The problem is with form factor. How many different (incompatible) options --
Compact Flash (standard in high end cameras or devices where you need the most space. 512 Meg and 1 Gig+ available now)
Smartmedia (standard in items that do not require much space -- or where they did not "know any better" -- Lot's of camera's and Mp3 players)
MMC Expensive and caps out about 128 Meg)
SD Being used more and more -- getting bigger and bigger -- but did not all of us already have about $10,000 dollars worth of media in other formats by the time this broke the "64 meg" barrier?
Memory Stick Die Sony die...Why did we need this?
Xd (sic)? picture cards New cards being used by the new cameras. Small as a finger nail. But why? why? why? Why so many form factors?
Anybody on the bleeding edge will have aquired a variety of the above types of memory. I for one am always holding out for a device that supports CF -- since my first camera was CF, and I have the most cards in that factor -- and it makes me sick to my stomache to buy a new device that uses a type of memory that serves no purpose other than to make all of my existing memory useless.
Ya -- for the price of a laptop...and about as much life left in it as Sadaam. (I hope the axe from the ipaq will loose some on the streets for a good deal.)
the 200LX has features that Pda's today can only dream about!!! full keyboard, PCMCIA support, nice screen. Solid as a rock. To bad we can't get a device like that to run Linux on. (would need more memory and a faster CPU.)
To me the problem is with the "Local IT Pimp"...We pay top dollar for the service. If the H-1B is only getting a small percentage from his pimp then how is that my fault? Plus the days of getting 50 bucks an hour to "code" HTML died with the.com bust. Much like the people on the assembly lines getting paid 25 bucks an hour in the 70's to plug part A into socket B for 8 hours a day wondered why their jobs went away. Yet our school teachers work for peanuts to do a VERY tough job. And believe me I honor them more than someone who expects 50-80 bucks an hour to sit in an office with a big cup of coffee and headphones to write loops and conditions all day.
Try crawling through the internals of any recent "desktop" distro to find all the different font solutions working "together" to render your desktop apps and X window system, and you will soon find that no two applications seem to use the same solution. Even better yet try turning them all of for a sanity check. Anti alias this, font config that, it's a mess. Maybe no one will agree with me -- but I spent a month wondering why one application looked fine, and another looked pukey, and another looked like it would never render anything above 7 pixels. 500+ fonts installed -- and no single application could use more than a handful of them. And no two applications across graphics libraries (gtk1, gtk2, gtk2 antialias, qt, qt anti alias, etc.) seemed to use the same handful. I finally decided to go back to the days where applications just used the default font server provided by launching Xwindow. I downloaded the "ancient" xfstt and imported my favorite TT Fonts -- and I was up and running with Debian stable. The only problem I have now is trying to get slightly newer verisons of some of my apps.....Some of this stuff in Debian stable are stuck in the point release my Grandfather used in his day.
I have read 100 posts that say that these guys are being paid akin to McDonalds help to program complex systems. At least from where I stand all the H1B's in this part of the Country do just as good as the next guy. (They drive cars and live in Houses/Apartments that no fast food jocky would be able to afford.) I have hired over 40 contractors over the last 4 years (about 1/2 H1B) -- and I can say that price was never a deciding factor....(wages were all pretty much the same -- maybe a dollar or two either way)....The biggest factor I have noticed is that in India they are generally better educated and their schools seem to have more of a focus on quality learning. And you can bet your ass at the age me and you were chasing tails and drinking brew in high school and college -- these guys were studying by candle light to come over here and take your job.
I have a Sharp, I have an Ipaq, I have a Dell Axim, I had a few palms. The SINGLE most frustrating thing (since I left palm) is always worrying about being more than a stones throw away from "the juice" to plug these things in after streaming music over my lan for about 60 minutes or so on a full charge. I am being turned into a nervous wreck thinking that something so cool can be so frustrating when I have to constantlly worry about recharging a battery that is "one of a kind". I wish it was more like my "old" mp3 player where I can just make sure I have a nice cache of 1900 MaH AA rechargeables at the ready to do a quick swap. Hooking up to the juice for 2 or 3 hours in between every 2 hours of use is not the solution.....Hell if I wanted that problem I could sling my IBM 240 in a back pack....(at least I would not have to scroll my SSH sessions to the left and hunt and peck with a stylus to navigate around...)
