A centralized identity database can't recover from corruption. Whether it's from a corrupt bueracrat who changes something intentionally or from an innocuous data error that inadvertantly enters incorrect data, a central database just propogates the errors out to everyone. A decentralized system like we have now (birth certificate, passport, drivers licence, social security card, etc) offer a number of ways that corruption can be detected and corrected. If my passport record shows a birthday different from my drivers license, the error will be noticed and flagged when the data is needed. Other data authorities (e.g. my birth certificate) can resolve the discrepency.
A centralized identity system can save money and can simplify establishing false CIA identities. But the temptaion of abuse (especially with voter ID cards) or the massive headaches from even unintended errors make this a grossly silly idea to try to spring, fully-formed from a bit of legislation snuck in via the backdoor as this one has been.
The Aslan Slaughter / Sacrifice seems to be the first bit that I objected to as a reader. It's been a long time so I probably have this either completely messed up in my mind. Nevertheless, possible spoilers below.
Aslan's resurrection was predicated on an older prophecy than what the white queen was using. He sacrificed himself without hesitation knowing that he wasn't in any long term danger.
As a reader, this "older prophecy" felt sort of cheating because we didn't know about it until after his slaughter. It's like the hero of a space opera having a special protective shield that's only activiated after receiving a fatal shot from the enemy and not learning about it until after the faux death scene.
When I asked an adult about what I perceived as "cheating" in the story, she said that it wasn't cheating because it was based on the prophecy and symbology of the Old Testament. Well, that certainly made sense to me based on what I'd learned in Sunday school, but the story at that point actually had a negative influence on my relgious understanding at that point. If Aslan could be sacrificed because he had found an older prophecy, then we humans just need to be better at archeology and other sciences to dig up an older prophecy than what the Old Testament contained. There were probably older Eqyptian ruins that hadn't been found yet, since god's authority was based on who had the oldest belief there wasn't anything special about the Old Testament unless it was the oldest (and nothing in Narnia or my Sunday School said that it was in particular the definitive oldest in scripture.)
Today, I'm less offended by C.S. Lewis's use of religious allegory in his writing, but it's simplicity sort of undermines the sense of wonder about the story itself. Not that my insight is particularly insightful, but just trying to explain my discomfort / dislike of the story by using the story itself.
The Mona Lisa (famous and out of copyright) is often plagarized in whole or in part as part of commercial or satiric artistic works. These types of visual database engines have frequently been explained to me as being able to input the Mona Lisa and get a list of images that used the entirety of the image or just a part (such as the highly-praised subtle smile).
The big problem to me is specifying input. I know the "look" of the Mona Lisa's smile, but even with the best pen input methods I'd never be able to mimic DaVinci's subtle emotion of the smile; my hands just aren't capable of doing so. Using photos of the painting could simplify this, but this almost assumes that I'm only looking for the parody's and commercial exploiters of the image rather than the image itself (after all, I have the image to start with). And it raises the further issue that many photographic reproductions of the Mona Lisa that I can get my hands on are still under copyright and I'd be doing something legally questionable with an image long in the public domain.
Add to this the "infinite number of monkeys" issue where legally litigious companies will use technologies like this to scan the internet for litigation targets. Imagine Disney using a cell of Rafiki from the Lion King to find legally similar images that were created after the Lion King was released even if they were only superficially similar. Now do this for all movies back to Snow White or Steamboat WIlly and you could get to be a real visual mob boss with ownership (or at least threat of litigation) over huge libraries of works that weren't even created to intentionally violate Disney "Intellectual Property".
My need for this technology is small considering the input problems I'd have with my artistic abilities, while the litigation nightmare from large databases of "similar" visual data would seem to be more bothersome than helpful. I rather hope these visual search and categorizing methods don't catch on.
I submitted this about an hour ago, and it was rejected. Should I be offended that they accept everyone else's dupes but not mine? Ah, well
Have no worries. The moderators were only doing their duty by ensuring that this Apple "press release" was corroborated by the various Mac rumor sites.:-)
Consumer Reports had a report on it's back page of the May issue (with cautiously optimistic reviews of the Mac Mini and iPod shuffle).
The coin is a $10 coin of Liberian currency with George W. Bush on it. The coin is sent to you as the first in a collector's series and every month you have to pay $60.
There was a computer conference I went to in 2002 where a vendor was giving away golden coins of U.S. Presidents if you gave him an email address. These weren't U.S. coinage but they looked the same size and shape as the new golden dollar coin and were probably minted in the same not US mint. Unfortunately all of the popular Presidents were already taken. Not wanting a Chester Arthur, James Polk, or any of their ilk, I took a Richard Nixon coin.
