This reminds me of a skit Dave did a long time ago. He went into a machine shop that had an industrial press, and proceeded to crush goofy things that people on the street would suggest. One person said, "I want to see something as flat as a pancake!" so he took a stack of pancakes (and a bottle of syrup) and crushed that.
At the end of the skit, he gave a goofy monologe, and then proceeded to put his microphone in the press, and you heard the sounds of the microphone being crushed. You then saw him tapping on what was left of the microphone, and mouthing "Hello? Is this thing on??"
To be honest, my primary motivation was to build a "best of the best" system -- motherboard with 533MHz bus speed, ATA 133, USB 2.0. Top of the line GeForce 4. Pentium 4 2.0 GHz. SoundBlaster Audigy 5.1. Brushed Aluminum Case. So I expected to pay top dollar, and did.
HOWEVER -- I did do some research. Buying a computer from a mom and pop shop was almost identical to the cost of building it yourself. You may be able to find a Compaq/Dell/Gateway for less, but you are also getting a lot less flexibility -- built in video & sound that might be substandard. Welded on memory chips in Bank 1 (Compaq is infamous for this). An OS & Software bundle without the original Install CDs.
In my opinion, you get what you pay for. I got burned on a Packard Bell "special", and I swore to never buy a brand name PC again.
I just purchased a Pentium 4 screamer for myself. Since I was converting my old Pentium II compuuter to a Lunx box, I wanted to use the copy of Windows 2000 that I had running on it on my new computer -- I refuse to "upgrade" to XP. I was mindful of getting slapped with the OS tax if I refused a copy of XP. My solution?
I built the damn thing myself.
I bought the motherboard, video card, and case from CompUSA. I bought the memory, hard drive, DVD drive, skipped the floppy drive, Ethernet card, and sound card from a mom and pop computer store.
If you have avoided rolling your own computer, I must report that it was extremely intuitive and easy. If you can build Lego models, you can build your own PC.
Just say no to the MS tax. Build your own computer!
The DIVX goons specifically did NOT allow porn, softcore or hardcore, on their format. In the post mortum analysis that followed, I remember that this prohibition was compared to a lack of porn (I don't know if it was actively blocked or not) on the Betamax format. Most people tend to believe that blocking porn was one (of many) reasons why DIVX failed.
On the other hand, the porn industry threw their support completely behind Open DVD (just like they did for VHS), and you can see where the state of things are today...:-)
If I was more physically adept, for example, I would have certainly been more likely to have focused on that element of my life as a child...That forced me to seek out and use my other strengths, and make them a more important part of who I am.
So I guess that means that under different genetic circumstances, you would be trying to score a First Down today instead of a First Post:)
If you listen carefully, you can hear some beeping in the background of the piece. When I first heard this, I was stunned: It was the sound from the very first handheld video game I ever owned (and still do!): The UFO Master Blaster Station by Bambino.
Uh, the original soundtrack by Vangelis IS out -- at least in the U.S. It came out in '94
Yes, I own it, yes, it IS the Vangelis one and not the crappy New American Orchestra rendition (The booklet even has a statement by Vangelis saying how glad he is to finally be able to release this), and yes, it kicks ass.
If you don't see it under the soundtracks section, try the New Age section under Vangelis.
FWIW, Vangelis has an alternate version of the End Titles on his album titled Themes which is pretty good also. That album also has the Love Theme and Memories of Green (The song from the Unicorn dream sequence if I remember correctly), both of which are on the soundtrack as well.
I was really looking forward to this special edition. I had been under the impression that he was going to make this like the Terminator 2 SE DVD -- that is, make most or all of the multiple cuts of the movie availible via seamless branching, Harrison Ford voiceover on a second audio track, etc., etc.
Now this looks like it will just be Yet Another Director's Cut(TM), with maybe some EPK shit thrown in for good measure. Maybe this rant is right after all, and quality DVD special editions are on their way out the door as DVDs continue to get dumbed down for non movie connoisseurs.
I feel that the world that Tolkien has created using his words and my imagination is a lot more precious than something produced by the industry that bestows upon us Scary Movie 2 and Leprechaun 4: Leprechaun in space.