I know I ramble -- but this is frustrating to have so many hobbles in.....I have nightmares about charging batteries each night...My cellphone, my PDA's, my laptop, my cache of AA's....It is worse than a drug habit.
I will send 10 emails a day to the person in the cube right next to me. I just don't like to talk to the guy in person or the phone...He annoys me and he is lazy. Yet because we share certain physical resources (programmers) I have to keep a line of communication open. I only tend to verbally communicate with people I can stand. For as much as I HATE email in gerneral, this is one good thing about it.
Crap...I would love to give this a try but I have not had a windows machine for years -- and I am giving up trying to find my misplaced "disk 5" floppy of Win 95. 1-4 + 6-* does not work! I wonder what would happen if I called Redmond and told them I need them to ship me a replacement:)
Damn that pen...I had a million dollar idea to develop some "lead resistent space glasses" (patterend after regular safety glasses -- only a whole lot more expensive) to fix the whole "lead floating around and getting in the eyes problem.
I can't say if the Gnome desktop is any better than the KDE desktop because I suck and have older (Pre GHZ) machines and can not find using either one of them very comfortable. (But Fluxbox works great thank you.) However, this may just be a coincidence -- but I do find that the programs I find myself using all of the time (grip, galeon, gimp, etc) have more of a gnome (gtk) feel than a kde (qt) feel.
In all fairness -- I have done most of my desktop environment testing based on the amount of seconds it takes from startx until I can be surfing the web or listening to mp3's. And the 10 seconds with fluxbox and galeon always seems better than the 1 minute+ with Gnome or KDE -- but then again they may be minimized if I wear to join the 2 GHZ club.
how is this any different than buying an aftermarket carb for my car. Or an offbrand rim for my bike. Or a generic video card for my server. I guess now all of my replacement purchases must come from the original company that built the product. How crazy is this?
"Fixing bugs and security holes should not be considered a service - it is repairing a faulty product."
Hey that is the one sentance that best explains why I left the microsoft camp many years ago. The fact that this seems to become even a wider spread practice in this day and age is interesting to me.
Well if you can be sure that the same person who initiates the program will be around in 10 years to maintain it -- then go ahead and use 40 different scripting languages and 20 different compiled languages.
However -- in the real world (where we have to request specific skillsets for our contractors upon one person leaving and another person coming) we have been forced to standardize on a handful of languages to ensure that we could get the job of 2 people done with 2 people. Not having to employ an extra Python or Perl guru just in case those few programs that the one guy who thought Python was cool and could do it "tons" faster than Java or C need to be maintained or added to.
Sure -- we have extra up front time writing Java programs in a week when Perl could do it in a day.....But at least if we replace our "Java" resource with a "Java" resource -- we can ensure that future maintenence and enhancments to existing programs has a fighting chance.
If the gold rock stars can live on 40k a year and still have mansions, chicks and fleets of cars -- salon should be able to find some journalists to work for that and less...:) That way they could have stretched out the 80 meeelion just a little longer until they got a few more/. readers to pony up $15 bucks a piece... (just how many subscriptions would a website that burns through that kind of dough need to actually make money?)
Wow. Between the starving gold rock stars making a measlly 40K a year -- and a web site that pisses through 80 Million and can't find a way to keep the lights on, my heart just goes out to all these "poor" folks.
Maybe if I have any "compassion" left I will send a nickel to the evening news and a dime to the local newspaper -- they must be losing money to.
Their 40K a year must go a lot farther than my 40K...The 7 cars in the garage of the huge mansions with 2 or 3 swimming pools that I see on MTV cribs looks not much like my domain.
