But for most applications, there is not only a set of requirements, things it needs to do, but a very short period of time to make it do them in. [...] I'd love to be proven wrong here
Well, in my experience, applications don't even have a set of requirements; just a short period of time to make it do... something... in.
You know, you're supposed to claim all online purchases on your tax returns anyway.
Not only that, but online purchases incur shipping & handling costs that don't apply to brick-and-mortar purchases, either. Are those typically more or less than 7% for the type of purchases you make?
The biggest problem [with the Game Gear] was switching batteries out every few hours of play...
That, and that the games Sega released for it weren't "portable-ready". Sonic for GG, for example, might take two hours for an average player to play from beginning to end. Unfortunately, you could only get an hour and a half from a set of batteries, meaning you could never finish the game unless you were running on AC power. And there was no battery-backed savestate or password feature, either... in the end, the game basically could not be played all the way through.
The camera doesn't get thrown away when you're done. You just don't get to keep it.
Well, you COULD keep it, if you never decide to take it in and get your pictures developed. It's not like they're going to send goons out to find you and recover the device if you don't.
I myself still have a Tandy CoCo computer that was "loaned" to my father by a friend in 1983.
"Disposable" is quite a bit of a misnomer here. A more descriptive term might be "open-term rental".
You "buy" the camera from your shop, carry it around for as long as you want, take some pictures with it, then you return to the shop to hand the camera in and get the pictures on it developed. The shop doesn't crack open the camera like a walnut shell and toss it in the trash -- after extracting your pictures from it, it's refurbished and re-"sold" to the next person.
These aren't contributing to landfills any more than any other digital camera -- they only get disposed of when they've been damaged so badly that they cannot be repaired.
how is a programmer in the states supposed to know that a valid spanish word, used in the spanish version of the program, is an insult in central america?
A programmer shouldn't be expected to know that. They should just have code that grabs the proper expression for "gender" from a locale-specific resource file and paint it onto the screen.
The localization specialist that populates those resource files, however, needs to know if a word commonly used in Castilian Spanish has obscene connotations in Central American Spanish, and create separate resource files for each.
Spanish != Spanish the entire world around. If Microsoft failed to recognize that and released only one Spanish-language version of Windows, they are in fact doing poorly at worldwide distribution.
(However, the fact that there are 19 different dialects of Spanish in the Regional and Language Options Control Panel on my XP box suggests that this is not the case at all. More likely is that whomever installed the particular problematic version of Windows selected the wrong dialect.)
Microsoft did the only reasonable thing, they drew the maps to the favor of the richer countries (the ones that buy their software).
No, the reasonable thing to do would have been to develop different versions of the software for each country where it is sold, so that in Windows India Edition the Kashmir region is displayed as part of India, while in Windows Pakistan Edition the Kashmir region is displayed as part of Pakistan.
Microsoft appears to be trying to sell Windows as a global product, but there is no globally-accepted geography that can be used in it. Some degree of localization is necessary.
For the modern left, "tolerance" and "open-mindedness" only apply to ideas they agree with. Everything else is "hate speech" and thus deserving of complete extermination.
I'll say to you the same thing I'd say to the anti-GOP hackers:
We've done enough (I'm from Toronto) to screw up the environment around this city, we should NOT be doing this!
Yes, they should just keep doing things the same way they've been done, even though it's like four times as bad for the environment.
I'm pretty sure the environmental scientists that have actually studied this issue have a better idea of what the impact of this system will be than the typical NIMBY layperson.
When are phone companies going to actually ask the public what they need and use their phones for?
I'm pretty sure they already do that. In fact, I'd be suprised if there were a single major cellular carrier or handset manufacturer that DIDN'T do focus group testing to find out what people want in a phone.
What the public wants now is quality, better reception, and higher reliability.
No, that's what YOU want. Don't make the mistake of assuming most other people are like you.
The group of people sitting in front of the two-way mirror in a side room of some mall somewhere has apparently decided that fold-out QWERTY keyboards and cameras with digital zoom are more desirable than marginally improved reception. Sorry, but that's how the system works.
