The whole concept of speeding fines is broken. The fact that such a large number of people routinely exceed the posted speed limits by a set number such as 5 or 10 mph is proof that limits don't work. If the speed limit were 400 mph, people would still want to drive 410.
The difference with broadband usage is that your computer or cable modem doesn't stick a gauge in your face, telling you how far you've gone. Most ISPs tell their users to call tech support / customer service to find out their current usage for the month. Well I'll be damned if I have to wait a half-hour on the phone to ask some outsourcer if I'm downloading too much, especially when most of them either can't answer the question, or can't be trusted at all. Sometimes they have a web reporting tool, which opens up a bit of a loophole since you have to download something to get your response... not much, but enough to get the no-lifes whining loudly. Then you've got shareware/freeware tools that monitor it locally, but most people find these numbers don't match up with the ISP's report (null-routed packets, and ISP incompetence).
Much like speeding tickets are often shot down in court over inaccuracies and lazy cops, download limits are just as weak due to so many variables and points of failure in the process. The main difference is that speeding is a municipal, state or provincial affair with public dealings, while any gripes you have with an ISP are a private matter of contract. The state can toss you in jail, but Comcast would have to sue you pretty damned hard and blow a whole lineup of squirrely politicos and prosecutors to pull that off.
Power efficient hard disks... get a 2.5" laptop drive, or do what I do and netboot the thing, with an NFS filesystem on some other box far far away. I started doing that years ago on file servers (to avoid having a boot drive). The beauty of Linux is that it will correctly use up all the RAM for disk caching, so as long as you load it up full of cheap ram, the NFS thing won't bother you much once it's up and running.
430 days uptime and counting, on my little home network of firewall, print, web and file servers. They all run off of ~10w EPIA M10k's, save for the file server which is closer to 100w under load.
For comparison, my SLI'ed Geforce 8800's suck down more power than all my Linux boxes combined:)
That's right, this new Anti-Terror database has nothing to do with the one I unplugged ten seconds ago. War is Peace. Ignorance is Strength, and all that hum-dum.
-Dubya
It wasn't me, it was some hacker
on
Fox Hacks Fark
·
· Score: 1
Your Honor, I didn't do it. I was hacked! Some kid in Russia broke into my computer and framed me for the hit.
Seriously, I don't have to worry about the RIAA/MPAA/BSA or any other law-abusing midgets. I can just plead Malware and get out of jail free.
The fun thing about this finger-pointing is that you can't prosecute one party without opening the floodgates for everyone else. Let's pretend the Fox PC was actually rooted and some kid in eastern Europe is to blame... if you prosecute the kid, then everyone will use the Malware defense. If you prosecute the Fox guy, then all the script kiddies will hide behind proxies and be forever shielded from American lawmakers. It's a lose-lose situation.
No matter the outcome, I'm quite happy with my (legally acquired) cluster of European servers and the beloved chain of squid proxies that run on them. I'm not worried about willfully committing a crime, I'm more worried about something perfectly legal today that could become some senator's grinding stone tomorrow.
Raise your hand if you think Adobe software is even more buggy and temperamental than Microsoft ?
Raise your hand if every new version of Photoshop and Acrobat is sigificantly slower and weirder than the last.
Raise your hand if you'd rather donate your money to one of the many open-source suites in existence, that will inevitably be more reliable and enjoyable than anything to come out of Adobe.
(those of you with 3 hands in the air, umm... I love you!)
This is just an expansion (or rehash) of the exploit using custom "protocol" prefixes (the http:/// part). Now I must be on different intertubes than the rest of y'all, because I hardly ever (read: never) see anything but http, ftp and mailto in the links I use, and I build both public (as in gimmicky) web sites and business apps for a living. Anything else should be handled by a browser PLUGIN, not some creaky registry hack that can spawn any random process. The difference should be obvious: you can have a thousand executables on a PC, but probably less than a dozen browser plugins, making it a lot easier to spot suspicious bits.
Why do we need so many bizarre launchers anyway ? Do people really click funky URIs in IE7 to launch the copy of Firefox that's already installed on their system ? How about a desktop icon, you stupid shits!
