Nice looking board, no doubt about it, but to really make a splash they ought've made it 16:9 instead of 4:3. Just like the old car commercial says, "Wider is better."
And all your base are belong to us, Slashdot editors!
But on topic, I think this is great! Nothing quite like reviving an old computer brand name to rekindle the embers that we thought were long dead. I foresee that Atari will be back with their own portable media player; then we'll see the iAmiga, followed by the eAtari, followed by Apple's own iPod-GS, and then even IBM will join the fray with a portable player called the iPC-jr, complete with cooling fan and proprietary bus that won't take anyone else's add-on harddrive.
Heck, I might even get big hair and a skinny tie, too!
Modded as funny, but not a bad idea. You get categorization, prioritization, attachments, notes tracking, email reminders, reports, and it's even web accessible so you can access it anywhere you've got a browser.
Heck, depending on how you set it up, you could even allow public commentary on your to-do list items, which may (or mayn't) give you incentive to get them done.
Organization certification such as that with ISO 9000 or SEI's Capability Maturity Model forces you into a role where projects you take on affect your certification. I recall one subcontractor who had a CMM level 5 rating; the company produced absolute garbage, but goodness, did they ever produce it so well. They had level 5.
What was especially telling was when we let them go. Their only defense? "But we're CMM Level 5!" They had no idea that process quality was completely separate from product quality.
Brooks put forth a lot of good ideas, some of which morphed and/or were independently discovered and some that were true then as they are today. For example, he says, "Build one to throw away." Amen to that.
Another concept he brought to light was originally Harlan Mills's, that of making the programming team like a surgical team. A surgeon, or chief programmer, has primary architectural, design, and implementation responsibility, but is assisted by a copilot, administrator, editor, two secretaries, and a program clerk.
While I've never seen such a team, I have witnessed pair programming that the XP (not Windows, eXtreme Programming) folks praise, and it works quite well. It may not be a full-fledged surgical team as Brooks would've liked, but the productivity of a pilot on the keyboard and a copilot following after every little mistake certainly improves productivity.
ActionScript 2.0 is the newest language according to this chart. And if my manager gets ahold of this, I'll end up having to program in it by the month's end!
After all, to managers, "newer, and therefore better." *sigh*
Of course, "chartjunk" as defined Edward Tufte. Apparently, the deriviations and timeframes of the various languages wasn't interesting enough by themselves.
The web happened my dear friend, and it was based on the predominant distributed computing model at the time: client/server. Even DNS, with its highly distributed spread of processing and data, has a set of (overloaded) root servers with the commensurate single points of failure. The solution? Peer-to-peer.
Too bad even the term P2P raises so many red flags with certain Associations of America.:)
... first spacecraft to enter the asteroid belt, the ring of giant rocks beyond Mars. It survived...
Contrary to nearly every science fiction chase scene, the asteroid belt in orbit around our star is hardly what anyone would call dense. It "survived"? Heck, it'd have to try pretty hard to hit a rock out there!
Ugh. Why must I type her last name as "Gartner" over and over again? I know it's Garner. Sheesh. (Must have something to do with some ancient genetic muscle memory... or something.)
Recall that all of these efforts are standard definition television. Despite the nay-sayers, high definition television is indeed a reality, and has Linux support thanks to the HD-2000 card, which I'm happy to report has no support for Windows.
What a breath of fresh air. Now, back to watching hard-disk recordings of Alias featuring the supremely-cute Jennifer Gartner, who, in high-def, has many supremely-cute freckles.
I wonder if the companies that have a stake in Linux like RedHat, IBM, and so forth would be willing to pony up the dough to create our own illustrious-sounding "institution" complete with a European-sounding name that could "create reports and advice to policymakers and government" that would instead be backed by the truth. Or at least the truth as we see it and not the way Micro$oft does.
This is similar to the evolution from ant to maven for Java developers. With ant, you gave the steps necessary to build your system, an imperative approach. With maven, you instead describe the shape of your system, and it figures out the steps.
Projects become more uniform as a result, and developers spend more time building the projects instead of maintaining build systems.
My only concern is the knowledge or experience that's lost as a result; larger and larger groups of developers have a smaller and a smaller understanding of the tools, environment, and subtle filesystem dependencies that systems tend to have, putting the experience in in-the-field debugging into a relative tiny number of cutting edge high-priced consultants.
I'm still waiting for "conventional" high-definition programming to become mainstream. Sure, we now have consumer level HD cameras but the local news broadcasts are still SD. Alias is in HD, and Jennifer Garner makes my HDTV purchase worth it (don't tell my wife), but every commercial is still in SD.
The FCC-mandated transition to digital broadcasts probably won't help make HD content mainstream either. Stations may be broadcasting all digital,
but they'll still be broadcasting Gilligan's Island reruns at SD or (gasp) upconverted to 1080i.
UHDV technology may be the future, but the expense of producing content won't make it mainstream.
Oh, and Slashdot covered this before.
Slashdot Mirror
Nice looking board, no doubt about it, but to really make a splash they ought've made it 16:9 instead of 4:3. Just like the old car commercial says, "Wider is better."
And all your base are belong to us, Slashdot editors!
But on topic, I think this is great! Nothing quite like reviving an old computer brand name to rekindle the embers that we thought were long dead. I foresee that Atari will be back with their own portable media player; then we'll see the iAmiga, followed by the eAtari, followed by Apple's own iPod-GS, and then even IBM will join the fray with a portable player called the iPC-jr, complete with cooling fan and proprietary bus that won't take anyone else's add-on harddrive.
Heck, I might even get big hair and a skinny tie, too!
And I hope most people will read your entire comment instead of just the subject line!
Worse than Shatner?
