And Law & Order SVU had an episode (Season 6, "GAME") where there were kids that were acting out a GTA-style game also, in particular by running over prostitutes.
I don't remember a media frenzy condemning all video games beeing specifically touched off by that episode, and I doubt there will be one here. I'm sure Jack Thompson will stick his nose in for another 15 seconds of fame but I doubt it'll incite anything L&O didn't already.
(Of course, the L&O episode caused my girlfriend and I to have a big argument about whether or not Rockstar is morally reprehensible for making violent games vs satisfying public cravings... but she doesn't play games so what does she know...:P Ultimately we agreed to disagree.)
Five or six months ago I was on business travel and stayed at the Ritz Carlton in Tyson's Corner, Virginia. When I went to check out, there were several charges from the minibar that I did *not* drink.
It turned out that the "smart" minibar recorded a purchase when I took an item out (it was some crazy $10/bottle Norwegian spring water or something, which I decided wasn't worth it) and didn't realize that I had put it back without drinking it.
The desk employee apologized profusely and credited my account, explaining that this happened all the time and that they'd been outwitted by the technology. So, instead of simply having the maid count the items in the minibar, they spent heaven only knows how much money on this "smart" minibar system and managed to irritate any guest who had the misfortune of opening the fridge and balking at the prices.
Sometimes adding technology to simple things makes it better, and sometimes it makes it worse.
Defense contractors. If you deal with sensitive government data, you need privacy.
I've worked for a defense contractor (which I won't name) for 5 years, and worked for awhile at Sun. I've always had a private office, even on my first day on the job straight out of college, and I like it that way.
In fact, two of my absolute-must-have critera for a job are a private office, and the "yes, please dress" kind of dress code. Gotta love it.
Microsoft is well known for spouting "Everything before now was crap. We did it right this time." as a marketing ploy to sell new versions of their OS.
However, I'm surprised that they're pulling that out before Vista's even on the shelves. Of course, maybe they're just hedging their bets because Vista is probably vaporware...
Even though I'll be modded down for supporting Godzilla, Easynews.com really does kick ass. I've been using it for several years now and I'm extremely pleased. The global search alone is worth the price of admission, but there's tons of other useful stuff there too (put stuff in zip files before downloading, http and nntp interfaces, nntp discounts towards quota, etc).
It's well worth the $10/mo. Don't knock it just because it's not free until you've given it a test drive.
We should build a huge exhaust fan to use all this extra heat to push our orbit outwards. As we generate more heat, we get further from the sun so we stay cooler. Earth maintains its status quo.
And we'll spend less in rocket fuel to colonize Mars, because we'll be closer!
(Yes, I am joking, but there's gotta be something useful we can do with this extra heat if we could channel it somehow. I leave figuring out what that something is as an exercise for the reader.)
> Last time I checked, it was the parents' job to ensure their kids were safe.
And in the rose-colored world that would be the case. The simple fact is that parents DO NOT parent.
Rather than disciplining their own children and teaching them right from wrong, parents expect the teachers to teach children about life, but do not allow them any disciplinary power (in fact, the parents will raise a shitstorm when teachers so much as yell at their little snotgobblers).
When teachers fail to instill values in children, the parents then turn to the police. I used to do juvenile night intake for several Maryland counties, and the general reaction of the parents was that they wanted their kids left overnight in jail "to teach them a lesson." The juvenile judicial system is more concerned with rehabilitation than punishment, which is probably as it should be, but it almost always fails miserably, because the kids learn that the system isn't going to punish them, so at age 18 they're adults with no fear of the DOJ/DOC, which is what keeps most people in line. The motto of the Maryland Juvenile Justice Department was "Spend time with your kids now, so we won't have to later."
Parents are simply more concerned with being their kids' friends than their parents. They look to teachers, police, and apparently now Yahoo! to teach, discipline, and safeguard (respectively) their kids instead of taking any responsibility for themselves.
Which, ultimately, is why we get stupid policies like this from Yahoo! which won't make any difference in the real world. They're just trying to cover their asses against the inevitable lawsuit from an irritable parent who couldn't bother to teach their kid themselves about the dangers of the internet.
I have watched people in my office spend WEEKS trying to get ClearCase configured and working correctly, and it needs a buff blade server all to itself. Meanwhile I put up a CVS server (yes, I'm interested in Subversion, but we needed something up and working, FAST, with minimal learning curve) on a pentium-3 linux box and imported everything into it and had it production ready in an hour.
