The tags might be a mess for less popular music, but that can easily be fixed up afterwards.
You'll have to fix them yourself in any case. For 99 cents a CD, you're not paying enough to have someone fix up your tags for you.
Like you, I would never pay somebody else to do something like this. But I'm more tight-fisted than almost anybody who has a decent income. Every department store and every car lot is full of stuff that I'd never spend money on — and yet millions of people spend billions of dollars on them.
And an unknown college dropout named Bill Gates, together with his partner Paul Allen, wrote a version of the programming language BASIC for the Altair, forming a company called Micro-Soft in the process. He would later drop the hyphen and the capital S, and make billions of dollars.
It's really sad that neither his detractors (quite a few) nor his admirers (there must be some) remember that Bill Gates got his start writing a really gawdawful implementation of BASIC. I guess it had to be gawdawful, because they had to strip out out a lot of features to fit the intepreter in a 4K ROM. But ROMs got bigger, and then got replaced by floppy disks, and then hard disks. But Microsoft never put any really important features back. Used to piss me off.
In 1983 I was working for a company that had a modest success with 8088 and 8086 systems running their proprietary OS. They licensed a lot of standard software from Microsoft, including GW-BASIC, to bundle with the product. They had decided to make the move into 68010-based Unix boxes, and asked Microsoft to quote a price to port GW-BASIC to the new platform. The quote was totally ridiculous, so they hired a single engineer to write a clone. I think it took him a couple of months.
Linux is a semi-modern OS, and has hardware requirements that reflect the fact. To run Linux, you need memory management. In the PC world, that means a 386 or better. By the time the 386 came along, the story TFA is telling was essentially over.
There were attempts to run more primitive Unix-like systems on PCs from the first 8088-based IBM boxes. Not notably successful. The best known is Xenix, which I have heard a lot of nasty things about.
You're not saying "Buy white box." You're saying, "buy from a good white box vendor." And how many of those are out there? From what I've seen, not that many.
Besides, by depending on this guy, you've created a one-man point of failure. What happens when this guy gets sick or goes on vacation? Where's your immediate response then?
Even if he never gets sick or takes time off, he's not going to be able to sustain this level of service. His own good reputation will work against him. He's obviously one of those people who has to do everything himself. He's probably not very good at delegating or training, so he's never going to be able to scale up his operation. So unless he starts turning away business and dropping customers when they get too big for him to handle, he's going to get in out of his depth.
If I were in your shoes, I'd want my hardware needs met by a solid organization, once I could count on not just now, but years from now. And that has to do with people, not with where the boxes are assembled.
As far as I can figure out, the post got three times as many "funny" mods as it got "troll" mods. Which pretty much reflects the distribution of opinion amongst slashdotters.
The ID versus Evolution battle is "gigantic" only if you live in Kansas or are a zealot on either side. It makes good news copy, but aside from that it's just not very important.
What we really have is a small but militant religious movement that is rejected by most people — including Christians. Their strident intolerance is making them less and less relevent. Today they flamed President Bush because he put an Old Testament verse on his family Xmas card! Let's stop taking these jokers seriously.
Apple has a tiny market share. Maybe being a small player works for them, but it's not going to work for Sun. If Sun becomes to the server market what Apple has long been to the desktop market, they're doomed.
My mistake. Still, I find it hard to believe that Sun can create software that's so good, people will buy Sun hardware just to run it. And if it's open source, they probably won't need Sun hardware to run it.
As with those Gilette razors, the product doesn't stand or fall on little pricing/marketing gimmicks. What matter is the basic value it creates for the customer. Sun hardware is superior, but not superior enough to justify its cost. And playing games with the way you sell the hardware isn't going to change that.
The "safety razor" model is easy to misunderstand, because the term doesn't mean what it used to back with Scott McNeely (and I) learned to shave.
Back in the 19th century, all men shaved with straight razors. Then in 1905 King Gilette patented a disposable-blade razor. It was called a "safety razor" purely for marketting reasons. Its main selling point was that you never had to sharpen the blade — when it got dull you just threw it out and bought a new one.