The reverse could just as easily be said too. What, there are no piece of crap books published? The book industry has it's own self-satisfying promotional push events (Oprah's book list, author signings, bestseller lists, etc), and award events for the best books of the year. And movies not based on books are routinely novelized; in fact movie -> book is way more common than (good) book -> movie.
I could have spared myself the research headache, and gone straight to the source for an answer.
I guess I deserve a (-1, Clueless) mod for that.
Re:ArsDigita and ArsTechnica
on
ArsDigita Shut Down
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I too was curious about this -- I have seen a number of "ArsXYZ" sites lately, so I did some searching. I assumed that "Ars" was latin, and I was right. A search on Mirriam Webster for ars produces two latin phrases: ars est celare artem (it is (true) art to conceal art), and more interestingly, ars longa, vita brevis (art is long, life is short).
From this, I have concluded that the suffix part of "ArsXYZ" names is a phony latinization of an obvious english word, and so the names come out to something like "The art of Digital", "The art of Technical", etc.
Of course, I don't know squat about latin -- this is just my best guess. Does anybody out there with a passing knowledge of latin know if my theory is correct?
the "move wont fit on one DVD" problem is not a real problem.. I have a 2 disc Laserdisc movie, and it's no problem at all to get up every 45 minutes and flip it over or change it. anyone that would have a problem with that needs to get phycological help as to why they are that lazy.
Uhm, why do you think that they invented the remote control? Because the average viewer, myself included, does not want to leave the couch to channel surf. And to be honest, yes, one of the big reasons why I never bought into LaserDisc was because of the disc flipping & swapping. I don't have to change the film reels at the movie house myself, so why whould I be distracted with disc changing in the middle of a movie at home?
They dont want to release 1080i material for many reasons...
And I can think of one very evil reason for them to do so -- I have heard that experiencing a true HDTV picture is like listening to AM all of your life, and suddenly one day walking into an electronics store and hearing FM for the first time. I have seen a couple of other posters indicate that a DVD picture's flaws are highlighted on a HDTV set; it may very well be that buying HDTV versions of DVD movies that you already own will be a "must upgrade" and selling you a second copy of a movie to you in only a few short years sounds like a very profitable prospect for the studios. And hey, HD-DVD won't be out for a couple of years yet, so why don't you in the mean time buy a HDTV copy on D-VHS?? Then, when the tape eventually wears out and breaks, you can buy a THIRD copy of the same move on HD-DVD!
High end DVD players with progressive scan outputs will give you a better picture on a HDTV set, but no, it is not a HDTV picture. I think that DVD's best output is 480p; compared with HDTV at 720p or 1080i.
The problem is that DVDs are currently too small to hold and entire movie at HDTV resolution. There are efforts underway to create a new, next generation HD-DVD player that would use blue or purple lasers that would allow for smaller pits on the disc, and therefore greater storage capacity, but for now these are in the prototyping stage only, and aren't expected to come to market for another 4-6 years or so.
D-VHS, on the other hand, will support HDTV resolutions, and will allow you to record a HDTV signal. There may or may not exist ulterior motives on the studios part to get people to buy into D-VHS, but unfortunately for now, of you want to record or view HDTV quality movies, D-VHS is your only alternative.
Cost for a .tv sucked, will it get better?
on
VeriSign Buys .tv
·
· Score: 1
The fleecing^H^H^H^H^Hpricing of.tv domains was truly blackmail under the old company. High profile ones, like abc.tv, went for hundreds of thousands of dollars right off the bat. Obscure ones, like my-amateur.tv, went for $30 for the first year, but then the price to re-register went up with each successive year, until you were forced to pay thousands or more per year for a domain that was now (potentially) high(er) profile.
I wonder if Verisign will keep this pricing policy, or if they will shift it to the flat rate that.com,.net, etc. command.
What makes goat milk so special for spider silk production? I would have thought of two other scenarios first:
-- Genetically alter silkworms to produce the spider silk.
-- Genetically alter cows to produce the silk laden milk, since they would produce much higher yields than goats.
The article is a little short on details, and it makes it appear like after the spider domestication failed, they went straight to goats. Anybody know why the above two examples are inferior to genetically altered goats?
I read The Digital Bits regularly, and from the editor's comments (which I agree with), most collectors of TV shows on DVD apparantly prefer to collect entire season box sets, as opposed to one or two ep.'s per disc priced separately, or "best of" compilations. Apparantly, Paramount ran a poll on the ST web site a few months ago asking how they should handle TNG DVDs, and the overwhelming consensus was to go with season box sets.