Just watched the show last week and some band I had never heard of (Blink 192 or something) was rolling around a spread like described above.
sync with my lotus suite applications running os/2 on my ps/2? And please tell me that it will cost a good 25-30% more than the competition....go big blue.
This may not apply to the m&m (sic), or Britney Spears types that sell millions of copies. But what is stopping the "marginal" acts that are considered "failures" on major or midsize labels because they only move 5 - 30 thousand CD's in the US -- from going to more of a "homebrew" and online distribution strategy. We are a diverse enough culture where you can have a cult following of 15-30 thousand purchasing fans -- yet bands and labels both lose money because the bands only see pennies for each CD sold, and labels don't break even unless they sell a certain amount of CD's.
I would say if a band went the "homebrew"/online distribution route, they could produce the CD's and packaging for about $1.50. If they were able to move 15,000-20,000 to there "cult" followers then everyone is happy.
Let the labels handle the heavy hitters -- let the other bands swallow their pride and realize that even though they may never go gold or platinum that they can still make a pretty good living peddling their wares to their fans.
Good....Now maybe the google folks can take a few of those *nix based 486 machines and replace the mess of M$ products that "run" blogger. I thought blogger was cool back in the day -- but was always perplexed as to the software choices they made in running such a big, complicated, heavy traffic service.
or did the whole "installed a MB, HD, CD and Ports into a....." phenom kinda peak at the whole "In a Pizza Box" story from way back in the/. dino days?
THe fact that I could use a USB pen drive does not mean much in my task of moving files to an old 386 laptop that my wife uses to dial in to her office (Private BBS) and send her daily work. (Her main machine is on broadband and nowhere near a phoneline --- so she copies her work files to a floppy and lugs it across the house...)
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The problem is with form factor. How many different (incompatible) options --
Compact Flash (standard in high end cameras or devices where you need the most space. 512 Meg and 1 Gig+ available now)
Smartmedia (standard in items that do not require much space -- or where they did not "know any better" -- Lot's of camera's and Mp3 players)
MMC Expensive and caps out about 128 Meg)
SD Being used more and more -- getting bigger and bigger -- but did not all of us already have about $10,000 dollars worth of media in other formats by the time this broke the "64 meg" barrier?
Memory Stick Die Sony die...Why did we need this?
Xd (sic)? picture cards New cards being used by the new cameras. Small as a finger nail. But why? why? why? Why so many form factors?
Anybody on the bleeding edge will have aquired a variety of the above types of memory. I for one am always holding out for a device that supports CF -- since my first camera was CF, and I have the most cards in that factor -- and it makes me sick to my stomache to buy a new device that uses a type of memory that serves no purpose other than to make all of my existing memory useless.
Ya -- for the price of a laptop...and about as much life left in it as Sadaam. (I hope the axe from the ipaq will loose some on the streets for a good deal.)
the 200LX has features that Pda's today can only dream about!!! full keyboard, PCMCIA support, nice screen. Solid as a rock. To bad we can't get a device like that to run Linux on. (would need more memory and a faster CPU.)
Yep. I am glad I was not the only one to notice.
To me the problem is with the "Local IT Pimp"...We pay top dollar for the service. If the H-1B is only getting a small percentage from his pimp then how is that my fault? Plus the days of getting 50 bucks an hour to "code" HTML died with the .com bust. Much like the people on the assembly lines getting paid 25 bucks an hour in the 70's to plug part A into socket B for 8 hours a day wondered why their jobs went away. Yet our school teachers work for peanuts to do a VERY tough job. And believe me I honor them more than someone who expects 50-80 bucks an hour to sit in an office with a big cup of coffee and headphones to write loops and conditions all day.