And yes, they did sell the handles at a loss, and made it back selling the blades But that was just to ease market resistance. The product stood on its own merits.
It's an interesting strategy, it doesn't apply in 90% of the business models it's claimed for. I certainly don't see how it applies to computers. Everybody know about Total Cost of Ownership, and aren't going to be impressed that they can get a Sun box for free. If Sun is going to make all its money off of software and customer service, then they should stop making computers altogether, and leave the hardware headaches to others.
If this is VRML, then so is every FPS game out there. There's more to VRML than just 3D graphics. There's a detailed simulation of the real world — including a lot of complex interactions. That's a lot harder to do than early VRML enthusiasts realized, which is why the topic is more or less dead.
After their big purchase, they took the Cray name for continuity with Cray's old customers and products, along with the fact that it's a much more viable "commercial" supercomputing name.
"Continuity" is kind of the wrong word, since the SGI had little use for the Cray name. While they owned Cray, the name appeared only on minor products such as the Craylink bus.
Despite SGI's neglect, the Cray name did and does have a lot of name recognition. So when Tera bought SGI's Cray division, they did so not just for the right to restore the Cray name on Cray products, but for the right to put the Cray name on Tera products. It's an exercise in branding. Indeed I suspect that Tera was more interested in buying the Cray brand than the Cray product line — which has never been profitable.
A more extreme case of branding is Atari, which is now the name of a French game software company that has no real connection with Nolan Bushnell's original company.
Before you go around quibbling with other people's arguments, take a closer look at your own. Your definitions of "ad hominem" and "denying the antecedent" are pure horseshit.
Wrong. "Ad hominem" would be if I said, "You're a Freemason, and Freemasons never know what they're talking about." I simply pointed out that his argument exhibited the very "What I know how to do is simple" fallacy that I had previously talked about.
On the one hand you insist that anybody should know how to compose a DOS command line. On the other hand, you can't handle the more basic skill of creating a grammatically correct English sentence. Kind of proves my point.
Has anyone seen/bought/built an e-mail client that will allow me to have my main e-mail client on my desktop and then update my laptop e-mail client when ever I'm in range, or through a personal IMAP Server?"
Jeez, how hard did you look? Any email client that supports both IMAP and "offline mode" will do that. I use Thunderbird, but I'm sure there are others.
Have we placed too much emphasis on making GUI-based applications, and left behind what was a perfectly good way of doing things?
You correctly perceive a big problem. But you're letting a secondary issue confuse things. There's a good reason GUIs took over: it's a lot easier to train computer newbies with standardized "point-and-grunt" user interfaces than to make them learn complicated command syntaxes and file system conventions. These things seem "simpler" to people who learned to use computers early on. But by any objective standard, they just aren't.
Which is not to say that you don't have a good point. There's no good reason you can't dispense with a mouse if you choose to. But there is a bad reason: developers just don't bother. They don't want to go through the extra work of providing keyboard shortcuts for every function in their software. So all those GUI programs could be keyboard-friendly. But very few of them are.
You're right about the limited job market. I went to my nephew's commencement ceremony at Academy of Art College (now University), and about 30 kids lined up to get BFAs in game design. I doubt if there were that many new game design jobs in the whole industry that year.
On the other hand, having the right degree is becomming more and more important. I'm a tech writer with a resume that includes experience at some of the computer industry's leaders. But there are lots of companies that won't even look at me. OK, I neglected to finish college, but they don't just want a Bachelor's, they want a major in CS or Tech Writing. And in some cases, it's "Master's degree preferred".
The problem is that high-tech industries have gotten big and bureaucratic. Where once you could get a job just by convincing a manager that you knew your stuff, now you have to deal with an HR bureaucracy that insists on standardized credentials. Perhaps the gaming industry is not as bad, since there are so many small design studios like Bioware. Then again, how many people do those small design studios hire, as opposed to the big companies?
Java applets use the web for deployment, but beyond that they're not really web applications. They run in little boxes on your web browser, and otherwise have nothing to do with the web. They don't leverage HTTP and other web technologies particularly well.
