Somehow/.'ers are appalled at paying for software, but think nothing of buying electronics or other toys.
I think most of us are happy to pay for software if it's worth the money. After 25 years of undocumented system calls, convoluted binary file formats, and planned obsolescence, though, we tend not to think MS Office is worth the money.
We also, I think, prefer owning things to renting them. It's one thing for Sony to sell me a huge flatscreen TV, it's another entirely for Rent-A-Center to lease that same TV out to a household that couldn't afford to purchase it outright, at damn near usurious rates.
Agreed. When working for any real length of time, I always go Green on Black (since long before "The Matrix" came out).
Old-school and much easier on the eyes.
If it works for you, great. But keep in mind, that color combination arose out of economic concerns, not usability ones. Using a green phosphor layer was the cheapest way to build a functional CRT display in the first few generations of computing, and probably still would be if economies of scale hadn't made RGB tricolor just as affordable.
A great deal of CPU time on a modern desktop system is spent on graphics operations, for example. That is all easily parallelized.
If true, then maybe the CPU makers should consider some sort of MultiMedia eXtension for their instruction sets, so that graphics rendering and similarly parallelizable operations are routed to a separate bit of silicon with registers and operators specificially designed for parallelism...
Some weasel.. er, vendors caught on after awhile and tried to circumvent the system. They were politely, but firmly told "I'm afraid you'll have to talk to our Procurement Advisor, this is his job."
I'm curious as to why the decision was made to waste some employee's time by having him play Procurement Advisor whenever a vendor showed up at the front desk, rather than having the receptionist tell them "We accept solicitations by appointment only."
Flash text does not behave like HTML text in several ways.
And furthermore, the rules of cricket differ and several ways from the rules of baseball!
The World Wide Web is a medium for many content types, of which text/html is only one. Complaining that Flash doesn't work the same as HTML is like complaining that pears don't taste like apples. They're not SUPPOSED to be the same.
And they both, to this day, only make money from selling what got them into the business in the first place. For google that would be Adsense, and for MS, Windows and Office.
It's no surprise that there are different tiers of employee status within a company's org chart; this is true of any company with more than one employee.
What's shocking to me is that Microsoft has at least SIXTY-FIVE such levels -- probably over a hundred, given that Sergey's new title is still considered a "Manager" and not Director or Executive.
MSFT has about 90,000 employees. Assuming a reasonable management structure where nobody has more than five direct reportees, the company should have at most eight tiers of employees, perhaps with minor bands within each tier.
Microsoft's management structure must not be very reasonable, huh.
[Microsoft's] products ooze of something designed for a company with 100-1000 employees.
What this suggests to me is that if you're a company with fewer than 1000 employees (as most companies are), Microsoft products may be a really good fit for you.
If you have more than 1000 employees, you can hire sufficient resources to implement and support Free Software solutions (or have custom software written for you from scratch). I'm not sure it's really a business mistake on their part to underserve this market.
FTFA: Within a few years of the FCC's Carterfone decision, America had become a motley world of funny receivers, slick switch boxes, and rickety answering machines. More importantly, consumers quickly embraced the "modulate/demodulate" device, otherwise known as the telephone modem.
Really? Because in the world that I've actually lived my life in, "consumers" (meaning the general public, and not just B2B niche markets) didn't even have computers in their homes, much less modems to connect them to the phone network with, until the late 1970s, and it was still a tiny majority of households that were 'online' until the mid-1990s brought us The Internet to replace proprietary services like CompuServe and "a local 15-year-old geek's one-line BBS running on a warez copy of Telegard".
If Ars Technica's thesis is that the Carter[f|ph]one decision changed everything, it's perhaps a bit dishonest to gloss over the fact that it didn't change much until twenty-five years later.
1. The police are usually historians. They are not there to protect us.
Oh, is that why the police motto is "Not To Protect, But Rather To Serve"?
The mere presence of a police force, whether it's a beat cop standing on the corner, or a squad car that can be dispatched to the scene within minutes, is a deterrent to crime. It is not the goal of the police to serve as a complete surrogate for one's right and duty to defend oneself, though.
2. The Second Amendment is the reset button on the constitution. You hope the processes all run & terminate cleanly, but sometimes . ..
A coup is not a reboot of a machine, it is a rewrite of a functional application. Yes, a lot of cruft builds up in a legacy app over time, but in the huge majority of situations it's a better solution to patch the existing code than throw everything out and rewrite it from scratch. Otherwise you run a high risk of re-introducing some severe bugs that were already taken care of a long time ago.