The biggest problem, IMO, with releasing one or two ep's at a time is that if the sales numbers don't crunch, additional ep's may be indefanately delayed, or cancelled. This happened with South Park (they released a bunch in order, then there was a loooong delay, and now they release out-of-order "best of" compilations, much to my dismay), and My So-Called Life (one disc with 2 or 3 eps was released, and when nobody bought it, the rest were quietly cancelled).
Well, for regular (non-premium) TV, once you have bought the TV series on VHS or DVD, you will never watch it again in reruns/syndication, and that's one less eyeball watching the commercials, so the studios figure that they can at least partially make up for it by charging you an arm and a leg to watch the show commercial free whenever and wherever.
As for premium channels like HBO, well, A) HBO has been good about enhancing the DVDs (commentaries, anamorphic widescreen, Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound) and has to recoup the additional production costs, and B) why buck the trend?:-)
I don't know about TNG, but apparantly with each season of Voyager's bloopers, these were compiled onto a tape, played at the season wrap party, and then destroyed. They decided that the bloopers would be reserved for the cast & crew's (one time) enjoyment only.
A shame too. I read an interview with Jeri Ryan (7 of 9) once, and she gave an anecdote of an amusing blooper where Garret Wang (Ensign Kim) was supposed to grab her elbow to get her attention. She miscued and turned to face him too early, and Garret wound up accidentally grabbing her boob! Apparantly there were many "That's not an elbow" jokes on the set from that point on...
CS != Programming? Well, as I alluded to in my previous comment, I think that depends on the school. In my case, I think my CIS degree was by and large a computer programming degree. At least, that's what you were best trained to do after graduation, and that's what most of the graduates that I kept in touch with did -- including myself.
In fact, I believe that someone with CS theory is much better qualified to be a programmer than someone who takes a few computer programming courses. Let me give you an anecdote from my first job as a contractor to IBM: I was tasked to monitor JCL on s/390 mainframes. To alleviate the repetitveness of manually reading JCL dumps, I was encouraged to write scripts in CLIST to automate parsing of the output. Now, the fact is, CLIST sucks ass. After writing one or two CLIST scripts, I discovered that REXX had just been ported to MVS, so I spent a week self-teaching myself REXX, and wrote the rest of my scripts in that.
When my contract ended, I turned over my scripts to my IBM supervisors. They were dumbfounded. "You wrote these in REXX!" one person exclamed. "Yeah, So?" I asked. "But, but, nobody here knows REXX! We do all of our work in CLIST! How are we supposed to support this?!"
Unbeliveable. No one there had gone to University and gotten CS training. IBM had provided them all with "computer programming" courses, and because no one had taken a course to learn REXX, it was like hitting a brick wall to them.
I have seen this time and again. People with a "Computer Programming" certificate or something or other need to take expensive courses in Java, Perl, HTML, etc., because they never learned the underlying CS theory that I feel is essential to being a real programmer. My college taught me Pascal, and based on the rest of the CS theory, I was able to self teach myself C, C++, Java, JavaScript, Python, the Win32 API, Sockets, PThreads, etc., etc. without ever having to resort to programming classes.
I don't mean to sound like a braggart. I am not some kind of genius or something. I am just trying to point out that having a CS degree that concentrates on software can make you an excellent computer programmer -- far better than simply taking a few night courses in Java will.
I got a CIS degree from SUNY Potsdam in New York. The degree was advertised as the best of MIS (IT stuff) and CS (programming). In actuality, there was only really one MIS related course offered (which was mandatory) -- all the rest were strictly CS related, and the vast majority of the CS courses were software rather than hardware related.
So, even though you could claim with a CIS degree to be a "jack of all trades", at my college, at least, you were trained to be a couter programmer, with only a "flavoring" of MIS.
Portals are like the Yellow Pages of the Internet. They have categorized areas, and you generally have to ask to be included. Back in the Day at least (when Yahoo was the only game in town, and portaling was all they did), they made a decent alternative to search engines, which I have always equated with being the "white pages" of Internetland. If you want to find websites that fit into a known category, a portal can sometimes cut the wheat from the chaff better than a search engine can.