The IBM/Rational guys came out to talk to us about ClearCase setup and they literally wanted something around $10k PER HEAD for the training. It was obscene, and when my irritation got the best of me and I asked exactly what this bought us instead of CVS, the response was that "well, for what you're doing, it's probably not going to make a huge difference."
I had a good experience with Rational Rose around 6 or 7 years ago, and would love to see that sort of functionality added to Eclipse, but I can live without the rest of their tools, or their price tag.
it's yet another area in which Microsoft can expand their monopoly... I wish they'd focus on getting even just one thing RIGHT before they worry about tying TEN things together.
what's next, the Microsoft Toaster/Fridge/Dishwasher/Hair dryer combo?
"Though the application has found legitimate uses, the company wants to distance itself from any association with piracy."
You mean they're not jumping up and down screaming "Hey publishers, we made it really easy for people to pirate your products!"
Napster tried to distance themselves too, but it didn't work out so well for them. At least these guys had the foresight (thanks to Napster's trailblazing) to have a decentralized architecture.
Of course, "enterprise-scale" is a buzzword used by cathedral-style development houses who want to sell their products to "enterprise-scale" pointy-haired middle managers who have absolutely no idea how to parse buzzwords and hype with any degree of skepticism.
In my "enterprise", we prefer the open-source far-more-used-and-debugged combination of OpenSSH and PuTTY. SSH Communications is probably going to attack PuTTY next, spouting about how it's not as good as their shitty windows terminal either.
I asked that of every telemarketer call for the last several years and it never seemed to make any kind of difference. Being on the Do Not Call registry didn't seem to help either, in fact the calls seemed to increase.
Then I got a TeleZapper and over the last six months the calls have dropped to nearly zero. One or two a month, and there's just a dead line when I (or my answering machine) pick up the phone. Best $25 bucks I ever spent.
I'm so glad to see that a country that can't afford to even provide good living conditions for its citizens can afford to spend 1.3 million on a robotic hospital. I'm sure that's money better spent than on, say, roads and sanitation.
If the Mexican government spent more money on their infrastructure and less on "pie in the sky" robotic hospitals, maybe their citizens would stay there instead of border jumping.
[Microsoft, Netscape] Interim software used internally for testing. "To eat one's own dogfood" (from which the slang noun derives) means to use the software one is developing, as part of one's everyday development environment (the phrase is used outside Microsoft and Netscape). The practice is normal in the Linux community and elsewhere, but the term 'dogfood' is seldom used as open-source betas tend to be quite tasty and nourishing. The idea is that developers who are using their own software will quickly learn what's missing or broken. Dogfood is typically not even of beta quality.
The GOVERNMENT will never allow confidential or classified documents to be edited online. They will apply this rule to all government prime contractors as well. The contractors will apply this rule to their subcontractors, and so on down the line.
The standalone desktop OS isn't going anywhere. (I'll leave the MS vs Linux vs OSX debate alone for now.)
The article accuses illegal downloaders of "damaging music". How does one damage music?
Generally, the mp3 files are posted with excellent bitrates, so that can't be it. Most of those mp3s also don't have random noise superimposed over the music, so that's not it either.
Maybe if they'd stop trying to be so dramatic and incendiary, and say what they really mean: illegal downloaders damage the financial bottom line of the music recording companies.
But that doesn't really inspire the same level of dramatic indignance on the part of the reader, does it? "Holy hell, they're damaging the music! They must be stopped!" versus "Who the hell cares, record companies make too much money already."
I was a strong supporter of netbeans up through 3.6. When they went to 4.0, and their ant based architecture, they screwed things up.
If you have an ant-based project, the idea is that you can add some xml entries to the config files and your buildfiles to hook the gui commands to your targets. Sounds good, right?
Wrong. Netbeans takes the road that if you want to own the buildfile, you own everything. You have to write targets to run the program in the debugger, you have to manage the classpath, you have to write targets to run/compile/debug a single file, to run/compile/debug your whole project, etc etc and so on.
A few weeks ago I watched a coworker join my development project with eclipse. He took a copy of the source tree, pointed eclipse at the top level directory, and it promptly figured out the classpath. Running and debugging worked exactly as you expect. Adding support for the existing ant buildfile was also easy, and didn't interfere with what eclipse offered.