Apparently Stevens needs to learn how to read. Of course the framers wanted to reserve the tools for revolution to the people.
Let me dissent from your dissent.
I'm sure you're a special unique snowflake, but it should go without saying that Justice Stevens (and the other three he spoke on behalf of in his opinion) knows a butt of a lot more about the Constitution and its framers than you do.
If you're going to make an argument that "of course the framers meant...", you'll need to provide some supporting evidence if you wish to convince us skeptics.
Now we get to hear from a bunch of people who normally bitch about the government taking away individual freedoms try to justify their hypocrisy while they argue for gun control, and how the supreme court wasn't thinking of the children...
The nice thing about strawmen is that they don't bleed when you fire a gun at them.
Most gun control advocates I'm aware of do not propose an outright ban on legal guns. There are a lot of them who have the same view of the issue that I do:
- The right to bear arms is not absolute; the right to own a knife or handgun does not preclude restrictions on more potent weaponry such as nerve gas or nuclear warheads. The government has a legitimate justification for keeping certain arms out of civilian hands. (The approach that's been attempted, banning "assault weapons" based on visual characteristics and etc., has been a poor one.)
- Society should have confidence that firearm owners will use them safely and responsibly. Abusing the right to bear arms -- being convicted of a felony involving a gun, for example -- should resulting in that right being abrogated. People with mental illnesses or without knowledge of basic firearm safety pose an elevated risk to the public.
A thought-provoking piece written by someone who neither understands the scientific method nor Google. Who doesn't understand the difference between a Theory and a model. Who still doesn't get correlation!=causation. Who probably has never had to actually analyze any substantial amount of data before. And who has clearly been raised on a self-important intellectual diet consisting of too much Buckminster Fuller, Kurtzweil, Frank Tipler, and Derrida.
The power lines of rural America are, in general, even worse than the awful phone and cable TV lines that were preventing customers there from having more traditional broadband service.
It shouldn't surprise anybody that a power infrastructure built to meet specs of '60Hz more or less, somewhere between 100 and 130VAC hopefully' would be under-engineered for reliable data transmission.
It's really a moot point, because it's unlikely that the developers of Browser X knew any "cheats" that would let them use substantially less memory than every other browser out there.
Unless, hypothetically, Browser X had been developed by the same company that had developed the operating system...
(Yes, that's right, I'm accusing Safari of taking advantage of secret undocumented OS X system calls.)
Despite the games companies constantly bleating about how much money they make and how games are now a bigger contributor to the British economy than films, they seem unwilling or unable to compensate leading engineering talent.
For every programmer actually employed in the gaming business, there are probably a dozen who would love to break in given the opportunity. With such an overabundant workforce, what would the companies' reasoning be for offering higher salaries than people are willing to work for?
Back then [in 2000-2004], we had articles on different database systems, IDEs, different linux distros, with lots of commentary as to the details of why one might be better then another. Including specific tips or tricks of the trade or related tools.
Wait, you actually MISS the days of endless MySQL-vs-PostgreSQL, RedHat-vs-SuSE, Emacs-vs-vi pissing contests?
When I was in elementary and junior high, the school split us into classes based on academic results so far. [...] This is now deemed to be prejudicial and so the school no longer does this.
If this is true, then it is impossible for there to be "grade inflation" where overachievers are able to get better-than-perfect grade point averages by loading up on Honors classes which are more heavily weighted than normal classes.
Yet that phenomenon exists, which must mean that the concept of segregating classrooms by student ability must not be entirely dead.
Slashdot Mirror
Somehow /.'ers are appalled at paying for software, but think nothing of buying electronics or other toys.
I think most of us are happy to pay for software if it's worth the money. After 25 years of undocumented system calls, convoluted binary file formats, and planned obsolescence, though, we tend not to think MS Office is worth the money.
We also, I think, prefer owning things to renting them. It's one thing for Sony to sell me a huge flatscreen TV, it's another entirely for Rent-A-Center to lease that same TV out to a household that couldn't afford to purchase it outright, at damn near usurious rates.
Agreed. When working for any real length of time, I always go Green on Black (since long before "The Matrix" came out).
Old-school and much easier on the eyes.
