Never celebrate the demise of a fingernails-on-chalkboard TV commercial. New ones are born at least as fast as the old ones die. Just watch TV with one finger on the mute button!
Nothing says status like space. The fact that you're in a smaller space is not a good sign.
I hate working in a cube -- but I've come to accept that there may be some wisdom in banning private offices.
War story 1: I worked at Borland, whose main building is designed around one simple (but expensive) feature: everybody who works on the third floor gets a private office with a Window. But who gets to work on the third floor? Originally, the idea was, Top Management and R&D developers. Which is nice for them, but doesn't make all the other employees exactly feel loved. Later, when Borland shrunk, everybody who could get away with it moved to the third floor. Then half the building was leased out, the company started to grow again, and a lot of people had to be (literally) kicked downstairs. The ensuing battles were not pretty.
War story 2: Sun tries to allot a private offices to everybody whose job doesn't involve answering the phone. But that leads to status issues over office size and window-versus-windowless. The office allocator for one particualr division got in trouble because she had more window offices to allocate than she had high-status people to put in them. Her solution was to double people up in large offices, claiming that some offices had been allocated to people who hadn't moved into the building yet....
I suggested that we simply paint over the windows in some offices. Nobody else thought it was funny....
I was about to make the usual crack about Americans not knowing their geography. Then I noticed that the newspaper writer who made the mistake was Canadian...
I just remembered a similar mistake, even more drastic. I once had a co-worker confide that she'd accepted a job in Silicon Valley because she wanted to be near Disneyland. I don't know what disturbed me more -- a grownup who wanted to live near Disneyland, or a grownup who didn't know how big California is. Slightly bigger than England, anyway.
I've never heard anybody trash DeVry. But I have to admit that I had assumed they were just another seedy unaccredited diploma mill. Not because of anything I actually knew about them. But because that's what their tacky little TV commercials manage to imply.
Clients can compute physics for their nearby surroundings just like GTA3 does now. Positions and stats of objects should be all the server cares about really.
But its precisely the nearby physics that are mostly likely to overload a typical desktop computer. GTA3 only gets away it by making non-player objects stupid and slow.
In point of fact GTA3 cheats by not maintaining the existance of non-player actors that are more than a certain distance away, unless you're looking looking directly at them. It's amusing to watch people at the other end of the street, turn away for a moment, then turn back to see a completely separate set of people! More absurd is the mission where you're supposed to convoy the armored car. If you stick close to the armored car, you're swarmed by Diablos. But if you avoid the very car you're supposed to be protecting, then no Diablos are created to attack it!
You're quite correct, though the technology you cite is really out of date. JITs, which reduce whole class files to native code, are a brute force technology that were popular when people first discovered the shortcomings of Java bytecode interpreters. JVMs have evolved a bit since then, and usually rely on dynamic compiling, heuristic inlining, and other sophisticated techniques. This not only has a lower overhead than compiling a whole class every time you load it, it's much more effective in creating fast code.
The creators of the Hotspot VM used to claim that their brainchild would someday outperform C++, because of intelligent optimization at runtime. Don't know if that ever happened.
There are a lot of MM games out there. But do any of them even try to emulate real-world physics to the extent that GTA does? The amount of computing power to make this work is mind boggling. Maybe SGI will survive after all!
I was nodding my head in agreement until I got to the very end of your post, and you started listing formal logic topics that are way beyond the scope of day-to-day database design. That kind of rigorous theory is useful for designing a query engine or picking nits with the fine points of various SQL dialects. But I submit that it's serious overkill to insist that every database designer make a serious study of these topics. To really get a useful grasp of these topics, you'd have to do more than read a few Wikipedia articles or buy a couple of books. A full semester of upper-division college courses would be more like it. Which is really overkill for most database developers.
I do agree that there's not enough understanding of these topics in the database community. But what's needed is more practical stuff. Like an intuitive knowledge of database normalization. Not sophisticated formalisms that are difficult to learn and rarely applied.
That pretty much summarizes the reason for Firefox's recent surge in popularity.
Although, the 25 million downloads doesn't actually equate to 25 million users. How many times have you downloaded Firefox? I'm over 10, that's for sure. And how many people got it from others, rather than downloading it?
You've downloaded it 10 times? You're obviously an early adopter, which makes you pretty unrepresentative. On the other hand, many downloads never get past the evaluation phase. I myself tried Firefox 2 or 3 times, but resisted changing until a nonbuggy Googlebar became available.
Oh yeah, and don't forget upgrades.