I've been wanting a Mini/Nano/Pico system for a while now, but there are many problems with VIA:
1. These things are hard to find, and stock is scarce 2. They're ridiculously overpriced, when you consider they're targeted at tinkerers and DIYers 3. No warranty, and no way to fix them if/when they fail because it's 100% custom.
I simply can't think of a non-vanity project that would justify overcoming all those negatives. Far easier and cheaper to go down the ARM route instead.
If by development process you mean "two guys with day jobs", then yes, there's something wrong.
Everyone was making games in the early 90's, even I managed to churn out some colorful fun thingies back in the day (and made a bit of money selling them too). Unless they're creative geniuses that take 5 years to produce something mind-blowing (not the case), then they're just a handful of guys with delusions of grandeur. Game houses in the 21st century have to keep busy, it's grown far too competitive a market to be sitting on your ass whining about features, which, by the time the court case runs its course, will be long-obsolete anyway! If you lose, you're in big trouble. If you win, well you get an aging engine to plug into your already stagnant project.
It's called development hell, and lawyers only make it worse. We don't need another Daikatana.
Cloning a product actually works against the few benefits of capitalism. For one, you're taking one company's hard work and investment in R&D and pissing all over it and getting filthy rich by selling the knockoffs. Eventually the innovators decide it's not worth the effort anymore, and we stop seeing cool new gadgets.
Let's face it: if I had spent four years designing and built the iPhone, and some guy across the street just took it apart, duplicated the concept and sold it for half the price in a matter of days, I'd probably be thinking about getting that guy killed because he effectively nullified four years of my life, I'm getting punished for being the creative genius, and that's just not right.
What I find simultaneously fascinating and disappointing is how these Chinese knockoff artists are so good at counterfeiting stuff, why don't they add a few designers to their team and put their extensive manufacturing skills to good use ? Screw the iPhone, build something even better! Instead, they churn out millions of cheap half-broken devices that work like ass and rarely live past their first birthday. What the hell ?
Thank you. I never cared about commercial MySQL either. If I wanted to blow big bucks on a DB, I'd go somewhere else, simply because I can shop around for support contracts.
Given that most people are using it in a web backend, I don't see very many people rushing to buy the Enterprise edition. The free stuff gets the job done, and if it didn't, we'd find something else to fawn over. That's the philosophy of FOSS: if you don't like it, roll your own!
The roads would be safer if we just didn't let stupid people drive.
I don't mean to downplay the negatives of DUI, but in a world where it's dangerous to drive completely sober, I think we're focusing our attention in the wrong places. There are too many cars on the road, and too many busy/stressed/airheaded people driving those cars. I would argue that one little Honda-racing subwoofer-destrorying yo-yo kid is far more deadly than a drunk driver. Just because the Honda kids are involves in less reported accidents than drunks, doesn't mean they actually cause less accidents. One asshole cutting someone off at high speed can cause an accident way back as everyone panics to avoid the ricer.
So should we arrest anyone driving an import car with more bass than treble ? I say YES! Who's with me ?...
See ? People would think I'm crazy for suggesting that. So why is it less crazy to arrest people who've had a drink or two ? 0.08 may as well be a random number, some people are still straight at 0.15, and some people are still idiots at 0.00.
I'm a former Dell employee, one that is both dangerously competent and speaks mostly good English (Canadian). On my team of about 16 techs, we had great techs and we had horrible techs. The great techs weren't always the fastest, and the horrible techs weren't always the slowest.
As the absolute fastest guy on the floor (by a good margin, too!), I kept getting asked what my "secret" was. The secret is confidence. Let's face it: computers aren't that complicated. I think my car is a lot harder to troubleshoot than any PC, because the car has a thousand little parts whereas a PC has a motherboard, processor, power supply, ram and a hard drive, maybe an expansion card or two. The difference between my 5 minute calls and my neighbor's 90-minute calls is that I wasn't worried about "over-fixing". Allow me to explain:
Assuming you've ruled out software issues, you're down to just hardware flakiness. If it takes 2 hours of diagnostics and fiddling around to get to 99% confidence, but only 5 or 10 minutes to reach 90% confidence, I say stop after that 5-10 mins and ship out whatever you think is necessary to fix it. Worst case, you'll replace a part that wasn't really defective, and the guys at the testing facility will put them in the refurb bin, not the end of the world considering that you've solved the problem in 1/20th of the time for both you and your customer.
