At Best Buy and Circuit city I've seen lots of SD signals on HD displays. How on earth am I going to know if it's the set or the signal that's producing all those jaggies? Ask? At Best Buy? I might as well ask them to build a moon rocket while they're at it.
So don't go to Best Buy or Circuit City to evaluate your monitors! Go to a high-end video shop to evaluate your monitors and then go to Best Buy or Circuit City to buy them if the prices are really that much better.
Seriously, do you want to solve the problem or just argue?
Re:Not a cron replacement, a init replacement
on
Does launchd Beat cron?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Why in the world would they use XML configs? Gesh.
Well, machine parsable, heaps of validation tools to make sure you haven't shanked it, and user readable text so you can go in there and hack on it if you want.
Given that damn near every scripting tool out there has xml support, it seems like they've kept 90% of the admin-friendliness of unix config files and improved on system parsing by simply hanging off of a well proven structured document format, which standard config files most certainly lack.
But the low-end of the market is just brutal. I can get a 17" LCD (not widescreen) at Microcenter for $150 or a 19" for $200. Yeah, they're not half as nice as the Cinemas, but the mini is Apple ceding the accessory space to the economy-of-scale players and providing the only thing that only Apple can provide - the CPU. The larger monitors make sense because Apple markets those to people who care enough about the quality of the monitor to pay extra. That market just isn't interested in 17" any more.
What this means is that you can buy two (mini + KB + mouse + 17" LCD + printer) for less than the lowest-end non-specced-in-the-press-release Powermac which still lacks a monitor.
Still not as cheap as the PCs, but damn if it isn't a ton better than it was 6 months ago.
It doesn't matter if we from the outside can see the complete nuttiness of switching a pdf-based workflow to a MS-the-root-of-all-evil-based workflow. This will succeed, just as Word has succeeded to be the de-facto document standard in every organisation and corporation out there, it's from the same guys who does the rest of the complex shit inside my harddrive.
It sounds like a great plan until it runs asslong into the non-trivial market of Mac based graphic designers and layout wonks. Oh, they own a nice heap of the back-end print workflow as well.
Acrobat may or may not suck hard, but moving to Linux was a step in the right direction, and the endless list of PDF based tools and workflow tools will ensure that MS will never make this work.
Yeah, it might become the way that most orgs shove docs through Outlook or some damn thing, but pdf isn't going anywhere.
The problem is that they try and teach you to write comments prematurely.
No, the problem is that they try and teach you to write code prematurely.
Document your application, requirements, constraints, and system interactions (what the engineer does). Then write the code (what the coder does).
What you will quickly learn is that it's better to be the engineer than the coder. What you'll realize is that the engineer is the client-side guy that figures out how to solve the challenge presented and the coder is the guy who can live in Manipal.
The computer scientist is another guy altogether, that sets the boundaries within which the engineer must work and provides many of the tools.
Somehow CS education has gotten horribly derailed, and asks students to combine the equivalents of electromagnetic theory, power system design, and basic home wiring in one curriculum. No wonder enrollments are plummeting - nobody knows what a CS major is or should do.
I think the problem is that on 4/26/2004, 4/26/2003, and 4/26/2002, the very same thing could be said, and it appears it will be true on 2/26/2006 as well.
I'm sure Apple frequently uttered those very words with Copeland.
But Steve is also aware that Google Desktop Search is functionally equivalent to Sherlock search in OS 8/9, except for doing it in the browser, of course.
It's not so much that MS is copying Apple, etc. but that Longhorn seems to offer *nothing* that isn't in Tiger and before, and any of the things Longhorn previously promised to offer have been cut.
That wasn't true of XP and most previous versions of Windows, but seems very apparent right now. My guess is that Macworld SF (Jan 2006) will offer a preview of 10.6, presumably due around the end of 2006. Will MS feel the need to respond to that in Longhorn? They'll be shipping Longhorn in roughly the same time window.
I find what you said really rude and uninformed. There are literaly thousands of different types of jobs in the world of computer science.