Search engines are great for specific lookups. For more generalized lookups, portals can sometimes be helpful.
...If you have to pay for both sales tax AND shipping.
I have found living in California, where many of the e-tailers are, that having to pay CA sales tax (& sometimes even being forced to pay the higher Los Angeles city rate, even though I don't live there), and having to pay $2-$5 for Shipping & Handling per item, totally wipes out any online discount off of the retail price for a product.
See, B&M Stores do bulk shipping from major distributors, so the actual shipping cost is low enough to them so that they can "eat" the cost -- actually, the cost winds up being built into the retail price nicely for them (Plus, you pay the cost for the "final mile" shipping, by driving the merchandise to your house).
Online stores don't have that luxury. Their shipping costs are much higher. So they have to tack on the shipping costs, or lose a bundle, and go dot-bomb up.
I have no problem with this. But, when I am also forced to pay sales tax, the price of the product is likely to be un-competitive with the final B&M price, even though they have to charge sales tax too.
So every time I hear mom & pop stores and state governors whining about lost revenue to Internet sales, it really boils my pot. Because if they have their way, and ALL Internet sales are charged state sales tax regardless of point of origin (to say nothing if the govt. one day decides to levy a special federal level Internet tax on purchases), all online shopping will be un-competetive price wise, and nobody will buy anything online except for those hard-to-find items. And guess what, people? those hard-to-find items won't be there if companies can't make money off of common items as well!
If other international organizations had petitioned for their own TLD.
The International Council of Museums is the driving force behind the creation of the.museum domain. But what if other organizational bodies had been as clever as ICOM? What if there had been petitions for.aquarium,.zoo,.observatory, etc.?
If a lot of petitions for TLDs were submitted to partition the Internet into private or semi-private areas for "worthy" institutions and/or causes, I think then that the ICANN would have realized how foolish it would be to create separate and unequal TLDs.
ICANN only approved this because only a handfull of comunities asked for private space..aero would also have been rejected if there were applications for.bank,.law,.stock-market, etc., etc.
Slashdot Mirror
This reminds me of a skit Dave did a long time ago. He went into a machine shop that had an industrial press, and proceeded to crush goofy things that people on the street would suggest. One person said, "I want to see something as flat as a pancake!" so he took a stack of pancakes (and a bottle of syrup) and crushed that.
At the end of the skit, he gave a goofy monologe, and then proceeded to put his microphone in the press, and you heard the sounds of the microphone being crushed. You then saw him tapping on what was left of the microphone, and mouthing "Hello? Is this thing on??"
To be honest, my primary motivation was to build a "best of the best" system -- motherboard with 533MHz bus speed, ATA 133, USB 2.0. Top of the line GeForce 4. Pentium 4 2.0 GHz. SoundBlaster Audigy 5.1. Brushed Aluminum Case. So I expected to pay top dollar, and did.
HOWEVER -- I did do some research. Buying a computer from a mom and pop shop was almost identical to the cost of building it yourself. You may be able to find a Compaq/Dell/Gateway for less, but you are also getting a lot less flexibility -- built in video & sound that might be substandard. Welded on memory chips in Bank 1 (Compaq is infamous for this). An OS & Software bundle without the original Install CDs.
In my opinion, you get what you pay for. I got burned on a Packard Bell "special", and I swore to never buy a brand name PC again.
I just purchased a Pentium 4 screamer for myself. Since I was converting my old Pentium II compuuter to a Lunx box, I wanted to use the copy of Windows 2000 that I had running on it on my new computer -- I refuse to "upgrade" to XP. I was mindful of getting slapped with the OS tax if I refused a copy of XP. My solution?
I built the damn thing myself.
I bought the motherboard, video card, and case from CompUSA. I bought the memory, hard drive, DVD drive, skipped the floppy drive, Ethernet card, and sound card from a mom and pop computer store.
If you have avoided rolling your own computer, I must report that it was extremely intuitive and easy. If you can build Lego models, you can build your own PC.
Just say no to the MS tax. Build your own computer!
This is how NASA should be making its money:
The DIVX goons specifically did NOT allow porn, softcore or hardcore, on their format. In the post mortum analysis that followed, I remember that this prohibition was compared to a lack of porn (I don't know if it was actively blocked or not) on the Betamax format. Most people tend to believe that blocking porn was one (of many) reasons why DIVX failed.
