You mean if the market can't grow any more, there can't be competition? That's nonsense. The economy's full of markets that aren't growing, but have lots of people competing for a fixed amount of business. But when you have deep pockets, the easiest way to grow is to destroy or buy out your competitors -- and that is what kills competition. If we still had an real anti-trust enforcement, it just wouldn't be allowed.
Why? Because they referred to Siebel as a U.S. company, but didn't specify that Oracle was? That's natural for a British news source -- their local readers may not have heard of Siebel, but have certainly heard of Oracle, which does a lot of business in Europe.
And that cocktails are made with hard liquor, not beer. They were invented during prohibition, because the rotgut sold by most bootleggers was undrinkable without additional ingredients.
Why do you assume my data is in EBCDIC? IBM did own 90% of the market in that era, but that still leaves a lot of ASCII-based machines from that era, especially on university campuses, lab people preferred to have their on minis (usually a PDP) rather than share a mainframe, and no serious CS program relied on IBM systems.
Buying a desktop 9-track would cost me something like $300 -- more than I care to spend to read one tape with data of purely nostalgic value. If I ever care enough, I'll send the tape to a legacy/recovery service.
That would be the best method, but I would seriously question the wisdom of PDF files. Although they represent documents fairly well, the format is too proprietary and too variable to be safe. You want the baseline documents to be in a format you can read at ANY time in the future, not just three weeks down the road.
I'm not a big fan of PDF, at least as it's commonly used. (It's essential for prepress applications, but it's most commonly used for online document sharing, an application for which it sucks.) So I hate to disagree with a fellow PDF-hater. But your arguments against using it are nonsense.
Technically, yes, PDF is a proprietary format. a well-documented, widely licensed format. Really, it's just Postscript with a few organizational elements. Both Postscript and PDF have many third-part implementations, including one that's available under the GPL.
With the merge of Adobe and Macromedia, the constant toying with DRM schemes, the allowing of unsafe code in current Adobe formats, etc, make format choice as vital as scanner choice.
I don't see what the merger with Macromedia has to do with anything. DRM would be an issue if Adobe was the only source for PDF software -- but it's not.
A good example of this was the use of Laserdisks for the 1980's survey of Britain to commemorate the Domesday Book. The Domesday Project is now unusable on anything but a very small number of machines, because they weren't adequately careful.
Hindsight is all very well -- but what format would you have chosen? Floppy disks would have been too expensive, CDs didn't exist yet. If it had been up to me, I would have chosen 9-track mag tape -- and I would have been wrong. (I still have a 9-track tape containing a backup of my student files, and no way to read it!) In any case, that mistake had to do with a choice of hardware. It's a lot easier to recreate old software than old hardware.
I'll skip past all your other hardware examples (papyrus???) and skip to...
In other words, don't digitize (or file) for the sake of doing so....
What, you think this is some kind of whim? If these documents are at all important, he has to bring them online. As long as they exist only in dead tree form, they are awkward to access, expensive to store, and run the risk of being lost in day-to-day use, to say nothing of the odd natural disaster.
You made half the point I was going to make. The other half is that a a Jeep Cherokee is a good candidate for an all-electric conversion. And there are plenty of people who do that.
Everybody assumes that global warming means a uniform rise in temperature and sea levels. (Peter Hamilton wrote some remarkably bad SF on that premise.) The planet's a tad more complicated than that. I don't know about Alaska, but I've seen reports claiming that Europe would likely get colder, because the Gulf Stream will probably be diverted. Other reports claim that sea levels in some areas would actually drop.
So if you're investing in Global Warming, don't buy real estate -- too uncertain what will happen to it. You might consider wind farming...
And if laptops were only used to take tests, you'd have a point. But they have many other classroom uses: writing (students do more writing with less proding if they have access to a laptop), research (accessing primary sources online for free instead of expensive, watered-down textbooks), educational software, etc.
I'm not sure what your point is with that "throwing money" remark, unless it's that we can't solve problems by buying technology without knowing what we're going to do with it. That's certainly true, but so what? Are you claiming that nobody who wants classroom computers knows what they plan to do with them? I see a lot of evidence to the contrary.
This LCD scheme, by contrast is poorly thought out. It worked for a single gizmo-loving teacher, but you haven't offered any serious evidence that it can be deployed cheaply, except that some of the basic parts are cheap. Others are pretty expensive: wiring, a gadget to tabulate the results, etc.
Typical geek solution: give a teacher a few electronic parts and say, "Here's your new grading system!" Who installs the system? Who fixes it when it breaks? How do you run the wires so they aren't a hazard?