I've taken this out as I dig in my wallet for other coins and dollars. It attracts a lot of attention from cashiers but none have questioned its legitimacy. Nixon was an infamous unpopular president; large denomization dollar coins are very unpopular but legal. I do wish the coin had the saying "I am not a crook" embossed on it.
"Half-Life: Aftermath" sounds pretty eerie but "Half-Life: After P.E." would really bring out all sorts of long buried terrors of heading to the locker room showers after a game of kill the nerd with the ball.
Yeah, I thought about posting a link to the blog in question... but then I remembered that I'm writing an posting for slashdot users.:-)
Linking to the actual blog would probably distract from my point. People would argue "You find that interesting?!?!?" or "Gosh, back on December 26th 2003 the author didn't seem quite as mature as you are describing." The fact that I find the blog to be interesting and mature are my personal opinions and would likely incite harsher, off-topic discussion about this fellow.
If I remember, I'll try and add a followup post in a week with the blog but for now talking about the archetype probably suits the discussion better.
The whiners who make up details about their boss, give away corporate secrets, or try to attack someone in an unfair manner are what should stop. There are many people's weblog entries I've read where they sound like spoiled brats. Comments and trackbacks indicate that they're writing this out of a self-esteem problem or just a nasty streak of insanity.
But there are many ways to write a negative web log that still tries to be completely fair and see things from the other person's point of view. I read a number of these (I actually started reading their logs for some tech project they were on but kept on after finding out that they have lives that don't revolve around first person shooters). They seem to write out of a need to get some sort of honesty about what's going on.
One fellow in particular that I enjoy reading writes about his boss, problem clients, assertive sex partners, and demanding family members. He's fun to read because he's figured out that in most cases he is the "problem" rather than all of these people he writes about. He is, after all, the only common link between all of these problematic things. When he writes about a stressful change at work he's not bitching about "the worst decision his boss ever made" but rather "a change his boss made that eluded his understanding".
If I were a future employer and came across his blog, the level of maturity he displayed would go a lot further than whether he mentioned someone by name. Not everyone's that way, but jeez, if you are completely anonymous writing stuff seems like a waste of time.
If you want to leak a secret wrongdoing, send it to a reporter's email address. If you want to write about your stresses and successes, do so in a mature way. If you want to bitch and moan and try to assasinate someone's integrity, be prepared to take the consequences for your juvenile tantrums.
Making judgements on budget flat panels is much harder than the pricier brands in my experience. Budget brands get their LCDs cheaply by saying they'll take a manufacturer's leftovers that fail the quality standards of the bigger name customers. That doesn't mean that all of their budget displays are bad; the budget buyer gets quite a number of perfect displays and almost perfect displays because they have to get something delivered.
For a brand that has high quality assurance standards evaluating one or two displays can be an effective evaluation, but reviewing a budget display this way is meaningless. When you're looking at brands that don't have quality standards and good return policies, then statistics like failure rate, customer satisfaction, and other non-visual stats can tell you whether it's a good risk to put your money down or not. You may get a great monitor; you may get something that's crap. But unless you're looking at the actual monitor you're going to buy in person, its the other stats that are going to tell you what your odds are of getting a great display for dirt cheap.
Three days is the total time I can be without my Mac if something goes horribly wrong with a peripheral or app that I can't live without. I hope the upgrade to Tiger will go without a hitch, but I'm planning for disaster in case something like my Internet router upgrades itself to incompatible firmware or my printer stops working and it has to be set up to print via a Windows box.
The time for the backup, clean install, reinstall of apps, reconfiguring of prefs is about a half day. The extra time is so that I can:
Run some tests to make sure everything is working.
Troubleshoot a malfunctioning app or peripheral under Tiger.
Restore Panther system from backup and migrate work from Tiger.
Purchase replacement app / device if still broken
This also allows for the runarounds I'm bound to get from support helplines who aren't ready to support their products on Tiger yet. (Not that tech support is wonderfully responsive when they are prepared.)
In those situations, I really don't want to be facing a deadline or hostile customer during the first three days of a Tiger install so I just make sure I have that extra time just in case... And if I happen to have a trouble-free upgrade, then I'll have a couple of days to play around and be completely unproductive while I play around and get accustomed to the new install:-)
Supposedly, the codenames of 10.0 (Cheetah) and 10.1 (Puma) were internally decided upon by the OS team. Jaguar, Panther, and Tiger have had some influence by marketing once the big-cat theme was embraced by the public to distinguish the releases.