This impressed me, and my coworker convinced me to take it for a testdrive. I had previously spent about 3 weeks researching and arguing config files with netbeans, and I had eclipse ready to write production code in a few hours. (And that was my first time using the tool, now I can configure it much faster.)
Bottom line: eclipse is a tool which is much better thought out than netbeans. it offers alot more functionality to the debugger, alot less painfully. netbeans 4.1, whoopdeedoo. i'm sticking with eclipse.
When I used to work at Sun Microsystems (about 5 years ago when the Santa Clara campus was very new) the food was excellent and there were routinely about 2 dozen different options for lunch each day. The cost was also so low I paid less than $5, even on an indulgent day.
Personally I found it nice to not have to leave work for a good lunch, and the time that we didn't spend driving around in that traffic meant that I could leave earlier in the day.
Despite what slave labor critics may claim, I never found it to be anything but a major perk of working there.
The BSA.... aren't they the ones that terrorize small businesses and threaten to audit their software licenses? (And without a glimmer of a search warrant, either.)
On the other hand, since they seem to have be pushing most of the important bits forward to release them for XP because of the delays in the Longhorn schedule, I'm just not at all surprised that their screenshots look like XP with a new coat of paint.
I really don't know what else they can do that's going to be terrifically revolutionary other than under the hood improvements. And they're being very tight lipped about those (what a shock).
I'm just glad that I heard somewhere (I think it was a cnet article in the last couple weeks) that they're going to improve the ability for laptops to be members of multiple domains. That's a big plus...
But the graphical crap? Most people are going to disable it to try(!) to minimize the resources that windows sucks so that they might actually have cpu cycles for tasks instead of eye candy.
Step Four: Stop tweaking every movie that you've already made. We don't need a remastered ultimate dvd director's cut special edition of everything you've done.
I think the official Star Wars version is going to be what's on store shelves when they nail shut his coffin, and not what was released in 1973.
Slashdot Mirror
And Law & Order SVU had an episode (Season 6, "GAME") where there were kids that were acting out a GTA-style game also, in particular by running over prostitutes.
:P Ultimately we agreed to disagree.)
I don't remember a media frenzy condemning all video games beeing specifically touched off by that episode, and I doubt there will be one here. I'm sure Jack Thompson will stick his nose in for another 15 seconds of fame but I doubt it'll incite anything L&O didn't already.
(Of course, the L&O episode caused my girlfriend and I to have a big argument about whether or not Rockstar is morally reprehensible for making violent games vs satisfying public cravings... but she doesn't play games so what does she know...
Five or six months ago I was on business travel and stayed at the Ritz Carlton in Tyson's Corner, Virginia. When I went to check out, there were several charges from the minibar that I did *not* drink.
It turned out that the "smart" minibar recorded a purchase when I took an item out (it was some crazy $10/bottle Norwegian spring water or something, which I decided wasn't worth it) and didn't realize that I had put it back without drinking it.
The desk employee apologized profusely and credited my account, explaining that this happened all the time and that they'd been outwitted by the technology. So, instead of simply having the maid count the items in the minibar, they spent heaven only knows how much money on this "smart" minibar system and managed to irritate any guest who had the misfortune of opening the fridge and balking at the prices.
Sometimes adding technology to simple things makes it better, and sometimes it makes it worse.
Defense contractors. If you deal with sensitive government data, you need privacy.
I've worked for a defense contractor (which I won't name) for 5 years, and worked for awhile at Sun. I've always had a private office, even on my first day on the job straight out of college, and I like it that way.
In fact, two of my absolute-must-have critera for a job are a private office, and the "yes, please dress" kind of dress code. Gotta love it.
Microsoft is well known for spouting "Everything before now was crap. We did it right this time." as a marketing ploy to sell new versions of their OS.
However, I'm surprised that they're pulling that out before Vista's even on the shelves. Of course, maybe they're just hedging their bets because Vista is probably vaporware...
Even though I'll be modded down for supporting Godzilla, Easynews.com really does kick ass. I've been using it for several years now and I'm extremely pleased. The global search alone is worth the price of admission, but there's tons of other useful stuff there too (put stuff in zip files before downloading, http and nntp interfaces, nntp discounts towards quota, etc).
It's well worth the $10/mo. Don't knock it just because it's not free until you've given it a test drive.
We should build a huge exhaust fan to use all this extra heat to push our orbit outwards. As we generate more heat, we get further from the sun so we stay cooler. Earth maintains its status quo.
And we'll spend less in rocket fuel to colonize Mars, because we'll be closer!