Nowadays, it would be more cost effective just to give every student a laptop, with a secure network application for test-taking. And a lot of schools are doing just that. Of course, every time a story about that appears on Slashdot, we hear a lot of noise about technology not replacing teachers.
Well, it's true -- technology can't replace teachers. But it sure can give them more time to actually teach.
Your teacher was a smart person. But she was lucky the bureaucracy let her get away with it. And that none of the students went whining to their parents about being made to do homework that wasn't graded. With school more bureaucratic and political than ever, I doubt if that would be allowed today.
You certainly did slip a digit. That's why I never use calculators.
Based on the (very optimistic!) assumption that it takes 1 minute to write and swap a floppy, I calculate that it would take 9 1/2 months to complete the backup.
Then again, with good backup software, you'd get 30% compression, which would shave 100,000 floppies and a couple of months off. Anybody know a program that can handle that many backup volumes?
Not the same thing. I was talking about mice that had the ability to resist hand motion. I dimly recall that some vibrator mice (ooh!) were sold as "force feedback" mice, but that was pure marketing BS.
Yeah, force-feedback was all the rage a while back, with mice, joysticks, etc. I was interested for the same reasons you were, but they were marketed mostly as a gaming toy. I think their main drawback was that they were very complicated mechnically. Which translates to much higher cost per unit, and much lower reliability. Mice get a lot of wear, so expensive and breaks easily translates to no customers. Indeed, the trend is in the opposite direction: last time I bought a mouse, every one in the store had optical movement sensors instead of a ball or other mechanical sensor. Which was fine with me -- I wouldn't have bought one if it had been available.
That's just it -- this wasn't a "personal thing". It was a shouting match between two co-workers over nothing. It's proof that both persons are immature and don't understand proper workplace behavior. Giving "misuse of the mail system" as ground for terminating them was just an excuse. Any competant manager who found out about such a silly feud would want both participants gone.
Also, switching to an outside mail system would require exactly the kind of foresight flame warriors never show. If they were able to think that far ahead, they'd realize how stupid the whole argument is. Flame wars are an exercise of ego, not judgment.
Abbreviations are for people who can't type very fast. A fatal flaw for any secretarial job. Grammar is less of an issue, since the secretaries mostly transcribe stuff other people have written -- especially in a law firm.
In a former life, I did academic typing for a living, and even now I can do 60 WPM. Plus I often do technical writing. So for me the full words come naturally, and using abbreviations would actually slow me down. Often gets awkward in IM sessions, where my full-blown prose comes across as pretentious.
People here are ignorant technology-wise--which is fine, as being tech-savvy is my job. However, they do not seem to trust my judgment on anything except changing printer cartridges.
There's your whole problem right there: you're "tech savvy" and they're "ignorant". Which is bullshit. Nowadays, very few people are totally ignorant about computers. They may not know as much as you (and many of them probably don't know as much as they think they do), but they know something.
If you march in and tell them everything they know is wrong, of course they're not going to trust you. Trust is something you earn. And you don't earn it by belittling the knowledge and skills of the people you're working with.
Which is not to say that you shouldn't try to re-educate them. You're quite right to want to move away from Microsoft products. But you have to do it without screwing up their lives. That's a gradual process they they have to be active participants in.
The key to the micropayment game is aggregation of volume . If your company is processing 2000 payments per day of $0.01 each from 2000 different people, it's probably costing you more than it's worth. However, if you're processing five million payments a week with an average individual's cost being around $0.25, you might be breaking even. If you could get two dozen major sites and hundreds of smaller ones on board, you might make money.
That's a pretty good assessment. So if we accept all you've said, we have to ask: why has nobody tried to do this? There are dozens of online content providers struggling to make a living off of advertising and subscriptions. You'd think a few of them would get together and form a micropayment consortium. So why haven't they? Failure of imagination? Intimdation by existing transaction processors (mainly banks)?
That last one is my pet theory -- though I should hasten to say that I have absolutely no evidence to back it up. Banks make huge profits off of credit/debit card transactions. I mean, 3% on most online transactions and a lot of old-fashioned transactions. You don't see it on your bill, because retailers aren't allowed to break it out, but you are paying it. It's a scandal. Imagine the reaction if they tried to impose a 3% national sales tax. And yet we're already paying one!
If there were a working micropayment system with transaction fees low enough to make penny transactions feasible, it would soon be adopted by retailers on the non-micro scale. Not something the banks would like to see!