Apple will probably stick with the big cat names but if they start to get repetitive they'll probably move on to another carnivorous predator name as long as Microsoft continues with the delicious herbivore name for their next OS. What might be some ideas?
Lion - new networking and chat features, easy to integrate into cluster, regal and beautiful.
Sabertooth - promotes backward compatability (updated Classic? Apple// or Newton layers?)
Tabby - heavy user interface refinements (Tablet input, dock redesign, aqua theme change)
Wolverine - heavy windows compatability and ideas that seem blatantly lifted from Microsoft (wolverine = carnivorous weasel known for habits of stealing food. Popular X-men member and football mascot, but not a cat.)
If Apple's internal teams have gone final (and that's a big IF) it's not uncommon for a release to still be waiting on:
notification of changes in code licensed from a vendor or third-party
a multiple week soak time after the code freeze to discover bugs (eat your own dog food for a while)
exhaustive documentation of the final changes (both to users and developers)
Even if all of this has been finalized as the rumors indicate, there are still other reasons why a release would be delayed after going final, including:
Finding the best marketing opportunity to make the introduction (which I know little of).
Ensuring that one's unfinished hardware has only expected problems and incompatabilities (if any at all).
Letting the application teams (Final Cut, iWork, iLife, etc) get their work fully compliant before release (the market does have higher expectations for Apple authored apps).
While the Mac rumor sites have been speculating on an early release of Tiger since it was announced last June, I don't think that their rumor-mongering does anything to speed up its release and quite possibly:
delays distribution of the gold master to developers.
delays the public announcement until Apple is seen as the one setting the expectations rather than the rumor sites.
makes open discussion of releases beyond Tiger even more secretive.
Personally, I'm still running Panther. I've got a backup plan, blank media, and a time estimate of about 3 days downtime needed to transition to Tiger and test my setup once it comes out. Beyond that, I've made no plans that depend on an unreleased or rumored feature. I'm anxious for that release date to get here, but I'm prepared as well as I can whether that date is tomorrow or June 30th.
Back when I learned to program in the 1970's there were a variety of magazines that would publish programs and tutorials. If Byte ran a game or productivity program for the TRS-80, you can bet that Nibble would an Apple ][ game that was similar in concept down the road. Even though the programs and explanations were nothing alike, even a 4th grader like me could see shared ideas floating around. And often times, being able to compare the ideas, programs, and platforms was even more beneficial than just one library of programs from one provider.
These days much has changed in terms of cross-platform software. People write code for libraries and api's rather than particular processors. Compliance standards like Posix and runtime layers like Apache's APR take out some of the low-level drudgery. Libraries like Mono and GnuStep are trying to bring the API's themselves into open source utility.
While this Java library sounds like a great thing, why write it specific to Java? Like those magazine articles of old, it seems like there'd be a demand for a variety of program ideas, tutorials demonstrating the construction, and a language specialist who'd take the program and customize for a particular language, platform, and or api set.
I know that cpan thrives because of the strong perl advocacy, but the idea here is for computer science advocacy with specialization to illustrate how the idea could be done implemented in Visual Basic versus Java versus Objective-C versus Python and on and on. Some of the best knowledge I learned about Object Oriented Programming didn't sink in until I specifically took a look at a program trying to do the same task in C, Java, and Smalltalk. While the Haskell advocates may not ever have the manpower to write comparative tutorials with procedural languages, they might be able to implement a few of the programs to give a Haskell newbie a leap on the big changes in mindset rather than just the syntax of a procedural langauge.
Would such an archive be profitable? Who knows. In no way am I trying to knock the new Java zoo, but just idlely speculating about ways that some of these great language specific libraries and tutorials might be made a bit more independent:-)
How do you ascertain that your 2 billion decimal places of pi are correct? After about 50 significant decimal places doesn't the accuracy get too small to test against reality? There are formulas for calculating pi but it would then seem that your "accuracy" in calculating pi just depends on which formula you chose and how big your power bill was that month. Is the act of calculating pi still a modern yardstick of computer accuracy or is this just what you need to do to get a feature in the New Yorker?
When I used to work for a database design company, we'd have the argument that "the person who confuses a database with a database management system" is obviously too ignorant of his trade to trust with your precious data. I note that this author confuses those terms in his article.