You can now buy a full song online for 1/4 the price of buying a lower-quality 15-second sample of the same song. The difference is that one is intended for your iPod, the other is intended for your cell phone. That's insane.
a song that contains probably less than 10% of what the cd recording contains
In terms of raw data, ok, MP3 may contain 1/10th as many bits as an uncompressed PCM wave recording does. But those bits have more MEANING--you may only end up losing 10% of the original signal, and it will be the least important 10% at that.
Read any paper on audio compression techniques to find out how this is accomplished; I don't have time to explain it to you.
People who claim that compressed music formats all sound like crap compared to the arbitrarily pristine 44.1KHz, 16-bit stereo Red Book audio standard are often fools. Listen with your ears, not with your eyes focused on an oscilloscope.
claiming that there was a bomb onboard [...] would probably allow a hijacker to meet his requirements with little or no danger of being apprehended
Unlikely in the post-9/11 world. Airline passengers now assume that even if they do capitulate to a hijacker's demands, they'll end up dead. And so with nothing to lose, those passengers are a lot more likely to gang up and beat the shit out of, or even kill, anyone who reveals themselves as a hijacker--visibly armed or not.
The current airline system just wasn't designed for the volume of users it currently has.
It's not the volume of users that's the problem; it's the volume of aircrafts.
I remember taking airline trips from Newark to St. Louis twenty years ago, and the plane would be a 747 or some other jumbo jet, seating maybe nine people across, with two aisles splitting the seats up.
If I make that same trip today, I'd probably be flying on the jet equivalent of a puddle-jumper -- a tiny craft with fewer seats than a Greyhound bus and a single narrow aisle.
People want the option to catch a flight to their destination at 5:30 AM, or 11:30PM, or at any two-hour interval in between. So the airlines have moved towards more frequent flights on smaller aircraft... and this has come to create an air traffic nightmare over time.
Well, maybe you enjoy carrying a separate cellular phone (make that two, actually--one for GSM and another for TDMA), pager, PDA, camera, MP3 player, calculator, stopwatch, and handheld videogame all around everywhere, but I'd much rather carry one device that does it all.
No, we're not at the point where all of those functions can be adequately performed by a single device YET, but we're getting closer.
No one's forcing convergence on you. If you don't want an address book in your mobile phone, just don't use the address book -- it's not like they were going to offer a model without the address book for $20 less anyway. It's basically no-cost.
Or, buy a deprecated handset model on closeout -- almost every phone manufactured in the past 5 years is still supported by the carrier networks, and you can get an entire case of no-frills phones dirt cheap. Problem is, you'll miss out on all the other advances in technology the hardware guys came up with while integrating cameras and IR ports in the handsets -- things like improved reception quality, longer talk time...
Why, oh why didn't he use linux, like the Simputer?
Seriously. I mean, the runaway success of the Linux-powered Simputer is impossible to ignore.
That's why we're all posting to Slashdots from Simputers now, why most artificial hearts are Simputer-based, and why Keith Emerson traded in his Moog synthesizer for a bank of Simputers.
Stupidity is trying something that's been done before but expecting a different result.
Commodities are by definition interchangeable. Until all my binaries run the same way under Windows, Linux, and OS X, the operating system is not a true commodity.
Why do I always see articles explain Linux as a 'so called' open source software.
It's because the term "open source" is not generally known and understood by the public at large.
Fifteen years ago the same journalism community would have been explaining how Apogee Software distributes Commander Keen using "the so called shareware model".
What defines an application?? If you start something as a service, does this mean it's not an application?
XP Task Manager has separate tabs for viewing running "Applications" and "Processes". It seems like any process that creates a window or resides in the System Tray is considered an Application.
I would assume that XP Crippled Edition would allow a large number of Processes but only three Applications.
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But for most applications, there is not only a set of requirements, things it needs to do, but a very short period of time to make it do them in. [...] I'd love to be proven wrong here
Well, in my experience, applications don't even have a set of requirements; just a short period of time to make it do... something... in.
I wonder if Shawn Fanning ever realized that this was the logical end point of the revolution he started
I'm sorry, no. Shawn Fanning was not a revolutionary.
The only thing we've ever upgraded on our servers is the RAM, and that's usually a stop-gap until we replace the thing.
Wholesale replacement of a machine with a newer, bigger, faster machine is a type of upgrade too, isn't it?