The classical AJAX app is Google Map. Imagine re-implementing it as a Java applet. Such an applet would take a lot of work to implement and would not leverage the web browser's ability to dynamically download graphic files. You'd spend a lot of time re-inventing stuff that your browser already does, and you'd end up with a large collection of Java classes that you'd have to deploy with a massive set of JAR files. Such a monster would be royal pain to deploy as an applet. It would make more sense to use a non-browser installer, such Java Web Start or with an old-fashioned installer generated in a download packge or on a CD. And indeed, that is how most Java appllications are distributed.
OK, suppose I get an urge to walk across country. My point was that audio players have a finite amount of memory, and I could get more out of that memory if I could use a speech-specific format.
Bandwidth limitation really isn't an excuse, nowadays.
Not for streaming over the Internet, maybe. But if you're storing files on a limited medium, it's still an issue. Well, not a big issue....
I own an MP3 player with 256MB that I mostly use to listen to spoken word stuff. At 16 kbps, which seems to be the minimum rate for that kind of content, I can store at most 25 hours. Yeah, that's a lot, but suppose I feel a sudden urge to drive accross country? I'd basically have to get another player with more storage or removable media. If I could use a speech-optimized format, instead of music-optimized MP3, I could use my flash more effectively.
None of which is an argument for using any format except MP3. Like VHS and QWERTY, it's not the best, but it is a de-facto standard. And that's enough.
Slashdot Mirror
The 286 did indeed run many advanced operating systems, including Unix. But Linux has always required at least a 386.
Like you, I would never pay somebody else to do something like this. But I'm more tight-fisted than almost anybody who has a decent income. Every department store and every car lot is full of stuff that I'd never spend money on — and yet millions of people spend billions of dollars on them.
In 1983 I was working for a company that had a modest success with 8088 and 8086 systems running their proprietary OS. They licensed a lot of standard software from Microsoft, including GW-BASIC, to bundle with the product. They had decided to make the move into 68010-based Unix boxes, and asked Microsoft to quote a price to port GW-BASIC to the new platform. The quote was totally ridiculous, so they hired a single engineer to write a clone. I think it took him a couple of months.
There were attempts to run more primitive Unix-like systems on PCs from the first 8088-based IBM boxes. Not notably successful. The best known is Xenix, which I have heard a lot of nasty things about.
Good point. So who's your provider? Somebody who hasn't crippled Bluetooth on their phones, obviously.
What use is an "Internet Tablet" if it's not connected to the Internet?
Besides, by depending on this guy, you've created a one-man point of failure. What happens when this guy gets sick or goes on vacation? Where's your immediate response then?
Even if he never gets sick or takes time off, he's not going to be able to sustain this level of service. His own good reputation will work against him. He's obviously one of those people who has to do everything himself. He's probably not very good at delegating or training, so he's never going to be able to scale up his operation. So unless he starts turning away business and dropping customers when they get too big for him to handle, he's going to get in out of his depth.
If I were in your shoes, I'd want my hardware needs met by a solid organization, once I could count on not just now, but years from now. And that has to do with people, not with where the boxes are assembled.
The ID versus Evolution battle is "gigantic" only if you live in Kansas or are a zealot on either side. It makes good news copy, but aside from that it's just not very important.
What we really have is a small but militant religious movement that is rejected by most people — including Christians. Their strident intolerance is making them less and less relevent. Today they flamed President Bush because he put an Old Testament verse on his family Xmas card! Let's stop taking these jokers seriously.
Apple has a tiny market share. Maybe being a small player works for them, but it's not going to work for Sun. If Sun becomes to the server market what Apple has long been to the desktop market, they're doomed.
As with those Gilette razors, the product doesn't stand or fall on little pricing/marketing gimmicks. What matter is the basic value it creates for the customer. Sun hardware is superior, but not superior enough to justify its cost. And playing games with the way you sell the hardware isn't going to change that.
Back in the 19th century, all men shaved with straight razors. Then in 1905 King Gilette patented a disposable-blade razor. It was called a "safety razor" purely for marketting reasons. Its main selling point was that you never had to sharpen the blade — when it got dull you just threw it out and bought a new one.