But putting aside that snippy, meaningless sales argument for a moment, we usually didn't care whether the client chose Open Source or Closed Source database tech (as long as we had someone on staff familiar with it). Our thought was that if we weren't paying for the tools we didn't care which system was chosen. We started to care after a custom van shop in Arizona wanted to use an all Microsoft platform (out of fear we'd abandon them and they wouldn't know what to do with this open source stuff). Being a startup though, they ran themselves in the ground and naturally our fees weren't paid due to the heavy fees they owed to Microsoft. After that, we'd push Open Source a little more if there was any sort of financial question about the company.
But the fact that we weren't a huge company did scare many clients. They were much more comfortable knowing that their cousin could fix something in Microsoft Access if we disappeared from the face of the earth, but they wouldn't have any idea what to do with a PostgreSQL data repository. This usually meant that either we'd use their preferred closed source tools or we'd create some extra tools for them for free to dump the repository to csv and tab separated formats.
Inevitably someone would ask me, personally, which dbms I thought was a better investment. I always loathed that question (since I was a programmer and not a salesman). But it usually came down to which programming environment I preferred and which environment I thought the salesperson had recommended. But looking back on it, if you were hiring our team to design the database that's where most of your expense would be. If you wanted to pay additional money to Microsoft for the database that was fine, but it wasn't going to reduce our costs any.
And Another Trend Is that open-source usually works well with cheap commodity machines, like the ubiquitous PC.
I work with many trendy (and wanna-be trendy) artists, writers, and other creative types. Their strong inclination is to purchase iBooks and Powerbooks for their needs.
What's even better about Open-Source software from my perspective is that I can get the software to work on their trendy hardware or on their less trendy accountant's generic desktop. In the world of commercial, closed-source products this always creates controversy because of ports that don't exist on the other platform, or inadequacies in the port. The fact that there's a robust amount of open source software that's largely platform independent helps me to help them.
Dan East wrote: Excuse my cynicism, but if I have to push a button in the first place, why shouldn't I just press the appropriate button to perform the desired command?
SECURITY
So that you are programmed to be the only recognizable voice and thereby solidifying your dominance over the remote in all situations.
EASE OF USE
This probably would be easier for my parents who can't seem to get the hang of even just 5 button remotes. Press a single button and say "Next", "Louder", or "Power" would be about all they'd really need.
HANDS FREE
A single button would be pretty easy to press while watching erotic pay per view. You could keep your hands on your partner (or yourself).
Re:acronyms all over.
on
IRC On The PSP
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
PSP = PhotoShop Plugin. Apparently, when one gets lonely after adding soft gausian blurs and airbrushing pimples off of photos for porn sites, one can just:
Create a new layer
Select the text tool
Choose the IRC plugin
And start receiving spam for all sorts of porn, viagra, and penile enlargements
I wasn't around during the breakup of AT&T but the limited monopoly given to the Bell in my area (BellSouth) makes me not sad for one moment that a serious market force will challenge their dominance. My local Bell just doesn't try to innovate anything until:
a competitor challenges them (offering new, better or cheaper services)
They fail at getting government to subsidize them (they don't always fail though).
They find that they can't negotiate or buy-off a limited truce with their new competitor.
At this point, if all of these money-backed attempts to ward off competition have failed they usually don't even bother looking internally at their own talent. They'll try buying up a third-party and use them as the signal that they're serious and starting to compete (whether they actually are or not).
I'd prefer that my telecom bills weren't funnelling money out of the country to an internationally owned competitor. I'd prefer to support my friends who work as sysadmins of the local Bell's subcontracting agency (since being downsized from Bell employees). But my local Bell doesn't seem to even attempt to innovate unless it has a serious challenger. Despite the coming months of political dogma, I'm glad that a serious challenger is attempting to enter the American market.
Subversion is a very cool version control tool, but any discussion of its merits will usually get proponents of Tom Lord's Arch versioning product riled up for being overlooked. I half expected this April Fools post to try and tweak the Arch team (but perhaps the tweak was in NOT mentioning them).
Arch attempts to redefine the whole concept of version control while Subversion just adopts the CVS model with a few changes.
The changes between CVS and SVN take a lot to get used to, but they are important. SVN revision numbers define the state of one's entire repository, not just an individual file's revisions like CVS does. In hindsight this change seems almost trivial, but it's a major re-think for the CVS users I've had to deal with.
Subversion still has come a long way but it still has a long way to go. It's right on the verge of entering stabilization for version 1.2.0 (which will include some basic, optional locking features). Though it'll probably take some time, I'm quite anxious to see the evolution of the merge tracking and "true rename" support.
One of the best things about svn is the documentation. The daily developer mailing list has a very high signal and very little noise. The O'Reilly book is free documentation. And if you want to pay for other info, I've found the Pragmatic Version Control Using Subversion book to be a very good intro to version control in general.