Yet you are seeing EXACTLY the disconnect plaguing engineering and related fields.
Women, for the most part, seek programs and careers that have some connection to society. Dilbert is the typical view of engineering and computer science - making products for other companies or for consumer sale.
The key to attracting women into the field is demonstrating how they can participate in the cancer cure by going into CS or bioengineering rather than just biology.
You can't berate these people by hollering 'just open your eyes' and expect to get anywhere, you need to show them. The whole industry does - and the programmer community is in such utter disarray that it's failing to market it's own field.
Just a few stories later is the FIRST LEGO competition for kids, for an example of how some of the engineers are promoting their field. It lacks the social connection, but where is the CS marketing?
I looked your school up. Your CS numbers are increasing, and doubled in 2003 and increased again in 2004.
However, your numbers are VERY small relative to most universities, and almost any school could make those kinds of gains provided they're willing to make certain compromises.
What you don't see is that the number of applicants to your program are not up. I would independently argue that Oklahoma public university trends are far from the national norm. In fact, outside of TX, CA, and NY, where populations are large and the university systems have enough diversity of campuses, all public university trends are somewhat unique. If you want to see some degree of consistency, you have to look at privates - it's a much more flat landscape because local education discounts don't apply.
Ok, it adds a few years, but it doesn't change the bottom line. As a project manager I would take a BS with 2-years of good, real-world experience over someone with 3- to 5-years of graduate study any day of the week.
You apparently failed to notice that I did not limit the appropriate tasks to fixing bugs. However, even a graduate degree just is not sufficient experience to be architecting major projects, unless you're incredibly gifted.
We have a problem in this country of confusing management with expertise.
A MS or a PhD gets you an expertise in Computer Science not project management. Whole other skill set.
If you need someone to figure out HOW to make Google Maps work in the lab, get a PhD.
If you need someone to get that work uniformly over 3.5 million square miles of maps while an ungodly number of people hammer on it constantly, managing a team of programmers and other professionals, and trying to meet some kind of budget and timetable (does Google even have deadlines?) then you want someone with proven experience, and I'd actually recommend an old-school engineer.
The guy who ultimately gets it done won't be the expert at the underlying nuts and bolts, but will be the guy who can protect the expert at the underlying nuts and bolts so he can do what he needs to do, and everyone else can as well.
I fail to see how this has anything to do with Slashdot. It's not tech, it's not Linux/F/OSS, and not anything else that I would consider Slashdot material. Since when has this place become a repository of whatever stupid "news" there happens to float around online?
The FA takes a perfectly serviceable document that most people would agree is concise and factual and adds usability and eye candy to help the user better understand it.
I think there's a tremendously relevant lesson for the Linux/F/OSS crowd.
I guess if it was a 'hey, there are good reasons why Linux should look more like OS X' article, you'd see that as relevant, but design is a broad thing that can be applied to most any product from a memo to an OS. Open your horizons up some and maybe you'll learn something.
I strongly suspect autovectorization is one of those few things in GCC that will work substantially better on PPC than x86. Apple is investing HUGELY in autovectorization in GCC, and PPC is far and away their primary goal.
But this just seems to be asking for a lot of trouble. Humanitarily speaking, since they are not actually in any country, who protects the rights of those 600 laboring software engineers? Does anyone have the authority to make sure that it's not (child) slave labor? No government agency can make sure that working conditions are safe and healthy.
Holy shit, man. Do you have any idea how many news helicopters are in LA? We had a *small* fire here, 50 miles from LA and 11 helicopters showed up to cover it - including the spanish channel. They send out the helicopters when it *might* rain. They send out the helicopters for car accidents. We've got 11 million people here for chrissake, there's always a goddamn car accident!
So yeah, I imagine that for lack of something more interesting to do, these guys will swing by the ship almost daily on their way out of LAX. They'd be idiots to do anything underhanded lest it get blasted out on 17 channels of the worst, but most pervasive local news in the nation.
"Really, I'd love to see what Apple has in store for Spotlight, but I definitely know that Windows Longhorn is better off without WinFS the way they originally planned it."