You know, you're supposed to claim all online purchases on your tax returns anyway.
Not only that, but online purchases incur shipping & handling costs that don't apply to brick-and-mortar purchases, either. Are those typically more or less than 7% for the type of purchases you make?
The biggest problem [with the Game Gear] was switching batteries out every few hours of play...
That, and that the games Sega released for it weren't "portable-ready". Sonic for GG, for example, might take two hours for an average player to play from beginning to end. Unfortunately, you could only get an hour and a half from a set of batteries, meaning you could never finish the game unless you were running on AC power. And there was no battery-backed savestate or password feature, either... in the end, the game basically could not be played all the way through.
The camera doesn't get thrown away when you're done. You just don't get to keep it.
Well, you COULD keep it, if you never decide to take it in and get your pictures developed. It's not like they're going to send goons out to find you and recover the device if you don't.
I myself still have a Tandy CoCo computer that was "loaned" to my father by a friend in 1983.
"Disposable" is quite a bit of a misnomer here. A more descriptive term might be "open-term rental".
You "buy" the camera from your shop, carry it around for as long as you want, take some pictures with it, then you return to the shop to hand the camera in and get the pictures on it developed. The shop doesn't crack open the camera like a walnut shell and toss it in the trash -- after extracting your pictures from it, it's refurbished and re-"sold" to the next person.
These aren't contributing to landfills any more than any other digital camera -- they only get disposed of when they've been damaged so badly that they cannot be repaired.
how is a programmer in the states supposed to know that a valid spanish word, used in the spanish version of the program, is an insult in central america?
A programmer shouldn't be expected to know that. They should just have code that grabs the proper expression for "gender" from a locale-specific resource file and paint it onto the screen.
The localization specialist that populates those resource files, however, needs to know if a word commonly used in Castilian Spanish has obscene connotations in Central American Spanish, and create separate resource files for each.
Spanish != Spanish the entire world around. If Microsoft failed to recognize that and released only one Spanish-language version of Windows, they are in fact doing poorly at worldwide distribution.
(However, the fact that there are 19 different dialects of Spanish in the Regional and Language Options Control Panel on my XP box suggests that this is not the case at all. More likely is that whomever installed the particular problematic version of Windows selected the wrong dialect.)
Microsoft did the only reasonable thing, they drew the maps to the favor of the richer countries (the ones that buy their software).
No, the reasonable thing to do would have been to develop different versions of the software for each country where it is sold, so that in Windows India Edition the Kashmir region is displayed as part of India, while in Windows Pakistan Edition the Kashmir region is displayed as part of Pakistan.
Microsoft appears to be trying to sell Windows as a global product, but there is no globally-accepted geography that can be used in it. Some degree of localization is necessary.
Theres even a INT 2E routine used into SF3, thats an undocumented but widely known backdoor to run COMMAND.COM-based programs!!
So by installing a game with this SF3 copy protection, I may be opening a security hole on my system that allows arbitrary executables to be run?
Gosh, sign me up!
For the modern left, "tolerance" and "open-mindedness" only apply to ideas they agree with. Everything else is "hate speech" and thus deserving of complete extermination.
I'll say to you the same thing I'd say to the anti-GOP hackers:
Grow up.
We've done enough (I'm from Toronto) to screw up the environment around this city, we should NOT be doing this!
Yes, they should just keep doing things the same way they've been done, even though it's like four times as bad for the environment.
I'm pretty sure the environmental scientists that have actually studied this issue have a better idea of what the impact of this system will be than the typical NIMBY layperson.
When are phone companies going to actually ask the public what they need and use their phones for?
I'm pretty sure they already do that. In fact, I'd be suprised if there were a single major cellular carrier or handset manufacturer that DIDN'T do focus group testing to find out what people want in a phone.
What the public wants now is quality, better reception, and higher reliability.
No, that's what YOU want. Don't make the mistake of assuming most other people are like you.
The group of people sitting in front of the two-way mirror in a side room of some mall somewhere has apparently decided that fold-out QWERTY keyboards and cameras with digital zoom are more desirable than marginally improved reception. Sorry, but that's how the system works.