If you want to toy around, look at grabbing an already compiled binary for your platform and follow directions for setting up a file-system based file-system rather than a database file system. At least until you get the hang of things more:-)
Do we really care about Apple so much we need to give free advertising to every accessory they launch? What's next - "Apple launch new white AA battery"?
Actually, I have a friend who did change the brand of batteries he buys based on the brand that Apple included in the packaging for his Bluetooth mouse. (HiTech Energizer; but they were white and silver double-A's so your quote doesn't quite fit).
The iPod socks are pretty controversial in the fashion circles my ex hangs around in. Sock isn't really the right term for them, more like the coordination one expects of gloves and hats. The fact that one is now expected to decorate their iPod in a style that coordinates with their clothing makes people who fail to do this either ignorant of the iPod accessories available (very unhip) or a person who has the fashion sense of a street vagrant (that's me!). These are pretty significant items, but probably not for the typical, heterosexual slashdot crowd.
Unfortunately my employer has found a source of LCD panels that are blurry, but at least they don't flicker.
This isn't hard to do. Low end LCD manufacturers are buying the LCD's that fail the quality assurance of the big name manufacturers. They get them for dirt cheap because of issues with dead pixels, focus problems, or glare coating unevenness. There is a market for these screens (be it a bundle or bulk purchase) where the cost is the driving factor rather than quality of the display.
The April Fools "pranks" that I have come to respect the most are those that use the cover of a silly prank to challenge an idea or convention that's too ingrained to even bring it up without that cover.
Something like the Pope entering a purely vegetative state before making his thoughts known on the subject as they apply to him personally. You'd get roasted alive as a heathen and heretic for even mentioning this possibility, but properly couched in an April Fools story, it'd give the avenue to address a previously inexpressible idea (due to social conventions).
This type of Gentoo on NT is probably a good geek equivalent of that, but I'm disappointed that there are fewer examples of the trend. Admittedly, any real conversation probably wouldn't happen today (if ever on Slashdot), but using the cover of April Fools pranks to break social conventions is probably the best and most justifiable use of the day. I just wish more constructive discussion had been generated from expressing the inexpressible.
Slashdot Mirror
A centralized identity database can't recover from corruption. Whether it's from a corrupt bueracrat who changes something intentionally or from an innocuous data error that inadvertantly enters incorrect data, a central database just propogates the errors out to everyone. A decentralized system like we have now (birth certificate, passport, drivers licence, social security card, etc) offer a number of ways that corruption can be detected and corrected. If my passport record shows a birthday different from my drivers license, the error will be noticed and flagged when the data is needed. Other data authorities (e.g. my birth certificate) can resolve the discrepency.
A centralized identity system can save money and can simplify establishing false CIA identities. But the temptaion of abuse (especially with voter ID cards) or the massive headaches from even unintended errors make this a grossly silly idea to try to spring, fully-formed from a bit of legislation snuck in via the backdoor as this one has been.
The Aslan Slaughter / Sacrifice seems to be the first bit that I objected to as a reader. It's been a long time so I probably have this either completely messed up in my mind. Nevertheless, possible spoilers below.
Aslan's resurrection was predicated on an older prophecy than what the white queen was using. He sacrificed himself without hesitation knowing that he wasn't in any long term danger.
As a reader, this "older prophecy" felt sort of cheating because we didn't know about it until after his slaughter. It's like the hero of a space opera having a special protective shield that's only activiated after receiving a fatal shot from the enemy and not learning about it until after the faux death scene.
When I asked an adult about what I perceived as "cheating" in the story, she said that it wasn't cheating because it was based on the prophecy and symbology of the Old Testament. Well, that certainly made sense to me based on what I'd learned in Sunday school, but the story at that point actually had a negative influence on my relgious understanding at that point. If Aslan could be sacrificed because he had found an older prophecy, then we humans just need to be better at archeology and other sciences to dig up an older prophecy than what the Old Testament contained. There were probably older Eqyptian ruins that hadn't been found yet, since god's authority was based on who had the oldest belief there wasn't anything special about the Old Testament unless it was the oldest (and nothing in Narnia or my Sunday School said that it was in particular the definitive oldest in scripture.)
Today, I'm less offended by C.S. Lewis's use of religious allegory in his writing, but it's simplicity sort of undermines the sense of wonder about the story itself. Not that my insight is particularly insightful, but just trying to explain my discomfort / dislike of the story by using the story itself.