I didn't say there was no point in doing online help for Katrina victims. But when you see a lot of different people announcing that they're going to found exactly the same Help Katrina Victims Web Site, you tend to get a little sceptical as to how many of them are going to be effective. Does it help Katrina victims to throw provide them with a couple dozen half-assed web sites, all trying to provide the same services?
As for Oppie in the Pacific -- there were undoubtedly many guys out there who could have headed up the scientific end of the Manhatten project. (And many others who would have told you they could if you asked them!) But only one guy actually got to do it. The Oppies of the world are important, but not everybody who's qualified to be Oppie gets to be him -- to say nothing of all the people who think they're a scientific genius and aren't.
As for your web site -- I could be wrong, but I'll bet you didn't start out with a Craigslist post. You just sat down, maybe with a couple friends, and did it. That's fine, and not at all what I was criticizing.
I agree. And here's my pet theory as to why: Slashcode hasn't kept up with the times. The user-interface still has a simplistic display model that doesn't work if there are more than 100 posts per article. Nowadays, frontpage articles often get thousands of posts -- and there's no way to skip past threads you're not interested in.
That shows in the current discussion, which started out with a long and pointless flame war about the SCO thing. Anybody interested in a serious discussion is going to want to skip past it -- but how? So the discussion is dominated by idiots. No thanks.
Here's a LiveJournal skin that has a handy "thread" link that let's you drill down into threads and subthreads you're interested in. Only the lead post in each thread is shown until you drill down.
A simpler fix would be to add a "skip this thread" link to each article. The link would take you to the next commend on the same level.
If you're making a joke, ha ha. If you're making a point -- that it's all about the personality of the developer, then you're way off base. There are some really serious issues here. Is MySQL really faster for simple queries? Does PostgreSQL's more complete RDBMS feature set matter to web developers?
Until recently, most Slashdot stories have assumed that MySQL was it as far as free database engines were concerned. Lately, we've been a little better informed, but I still haven't seen a good comparison of MySQL versus the PostgreSQL or Firebird. I browsed this discussion hoping for some useful comments, but all we have so far is a long and pointless flame war about the SCO connection, and of course the usual lame jokes.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean if the market can't grow any more, there can't be competition? That's nonsense. The economy's full of markets that aren't growing, but have lots of people competing for a fixed amount of business. But when you have deep pockets, the easiest way to grow is to destroy or buy out your competitors -- and that is what kills competition. If we still had an real anti-trust enforcement, it just wouldn't be allowed.
Why? Because they referred to Siebel as a U.S. company, but didn't specify that Oracle was? That's natural for a British news source -- their local readers may not have heard of Siebel, but have certainly heard of Oracle, which does a lot of business in Europe.
And that cocktails are made with hard liquor, not beer. They were invented during prohibition, because the rotgut sold by most bootleggers was undrinkable without additional ingredients.
Buying a desktop 9-track would cost me something like $300 -- more than I care to spend to read one tape with data of purely nostalgic value. If I ever care enough, I'll send the tape to a legacy/recovery service.
Technically, yes, PDF is a proprietary format. a well-documented, widely licensed format. Really, it's just Postscript with a few organizational elements. Both Postscript and PDF have many third-part implementations, including one that's available under the GPL.
I don't see what the merger with Macromedia has to do with anything. DRM would be an issue if Adobe was the only source for PDF software -- but it's not. Hindsight is all very well -- but what format would you have chosen? Floppy disks would have been too expensive, CDs didn't exist yet. If it had been up to me, I would have chosen 9-track mag tape -- and I would have been wrong. (I still have a 9-track tape containing a backup of my student files, and no way to read it!) In any case, that mistake had to do with a choice of hardware. It's a lot easier to recreate old software than old hardware.I'll skip past all your other hardware examples (papyrus???) and skip to...
What, you think this is some kind of whim? If these documents are at all important, he has to bring them online. As long as they exist only in dead tree form, they are awkward to access, expensive to store, and run the risk of being lost in day-to-day use, to say nothing of the odd natural disaster.The electric motor store?
You made half the point I was going to make. The other half is that a a Jeep Cherokee is a good candidate for an all-electric conversion. And there are plenty of people who do that.
So if you're investing in Global Warming, don't buy real estate -- too uncertain what will happen to it. You might consider wind farming...
I'm not sure what your point is with that "throwing money" remark, unless it's that we can't solve problems by buying technology without knowing what we're going to do with it. That's certainly true, but so what? Are you claiming that nobody who wants classroom computers knows what they plan to do with them? I see a lot of evidence to the contrary.