If I'm not mistaken, Apple is using Core Data's sqlite interface to manage the metadata, so they're doing almost exactly what you are proposing.
Certainly you can't say that your Macintosh does this absolutely perfectly every single time in every concievable situation?
Uh, I can. My powerbook routinely roams across no fewer than a dozen 11.b or 11.g networks - sometimes encountering both simultaneously - as well as the times when I need full 100T and plug in the cable. With a surprisingly minimal amount of effort, it knows which interfaces and networks to select first. It even knows when to connect via Firewire on the odd occassions when I do that. I don't use Bluetooth to connect, so that might be less smooth, but I can't recall a time in several years that it didn't connect to the network I needed.
Errr.... no. In many industries, having a range of prices, especially that vary with time, allows not only for greater profits, but for larger numbers of satisfied customers. The math is a bit more involuted than a simple supply/demand scissors curve, because you also have to factor in substitutibility, price elasticity, and information costs, and time value of money, but in many situations this allows for a good thing all around.
Sure, but Apple and Steve also realize when it's time to change strategy, and it's not clear that they're being unneccessarily stubborn on this.
In it's infancy, you don't want a service to be overly complicated to scare off potential users. Once that critical mass takes hold and the service begins to displace others, it can then afford to offer more choices.
Apple in its rebuilding phases under Steve has always been about simplification - 4 product lines, Mac-only, what have you. Once those reach a given point, you expand and differentiate.
I can't imagine that the $.99 only policy is a forever deal with Apple, but consider when this started, the up-front costs of buliding the iTMS, aiming for 1M songs in the library, with NO customers, nor a sense of what could realistically be expected looked like a huge money sink for Apple. So it was kept as simple as possible - one format, one bitrate, one pricing model, no pay-for-play, take it or leave it. It minimizes Apple's expense exposure and keeps the system from being overwhelming to customers.
Roll ahead a few years to when iTMS is pushing 100M songs every other month (right about now) and you have a situation where enough revenue is coming through to support variable pricing, volume discount, frequent buyer programs, or whatever.
Of course, the labels aren't going to report if Apple is planning these things, they want to jack prices up to $1.49 per song for the hot singles and recover Apple's $.09 in the process. After all, Apple's already spent the money to create the market which they don't need to reinvest.
So I don't buy for a minute that Apple isn't planning for that day that songs are variably priced, but I think the labels are downplaying the challenges of offering $0.49 singles and still having enough money left over to cover the transaction costs. Of course, for old songs, they're not paying the artists any more, so they *could* lower their price to Apple, but I doubt they'll volunteer that.
It's not a freedom of the press issue. Apple isn't looking for damages from the bloggers.
A civil crime has allegedly been committed and the bloggers have the key to resolving that crime. This is akin to a material witness order.
And the examples of corporate malfeasance are just retarded. If Apple was committing a crime, this could never be happening. Revealing a crime is a protected act and supercedes the civil contract. The product Apple intends to announce isn't illegal, so there's no parallel at all.
The answer is that CA passed a law a year ago that mandated notification of personal data theft (there's a list of data elements that trigger this) either directly to the individuals or publicly if that is not possible.
What you're seeing in CA is the first semi-proper accounting of how much data theft is taking place. The reason you don't see it in other states is that they don't have such laws, so it's not being disclosed. It most certainly IS still happening, however.
Slashdot Mirror
At Best Buy and Circuit city I've seen lots of SD signals on HD displays. How on earth am I going to know if it's the set or the signal that's producing all those jaggies? Ask? At Best Buy? I might as well ask them to build a moon rocket while they're at it.
So don't go to Best Buy or Circuit City to evaluate your monitors! Go to a high-end video shop to evaluate your monitors and then go to Best Buy or Circuit City to buy them if the prices are really that much better.
Seriously, do you want to solve the problem or just argue?
Why in the world would they use XML configs? Gesh.
Well, machine parsable, heaps of validation tools to make sure you haven't shanked it, and user readable text so you can go in there and hack on it if you want.