The big problem to me is specifying input. I know the "look" of the Mona Lisa's smile, but even with the best pen input methods I'd never be able to mimic DaVinci's subtle emotion of the smile; my hands just aren't capable of doing so. Using photos of the painting could simplify this, but this almost assumes that I'm only looking for the parody's and commercial exploiters of the image rather than the image itself (after all, I have the image to start with). And it raises the further issue that many photographic reproductions of the Mona Lisa that I can get my hands on are still under copyright and I'd be doing something legally questionable with an image long in the public domain.
Add to this the "infinite number of monkeys" issue where legally litigious companies will use technologies like this to scan the internet for litigation targets. Imagine Disney using a cell of Rafiki from the Lion King to find legally similar images that were created after the Lion King was released even if they were only superficially similar. Now do this for all movies back to Snow White or Steamboat WIlly and you could get to be a real visual mob boss with ownership (or at least threat of litigation) over huge libraries of works that weren't even created to intentionally violate Disney "Intellectual Property".
My need for this technology is small considering the input problems I'd have with my artistic abilities, while the litigation nightmare from large databases of "similar" visual data would seem to be more bothersome than helpful. I rather hope these visual search and categorizing methods don't catch on.
The coin is a $10 coin of Liberian currency with George W. Bush on it. The coin is sent to you as the first in a collector's series and every month you have to pay $60.
There was a computer conference I went to in 2002 where a vendor was giving away golden coins of U.S. Presidents if you gave him an email address. These weren't U.S. coinage but they looked the same size and shape as the new golden dollar coin and were probably minted in the same not US mint. Unfortunately all of the popular Presidents were already taken. Not wanting a Chester Arthur, James Polk, or any of their ilk, I took a Richard Nixon coin.
I've taken this out as I dig in my wallet for other coins and dollars. It attracts a lot of attention from cashiers but none have questioned its legitimacy. Nixon was an infamous unpopular president; large denomization dollar coins are very unpopular but legal. I do wish the coin had the saying "I am not a crook" embossed on it.
"Half-Life: Aftermath" sounds pretty eerie but "Half-Life: After P.E." would really bring out all sorts of long buried terrors of heading to the locker room showers after a game of kill the nerd with the ball.
No the Microsoft permissions in Longhorn will be different from Unix permissions... :-)
They'll be patented.
Yeah, I thought about posting a link to the blog in question... but then I remembered that I'm writing an posting for slashdot users. :-)
Linking to the actual blog would probably distract from my point. People would argue "You find that interesting?!?!?" or "Gosh, back on December 26th 2003 the author didn't seem quite as mature as you are describing." The fact that I find the blog to be interesting and mature are my personal opinions and would likely incite harsher, off-topic discussion about this fellow.
If I remember, I'll try and add a followup post in a week with the blog but for now talking about the archetype probably suits the discussion better.
But there are many ways to write a negative web log that still tries to be completely fair and see things from the other person's point of view. I read a number of these (I actually started reading their logs for some tech project they were on but kept on after finding out that they have lives that don't revolve around first person shooters). They seem to write out of a need to get some sort of honesty about what's going on.
One fellow in particular that I enjoy reading writes about his boss, problem clients, assertive sex partners, and demanding family members. He's fun to read because he's figured out that in most cases he is the "problem" rather than all of these people he writes about. He is, after all, the only common link between all of these problematic things. When he writes about a stressful change at work he's not bitching about "the worst decision his boss ever made" but rather "a change his boss made that eluded his understanding".
If I were a future employer and came across his blog, the level of maturity he displayed would go a lot further than whether he mentioned someone by name. Not everyone's that way, but jeez, if you are completely anonymous writing stuff seems like a waste of time.
If you want to leak a secret wrongdoing, send it to a reporter's email address. If you want to write about your stresses and successes, do so in a mature way. If you want to bitch and moan and try to assasinate someone's integrity, be prepared to take the consequences for your juvenile tantrums.
Making judgements on budget flat panels is much harder than the pricier brands in my experience. Budget brands get their LCDs cheaply by saying they'll take a manufacturer's leftovers that fail the quality standards of the bigger name customers. That doesn't mean that all of their budget displays are bad; the budget buyer gets quite a number of perfect displays and almost perfect displays because they have to get something delivered.
For a brand that has high quality assurance standards evaluating one or two displays can be an effective evaluation, but reviewing a budget display this way is meaningless. When you're looking at brands that don't have quality standards and good return policies, then statistics like failure rate, customer satisfaction, and other non-visual stats can tell you whether it's a good risk to put your money down or not. You may get a great monitor; you may get something that's crap. But unless you're looking at the actual monitor you're going to buy in person, its the other stats that are going to tell you what your odds are of getting a great display for dirt cheap.