(Yes, I am joking, but there's gotta be something useful we can do with this extra heat if we could channel it somehow. I leave figuring out what that something is as an exercise for the reader.)
> Last time I checked, it was the parents' job to ensure their kids were safe.
And in the rose-colored world that would be the case. The simple fact is that parents DO NOT parent.
Rather than disciplining their own children and teaching them right from wrong, parents expect the teachers to teach children about life, but do not allow them any disciplinary power (in fact, the parents will raise a shitstorm when teachers so much as yell at their little snotgobblers).
When teachers fail to instill values in children, the parents then turn to the police. I used to do juvenile night intake for several Maryland counties, and the general reaction of the parents was that they wanted their kids left overnight in jail "to teach them a lesson." The juvenile judicial system is more concerned with rehabilitation than punishment, which is probably as it should be, but it almost always fails miserably, because the kids learn that the system isn't going to punish them, so at age 18 they're adults with no fear of the DOJ/DOC, which is what keeps most people in line. The motto of the Maryland Juvenile Justice Department was "Spend time with your kids now, so we won't have to later."
Parents are simply more concerned with being their kids' friends than their parents. They look to teachers, police, and apparently now Yahoo! to teach, discipline, and safeguard (respectively) their kids instead of taking any responsibility for themselves.
Which, ultimately, is why we get stupid policies like this from Yahoo! which won't make any difference in the real world. They're just trying to cover their asses against the inevitable lawsuit from an irritable parent who couldn't bother to teach their kid themselves about the dangers of the internet.
I have to agree.
I have watched people in my office spend WEEKS trying to get ClearCase configured and working correctly, and it needs a buff blade server all to itself. Meanwhile I put up a CVS server (yes, I'm interested in Subversion, but we needed something up and working, FAST, with minimal learning curve) on a pentium-3 linux box and imported everything into it and had it production ready in an hour.
The IBM/Rational guys came out to talk to us about ClearCase setup and they literally wanted something around $10k PER HEAD for the training. It was obscene, and when my irritation got the best of me and I asked exactly what this bought us instead of CVS, the response was that "well, for what you're doing, it's probably not going to make a huge difference."
I had a good experience with Rational Rose around 6 or 7 years ago, and would love to see that sort of functionality added to Eclipse, but I can live without the rest of their tools, or their price tag.
it's yet another area in which Microsoft can expand their monopoly...
I wish they'd focus on getting even just one thing RIGHT before they
worry about tying TEN things together.
what's next, the Microsoft Toaster/Fridge/Dishwasher/Hair dryer combo?
Google is building their own internet to replace the existing one.
Well, they ARE rumored to be doing something like that.
And if it were a private commercial venture, and large evil corporate dictator concerns aside, they could tell the U.N. to go fuck themselves.
Hmm... Google United Nations?
"Though the application has found legitimate uses, the company wants to distance itself from any association with piracy."
You mean they're not jumping up and down screaming "Hey publishers, we made it really easy for people to pirate your products!"
Napster tried to distance themselves too, but it didn't work out so well for them. At least these guys had the foresight (thanks to Napster's trailblazing) to have a decentralized architecture.
Of course, "enterprise-scale" is a buzzword used by cathedral-style development houses who want to sell their products to "enterprise-scale" pointy-haired middle managers who have absolutely no idea how to parse buzzwords and hype with any degree of skepticism.
In my "enterprise", we prefer the open-source far-more-used-and-debugged combination of OpenSSH and PuTTY. SSH Communications is probably going to attack PuTTY next, spouting about how it's not as good as their shitty windows terminal either.
I asked that of every telemarketer call for the last several years and it never seemed to make any kind of difference. Being on the Do Not Call registry didn't seem to help either, in fact the calls seemed to increase.
Then I got a TeleZapper and over the last six months the calls have dropped to nearly zero. One or two a month, and there's just a dead line when I (or my answering machine) pick up the phone. Best $25 bucks I ever spent.
I'm so glad to see that a country that can't afford to even provide good living conditions for its citizens can afford to spend 1.3 million on a robotic hospital. I'm sure that's money better spent than on, say, roads and sanitation.
If the Mexican government spent more money on their infrastructure and less on "pie in the sky" robotic hospitals, maybe their citizens would stay there instead of border jumping.
That's making progress from stage 2, where they threw chairs and made death threats towards Google.
from http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/D/dogfood.htm l :
dogfood: n.