This LCD scheme, by contrast is poorly thought out. It worked for a single gizmo-loving teacher, but you haven't offered any serious evidence that it can be deployed cheaply, except that some of the basic parts are cheap. Others are pretty expensive: wiring, a gadget to tabulate the results, etc.
Typical geek solution: give a teacher a few electronic parts and say, "Here's your new grading system!" Who installs the system? Who fixes it when it breaks? How do you run the wires so they aren't a hazard?
Well, it's true -- technology can't replace teachers. But it sure can give them more time to actually teach.
Your teacher was a smart person. But she was lucky the bureaucracy let her get away with it. And that none of the students went whining to their parents about being made to do homework that wasn't graded. With school more bureaucratic and political than ever, I doubt if that would be allowed today.
I challenge you to say "kibibit" with a straight face!
Based on the (very optimistic!) assumption that it takes 1 minute to write and swap a floppy, I calculate that it would take 9 1/2 months to complete the backup.
Then again, with good backup software, you'd get 30% compression, which would shave 100,000 floppies and a couple of months off. Anybody know a program that can handle that many backup volumes?
Not the same thing. I was talking about mice that had the ability to resist hand motion. I dimly recall that some vibrator mice (ooh!) were sold as "force feedback" mice, but that was pure marketing BS.
Yeah, force-feedback was all the rage a while back, with mice, joysticks, etc. I was interested for the same reasons you were, but they were marketed mostly as a gaming toy. I think their main drawback was that they were very complicated mechnically. Which translates to much higher cost per unit, and much lower reliability. Mice get a lot of wear, so expensive and breaks easily translates to no customers. Indeed, the trend is in the opposite direction: last time I bought a mouse, every one in the store had optical movement sensors instead of a ball or other mechanical sensor. Which was fine with me -- I wouldn't have bought one if it had been available.
Also, switching to an outside mail system would require exactly the kind of foresight flame warriors never show. If they were able to think that far ahead, they'd realize how stupid the whole argument is. Flame wars are an exercise of ego, not judgment.
In a former life, I did academic typing for a living, and even now I can do 60 WPM. Plus I often do technical writing. So for me the full words come naturally, and using abbreviations would actually slow me down. Often gets awkward in IM sessions, where my full-blown prose comes across as pretentious.
If you march in and tell them everything they know is wrong, of course they're not going to trust you. Trust is something you earn. And you don't earn it by belittling the knowledge and skills of the people you're working with.
Which is not to say that you shouldn't try to re-educate them. You're quite right to want to move away from Microsoft products. But you have to do it without screwing up their lives. That's a gradual process they they have to be active participants in.
That last one is my pet theory -- though I should hasten to say that I have absolutely no evidence to back it up. Banks make huge profits off of credit/debit card transactions. I mean, 3% on most online transactions and a lot of old-fashioned transactions. You don't see it on your bill, because retailers aren't allowed to break it out, but you are paying it. It's a scandal. Imagine the reaction if they tried to impose a 3% national sales tax. And yet we're already paying one!
If there were a working micropayment system with transaction fees low enough to make penny transactions feasible, it would soon be adopted by retailers on the non-micro scale. Not something the banks would like to see!
As for Oppie in the Pacific -- there were undoubtedly many guys out there who could have headed up the scientific end of the Manhatten project. (And many others who would have told you they could if you asked them!) But only one guy actually got to do it. The Oppies of the world are important, but not everybody who's qualified to be Oppie gets to be him -- to say nothing of all the people who think they're a scientific genius and aren't.
As for your web site -- I could be wrong, but I'll bet you didn't start out with a Craigslist post. You just sat down, maybe with a couple friends, and did it. That's fine, and not at all what I was criticizing.
That shows in the current discussion, which started out with a long and pointless flame war about the SCO thing. Anybody interested in a serious discussion is going to want to skip past it -- but how? So the discussion is dominated by idiots. No thanks.
Here's a LiveJournal skin that has a handy "thread" link that let's you drill down into threads and subthreads you're interested in. Only the lead post in each thread is shown until you drill down.
A simpler fix would be to add a "skip this thread" link to each article. The link would take you to the next commend on the same level.
Until recently, most Slashdot stories have assumed that MySQL was it as far as free database engines were concerned. Lately, we've been a little better informed, but I still haven't seen a good comparison of MySQL versus the PostgreSQL or Firebird. I browsed this discussion hoping for some useful comments, but all we have so far is a long and pointless flame war about the SCO connection, and of course the usual lame jokes.
That makes him sound like a Luddite. I think he was more to the point when he said, "Security is a process, not a product."
The R in RTFA stands for "read". We're talking a movie!