Oh.....come.....on.....I.....find that......hard....to.....believe!
Modded as funny, but not a bad idea. You get categorization, prioritization, attachments, notes tracking, email reminders, reports, and it's even web accessible so you can access it anywhere you've got a browser.
Heck, depending on how you set it up, you could even allow public commentary on your to-do list items, which may (or mayn't) give you incentive to get them done.
Organization certification such as that with ISO 9000 or SEI's Capability Maturity Model forces you into a role where projects you take on affect your certification. I recall one subcontractor who had a CMM level 5 rating; the company produced absolute garbage, but goodness, did they ever produce it so well. They had level 5.
What was especially telling was when we let them go. Their only defense? "But we're CMM Level 5!" They had no idea that process quality was completely separate from product quality.
Right. My favorite way of helping "managers" see this is by rhetorically asking, "So, why can't nine women make a baby in just one month?"
Brooks put forth a lot of good ideas, some of which morphed and/or were independently discovered and some that were true then as they are today. For example, he says, "Build one to throw away." Amen to that.
Another concept he brought to light was originally Harlan Mills's, that of making the programming team like a surgical team. A surgeon, or chief programmer, has primary architectural, design, and implementation responsibility, but is assisted by a copilot, administrator, editor, two secretaries, and a program clerk.
While I've never seen such a team, I have witnessed pair programming that the XP (not Windows, eXtreme Programming) folks praise, and it works quite well. It may not be a full-fledged surgical team as Brooks would've liked, but the productivity of a pilot on the keyboard and a copilot following after every little mistake certainly improves productivity.
ActionScript 2.0 is the newest language according to this chart. And if my manager gets ahold of this, I'll end up having to program in it by the month's end!
After all, to managers, "newer, and therefore better." *sigh*
Of course, "chartjunk" as defined Edward Tufte. Apparently, the deriviations and timeframes of the various languages wasn't interesting enough by themselves.
I guess I was one of the lucky ones. Here's what I got when I tried to download it:
/pub/mozilla.org/thunderbird/releases/0.7/thunderb ird-0.7-macosx.dmg.gz was not found on this server.
The requested URL
Slashdotted? Or taken offline for repairs?
The web happened my dear friend, and it was based on the predominant distributed computing model at the time: client/server. Even DNS, with its highly distributed spread of processing and data, has a set of (overloaded) root servers with the commensurate single points of failure. The solution? Peer-to-peer.
:)
Too bad even the term P2P raises so many red flags with certain Associations of America.
... first spacecraft to enter the asteroid belt, the ring of giant rocks beyond Mars. It survived ...
Contrary to nearly every science fiction chase scene, the asteroid belt in orbit around our star is hardly what anyone would call dense. It "survived"? Heck, it'd have to try pretty hard to hit a rock out there!
Proof? Click here. :-)
Yeesh.
... whatever you do, don't let director Roland Emmerich get ahold of this article!
... features the new default theme ported from Mac OS on Windows ...
Does that mean the next release of Camino will have the Windows look/feel ported to MacOS X? (I hope not!)
Also, didja notice that someone's already squatted mozzila.org?
Ugh. Why must I type her last name as "Gartner" over and over again? I know it's Garner. Sheesh. (Must have something to do with some ancient genetic muscle memory ... or something.)
Recall that all of these efforts are standard definition television. Despite the nay-sayers, high definition television is indeed a reality, and has Linux support thanks to the HD-2000 card, which I'm happy to report has no support for Windows.
What a breath of fresh air. Now, back to watching hard-disk recordings of Alias featuring the supremely-cute Jennifer Gartner, who, in high-def, has many supremely-cute freckles.
I wonder if the companies that have a stake in Linux like RedHat, IBM, and so forth would be willing to pony up the dough to create our own illustrious-sounding "institution" complete with a European-sounding name that could "create reports and advice to policymakers and government" that would instead be backed by the truth. Or at least the truth as we see it and not the way Micro$oft does.
I like our truth more, admittedly.
If you can't find "a sustainable business model" lobby to make free hotspots illegal.
This is similar to the evolution from ant to maven for Java developers. With ant, you gave the steps necessary to build your system, an imperative approach. With maven, you instead describe the shape of your system, and it figures out the steps.
;)
Projects become more uniform as a result, and developers spend more time building the projects instead of maintaining build systems.
My only concern is the knowledge or experience that's lost as a result; larger and larger groups of developers have a smaller and a smaller understanding of the tools, environment, and subtle filesystem dependencies that systems tend to have, putting the experience in in-the-field debugging into a relative tiny number of cutting edge high-priced consultants.
By the way, I'm available.
I'm still waiting for "conventional" high-definition programming to become mainstream. Sure, we now have consumer level HD cameras but the local news broadcasts are still SD. Alias is in HD, and Jennifer Garner makes my HDTV purchase worth it (don't tell my wife), but every commercial is still in SD.
The FCC-mandated transition to digital broadcasts probably won't help make HD content mainstream either. Stations may be broadcasting all digital, but they'll still be broadcasting Gilligan's Island reruns at SD or (gasp) upconverted to 1080i.
UHDV technology may be the future, but the expense of producing content won't make it mainstream. Oh, and Slashdot covered this before.
Artist Howard Hallis came up with The Mini as a concept for such a device.
Oddly, he created this work of "art" in the medium of "lenticular," those tilt-the-page things to see a different image.
Still, I wouldn't mind such a device.
It has an NTSC tuner. Weren't all stations supposed to go to digital ATSC broadcasts by 2006?
Still, being able to watch snow year-round might be its own reward, for those of you who live in balmy or tropical climes, at least.
Check the Wikipedia my dear.
Or alternatively, see this (goatse-free) image.