:-)
On the other hand, the porn industry threw their support completely behind Open DVD (just like they did for VHS), and you can see where the state of things are today...
If I was more physically adept, for example, I would have certainly been more likely to have focused on that element of my life as a child...That forced me to seek out and use my other strengths, and make them a more important part of who I am.
:)
So I guess that means that under different genetic circumstances, you would be trying to score a First Down today instead of a First Post
Ooh, I just remembered this little anecdote!
If you listen carefully, you can hear some beeping in the background of the piece. When I first heard this, I was stunned: It was the sound from the very first handheld video game I ever owned (and still do!): The UFO Master Blaster Station by Bambino.
How cool is that!
Uh, the original soundtrack by Vangelis IS out -- at least in the U.S. It came out in '94
Yes, I own it, yes, it IS the Vangelis one and not the crappy New American Orchestra rendition (The booklet even has a statement by Vangelis saying how glad he is to finally be able to release this), and yes, it kicks ass.
If you don't see it under the soundtracks section, try the New Age section under Vangelis.
FWIW, Vangelis has an alternate version of the End Titles on his album titled Themes which is pretty good also. That album also has the Love Theme and Memories of Green (The song from the Unicorn dream sequence if I remember correctly), both of which are on the soundtrack as well.
I was really looking forward to this special edition. I had been under the impression that he was going to make this like the Terminator 2 SE DVD -- that is, make most or all of the multiple cuts of the movie availible via seamless branching, Harrison Ford voiceover on a second audio track, etc., etc.
Now this looks like it will just be Yet Another Director's Cut(TM), with maybe some EPK shit thrown in for good measure. Maybe this rant is right after all, and quality DVD special editions are on their way out the door as DVDs continue to get dumbed down for non movie connoisseurs.
I feel that the world that Tolkien has created using his words and my imagination is a lot more precious than something produced by the industry that bestows upon us Scary Movie 2 and Leprechaun 4: Leprechaun in space.
The reverse could just as easily be said too. What, there are no piece of crap books published? The book industry has it's own self-satisfying promotional push events (Oprah's book list, author signings, bestseller lists, etc), and award events for the best books of the year. And movies not based on books are routinely novelized; in fact movie -> book is way more common than (good) book -> movie.
I could have spared myself the research headache, and gone straight to the source for an answer.
I guess I deserve a (-1, Clueless) mod for that.
I too was curious about this -- I have seen a number of "ArsXYZ" sites lately, so I did some searching. I assumed that "Ars" was latin, and I was right. A search on Mirriam Webster for ars produces two latin phrases: ars est celare artem (it is (true) art to conceal art), and more interestingly, ars longa, vita brevis (art is long, life is short).
From this, I have concluded that the suffix part of "ArsXYZ" names is a phony latinization of an obvious english word, and so the names come out to something like "The art of Digital", "The art of Technical", etc.
Of course, I don't know squat about latin -- this is just my best guess. Does anybody out there with a passing knowledge of latin know if my theory is correct?
the "move wont fit on one DVD" problem is not a real problem.. I have a 2 disc Laserdisc movie, and it's no problem at all to get up every 45 minutes and flip it over or change it. anyone that would have a problem with that needs to get phycological help as to why they are that lazy.
Uhm, why do you think that they invented the remote control? Because the average viewer, myself included, does not want to leave the couch to channel surf. And to be honest, yes, one of the big reasons why I never bought into LaserDisc was because of the disc flipping & swapping. I don't have to change the film reels at the movie house myself, so why whould I be distracted with disc changing in the middle of a movie at home?
They dont want to release 1080i material for many reasons...
And I can think of one very evil reason for them to do so -- I have heard that experiencing a true HDTV picture is like listening to AM all of your life, and suddenly one day walking into an electronics store and hearing FM for the first time. I have seen a couple of other posters indicate that a DVD picture's flaws are highlighted on a HDTV set; it may very well be that buying HDTV versions of DVD movies that you already own will be a "must upgrade" and selling you a second copy of a movie to you in only a few short years sounds like a very profitable prospect for the studios. And hey, HD-DVD won't be out for a couple of years yet, so why don't you in the mean time buy a HDTV copy on D-VHS?? Then, when the tape eventually wears out and breaks, you can buy a THIRD copy of the same move on HD-DVD!