Now software issues are a whole different ballgame, and I'm grateful I was in the corporate segment, mostly dealing with I.T. people and not the end user. Even then, my answer was simple: if it's acting wonky, just format the OS and you can call me back if it's still messed up.
The other thing that's terribly obvious, yet most agents never thought of, is to prioritize your troubleshooting. Go for the quick, broad strokes at first. A quick diagnostic of the hard drive and/or memory takes 2-3 minutes, so do those right away. There's hardly ever a need to run the full test suite unless the user is deaf, dumb and blind. Typically within the first 30 seconds of them relating their problems, the tech should already have a pretty good idea where to start looking.
In the end, the problem is that it's still a call center, and call centers are staffed with whoever is desperate enough to take the job, you can't cherry-pick your techs when you're staffing a 2000-phone building. Training isn't all bad, but much like driving lessons, they show you how to operate the equipment, but that doesn't make you an expert. For the overseas call centers, well, you get what you pay for.
I run everything with noatime, the tradeoff is that for the handful of scenarios where I do need some sort of access time, I just have to store it elsewhere. For web logs, that timestamp is stored in the SQL DB along with the rest of my log processor's data, that way I can choose when to update it, only when it needs to be and without affecting every other file on my server.
Sure, there's a small performance hit on the DB, but with the large quantity of data transfer I go through, I'm sure the noatime benefits me far more than the cost of a DB transaction.
They use the same components as any other computer. You just pop off the cover and add RAM or swap the hard drive like any other.
I still don't understand why Apple insists on charging completely absurd prices for basic upgrades. I'd be more than happy to pay a premium for the platform, but don't insult me by charging 700$ extra for 3 extra gigs of ram, that I could get for about 120$ from Tigerdirect.
Their pricing makes me wish I could order a bare-bones iMac without RAM, HDD or even CPU, but that will never happen because I could simply put in my cheap components and resell the thing for a huge profit. And by "me" I mean "every bottom-feeding used-cell-phone-dealer-type scammer on the planet", so that's definitely not something Apple would want. They already danced with OEM way back in the old days and bailed out because their "partners" were making more money than Apple.
At the end of the day, what matters the most is whether your team fits well together or not. I've recently found myself in a situation where my extensive coding skills are going to waste, just because the shop I work for, like to do things differently (read: fast and cheap, to stay competitive). Now there's nothing inherently wrong with that, because that's how the customers like it. I find myself struggling with what should be trivial work, simply because I haven't written such spaghetti code in oh, 20 years! It doesn't matter that I could probably code an operating system in Javascript (a very shitty operating system, indeed!), my daily challenge is to set aside my pattern-rich design style, and settle for the quickest solution that fits the requirements.
I guess my point is, no matter how specialized you are, 90% of the work out there is simple generic crap. Just because we're brilliant designers doesn't mean there's a client to appreciate our artful code. What the user sees is "I type stuff in, and click a button", whether you coded 4 levels of abstraction, or you're some half-brained VB 2.0 "developer"... it's all the same to their eyes, and the only thing that matters beyond that is the bottom line. This means we'll be seeing more and more junior (low wage) developers churning out garbage code that usually does what the client wants, that's simply the product of a competitive market.
I'm particularly excited about the swerving detection... that alone would eliminate 90% of SOBER drivers in my city.
How about a camera that can tell if the driver is a half-brained preppie trying to simultaneously talk on their Blackberry, do their makeup/shave, and is about to make a left turn from the right lane. It would be nice if the sensor could then activate a dash-mounted AK-47, but I'd settle for a wireless warning to nearby drivers. I can shoot the bastard myself.
Okay so why should the whole OS be bogged down because of a bunch of lazy programmers who can't read API docs ? I say make it into a microkernel or whatever you want to call it, then let the shims take care of the offending legacy apps without defecating all over the system.
Things would run a lot smoother if we lowered our tolerance levels a teeny bit... Old app giving you problems ? Shoot it! Really need the old app, but can't run the original OS/Hardware and can't afford to update the app ? Shoot yourself, you don't belong in the fast-moving world of computing.