Try crawling through the internals of any recent "desktop" distro to find all the different font solutions working "together" to render your desktop apps and X window system, and you will soon find that no two applications seem to use the same solution. Even better yet try turning them all of for a sanity check. Anti alias this, font config that, it's a mess. Maybe no one will agree with me -- but I spent a month wondering why one application looked fine, and another looked pukey, and another looked like it would never render anything above 7 pixels. 500+ fonts installed -- and no single application could use more than a handful of them. And no two applications across graphics libraries (gtk1, gtk2, gtk2 antialias, qt, qt anti alias, etc.) seemed to use the same handful. I finally decided to go back to the days where applications just used the default font server provided by launching Xwindow. I downloaded the "ancient" xfstt and imported my favorite TT Fonts -- and I was up and running with Debian stable. The only problem I have now is trying to get slightly newer verisons of some of my apps.....Some of this stuff in Debian stable are stuck in the point release my Grandfather used in his day.
I have read 100 posts that say that these guys are being paid akin to McDonalds help to program complex systems. At least from where I stand all the H1B's in this part of the Country do just as good as the next guy. (They drive cars and live in Houses/Apartments that no fast food jocky would be able to afford.) I have hired over 40 contractors over the last 4 years (about 1/2 H1B) -- and I can say that price was never a deciding factor....(wages were all pretty much the same -- maybe a dollar or two either way)....The biggest factor I have noticed is that in India they are generally better educated and their schools seem to have more of a focus on quality learning. And you can bet your ass at the age me and you were chasing tails and drinking brew in high school and college -- these guys were studying by candle light to come over here and take your job.
I have a Sharp, I have an Ipaq, I have a Dell Axim, I had a few palms. The SINGLE most frustrating thing (since I left palm) is always worrying about being more than a stones throw away from "the juice" to plug these things in after streaming music over my lan for about 60 minutes or so on a full charge. I am being turned into a nervous wreck thinking that something so cool can be so frustrating when I have to constantlly worry about recharging a battery that is "one of a kind". I wish it was more like my "old" mp3 player where I can just make sure I have a nice cache of 1900 MaH AA rechargeables at the ready to do a quick swap. Hooking up to the juice for 2 or 3 hours in between every 2 hours of use is not the solution.....Hell if I wanted that problem I could sling my IBM 240 in a back pack....(at least I would not have to scroll my SSH sessions to the left and hunt and peck with a stylus to navigate around...)
I know I ramble -- but this is frustrating to have so many hobbles in.....I have nightmares about charging batteries each night...My cellphone, my PDA's, my laptop, my cache of AA's....It is worse than a drug habit.
I will send 10 emails a day to the person in the cube right next to me. I just don't like to talk to the guy in person or the phone...He annoys me and he is lazy. Yet because we share certain physical resources (programmers) I have to keep a line of communication open. I only tend to verbally communicate with people I can stand. For as much as I HATE email in gerneral, this is one good thing about it.
Crap...I would love to give this a try but I have not had a windows machine for years -- and I am giving up trying to find my misplaced "disk 5" floppy of Win 95. 1-4 + 6-* does not work! I wonder what would happen if I called Redmond and told them I need them to ship me a replacement :)
Damn that pen...I had a million dollar idea to develop some "lead resistent space glasses" (patterend after regular safety glasses -- only a whole lot more expensive) to fix the whole "lead floating around and getting in the eyes problem.
I can't say if the Gnome desktop is any better than the KDE desktop because I suck and have older (Pre GHZ) machines and can not find using either one of them very comfortable. (But Fluxbox works great thank you.) However, this may just be a coincidence -- but I do find that the programs I find myself using all of the time (grip, galeon, gimp, etc) have more of a gnome (gtk) feel than a kde (qt) feel.
In all fairness -- I have done most of my desktop environment testing based on the amount of seconds it takes from startx until I can be surfing the web or listening to mp3's. And the 10 seconds with fluxbox and galeon always seems better than the 1 minute+ with Gnome or KDE -- but then again they may be minimized if I wear to join the 2 GHZ club.
can they type: ../configure;make windows;make install?