Given that damn near every scripting tool out there has xml support, it seems like they've kept 90% of the admin-friendliness of unix config files and improved on system parsing by simply hanging off of a well proven structured document format, which standard config files most certainly lack.
I switched to OS/2 a month ago for just this reason. Not sure when the next upgrade is coming out, but I'll be raking in the savings until then.
But the low-end of the market is just brutal. I can get a 17" LCD (not widescreen) at Microcenter for $150 or a 19" for $200. Yeah, they're not half as nice as the Cinemas, but the mini is Apple ceding the accessory space to the economy-of-scale players and providing the only thing that only Apple can provide - the CPU. The larger monitors make sense because Apple markets those to people who care enough about the quality of the monitor to pay extra. That market just isn't interested in 17" any more.
What this means is that you can buy two (mini + KB + mouse + 17" LCD + printer) for less than the lowest-end non-specced-in-the-press-release Powermac which still lacks a monitor.
Still not as cheap as the PCs, but damn if it isn't a ton better than it was 6 months ago.
It doesn't matter if we from the outside can see the complete nuttiness of switching a pdf-based workflow to a MS-the-root-of-all-evil-based workflow. This will succeed, just as Word has succeeded to be the de-facto document standard in every organisation and corporation out there, it's from the same guys who does the rest of the complex shit inside my harddrive.
It sounds like a great plan until it runs asslong into the non-trivial market of Mac based graphic designers and layout wonks. Oh, they own a nice heap of the back-end print workflow as well.
Acrobat may or may not suck hard, but moving to Linux was a step in the right direction, and the endless list of PDF based tools and workflow tools will ensure that MS will never make this work.
Yeah, it might become the way that most orgs shove docs through Outlook or some damn thing, but pdf isn't going anywhere.
The problem is that they try and teach you to write comments prematurely.
No, the problem is that they try and teach you to write code prematurely.
Document your application, requirements, constraints, and system interactions (what the engineer does). Then write the code (what the coder does).
What you will quickly learn is that it's better to be the engineer than the coder. What you'll realize is that the engineer is the client-side guy that figures out how to solve the challenge presented and the coder is the guy who can live in Manipal.
The computer scientist is another guy altogether, that sets the boundaries within which the engineer must work and provides many of the tools.
Somehow CS education has gotten horribly derailed, and asks students to combine the equivalents of electromagnetic theory, power system design, and basic home wiring in one curriculum. No wonder enrollments are plummeting - nobody knows what a CS major is or should do.
I think the problem is that on 4/26/2004, 4/26/2003, and 4/26/2002, the very same thing could be said, and it appears it will be true on 2/26/2006 as well.
I'm sure Apple frequently uttered those very words with Copeland.
Oh, did you know who actually made most of super-US bimbo Britney Spears smash hits? A swede called Max Martin. Go figure!
Oh, sure. You swedes are great at all that stuff, but who do you need to actually provided the bimbos? America, that's who!
Hey, wait a sec...
Automator is a GUI front end to AppleScript that allows one to represent a script as a number of steps intead of actually writing the script.
Close. Automator uses the same hooks as AS, but is a somewhat different animal. It can interact with Applescripts, but doesn't create Applescripts.
I'm not sure how I feel about that - we'll need to see how this plays out. It might be yet another of Apple's one-step-back/six-steps-forward things.
But Steve is also aware that Google Desktop Search is functionally equivalent to Sherlock search in OS 8/9, except for doing it in the browser, of course.
It's not so much that MS is copying Apple, etc. but that Longhorn seems to offer *nothing* that isn't in Tiger and before, and any of the things Longhorn previously promised to offer have been cut.
That wasn't true of XP and most previous versions of Windows, but seems very apparent right now. My guess is that Macworld SF (Jan 2006) will offer a preview of 10.6, presumably due around the end of 2006. Will MS feel the need to respond to that in Longhorn? They'll be shipping Longhorn in roughly the same time window.