High end DVD players with progressive scan outputs will give you a better picture on a HDTV set, but no, it is not a HDTV picture. I think that DVD's best output is 480p; compared with HDTV at 720p or 1080i.
The problem is that DVDs are currently too small to hold and entire movie at HDTV resolution. There are efforts underway to create a new, next generation HD-DVD player that would use blue or purple lasers that would allow for smaller pits on the disc, and therefore greater storage capacity, but for now these are in the prototyping stage only, and aren't expected to come to market for another 4-6 years or so.
D-VHS, on the other hand, will support HDTV resolutions, and will allow you to record a HDTV signal. There may or may not exist ulterior motives on the studios part to get people to buy into D-VHS, but unfortunately for now, of you want to record or view HDTV quality movies, D-VHS is your only alternative.
The fleecing^H^H^H^H^Hpricing of .tv domains was truly blackmail under the old company. High profile ones, like abc.tv, went for hundreds of thousands of dollars right off the bat. Obscure ones, like my-amateur.tv, went for $30 for the first year, but then the price to re-register went up with each successive year, until you were forced to pay thousands or more per year for a domain that was now (potentially) high(er) profile.
.com, .net, etc. command.
I wonder if Verisign will keep this pricing policy, or if they will shift it to the flat rate that
What makes goat milk so special for spider silk production? I would have thought of two other scenarios first:
-- Genetically alter silkworms to produce the spider silk.
-- Genetically alter cows to produce the silk laden milk, since they would produce much higher yields than goats.
The article is a little short on details, and it makes it appear like after the spider domestication failed, they went straight to goats. Anybody know why the above two examples are inferior to genetically altered goats?
I read The Digital Bits regularly, and from the editor's comments (which I agree with), most collectors of TV shows on DVD apparantly prefer to collect entire season box sets, as opposed to one or two ep.'s per disc priced separately, or "best of" compilations. Apparantly, Paramount ran a poll on the ST web site a few months ago asking how they should handle TNG DVDs, and the overwhelming consensus was to go with season box sets.
The biggest problem, IMO, with releasing one or two ep's at a time is that if the sales numbers don't crunch, additional ep's may be indefanately delayed, or cancelled. This happened with South Park (they released a bunch in order, then there was a loooong delay, and now they release out-of-order "best of" compilations, much to my dismay), and My So-Called Life (one disc with 2 or 3 eps was released, and when nobody bought it, the rest were quietly cancelled).
Well, for regular (non-premium) TV, once you have bought the TV series on VHS or DVD, you will never watch it again in reruns/syndication, and that's one less eyeball watching the commercials, so the studios figure that they can at least partially make up for it by charging you an arm and a leg to watch the show commercial free whenever and wherever.
:-)
As for premium channels like HBO, well, A) HBO has been good about enhancing the DVDs (commentaries, anamorphic widescreen, Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound) and has to recoup the additional production costs, and B) why buck the trend?
I don't know about TNG, but apparantly with each season of Voyager's bloopers, these were compiled onto a tape, played at the season wrap party, and then destroyed. They decided that the bloopers would be reserved for the cast & crew's (one time) enjoyment only.
A shame too. I read an interview with Jeri Ryan (7 of 9) once, and she gave an anecdote of an amusing blooper where Garret Wang (Ensign Kim) was supposed to grab her elbow to get her attention. She miscued and turned to face him too early, and Garret wound up accidentally grabbing her boob! Apparantly there were many "That's not an elbow" jokes on the set from that point on...
CS != Programming? Well, as I alluded to in my previous comment, I think that depends on the school. In my case, I think my CIS degree was by and large a computer programming degree. At least, that's what you were best trained to do after graduation, and that's what most of the graduates that I kept in touch with did -- including myself.
In fact, I believe that someone with CS theory is much better qualified to be a programmer than someone who takes a few computer programming courses. Let me give you an anecdote from my first job as a contractor to IBM: I was tasked to monitor JCL on s/390 mainframes. To alleviate the repetitveness of manually reading JCL dumps, I was encouraged to write scripts in CLIST to automate parsing of the output. Now, the fact is, CLIST sucks ass. After writing one or two CLIST scripts, I discovered that REXX had just been ported to MVS, so I spent a week self-teaching myself REXX, and wrote the rest of my scripts in that.