Anyway, the download number is just another gee-whiz statistic, unconnected with any real measure of Firefox's progress. I'd be much happer to see evidence that its user share has grown out of the single digits. Pity Google stopped tracking browsers.
Slightly offtopic: I have to put in a word to Firefox extension developers, which seem to be legion these days. (I have 13 extensions installed, everying from a RSS browser to a simple tweak that prevents right-click from being disabled.) Extension are easily Firefox's coolest feature. But they're also its biggest potential problem, because nobody bothers to sign their extension. Please start doing so, before the malware bozos decide that your extension is something they can steal and modify to their own ends.
Your attitude towards people who resist the move away from Windows is both ignorant and patronizing. Retooling your business process to that extent is hard. Everybody has to learn new ways of doing things, new software solutions have to be found, etc. Even if everybody made the decision tommorrow to move to Linux, it would be a long, painful, expensive process.
Your "ignorant fuckwits" comment is particular offtarget for two reasons: (a) you can't just tell people, "shut up, we know more than you do, do as you're told"; (b) lots of well-trained IT people actually do believe in Microsoft technology. One big reason for (b) is Linux zealots with poor social skills who convince people that Linux is just a technohippie fad. So careful with the namecalling.
True, but I think the idea is that if enough CRPs actually pay for something, the price will eventually come down to something moderately well-off Crazy People can afford.
Perhaps. More likely we'll see one or more of the following scenarios: (a) the resort is popular until the first fatal accident; (b) people realize that being locked in a tiny airtight box is not the most fun vacation; (c) it turns out that there are just not enough people sufficiently crazy and/or rich; (d) the next silly fad comes along, and people lose interest in vacationing in space.
I remember a time when backers of space travel talked in terms of serious economic development: zero-g manufacturing, orbital power collectors, asteroid mining. Now we're reduced to junkets for the overprivileged. Pathetic.
Still, most innovators are a bit nuts, and crazy rich people built this world, so more power to them.
That's debateable. In any case, you don't just need a CRP to finance this deal, you need a lot more CRPs to actually pay to go to the station. Doesn't strike me as a sustainable business model.
But that's actually pretty common. Probably not the specific thing you describe, but it's a common legal tactic to control a thing by making it difficult for people to access it, without actually claiming ownership.
IANAL, so I don't know any really good examples. But here's a couple so-so ones. Guy living in Virginia in the 1780s is owed money by a Revolutionary War vet. In lieu of repayment, he accepts the deed to a land grant in Western Pennsylvannia. Travel was really difficult in those days,so it's a really long time before he ever visits the land. But he has to make improvements to retain title. So he has somebody on the scene build a cabin. When he finally visits the site he discovers that somebody who thinks he owns the land has built a second cabin on the property. And they've sited it so there's no way to get into the first cabin!
(Why do I know such a strange story? Cause the guy from Virginia was George Washington. I just finished reading The Grand Idea: George Washington's Potomac and the Race to the West.)
Another example that's kind of closer (because IP is involved) is the movie It's a Wonderful Life, which has been copyright-free since the early 50s, due to a screwup by a studio lawyer. That's why you used to see it over and over again every Christmas, because you could broadcast it or show it without paying royalties. Then Aaron Spelling's lawyers managed to secure the rights to a bunch of things relating to the movie: a song somebody sings in it, a story that the movie may have been based on (the paper trail's unclear), some other stuff. So now you can't show this movie without AS's permission -- even though he doesn't own it! Possibly a good lawyer could knock down his claim, but who's going to hire one just to show an old movie?
I'm guessing that Blizzard's lawyers simply decided that the best way to make the software non-transferrable was to not let people sell the registration numbers, and not bother putting anything in the EULA. From my own feeble knowledge of law, I know of no reason they can't do that. Maybe I'm wrong, but please don't waste your time telling me that -- unless you have more than an amateur's knowledge of the law yourself.
I am the first to criticize Windows security. But it is clearly good enough to the PHBs who sign the checks. If it wasn't, we'd all be using something else already.
In the past we haven't... oh, go back and read my previous post.
I don't really think focusing on security is going to do it either. Microsoft is making daily improvements in that department.
No, they're making more noise about security. As far as I can see, they're actually losing ground, even though they're throwing more and more resources at the probem.
"Several steps behind"? It's not clear what you mean by that. Are you talking about all the elaborate attempts by KDE and GNOME to out-feature Windows? That's all secondary. Desktop Linux is stuck on one simple, but seemingly insurmountable step: convincing people that moving away from Windows is worth the hassle.
The "good enough" argument is dead, because the spyware crisis has made it abundantly clear that Windows security is anything but. When somebody sits down at their computer and finds it unusable because there are thousands of spyware programs running, security stops being something they can put off dealing with.