You can now buy a full song online for 1/4 the price of buying a lower-quality 15-second sample of the same song. The difference is that one is intended for your iPod, the other is intended for your cell phone. That's insane.
a song that contains probably less than 10% of what the cd recording contains
In terms of raw data, ok, MP3 may contain 1/10th as many bits as an uncompressed PCM wave recording does. But those bits have more MEANING--you may only end up losing 10% of the original signal, and it will be the least important 10% at that.
Read any paper on audio compression techniques to find out how this is accomplished; I don't have time to explain it to you.
People who claim that compressed music formats all sound like crap compared to the arbitrarily pristine 44.1KHz, 16-bit stereo Red Book audio standard are often fools. Listen with your ears, not with your eyes focused on an oscilloscope.
This is Slashdot, generally a F/OSS advocacy site.
No, Slashdot is "News for nerds. Stuff that matters." Unless stories about sci-fi book reviews have something to do with Open Source somehow...
claiming that there was a bomb onboard [...] would probably allow a hijacker to meet his requirements with little or no danger of being apprehended
Unlikely in the post-9/11 world. Airline passengers now assume that even if they do capitulate to a hijacker's demands, they'll end up dead. And so with nothing to lose, those passengers are a lot more likely to gang up and beat the shit out of, or even kill, anyone who reveals themselves as a hijacker--visibly armed or not.
The current airline system just wasn't designed for the volume of users it currently has.
It's not the volume of users that's the problem; it's the volume of aircrafts.
I remember taking airline trips from Newark to St. Louis twenty years ago, and the plane would be a 747 or some other jumbo jet, seating maybe nine people across, with two aisles splitting the seats up.
If I make that same trip today, I'd probably be flying on the jet equivalent of a puddle-jumper -- a tiny craft with fewer seats than a Greyhound bus
and a single narrow aisle.
People want the option to catch a flight to their destination at 5:30 AM, or 11:30PM, or at any two-hour interval in between. So the airlines have moved towards more frequent flights on smaller aircraft... and this has come to create an air traffic nightmare over time.
Well, maybe you enjoy carrying a separate cellular phone (make that two, actually--one for GSM and another for TDMA), pager, PDA, camera, MP3 player, calculator, stopwatch, and handheld videogame all around everywhere, but I'd much rather carry one device that does it all.
No, we're not at the point where all of those functions can be adequately performed by a single device YET, but we're getting closer.
No one's forcing convergence on you. If you don't want an address book in your mobile phone, just don't use the address book -- it's not like they were going to offer a model without the address book for $20 less anyway. It's basically no-cost.
Or, buy a deprecated handset model on closeout -- almost every phone manufactured in the past 5 years is still supported by the carrier networks, and you can get an entire case of no-frills phones dirt cheap. Problem is, you'll miss out on all the other advances in technology the hardware guys came up with while integrating cameras and IR ports in the handsets -- things like improved reception quality, longer talk time...
Why, oh why didn't he use linux, like the Simputer?
Seriously. I mean, the runaway success of the Linux-powered Simputer is impossible to ignore.
That's why we're all posting to Slashdots from Simputers now, why most artificial hearts are Simputer-based, and why Keith Emerson traded in his Moog synthesizer for a bank of Simputers.
Stupidity is trying something that's been done before but expecting a different result.
When the annual review comes up the people that take pride or work hard will move ahead.
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!... oh, you were being serious.
Have you seen the movie "Office Space"?
Sheesh.
Google Groups is an online replacement for your desktop newsreader app, see...
The market now says "OSs are commodity".
Hardly.
Commodities are by definition interchangeable. Until all my binaries run the same way under Windows, Linux, and OS X, the operating system is not a true commodity.
Why do I always see articles explain Linux as a 'so called' open source software.
It's because the term "open source" is not generally known and understood by the public at large.
Fifteen years ago the same journalism community would have been explaining how Apogee Software distributes Commander Keen using "the so called shareware model".
What defines an application?? If you start something as a service, does this mean it's not an application?
XP Task Manager has separate tabs for viewing running "Applications" and "Processes". It seems like any process that creates a window or resides in the System Tray is considered an Application.
I would assume that XP Crippled Edition would allow a large number of Processes but only three Applications.