If not -- then how do they know that the code they are looking at is the same version that goes into the build on their desktops?
how is this any different than buying an aftermarket carb for my car. Or an offbrand rim for my bike. Or a generic video card for my server. I guess now all of my replacement purchases must come from the original company that built the product. How crazy is this?
"Fixing bugs and security holes should not be considered a service - it is repairing a faulty product."
Hey that is the one sentance that best explains why I left the microsoft camp many years ago. The fact that this seems to become even a wider spread practice in this day and age is interesting to me.
Well if you can be sure that the same person who initiates the program will be around in 10 years to maintain it -- then go ahead and use 40 different scripting languages and 20 different compiled languages.
However -- in the real world (where we have to request specific skillsets for our contractors upon one person leaving and another person coming) we have been forced to standardize on a handful of languages to ensure that we could get the job of 2 people done with 2 people. Not having to employ an extra Python or Perl guru just in case those few programs that the one guy who thought Python was cool and could do it "tons" faster than Java or C need to be maintained or added to.
Sure -- we have extra up front time writing Java programs in a week when Perl could do it in a day.....But at least if we replace our "Java" resource with a "Java" resource -- we can ensure that future maintenence and enhancments to existing programs has a fighting chance.
If the gold rock stars can live on 40k a year and still have mansions, chicks and fleets of cars -- salon should be able to find some journalists to work for that and less...:) That way they could have stretched out the 80 meeelion just a little longer until they got a few more /. readers to pony up $15 bucks a piece... (just how many subscriptions would a website that burns through that kind of dough need to actually make money?)
Wow. Between the starving gold rock stars making a measlly 40K a year -- and a web site that pisses through 80 Million and can't find a way to keep the lights on, my heart just goes out to all these "poor" folks.
Maybe if I have any "compassion" left I will send a nickel to the evening news and a dime to the local newspaper -- they must be losing money to.
Bullshit!
Their 40K a year must go a lot farther than my 40K...The 7 cars in the garage of the huge mansions with 2 or 3 swimming pools that I see on MTV cribs looks not much like my domain.
Just watched the show last week and some band I had never heard of (Blink 192 or something) was rolling around a spread like described above.
Cool. I don't see what all the fuss is about this new fangled Ethernet stuff, Token Ring is the only way to go.
sync with my lotus suite applications running os/2 on my ps/2? And please tell me that it will cost a good 25-30% more than the competition....go big blue.
This may not apply to the m&m (sic), or Britney Spears types that sell millions of copies. But what is stopping the "marginal" acts that are considered "failures" on major or midsize labels because they only move 5 - 30 thousand CD's in the US -- from going to more of a "homebrew" and online distribution strategy. We are a diverse enough culture where you can have a cult following of 15-30 thousand purchasing fans -- yet bands and labels both lose money because the bands only see pennies for each CD sold, and labels don't break even unless they sell a certain amount of CD's.
I would say if a band went the "homebrew"/online distribution route, they could produce the CD's and packaging for about $1.50. If they were able to move 15,000-20,000 to there "cult" followers then everyone is happy.
Let the labels handle the heavy hitters -- let the other bands swallow their pride and realize that even though they may never go gold or platinum that they can still make a pretty good living peddling their wares to their fans.
Good....Now maybe the google folks can take a few of those *nix based 486 machines and replace the mess of M$ products that "run" blogger. I thought blogger was cool back in the day -- but was always perplexed as to the software choices they made in running such a big, complicated, heavy traffic service.
or did the whole "installed a MB, HD, CD and Ports into a....." phenom kinda peak at the whole "In a Pizza Box" story from way back in the /. dino days?
THe fact that I could use a USB pen drive does not mean much in my task of moving files to an old 386 laptop that my wife uses to dial in to her office (Private BBS) and send her daily work. (Her main machine is on broadband and nowhere near a phoneline --- so she copies her work files to a floppy and lugs it across the house...)