Maybe by the time I buy it, the instructions will ask me to drop it from 3 inches in the air.
Maybe, but at least now it has a built-in accelerometer so you can see if you've done it right.
I find what you said really rude and uninformed. There are literaly thousands of different types of jobs in the world of computer science.
Yet you are seeing EXACTLY the disconnect plaguing engineering and related fields.
Women, for the most part, seek programs and careers that have some connection to society. Dilbert is the typical view of engineering and computer science - making products for other companies or for consumer sale.
The key to attracting women into the field is demonstrating how they can participate in the cancer cure by going into CS or bioengineering rather than just biology.
You can't berate these people by hollering 'just open your eyes' and expect to get anywhere, you need to show them. The whole industry does - and the programmer community is in such utter disarray that it's failing to market it's own field.
Just a few stories later is the FIRST LEGO competition for kids, for an example of how some of the engineers are promoting their field. It lacks the social connection, but where is the CS marketing?
I looked your school up. Your CS numbers are increasing, and doubled in 2003 and increased again in 2004.
However, your numbers are VERY small relative to most universities, and almost any school could make those kinds of gains provided they're willing to make certain compromises.
What you don't see is that the number of applicants to your program are not up. I would independently argue that Oklahoma public university trends are far from the national norm. In fact, outside of TX, CA, and NY, where populations are large and the university systems have enough diversity of campuses, all public university trends are somewhat unique. If you want to see some degree of consistency, you have to look at privates - it's a much more flat landscape because local education discounts don't apply.
Ok, it adds a few years, but it doesn't change the bottom line. As a project manager I would take a BS with 2-years of good, real-world experience over someone with 3- to 5-years of graduate study any day of the week.
You apparently failed to notice that I did not limit the appropriate tasks to fixing bugs. However, even a graduate degree just is not sufficient experience to be architecting major projects, unless you're incredibly gifted.
We have a problem in this country of confusing management with expertise.
A MS or a PhD gets you an expertise in Computer Science not project management. Whole other skill set.
If you need someone to figure out HOW to make Google Maps work in the lab, get a PhD.
If you need someone to get that work uniformly over 3.5 million square miles of maps while an ungodly number of people hammer on it constantly, managing a team of programmers and other professionals, and trying to meet some kind of budget and timetable (does Google even have deadlines?) then you want someone with proven experience, and I'd actually recommend an old-school engineer.
The guy who ultimately gets it done won't be the expert at the underlying nuts and bolts, but will be the guy who can protect the expert at the underlying nuts and bolts so he can do what he needs to do, and everyone else can as well.
I fail to see how this has anything to do with Slashdot. It's not tech, it's not Linux/F/OSS, and not anything else that I would consider Slashdot material. Since when has this place become a repository of whatever stupid "news" there happens to float around online?
The FA takes a perfectly serviceable document that most people would agree is concise and factual and adds usability and eye candy to help the user better understand it.
I think there's a tremendously relevant lesson for the Linux/F/OSS crowd.
I guess if it was a 'hey, there are good reasons why Linux should look more like OS X' article, you'd see that as relevant, but design is a broad thing that can be applied to most any product from a memo to an OS. Open your horizons up some and maybe you'll learn something.
I strongly suspect autovectorization is one of those few things in GCC that will work substantially better on PPC than x86. Apple is investing HUGELY in autovectorization in GCC, and PPC is far and away their primary goal.
Apple wasn't working on GCC until version 3. I suspect a lot of other companies weren't either.
But this just seems to be asking for a lot of trouble. Humanitarily speaking, since they are not actually in any country, who protects the rights of those 600 laboring software engineers? Does anyone have the authority to make sure that it's not (child) slave labor? No government agency can make sure that working conditions are safe and healthy.
Holy shit, man. Do you have any idea how many news helicopters are in LA? We had a *small* fire here, 50 miles from LA and 11 helicopters showed up to cover it - including the spanish channel. They send out the helicopters when it *might* rain. They send out the helicopters for car accidents. We've got 11 million people here for chrissake, there's always a goddamn car accident!