That has to be the first pro-Vista post I've read that didn't make me want to punch the poster. I can safely say that those features don't appeal to me all that much, because I tend to stick with my old-school work habits, but thank you for spelling them out properly, sans-marketing drivel.
What kind of dumb fuck would want to recycle a rusty, dented and scratched Ford Focus ? I don't even need to lock my doors anymore, even joyriding teenagers won't touch my car (it would probably stall and seize after ten feet).
Security through junk. It's like that SNL faux-mercial of a luxury car that looks like a pile of rust, only my car's inside is as ugly as the outside.
IANAA (I am not a anything!), but from my own personal experiences, if something is technically infeasible for the average half-brained VB consultant, then it's probably above what little technical understanding any court (or its "expert" witness) would have if such technology were to be used as evidence.
On one hand, you've got WORM tapes and optical write-once media. If you have to implement some sort of buffering to make these storage mediums happy, then you simply have to do it and that's the end of it.
The people drafting SOX aren't device driver coders, they're accountants and attorneys and other non-computer folk. If they said you had to tattoo each transaction on a live hamster and shoot them into space, you'd be in the same tight spot. Just like instant WORM logging, it's marginally feasible but terribly impractical using currently available technology.
Sony backs Blu-Ray. Sony is evil; therefore Blu-Ray is evil.
Year after year, they churn out various forms of lock-in built into their numerous underwhelming products, yet they charge a premium for the brand name. At least the other cheap asian names like Acer, Hicon and Konka don't waste our time and money with trademarked superlatives and coked-up sales reps. I lump Sony in with those crap brands because the only halfway-decent thing they've sold in 30 years is the Playstation line. It has its flaws, but that product line is the one thing that doesn't automatically blow up or become obsolete every other year.
Sony built their reputation in the 70's and early 80's, and has spend every waking moment thereafter, milking that reputation for every penny on the backs of their customers.
Slashdot Mirror
The whole concept of speeding fines is broken. The fact that such a large number of people routinely exceed the posted speed limits by a set number such as 5 or 10 mph is proof that limits don't work. If the speed limit were 400 mph, people would still want to drive 410.
The difference with broadband usage is that your computer or cable modem doesn't stick a gauge in your face, telling you how far you've gone. Most ISPs tell their users to call tech support / customer service to find out their current usage for the month. Well I'll be damned if I have to wait a half-hour on the phone to ask some outsourcer if I'm downloading too much, especially when most of them either can't answer the question, or can't be trusted at all. Sometimes they have a web reporting tool, which opens up a bit of a loophole since you have to download something to get your response... not much, but enough to get the no-lifes whining loudly. Then you've got shareware/freeware tools that monitor it locally, but most people find these numbers don't match up with the ISP's report (null-routed packets, and ISP incompetence).
Much like speeding tickets are often shot down in court over inaccuracies and lazy cops, download limits are just as weak due to so many variables and points of failure in the process. The main difference is that speeding is a municipal, state or provincial affair with public dealings, while any gripes you have with an ISP are a private matter of contract. The state can toss you in jail, but Comcast would have to sue you pretty damned hard and blow a whole lineup of squirrely politicos and prosecutors to pull that off.
Power efficient hard disks... get a 2.5" laptop drive, or do what I do and netboot the thing, with an NFS filesystem on some other box far far away. I started doing that years ago on file servers (to avoid having a boot drive). The beauty of Linux is that it will correctly use up all the RAM for disk caching, so as long as you load it up full of cheap ram, the NFS thing won't bother you much once it's up and running.
:)
430 days uptime and counting, on my little home network of firewall, print, web and file servers. They all run off of ~10w EPIA M10k's, save for the file server which is closer to 100w under load.
For comparison, my SLI'ed Geforce 8800's suck down more power than all my Linux boxes combined
Nothing to see here folks, move along.
(plugs the server back in)
That's right, this new Anti-Terror database has nothing to do with the one I unplugged ten seconds ago. War is Peace. Ignorance is Strength, and all that hum-dum.
-Dubya
Your Honor, I didn't do it. I was hacked! Some kid in Russia broke into my computer and framed me for the hit.
Seriously, I don't have to worry about the RIAA/MPAA/BSA or any other law-abusing midgets. I can just plead Malware and get out of jail free.