If it works for you, great. But keep in mind, that color combination arose out of economic concerns, not usability ones. Using a green phosphor layer was the cheapest way to build a functional CRT display in the first few generations of computing, and probably still would be if economies of scale hadn't made RGB tricolor just as affordable.
AMD has this thing called NUMA. What do you think "HyperTransport" means?
I assumed it was just meaningless marketing jargon, like Sega's "Blast Processing".
A great deal of CPU time on a modern desktop system is spent on graphics operations, for example. That is all easily parallelized.
If true, then maybe the CPU makers should consider some sort of MultiMedia eXtension for their instruction sets, so that graphics rendering and similarly parallelizable operations are routed to a separate bit of silicon with registers and operators specificially designed for parallelism...
Some weasel.. er, vendors caught on after awhile and tried to circumvent the system. They were politely, but firmly told "I'm afraid you'll have to talk to our Procurement Advisor, this is his job."
I'm curious as to why the decision was made to waste some employee's time by having him play Procurement Advisor whenever a vendor showed up at the front desk, rather than having the receptionist tell them "We accept solicitations by appointment only."
Flash text does not behave like HTML text in several ways.
And furthermore, the rules of cricket differ and several ways from the rules of baseball!
The World Wide Web is a medium for many content types, of which text/html is only one. Complaining that Flash doesn't work the same as HTML is like complaining that pears don't taste like apples. They're not SUPPOSED to be the same.
And they both, to this day, only make money from selling what got them into the business in the first place. For google that would be Adsense, and for MS, Windows and Office.
And Microcomputer BASIC. Can't forget that one.
It's no surprise that there are different tiers of employee status within a company's org chart; this is true of any company with more than one employee.
What's shocking to me is that Microsoft has at least SIXTY-FIVE such levels -- probably over a hundred, given that Sergey's new title is still considered a "Manager" and not Director or Executive.
MSFT has about 90,000 employees. Assuming a reasonable management structure where nobody has more than five direct reportees, the company should have at most eight tiers of employees, perhaps with minor bands within each tier.
Microsoft's management structure must not be very reasonable, huh.
[Microsoft's] products ooze of something designed for a company with 100-1000 employees.
What this suggests to me is that if you're a company with fewer than 1000 employees (as most companies are), Microsoft products may be a really good fit for you.
If you have more than 1000 employees, you can hire sufficient resources to implement and support Free Software solutions (or have custom software written for you from scratch). I'm not sure it's really a business mistake on their part to underserve this market.
FTFA: Within a few years of the FCC's Carterfone decision, America had become a motley world of funny receivers, slick switch boxes, and rickety answering machines. More importantly, consumers quickly embraced the "modulate/demodulate" device, otherwise known as the telephone modem.
Really? Because in the world that I've actually lived my life in, "consumers" (meaning the general public, and not just B2B niche markets) didn't even have computers in their homes, much less modems to connect them to the phone network with, until the late 1970s, and it was still a tiny majority of households that were 'online' until the mid-1990s brought us The Internet to replace proprietary services like CompuServe and "a local 15-year-old geek's one-line BBS running on a warez copy of Telegard".
If Ars Technica's thesis is that the Carter[f|ph]one decision changed everything, it's perhaps a bit dishonest to gloss over the fact that it didn't change much until twenty-five years later.
1. The police are usually historians. They are not there to protect us.
Oh, is that why the police motto is "Not To Protect, But Rather To Serve"?
The mere presence of a police force, whether it's a beat cop standing on the corner, or a squad car that can be dispatched to the scene within minutes, is a deterrent to crime. It is not the goal of the police to serve as a complete surrogate for one's right and duty to defend oneself, though.
2. The Second Amendment is the reset button on the constitution. You hope the processes all run & terminate cleanly, but sometimes . . .
A coup is not a reboot of a machine, it is a rewrite of a functional application. Yes, a lot of cruft builds up in a legacy app over time, but in the huge majority of situations it's a better solution to patch the existing code than throw everything out and rewrite it from scratch. Otherwise you run a high risk of re-introducing some severe bugs that were already taken care of a long time ago.
Apparently Stevens needs to learn how to read. Of course the framers wanted to reserve the tools for revolution to the people.
Let me dissent from your dissent.
I'm sure you're a special unique snowflake, but it should go without saying that Justice Stevens (and the other three he spoke on behalf of in his opinion) knows a butt of a lot more about the Constitution and its framers than you do.