You talk about MS's "public moves to improve the security of Windows" as if it was something they just got around to, and will quickly succeed at. The truth is, they've been fighting a losing battle against their security problems for a couple years now. But the same mismanagement that created the problem is making it very hard for them to respond. So not only do they have security problems they never should have had, they have security patches that are buggy, slow to be released, and not compatible with many existing systems!
My claim that Microsoft is mismanaged might seem insane. They're the biggest, most profitable high tech venture ever. How can they be mismanaged? But those profits mostly come from dependable revenue streams they accidentally created over 20 years ago. Most especially, everbody who buys a PC has pay them a tithe. No matter how many mistakes they make, they will continue to make money. Until they screw up so badly, nobody can fool themselves into thinking that MS software is "good enough".
And possibly that day is here. Which is why Linux adovcates should focus on Microsoft's inescapable mistakes, not trying to fight old battles Microsoft has long since won.
The TCO issue is kind of worn out by now. For years now, Linux advocates (and before them, the advocates of network computing) have tried to convince IT decision makers that they needed to get their TCO down by moving away from Windows. I've always thought the argument was a pretty good one, but it's never been convincing to the decision makers, who just haven't been willing to make the necessary paradigm shift.
Microsoft's current inability to handle security issues is much more persuasive. Linux advocates should focus on that, instead of beating a dead horse.
A good color scheme is nice, but how does it become "the most important thing"? What about actual content? Ease of use? Good organization? These all deserve more attention than your color scheme.
Heard of Google? They managed to attract one or two users wihout any color scheme at all.
It's almost offtopic, but I can't resist mentioning Bruce Lawson's supremely ugly CSS skin, Geocities 1996. Unfortunately, Firefox is unable to manage the more epilepsy-inducing effects. Soo much for browser independence!
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Never celebrate the demise of a fingernails-on-chalkboard TV commercial. New ones are born at least as fast as the old ones die. Just watch TV with one finger on the mute button!
War story 1: I worked at Borland, whose main building is designed around one simple (but expensive) feature: everybody who works on the third floor gets a private office with a Window. But who gets to work on the third floor? Originally, the idea was, Top Management and R&D developers. Which is nice for them, but doesn't make all the other employees exactly feel loved. Later, when Borland shrunk, everybody who could get away with it moved to the third floor. Then half the building was leased out, the company started to grow again, and a lot of people had to be (literally) kicked downstairs. The ensuing battles were not pretty.
War story 2: Sun tries to allot a private offices to everybody whose job doesn't involve answering the phone. But that leads to status issues over office size and window-versus-windowless. The office allocator for one particualr division got in trouble because she had more window offices to allocate than she had high-status people to put in them. Her solution was to double people up in large offices, claiming that some offices had been allocated to people who hadn't moved into the building yet....
I suggested that we simply paint over the windows in some offices. Nobody else thought it was funny....
I just remembered a similar mistake, even more drastic. I once had a co-worker confide that she'd accepted a job in Silicon Valley because she wanted to be near Disneyland. I don't know what disturbed me more -- a grownup who wanted to live near Disneyland, or a grownup who didn't know how big California is. Slightly bigger than England, anyway.
It's not so much a matter of confusion as of attitude.
I got news for you: most Americans think that Boston is the same as New York!
I've never heard anybody trash DeVry. But I have to admit that I had assumed they were just another seedy unaccredited diploma mill. Not because of anything I actually knew about them. But because that's what their tacky little TV commercials manage to imply.
Now I know what to get John Travolta for his birthday!
That's only for magazines that are generated by Automake. This magazine is written by actual people.
In point of fact GTA3 cheats by not maintaining the existance of non-player actors that are more than a certain distance away, unless you're looking looking directly at them. It's amusing to watch people at the other end of the street, turn away for a moment, then turn back to see a completely separate set of people! More absurd is the mission where you're supposed to convoy the armored car. If you stick close to the armored car, you're swarmed by Diablos. But if you avoid the very car you're supposed to be protecting, then no Diablos are created to attack it!
The creators of the Hotspot VM used to claim that their brainchild would someday outperform C++, because of intelligent optimization at runtime. Don't know if that ever happened.
There are a lot of MM games out there. But do any of them even try to emulate real-world physics to the extent that GTA does? The amount of computing power to make this work is mind boggling. Maybe SGI will survive after all!
I do agree that there's not enough understanding of these topics in the database community. But what's needed is more practical stuff. Like an intuitive knowledge of database normalization. Not sophisticated formalisms that are difficult to learn and rarely applied.