The fun thing about this finger-pointing is that you can't prosecute one party without opening the floodgates for everyone else. Let's pretend the Fox PC was actually rooted and some kid in eastern Europe is to blame... if you prosecute the kid, then everyone will use the Malware defense. If you prosecute the Fox guy, then all the script kiddies will hide behind proxies and be forever shielded from American lawmakers. It's a lose-lose situation.
No matter the outcome, I'm quite happy with my (legally acquired) cluster of European servers and the beloved chain of squid proxies that run on them. I'm not worried about willfully committing a crime, I'm more worried about something perfectly legal today that could become some senator's grinding stone tomorrow.
Raise your hand if you think Adobe software is even more buggy and temperamental than Microsoft ?
Raise your hand if every new version of Photoshop and Acrobat is sigificantly slower and weirder than the last.
Raise your hand if you'd rather donate your money to one of the many open-source suites in existence, that will inevitably be more reliable and enjoyable than anything to come out of Adobe.
(those of you with 3 hands in the air, umm... I love you!)
This is just an expansion (or rehash) of the exploit using custom "protocol" prefixes (the http:/// part). Now I must be on different intertubes than the rest of y'all, because I hardly ever (read: never) see anything but http, ftp and mailto in the links I use, and I build both public (as in gimmicky) web sites and business apps for a living. Anything else should be handled by a browser PLUGIN, not some creaky registry hack that can spawn any random process. The difference should be obvious: you can have a thousand executables on a PC, but probably less than a dozen browser plugins, making it a lot easier to spot suspicious bits.
Why do we need so many bizarre launchers anyway ? Do people really click funky URIs in IE7 to launch the copy of Firefox that's already installed on their system ? How about a desktop icon, you stupid shits!
I've been wanting a Mini/Nano/Pico system for a while now, but there are many problems with VIA:
1. These things are hard to find, and stock is scarce
2. They're ridiculously overpriced, when you consider they're targeted at tinkerers and DIYers
3. No warranty, and no way to fix them if/when they fail because it's 100% custom.
I simply can't think of a non-vanity project that would justify overcoming all those negatives. Far easier and cheaper to go down the ARM route instead.
If by development process you mean "two guys with day jobs", then yes, there's something wrong.
Everyone was making games in the early 90's, even I managed to churn out some colorful fun thingies back in the day (and made a bit of money selling them too). Unless they're creative geniuses that take 5 years to produce something mind-blowing (not the case), then they're just a handful of guys with delusions of grandeur. Game houses in the 21st century have to keep busy, it's grown far too competitive a market to be sitting on your ass whining about features, which, by the time the court case runs its course, will be long-obsolete anyway! If you lose, you're in big trouble. If you win, well you get an aging engine to plug into your already stagnant project.
It's called development hell, and lawyers only make it worse. We don't need another Daikatana.
Cloning a product actually works against the few benefits of capitalism. For one, you're taking one company's hard work and investment in R&D and pissing all over it and getting filthy rich by selling the knockoffs. Eventually the innovators decide it's not worth the effort anymore, and we stop seeing cool new gadgets.
Let's face it: if I had spent four years designing and built the iPhone, and some guy across the street just took it apart, duplicated the concept and sold it for half the price in a matter of days, I'd probably be thinking about getting that guy killed because he effectively nullified four years of my life, I'm getting punished for being the creative genius, and that's just not right.
What I find simultaneously fascinating and disappointing is how these Chinese knockoff artists are so good at counterfeiting stuff, why don't they add a few designers to their team and put their extensive manufacturing skills to good use ? Screw the iPhone, build something even better! Instead, they churn out millions of cheap half-broken devices that work like ass and rarely live past their first birthday. What the hell ?
Thank you. I never cared about commercial MySQL either. If I wanted to blow big bucks on a DB, I'd go somewhere else, simply because I can shop around for support contracts.
Given that most people are using it in a web backend, I don't see very many people rushing to buy the Enterprise edition. The free stuff gets the job done, and if it didn't, we'd find something else to fawn over. That's the philosophy of FOSS: if you don't like it, roll your own!
The roads would be safer if we just didn't let stupid people drive.
...