[Microsoft, Netscape] Interim software used internally for testing. "To eat one's own dogfood" (from which the slang noun derives) means to use the software one is developing, as part of one's everyday development environment (the phrase is used outside Microsoft and Netscape). The practice is normal in the Linux community and elsewhere, but the term 'dogfood' is seldom used as open-source betas tend to be quite tasty and nourishing. The idea is that developers who are using their own software will quickly learn what's missing or broken. Dogfood is typically not even of beta quality.
The GOVERNMENT will never allow confidential or classified documents to be edited online. They will apply this rule to all government prime contractors as well. The contractors will apply this rule to their subcontractors, and so on down the line.
The standalone desktop OS isn't going anywhere. (I'll leave the MS vs Linux vs OSX debate alone for now.)
The article accuses illegal downloaders of "damaging music". How does one damage music?
Generally, the mp3 files are posted with excellent bitrates, so that can't be it. Most of those mp3s also don't have random noise superimposed over the music, so that's not it either.
Maybe if they'd stop trying to be so dramatic and incendiary, and say what they really mean: illegal downloaders damage the financial bottom line of the music recording companies.
But that doesn't really inspire the same level of dramatic indignance on the part of the reader, does it? "Holy hell, they're damaging the music! They must be stopped!" versus "Who the hell cares, record companies make too much money already."
Damn public relations spin doctors...
I was a strong supporter of netbeans up through 3.6. When they went to 4.0, and their ant based architecture, they screwed things up.
If you have an ant-based project, the idea is that you can add some xml entries to the config files and your buildfiles to hook the gui commands to your targets. Sounds good, right?
Wrong. Netbeans takes the road that if you want to own the buildfile, you own everything. You have to write targets to run the program in the debugger, you have to manage the classpath, you have to write targets to run/compile/debug a single file, to run/compile/debug your whole project, etc etc and so on.
A few weeks ago I watched a coworker join my development project with eclipse. He took a copy of the source tree, pointed eclipse at the top level directory, and it promptly figured out the classpath. Running and debugging worked exactly as you expect. Adding support for the existing ant buildfile was also easy, and didn't interfere with what eclipse offered.
This impressed me, and my coworker convinced me to take it for a testdrive. I had previously spent about 3 weeks researching and arguing config files with netbeans, and I had eclipse ready to write production code in a few hours. (And that was my first time using the tool, now I can configure it much faster.)
Bottom line: eclipse is a tool which is much better thought out than netbeans. it offers alot more functionality to the debugger, alot less painfully. netbeans 4.1, whoopdeedoo. i'm sticking with eclipse.
from the tradersnation article:
TIMOTHY M. ROBERTS - Chairman and Chief Executive Officer (founder)
Strong track record of founding and launching variety of successful companies.
*lol*
Yeah, HardOCP debunked that for us already. Idiots, all of them.
Dear Rick,
Take a lesson from the mistakes of George Lucas. Just walk away.
Devoted fan (well, you fixed that too)
When I used to work at Sun Microsystems (about 5 years ago when the Santa Clara campus was very new) the food was excellent and there were routinely about 2 dozen different options for lunch each day. The cost was also so low I paid less than $5, even on an indulgent day.
Personally I found it nice to not have to leave work for a good lunch, and the time that we didn't spend driving around in that traffic meant that I could leave earlier in the day.
Despite what slave labor critics may claim, I never found it to be anything but a major perk of working there.
The BSA.... aren't they the ones that terrorize small businesses and threaten to audit their software licenses? (And without a glimmer of a search warrant, either.)
On the other hand, since they seem to have be pushing most of the important bits forward to release them for XP because of the delays in the Longhorn schedule, I'm just not at all surprised that their screenshots look like XP with a new coat of paint.
I really don't know what else they can do that's going to be terrifically revolutionary other than under the hood improvements. And they're being very tight lipped about those (what a shock).
I'm just glad that I heard somewhere (I think it was a cnet article in the last couple weeks) that they're going to improve the ability for laptops to be members of multiple domains. That's a big plus...
But the graphical crap? Most people are going to disable it to try(!) to minimize the resources that windows sucks so that they might actually have cpu cycles for tasks instead of eye candy.
Step Four: Stop tweaking every movie that you've already made. We don't need a remastered ultimate dvd director's cut special edition of everything you've done.
I think the official Star Wars version is going to be what's on store shelves when they nail shut his coffin, and not what was released in 1973.