And yes, they did sell the handles at a loss, and made it back selling the blades But that was just to ease market resistance. The product stood on its own merits.
It's an interesting strategy, it doesn't apply in 90% of the business models it's claimed for. I certainly don't see how it applies to computers. Everybody know about Total Cost of Ownership, and aren't going to be impressed that they can get a Sun box for free. If Sun is going to make all its money off of software and customer service, then they should stop making computers altogether, and leave the hardware headaches to others.
Believe it or not, Slashdot is a geek forum too. If you think otherwise, you haven't been paying attention....
If this is VRML, then so is every FPS game out there. There's more to VRML than just 3D graphics. There's a detailed simulation of the real world — including a lot of complex interactions. That's a lot harder to do than early VRML enthusiasts realized, which is why the topic is more or less dead.
Despite SGI's neglect, the Cray name did and does have a lot of name recognition. So when Tera bought SGI's Cray division, they did so not just for the right to restore the Cray name on Cray products, but for the right to put the Cray name on Tera products. It's an exercise in branding. Indeed I suspect that Tera was more interested in buying the Cray brand than the Cray product line — which has never been profitable.
A more extreme case of branding is Atari, which is now the name of a French game software company that has no real connection with Nolan Bushnell's original company.
Before you go around quibbling with other people's arguments, take a closer look at your own. Your definitions of "ad hominem" and "denying the antecedent" are pure horseshit.
Wrong. "Ad hominem" would be if I said, "You're a Freemason, and Freemasons never know what they're talking about." I simply pointed out that his argument exhibited the very "What I know how to do is simple" fallacy that I had previously talked about.
On the one hand you insist that anybody should know how to compose a DOS command line. On the other hand, you can't handle the more basic skill of creating a grammatically correct English sentence. Kind of proves my point.
Which is not to say that you don't have a good point. There's no good reason you can't dispense with a mouse if you choose to. But there is a bad reason: developers just don't bother. They don't want to go through the extra work of providing keyboard shortcuts for every function in their software. So all those GUI programs could be keyboard-friendly. But very few of them are.
On the other hand, having the right degree is becomming more and more important. I'm a tech writer with a resume that includes experience at some of the computer industry's leaders. But there are lots of companies that won't even look at me. OK, I neglected to finish college, but they don't just want a Bachelor's, they want a major in CS or Tech Writing. And in some cases, it's "Master's degree preferred".
The problem is that high-tech industries have gotten big and bureaucratic. Where once you could get a job just by convincing a manager that you knew your stuff, now you have to deal with an HR bureaucracy that insists on standardized credentials. Perhaps the gaming industry is not as bad, since there are so many small design studios like Bioware. Then again, how many people do those small design studios hire, as opposed to the big companies?
The classical AJAX app is Google Map. Imagine re-implementing it as a Java applet. Such an applet would take a lot of work to implement and would not leverage the web browser's ability to dynamically download graphic files. You'd spend a lot of time re-inventing stuff that your browser already does, and you'd end up with a large collection of Java classes that you'd have to deploy with a massive set of JAR files. Such a monster would be royal pain to deploy as an applet. It would make more sense to use a non-browser installer, such Java Web Start or with an old-fashioned installer generated in a download packge or on a CD. And indeed, that is how most Java appllications are distributed.
If I had a dollar for every movie that was ever "in development", but never went anywhere, I could afford to make a movie myself!
OK, suppose I get an urge to walk across country. My point was that audio players have a finite amount of memory, and I could get more out of that memory if I could use a speech-specific format.
I own an MP3 player with 256MB that I mostly use to listen to spoken word stuff. At 16 kbps, which seems to be the minimum rate for that kind of content, I can store at most 25 hours. Yeah, that's a lot, but suppose I feel a sudden urge to drive accross country? I'd basically have to get another player with more storage or removable media. If I could use a speech-optimized format, instead of music-optimized MP3, I could use my flash more effectively.
None of which is an argument for using any format except MP3. Like VHS and QWERTY, it's not the best, but it is a de-facto standard. And that's enough.