for steering traffic to their site.
And I thought the first lame joke would be about car pool lanes. Terribly Californiacentric of me.
I give up. You're right. Zonk is fucking evil genius.
Hey, Slashdot is just a bunch of Perl hackers who lucked into a big following. If they hadn't appeared right when there was a lot of VC to waste on marginal enterprises, they'd be out of business by now. I value their better work — but they screw up a lot. They're the first to admit it.
I agree that separation of content from presentation is a good idea. Indeed, for thie purpose at hand, it's essential. But LaTeX does not do any such thing. It embeds formatting info in the document.
See my response to somebody else who said pretty much the same thing you did.
And even if you're right, you don't need to switch to LaTex to have plain text files. All word processors, including Word, have plain text formats.
LaTex may be terminally cool for creating fancy-looking documents. But it doesn't solve any problems that this guy cares about. For his purposes, it's just another word processing format.
Your big problem is your analysts. They want "ease of use" which is just another way of saying "we like working with a word processor". But the messy data maintained by a word processor is incompatible with your other goals. You need a well-structured format such as XML/Docbook. (I mention that specific format by way of example, though it's a good general-purpose solution if you want to maximize your reliance on off-the-shelf technology.) Imposing structure on your document base is moderately difficult, but well within the ability of any semi-competent software wonk. Persuading people that they have to give up their word processors is much, much harder. As the flame I'm anticipating in response to this post will certainly reveal.
The submission makes it sound like Jonathan Last is some kind of technical expert. He's just a reporter on the technology beat. He does make some good points in the article, but he also makes some of the lame mistakes ("the DVD already had one competitor, DivX" and "household gadgets needed in a war-ravaged country: rice cookers and heating pads") typical of those self-taught "experts" who doesn't know technology as well as they think they do.