If you're going to make an argument that "of course the framers meant...", you'll need to provide some supporting evidence if you wish to convince us skeptics.
The day the Stormtroopers come knocking at your door, you'll wish you had a gun.
Why, so I can take one or two of them down with me in a blaze of "glory"?
If "the Stormtroopers" come for me (why would they?), I'm already fucked either way.
Now we get to hear from a bunch of people who normally bitch about the government taking away individual freedoms try to justify their hypocrisy while they argue for gun control, and how the supreme court wasn't thinking of the children...
The nice thing about strawmen is that they don't bleed when you fire a gun at them.
Most gun control advocates I'm aware of do not propose an outright ban on legal guns. There are a lot of them who have the same view of the issue that I do:
- The right to bear arms is not absolute; the right to own a knife or handgun does not preclude restrictions on more potent weaponry such as nerve gas or nuclear warheads. The government has a legitimate justification for keeping certain arms out of civilian hands. (The approach that's been attempted, banning "assault weapons" based on visual characteristics and etc., has been a poor one.)
- Society should have confidence that firearm owners will use them safely and responsibly. Abusing the right to bear arms -- being convicted of a felony involving a gun, for example -- should resulting in that right being abrogated. People with mental illnesses or without knowledge of basic firearm safety pose an elevated risk to the public.
If this stuff had leaked out to everyone in the company, who knows what it would have done for morale?
Nevermind that -- would would it have done to his own net worth!
Public admission that Microsoft is failing to meet quality expectations = drop in MSFT stock price = Gates' massive stock holdings lose value.
At which point, it'll be cost-effective to install and operate a nation-wide high-speed passenger and light-cargo rail service network.
It will NEVER be cost-effective to install and operate a nationwide high-speed rail service network in the United States.
A thought-provoking piece written by someone who neither understands the scientific method nor Google. Who doesn't understand the difference between a Theory and a model. Who still doesn't get correlation!=causation. Who probably has never had to actually analyze any substantial amount of data before. And who has clearly been raised on a self-important intellectual diet consisting of too much Buckminster Fuller, Kurtzweil, Frank Tipler, and Derrida.
And he works at Wired magazine? You don't say.
The power lines of rural America are, in general, even worse than the awful phone and cable TV lines that were preventing customers there from having more traditional broadband service.
It shouldn't surprise anybody that a power infrastructure built to meet specs of '60Hz more or less, somewhere between 100 and 130VAC hopefully' would be under-engineered for reliable data transmission.
It's really a moot point, because it's unlikely that the developers of Browser X knew any "cheats" that would let them use substantially less memory than every other browser out there.
Unless, hypothetically, Browser X had been developed by the same company that had developed the operating system...
(Yes, that's right, I'm accusing Safari of taking advantage of secret undocumented OS X system calls.)
No; managers who do not understand iterative development pave the way to waterfall projects. Sometimes those managers use MS Project.
I thought 'water ice' was found mainly in and around Philadelphia, and that in most other regions the sweet treat is called 'Italian ice'.
Does this mean that Mars has been inhabitated by Philadelphians... or VICE VERSA?!
This article somehow managed to misspell "Infogrames" as A-T-A-R-I, every single time.
Also, "Infogames" seems to have an erroneous 'R' in the middle of it.
Despite the games companies constantly bleating about how much money they make and how games are now a bigger contributor to the British economy than films, they seem unwilling or unable to compensate leading engineering talent.
For every programmer actually employed in the gaming business, there are probably a dozen who would love to break in given the opportunity. With such an overabundant workforce, what would the companies' reasoning be for offering higher salaries than people are willing to work for?
Back then [in 2000-2004], we had articles on different database systems, IDEs, different linux distros, with lots of commentary as to the details of why one might be better then another. Including specific tips or tricks of the trade or related tools.
Wait, you actually MISS the days of endless MySQL-vs-PostgreSQL, RedHat-vs-SuSE, Emacs-vs-vi pissing contests?
Do you reread JonKatz's books for fun, too?
When I was in elementary and junior high, the school split us into classes based on academic results so far. [...] This is now deemed to be prejudicial and so the school no longer does this.
If this is true, then it is impossible for there to be "grade inflation" where overachievers are able to get better-than-perfect grade point averages by loading up on Honors classes which are more heavily weighted than normal classes.
Yet that phenomenon exists, which must mean that the concept of segregating classrooms by student ability must not be entirely dead.