Oh yeah, and don't forget upgrades.
Anyway, the download number is just another gee-whiz statistic, unconnected with any real measure of Firefox's progress. I'd be much happer to see evidence that its user share has grown out of the single digits. Pity Google stopped tracking browsers.
Slightly offtopic: I have to put in a word to Firefox extension developers, which seem to be legion these days. (I have 13 extensions installed, everying from a RSS browser to a simple tweak that prevents right-click from being disabled.) Extension are easily Firefox's coolest feature. But they're also its biggest potential problem, because nobody bothers to sign their extension. Please start doing so, before the malware bozos decide that your extension is something they can steal and modify to their own ends.
Indeed. "Drop the soap" is an issue in British prisons too.
Your "ignorant fuckwits" comment is particular offtarget for two reasons: (a) you can't just tell people, "shut up, we know more than you do, do as you're told"; (b) lots of well-trained IT people actually do believe in Microsoft technology. One big reason for (b) is Linux zealots with poor social skills who convince people that Linux is just a technohippie fad. So careful with the namecalling.
I remember a time when backers of space travel talked in terms of serious economic development: zero-g manufacturing, orbital power collectors, asteroid mining. Now we're reduced to junkets for the overprivileged. Pathetic.
IANAL, so I don't know any really good examples. But here's a couple so-so ones. Guy living in Virginia in the 1780s is owed money by a Revolutionary War vet. In lieu of repayment, he accepts the deed to a land grant in Western Pennsylvannia. Travel was really difficult in those days,so it's a really long time before he ever visits the land. But he has to make improvements to retain title. So he has somebody on the scene build a cabin. When he finally visits the site he discovers that somebody who thinks he owns the land has built a second cabin on the property. And they've sited it so there's no way to get into the first cabin!
(Why do I know such a strange story? Cause the guy from Virginia was George Washington. I just finished reading The Grand Idea: George Washington's Potomac and the Race to the West.)
Another example that's kind of closer (because IP is involved) is the movie It's a Wonderful Life, which has been copyright-free since the early 50s, due to a screwup by a studio lawyer. That's why you used to see it over and over again every Christmas, because you could broadcast it or show it without paying royalties. Then Aaron Spelling's lawyers managed to secure the rights to a bunch of things relating to the movie: a song somebody sings in it, a story that the movie may have been based on (the paper trail's unclear), some other stuff. So now you can't show this movie without AS's permission -- even though he doesn't own it! Possibly a good lawyer could knock down his claim, but who's going to hire one just to show an old movie?
I'm guessing that Blizzard's lawyers simply decided that the best way to make the software non-transferrable was to not let people sell the registration numbers, and not bother putting anything in the EULA. From my own feeble knowledge of law, I know of no reason they can't do that. Maybe I'm wrong, but please don't waste your time telling me that -- unless you have more than an amateur's knowledge of the law yourself.
The "good enough" argument is dead, because the spyware crisis has made it abundantly clear that Windows security is anything but. When somebody sits down at their computer and finds it unusable because there are thousands of spyware programs running, security stops being something they can put off dealing with.
You talk about MS's "public moves to improve the security of Windows" as if it was something they just got around to, and will quickly succeed at. The truth is, they've been fighting a losing battle against their security problems for a couple years now. But the same mismanagement that created the problem is making it very hard for them to respond. So not only do they have security problems they never should have had, they have security patches that are buggy, slow to be released, and not compatible with many existing systems!
My claim that Microsoft is mismanaged might seem insane. They're the biggest, most profitable high tech venture ever. How can they be mismanaged? But those profits mostly come from dependable revenue streams they accidentally created over 20 years ago. Most especially, everbody who buys a PC has pay them a tithe. No matter how many mistakes they make, they will continue to make money. Until they screw up so badly, nobody can fool themselves into thinking that MS software is "good enough".
And possibly that day is here. Which is why Linux adovcates should focus on Microsoft's inescapable mistakes, not trying to fight old battles Microsoft has long since won.
I don't deny that a good color scheme can do a lot for a web site. But it's hardly an absolute necessity, much less "the most important thing".
Microsoft's current inability to handle security issues is much more persuasive. Linux advocates should focus on that, instead of beating a dead horse.
But you do appreciate the irony, don't you? All those people out there selling their web expertise, but not using the web to dispense it?
Heard of Google? They managed to attract one or two users wihout any color scheme at all.
It's almost offtopic, but I can't resist mentioning Bruce Lawson's supremely ugly CSS skin, Geocities 1996. Unfortunately, Firefox is unable to manage the more epilepsy-inducing effects. Soo much for browser independence!