The time for the backup, clean install, reinstall of apps, reconfiguring of prefs is about a half day. The extra time is so that I can:
- Run some tests to make sure everything is working.
- Troubleshoot a malfunctioning app or peripheral under Tiger.
- Restore Panther system from backup and migrate work from Tiger.
- Purchase replacement app / device if still broken
This also allows for the runarounds I'm bound to get from support helplines who aren't ready to support their products on Tiger yet. (Not that tech support is wonderfully responsive when they are prepared.)In those situations, I really don't want to be facing a deadline or hostile customer during the first three days of a Tiger install so I just make sure I have that extra time just in case... And if I happen to have a trouble-free upgrade, then I'll have a couple of days to play around and be completely unproductive while I play around and get accustomed to the new install :-)
Apple will probably stick with the big cat names but if they start to get repetitive they'll probably move on to another carnivorous predator name as long as Microsoft continues with the delicious herbivore name for their next OS. What might be some ideas?
- notification of changes in code licensed from a vendor or third-party
- a multiple week soak time after the code freeze to discover bugs (eat your own dog food for a while)
- exhaustive documentation of the final changes (both to users and developers)
Even if all of this has been finalized as the rumors indicate, there are still other reasons why a release would be delayed after going final, including:While the Mac rumor sites have been speculating on an early release of Tiger since it was announced last June, I don't think that their rumor-mongering does anything to speed up its release and quite possibly:
- delays distribution of the gold master to developers.
- delays the public announcement until Apple is seen as the one setting the expectations rather than the rumor sites.
- makes open discussion of releases beyond Tiger even more secretive.
Personally, I'm still running Panther. I've got a backup plan, blank media, and a time estimate of about 3 days downtime needed to transition to Tiger and test my setup once it comes out. Beyond that, I've made no plans that depend on an unreleased or rumored feature. I'm anxious for that release date to get here, but I'm prepared as well as I can whether that date is tomorrow or June 30th.These days much has changed in terms of cross-platform software. People write code for libraries and api's rather than particular processors. Compliance standards like Posix and runtime layers like Apache's APR take out some of the low-level drudgery. Libraries like Mono and GnuStep are trying to bring the API's themselves into open source utility.
While this Java library sounds like a great thing, why write it specific to Java? Like those magazine articles of old, it seems like there'd be a demand for a variety of program ideas, tutorials demonstrating the construction, and a language specialist who'd take the program and customize for a particular language, platform, and or api set.
I know that cpan thrives because of the strong perl advocacy, but the idea here is for computer science advocacy with specialization to illustrate how the idea could be done implemented in Visual Basic versus Java versus Objective-C versus Python and on and on. Some of the best knowledge I learned about Object Oriented Programming didn't sink in until I specifically took a look at a program trying to do the same task in C, Java, and Smalltalk. While the Haskell advocates may not ever have the manpower to write comparative tutorials with procedural languages, they might be able to implement a few of the programs to give a Haskell newbie a leap on the big changes in mindset rather than just the syntax of a procedural langauge.
Would such an archive be profitable? Who knows. In no way am I trying to knock the new Java zoo, but just idlely speculating about ways that some of these great language specific libraries and tutorials might be made a bit more independent :-)
How do you ascertain that your 2 billion decimal places of pi are correct? After about 50 significant decimal places doesn't the accuracy get too small to test against reality? There are formulas for calculating pi but it would then seem that your "accuracy" in calculating pi just depends on which formula you chose and how big your power bill was that month. Is the act of calculating pi still a modern yardstick of computer accuracy or is this just what you need to do to get a feature in the New Yorker?
But putting aside that snippy, meaningless sales argument for a moment, we usually didn't care whether the client chose Open Source or Closed Source database tech (as long as we had someone on staff familiar with it). Our thought was that if we weren't paying for the tools we didn't care which system was chosen. We started to care after a custom van shop in Arizona wanted to use an all Microsoft platform (out of fear we'd abandon them and they wouldn't know what to do with this open source stuff). Being a startup though, they ran themselves in the ground and naturally our fees weren't paid due to the heavy fees they owed to Microsoft. After that, we'd push Open Source a little more if there was any sort of financial question about the company.
But the fact that we weren't a huge company did scare many clients. They were much more comfortable knowing that their cousin could fix something in Microsoft Access if we disappeared from the face of the earth, but they wouldn't have any idea what to do with a PostgreSQL data repository. This usually meant that either we'd use their preferred closed source tools or we'd create some extra tools for them for free to dump the repository to csv and tab separated formats.