I don't mean to downplay the negatives of DUI, but in a world where it's dangerous to drive completely sober, I think we're focusing our attention in the wrong places. There are too many cars on the road, and too many busy/stressed/airheaded people driving those cars. I would argue that one little Honda-racing subwoofer-destrorying yo-yo kid is far more deadly than a drunk driver. Just because the Honda kids are involves in less reported accidents than drunks, doesn't mean they actually cause less accidents. One asshole cutting someone off at high speed can cause an accident way back as everyone panics to avoid the ricer.
So should we arrest anyone driving an import car with more bass than treble ? I say YES! Who's with me ?
See ? People would think I'm crazy for suggesting that. So why is it less crazy to arrest people who've had a drink or two ? 0.08 may as well be a random number, some people are still straight at 0.15, and some people are still idiots at 0.00.
It's called BitTorrent.
Realistically, if NetFlix has a DVD for rent, chances are it's already been ripped to DivX/Xvid and floating around the intertubes.
I'm a former Dell employee, one that is both dangerously competent and speaks mostly good English (Canadian). On my team of about 16 techs, we had great techs and we had horrible techs. The great techs weren't always the fastest, and the horrible techs weren't always the slowest.
As the absolute fastest guy on the floor (by a good margin, too!), I kept getting asked what my "secret" was. The secret is confidence. Let's face it: computers aren't that complicated. I think my car is a lot harder to troubleshoot than any PC, because the car has a thousand little parts whereas a PC has a motherboard, processor, power supply, ram and a hard drive, maybe an expansion card or two. The difference between my 5 minute calls and my neighbor's 90-minute calls is that I wasn't worried about "over-fixing". Allow me to explain:
Assuming you've ruled out software issues, you're down to just hardware flakiness. If it takes 2 hours of diagnostics and fiddling around to get to 99% confidence, but only 5 or 10 minutes to reach 90% confidence, I say stop after that 5-10 mins and ship out whatever you think is necessary to fix it. Worst case, you'll replace a part that wasn't really defective, and the guys at the testing facility will put them in the refurb bin, not the end of the world considering that you've solved the problem in 1/20th of the time for both you and your customer.
Now software issues are a whole different ballgame, and I'm grateful I was in the corporate segment, mostly dealing with I.T. people and not the end user. Even then, my answer was simple: if it's acting wonky, just format the OS and you can call me back if it's still messed up.
The other thing that's terribly obvious, yet most agents never thought of, is to prioritize your troubleshooting. Go for the quick, broad strokes at first. A quick diagnostic of the hard drive and/or memory takes 2-3 minutes, so do those right away. There's hardly ever a need to run the full test suite unless the user is deaf, dumb and blind. Typically within the first 30 seconds of them relating their problems, the tech should already have a pretty good idea where to start looking.
In the end, the problem is that it's still a call center, and call centers are staffed with whoever is desperate enough to take the job, you can't cherry-pick your techs when you're staffing a 2000-phone building. Training isn't all bad, but much like driving lessons, they show you how to operate the equipment, but that doesn't make you an expert. For the overseas call centers, well, you get what you pay for.
Extremely useful ? Yes. Extremely replaceable ? Hell yes.
I run everything with noatime, the tradeoff is that for the handful of scenarios where I do need some sort of access time, I just have to store it elsewhere. For web logs, that timestamp is stored in the SQL DB along with the rest of my log processor's data, that way I can choose when to update it, only when it needs to be and without affecting every other file on my server.
Sure, there's a small performance hit on the DB, but with the large quantity of data transfer I go through, I'm sure the noatime benefits me far more than the cost of a DB transaction.
They use the same components as any other computer. You just pop off the cover and add RAM or swap the hard drive like any other.
I still don't understand why Apple insists on charging completely absurd prices for basic upgrades. I'd be more than happy to pay a premium for the platform, but don't insult me by charging 700$ extra for 3 extra gigs of ram, that I could get for about 120$ from Tigerdirect.
Their pricing makes me wish I could order a bare-bones iMac without RAM, HDD or even CPU, but that will never happen because I could simply put in my cheap components and resell the thing for a huge profit. And by "me" I mean "every bottom-feeding used-cell-phone-dealer-type scammer on the planet", so that's definitely not something Apple would want. They already danced with OEM way back in the old days and bailed out because their "partners" were making more money than Apple.