So yeah, I imagine that for lack of something more interesting to do, these guys will swing by the ship almost daily on their way out of LAX. They'd be idiots to do anything underhanded lest it get blasted out on 17 channels of the worst, but most pervasive local news in the nation.
Well, maybe if they're more specific:
skip[sex(male frontal nudity)], play[sex(female frontal nudity)], slow-mo[sex(girl-on-girl)]
I bet lots of people would pay more for those pre-screened DVDs.
"Really, I'd love to see what Apple has in store for Spotlight, but I definitely know that Windows Longhorn is better off without WinFS the way they originally planned it."
If I'm not mistaken, Apple is using Core Data's sqlite interface to manage the metadata, so they're doing almost exactly what you are proposing.
Certainly you can't say that your Macintosh does this absolutely perfectly every single time in every concievable situation?
Uh, I can. My powerbook routinely roams across no fewer than a dozen 11.b or 11.g networks - sometimes encountering both simultaneously - as well as the times when I need full 100T and plug in the cable. With a surprisingly minimal amount of effort, it knows which interfaces and networks to select first. It even knows when to connect via Firewire on the odd occassions when I do that. I don't use Bluetooth to connect, so that might be less smooth, but I can't recall a time in several years that it didn't connect to the network I needed.
Errr.... no. In many industries, having a range of prices, especially that vary with time, allows not only for greater profits, but for larger numbers of satisfied customers. The math is a bit more involuted than a simple supply/demand scissors curve, because you also have to factor in substitutibility, price elasticity, and information costs, and time value of money, but in many situations this allows for a good thing all around.
Sure, but Apple and Steve also realize when it's time to change strategy, and it's not clear that they're being unneccessarily stubborn on this.
In it's infancy, you don't want a service to be overly complicated to scare off potential users. Once that critical mass takes hold and the service begins to displace others, it can then afford to offer more choices.
Apple in its rebuilding phases under Steve has always been about simplification - 4 product lines, Mac-only, what have you. Once those reach a given point, you expand and differentiate.
I can't imagine that the $.99 only policy is a forever deal with Apple, but consider when this started, the up-front costs of buliding the iTMS, aiming for 1M songs in the library, with NO customers, nor a sense of what could realistically be expected looked like a huge money sink for Apple. So it was kept as simple as possible - one format, one bitrate, one pricing model, no pay-for-play, take it or leave it. It minimizes Apple's expense exposure and keeps the system from being overwhelming to customers.
Roll ahead a few years to when iTMS is pushing 100M songs every other month (right about now) and you have a situation where enough revenue is coming through to support variable pricing, volume discount, frequent buyer programs, or whatever.
Of course, the labels aren't going to report if Apple is planning these things, they want to jack prices up to $1.49 per song for the hot singles and recover Apple's $.09 in the process. After all, Apple's already spent the money to create the market which they don't need to reinvest.
So I don't buy for a minute that Apple isn't planning for that day that songs are variably priced, but I think the labels are downplaying the challenges of offering $0.49 singles and still having enough money left over to cover the transaction costs. Of course, for old songs, they're not paying the artists any more, so they *could* lower their price to Apple, but I doubt they'll volunteer that.
It's not a freedom of the press issue. Apple isn't looking for damages from the bloggers.
A civil crime has allegedly been committed and the bloggers have the key to resolving that crime. This is akin to a material witness order.
And the examples of corporate malfeasance are just retarded. If Apple was committing a crime, this could never be happening. Revealing a crime is a protected act and supercedes the civil contract. The product Apple intends to announce isn't illegal, so there's no parallel at all.
I work at a CA university, so I know the answer.
The answer is that CA passed a law a year ago that mandated notification of personal data theft (there's a list of data elements that trigger this) either directly to the individuals or publicly if that is not possible.
What you're seeing in CA is the first semi-proper accounting of how much data theft is taking place. The reason you don't see it in other states is that they don't have such laws, so it's not being disclosed. It most certainly IS still happening, however.
Floating soap doesn't date you so much as your UID does.