Inevitably someone would ask me, personally, which dbms I thought was a better investment. I always loathed that question (since I was a programmer and not a salesman). But it usually came down to which programming environment I preferred and which environment I thought the salesperson had recommended. But looking back on it, if you were hiring our team to design the database that's where most of your expense would be. If you wanted to pay additional money to Microsoft for the database that was fine, but it wasn't going to reduce our costs any.
Now I know what those newpapers mean when they write something like "The pictures from Abu Ghraib prison have shocked the US army."
Just beta testing...
What's even better about Open-Source software from my perspective is that I can get the software to work on their trendy hardware or on their less trendy accountant's generic desktop. In the world of commercial, closed-source products this always creates controversy because of ports that don't exist on the other platform, or inadequacies in the port. The fact that there's a robust amount of open source software that's largely platform independent helps me to help them.
Dan East wrote: Excuse my cynicism, but if I have to push a button in the first place, why shouldn't I just press the appropriate button to perform the desired command? SECURITY So that you are programmed to be the only recognizable voice and thereby solidifying your dominance over the remote in all situations. EASE OF USE This probably would be easier for my parents who can't seem to get the hang of even just 5 button remotes. Press a single button and say "Next", "Louder", or "Power" would be about all they'd really need. HANDS FREE A single button would be pretty easy to press while watching erotic pay per view. You could keep your hands on your partner (or yourself).
- Create a new layer
- Select the text tool
- Choose the IRC plugin
- And start receiving spam for all sorts of porn, viagra, and penile enlargements
All without leaving PhotoShop!- a competitor challenges them (offering new, better or cheaper services)
- They fail at getting government to subsidize them (they don't always fail though).
- They find that they can't negotiate or buy-off a limited truce with their new competitor.
At this point, if all of these money-backed attempts to ward off competition have failed they usually don't even bother looking internally at their own talent. They'll try buying up a third-party and use them as the signal that they're serious and starting to compete (whether they actually are or not).I'd prefer that my telecom bills weren't funnelling money out of the country to an internationally owned competitor. I'd prefer to support my friends who work as sysadmins of the local Bell's subcontracting agency (since being downsized from Bell employees). But my local Bell doesn't seem to even attempt to innovate unless it has a serious challenger. Despite the coming months of political dogma, I'm glad that a serious challenger is attempting to enter the American market.
Arch attempts to redefine the whole concept of version control while Subversion just adopts the CVS model with a few changes.
The changes between CVS and SVN take a lot to get used to, but they are important. SVN revision numbers define the state of one's entire repository, not just an individual file's revisions like CVS does. In hindsight this change seems almost trivial, but it's a major re-think for the CVS users I've had to deal with.
Subversion still has come a long way but it still has a long way to go. It's right on the verge of entering stabilization for version 1.2.0 (which will include some basic, optional locking features). Though it'll probably take some time, I'm quite anxious to see the evolution of the merge tracking and "true rename" support.
One of the best things about svn is the documentation. The daily developer mailing list has a very high signal and very little noise. The O'Reilly book is free documentation. And if you want to pay for other info, I've found the Pragmatic Version Control Using Subversion book to be a very good intro to version control in general.
If you want to toy around, look at grabbing an already compiled binary for your platform and follow directions for setting up a file-system based file-system rather than a database file system. At least until you get the hang of things more :-)
The iPod socks are pretty controversial in the fashion circles my ex hangs around in. Sock isn't really the right term for them, more like the coordination one expects of gloves and hats. The fact that one is now expected to decorate their iPod in a style that coordinates with their clothing makes people who fail to do this either ignorant of the iPod accessories available (very unhip) or a person who has the fashion sense of a street vagrant (that's me!). These are pretty significant items, but probably not for the typical, heterosexual slashdot crowd.
The April Fools "pranks" that I have come to respect the most are those that use the cover of a silly prank to challenge an idea or convention that's too ingrained to even bring it up without that cover.
Something like the Pope entering a purely vegetative state before making his thoughts known on the subject as they apply to him personally. You'd get roasted alive as a heathen and heretic for even mentioning this possibility, but properly couched in an April Fools story, it'd give the avenue to address a previously inexpressible idea (due to social conventions).
This type of Gentoo on NT is probably a good geek equivalent of that, but I'm disappointed that there are fewer examples of the trend. Admittedly, any real conversation probably wouldn't happen today (if ever on Slashdot), but using the cover of April Fools pranks to break social conventions is probably the best and most justifiable use of the day. I just wish more constructive discussion had been generated from expressing the inexpressible.