Do your worst, buddy. Having lived half my life in nightclubs, I'm definitely not afraid of a little strobe light.
If you want a non-lethal weapon to make people puke, just walk around with naked pics of Whoopi Goldberg!
At the end of the day, what matters the most is whether your team fits well together or not. I've recently found myself in a situation where my extensive coding skills are going to waste, just because the shop I work for, like to do things differently (read: fast and cheap, to stay competitive). Now there's nothing inherently wrong with that, because that's how the customers like it. I find myself struggling with what should be trivial work, simply because I haven't written such spaghetti code in oh, 20 years! It doesn't matter that I could probably code an operating system in Javascript (a very shitty operating system, indeed!), my daily challenge is to set aside my pattern-rich design style, and settle for the quickest solution that fits the requirements.
I guess my point is, no matter how specialized you are, 90% of the work out there is simple generic crap. Just because we're brilliant designers doesn't mean there's a client to appreciate our artful code. What the user sees is "I type stuff in, and click a button", whether you coded 4 levels of abstraction, or you're some half-brained VB 2.0 "developer"... it's all the same to their eyes, and the only thing that matters beyond that is the bottom line. This means we'll be seeing more and more junior (low wage) developers churning out garbage code that usually does what the client wants, that's simply the product of a competitive market.
That's no longer a data center, that's a closet!
I'm particularly excited about the swerving detection... that alone would eliminate 90% of SOBER drivers in my city.
How about a camera that can tell if the driver is a half-brained preppie trying to simultaneously talk on their Blackberry, do their makeup/shave, and is about to make a left turn from the right lane. It would be nice if the sensor could then activate a dash-mounted AK-47, but I'd settle for a wireless warning to nearby drivers. I can shoot the bastard myself.
Allow me to correct your typo:
"in the silos of their so-called investors"
You don't need brains to hold a patent, you just need to write something stupid on the application, and staple your fee check to it.
Okay so why should the whole OS be bogged down because of a bunch of lazy programmers who can't read API docs ? I say make it into a microkernel or whatever you want to call it, then let the shims take care of the offending legacy apps without defecating all over the system.
Things would run a lot smoother if we lowered our tolerance levels a teeny bit... Old app giving you problems ? Shoot it! Really need the old app, but can't run the original OS/Hardware and can't afford to update the app ? Shoot yourself, you don't belong in the fast-moving world of computing.
That has to be the first pro-Vista post I've read that didn't make me want to punch the poster. I can safely say that those features don't appeal to me all that much, because I tend to stick with my old-school work habits, but thank you for spelling them out properly, sans-marketing drivel.
What kind of dumb fuck would want to recycle a rusty, dented and scratched Ford Focus ? I don't even need to lock my doors anymore, even joyriding teenagers won't touch my car (it would probably stall and seize after ten feet).
Security through junk. It's like that SNL faux-mercial of a luxury car that looks like a pile of rust, only my car's inside is as ugly as the outside.
IANAA (I am not a anything!), but from my own personal experiences, if something is technically infeasible for the average half-brained VB consultant, then it's probably above what little technical understanding any court (or its "expert" witness) would have if such technology were to be used as evidence.
On one hand, you've got WORM tapes and optical write-once media. If you have to implement some sort of buffering to make these storage mediums happy, then you simply have to do it and that's the end of it.
The people drafting SOX aren't device driver coders, they're accountants and attorneys and other non-computer folk. If they said you had to tattoo each transaction on a live hamster and shoot them into space, you'd be in the same tight spot. Just like instant WORM logging, it's marginally feasible but terribly impractical using currently available technology.
It's very simple:
Sony backs Blu-Ray. Sony is evil; therefore Blu-Ray is evil.
Year after year, they churn out various forms of lock-in built into their numerous underwhelming products, yet they charge a premium for the brand name. At least the other cheap asian names like Acer, Hicon and Konka don't waste our time and money with trademarked superlatives and coked-up sales reps. I lump Sony in with those crap brands because the only halfway-decent thing they've sold in 30 years is the Playstation line. It has its flaws, but that product line is the one thing that doesn't automatically blow up or become obsolete every other year.
Sony built their reputation in the 70's and early 80's, and has spend every waking moment thereafter, milking that reputation for every penny on the backs of their customers.