When my contract ended, I turned over my scripts to my IBM supervisors. They were dumbfounded. "You wrote these in REXX!" one person exclamed. "Yeah, So?" I asked. "But, but, nobody here knows REXX! We do all of our work in CLIST! How are we supposed to support this?!"
Unbeliveable. No one there had gone to University and gotten CS training. IBM had provided them all with "computer programming" courses, and because no one had taken a course to learn REXX, it was like hitting a brick wall to them.
I have seen this time and again. People with a "Computer Programming" certificate or something or other need to take expensive courses in Java, Perl, HTML, etc., because they never learned the underlying CS theory that I feel is essential to being a real programmer. My college taught me Pascal, and based on the rest of the CS theory, I was able to self teach myself C, C++, Java, JavaScript, Python, the Win32 API, Sockets, PThreads, etc., etc. without ever having to resort to programming classes.
I don't mean to sound like a braggart. I am not some kind of genius or something. I am just trying to point out that having a CS degree that concentrates on software can make you an excellent computer programmer -- far better than simply taking a few night courses in Java will.
I got a CIS degree from SUNY Potsdam in New York. The degree was advertised as the best of MIS (IT stuff) and CS (programming). In actuality, there was only really one MIS related course offered (which was mandatory) -- all the rest were strictly CS related, and the vast majority of the CS courses were software rather than hardware related.
So, even though you could claim with a CIS degree to be a "jack of all trades", at my college, at least, you were trained to be a couter programmer, with only a "flavoring" of MIS.
Portals are like the Yellow Pages of the Internet. They have categorized areas, and you generally have to ask to be included. Back in the Day at least (when Yahoo was the only game in town, and portaling was all they did), they made a decent alternative to search engines, which I have always equated with being the "white pages" of Internetland. If you want to find websites that fit into a known category, a portal can sometimes cut the wheat from the chaff better than a search engine can.
Search engines are great for specific lookups. For more generalized lookups, portals can sometimes be helpful.
...If you have to pay for both sales tax AND shipping.
I have found living in California, where many of the e-tailers are, that having to pay CA sales tax (& sometimes even being forced to pay the higher Los Angeles city rate, even though I don't live there), and having to pay $2-$5 for Shipping & Handling per item, totally wipes out any online discount off of the retail price for a product.
See, B&M Stores do bulk shipping from major distributors, so the actual shipping cost is low enough to them so that they can "eat" the cost -- actually, the cost winds up being built into the retail price nicely for them (Plus, you pay the cost for the "final mile" shipping, by driving the merchandise to your house).
Online stores don't have that luxury. Their shipping costs are much higher. So they have to tack on the shipping costs, or lose a bundle, and go dot-bomb up.
I have no problem with this. But, when I am also forced to pay sales tax, the price of the product is likely to be un-competitive with the final B&M price, even though they have to charge sales tax too.
So every time I hear mom & pop stores and state governors whining about lost revenue to Internet sales, it really boils my pot. Because if they have their way, and ALL Internet sales are charged state sales tax regardless of point of origin (to say nothing if the govt. one day decides to levy a special federal level Internet tax on purchases), all online shopping will be un-competetive price wise, and nobody will buy anything online except for those hard-to-find items. And guess what, people? those hard-to-find items won't be there if companies can't make money off of common items as well!
It's like that TV Commercial that's been playing in the States here:
*Woman peeks her head into IT Manager's office*
"Oh, and Bob, I opened that e-mail virus -- just like you told me not to!"
If other international organizations had petitioned for their own TLD.
.museum domain. But what if other organizational bodies had been as clever as ICOM? What if there had been petitions for .aquarium, .zoo, .observatory, etc.?
.aero would also have been rejected if there were applications for .bank, .law, .stock-market, etc., etc.
The International Council of Museums is the driving force behind the creation of the
If a lot of petitions for TLDs were submitted to partition the Internet into private or semi-private areas for "worthy" institutions and/or causes, I think then that the ICANN would have realized how foolish it would be to create separate and unequal TLDs.
ICANN only approved this because only a handfull of comunities asked for private space.