As for the big woofers, they might attract thieves and cause problems that way:)
That was my initial reaction. Tapes are hard to sell, but stereos move like hotcakes. If someone were to case my car, they'd be going for the ear-candy first, grabbing the computer gadgets second because of the "why not" factor.
In fact, my stereo might actually make the tapes safer, because the thieves would have a full load of amps and speakers, they'd have no room left to grab the tapes:)
Actually if anti-virus peddlers are "creating the market", so to speak, that makes it easier to beat them up because they get doubly hurt by each unprotected PC; they lose a victim and a customer at the same time, but talking paranoid won't help at all. It doesn't matter who writes the viruses, what matters is that there is a financial incentive to do it. If we can take away that incentive, we take away the motivation behind this underground industry.
If McDonalds weren't making tons of money selling their crap, they would stop and find something else to do, like war-mongering or somethin'.
Every single bank I've dealt with, has done some sort of semi-secure bill registration. In some cases I even had to call a human being to add a bill to my account. If someone breaks into my online banking, the worst they could do is overpay my bills. That's very evil, but it doesn't benefit the intruder much at all, save for the sadistic pleasure of giving my money to my worst enemy: Rogers Telecom. If your bank lets anyone send money anywhere, you need to start shopping for a new bank.
Mind you, I'm in Canada. Things are different here. I'm obviously biased, but it seems I hear about so many stupid scams in the USA because of the unbridled capitalism and the mentality that government should not get involved. Not enough rules leads to an unbalanced game. Up here in the great north, there's a laundry list of consumer rights agencies, many of them government-funded, that will brow-beat banks into doing the right thing for their customer.
Oh, that's too easy. The 386 had no on-die cache, so screw it. All later Intel processors have had anywhere from 8kb (486) to 32kb (P-III). Even more interesting is how the P-IV's cache dropped to 20kb. When truly profiling a piece of code, be it an OS kernel or a realtime process, the standard is to tune it for an 8+8kb cache... half data, half instruction.
Spilling beyond the L1 cache can make a tenfold difference in loop performance if it doesn't stall much. In many cases, just reordering instructions to tiptoe around memory stalls can double or triple the speed of a tight loop. These types of optimizations become more and more important as we more toward bursty, high-latency memory like DDR2 and DDR3.
Few people code in assembler these days, but there is definitely a need for low-level gurus in select areas of the industry, and I'm not even talking about embedded systems, just PCs.
Re:I'm curious...
on
Project Arcade
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Well then, call me a murderer but I think there's a certain charm to seeing my old game ROMS being traded through the intertubes. I'd rather see people enjoying my creations "illegally" than to watch them rot away in a New Mexico landfill like so many other Atari titles.
I guess that's the difference between creating for love of the art vs working for money. Eons ago, game programmers were "ninjas"; today, most of them are just wage-slaves in a big faceless machine. Warren Spector, John Carmack, Shigeru Miyamoto, Hideo Kojima... good lord, Sid Meier! Brilliant people who lust for the challenge and push the genres that everyone else merely copies.
The people who are pissed off about abandonware and casual piracy are people who don't like what they do for a living. All the money in the world won't make them happy.
These are all common-sense tips, but having them all automated and tallied is a great little helper. I'll most definitely be checking all my current sites with YSlow to see how my design practices hold up.
Especially for "indie" sites with small audiences, responsiveness can be a big selling point because you don't have that brand "power" to draw people in, but a snappy site will be noticed.
Right... so what does Vista do for YOU, better than XP did five years ago ?
I remember a long long time ago, I was surfing on a puny little 96mb 200mhz Pentium. The World Wide Web may have changed a bit since then, but it's still just a bunch of text with a few pictures mixed in. A quad-core 3.2ghz monster doesn't do it 64 times faster today, instead we throw more garbage at it to "make use" of the extra power.
The problem with Moore's law is simple: computers may evolve quickly, but humans sure don't. We're as dumb as we were ten years ago. Life on earth is pretty much the same as it was before, it just costs more money now. We consume more and more, and produce less and less. Why aren't these "thinking machines" doing our work for us ? Productivity is supposed to have increased, but what have we done with the excess ?
If anything, cheap laptops are a roadblock to progress. We're right on track to becoming telecom slaves, just the way they want us.
When supposed bastions of higher learning are overtly advocating suppression of rights and the veritable amputation of knowledge, it's time to start shopping for a new alma mater.
It's bad enough that universities sell your info to credit firms, telemarketers and foreign governments. Selling out to the DMCA abusers, while being a logical next step, is pretty much the last nail in the coffin. The greatest minds are those who aren't caged in by the artificial boundaries of corporate anti-culture.
Now I'm not advocating the free flow of copyrighted material on campus (at least, not in this post), but I believe the network admins should simply filter P2P traffic to the best (or least) of their ability, just for QoS reasons, and quietly enjoy their status of common carrier that they've always had. It is not the admins' job to defend someone else's copyrights. A million lawyers with a million DMCA laws might annoy the hell out of you, but there is nothing they can do against anyone but the actual person committing the crime. Don't let their money tell you otherwise.
I really wish they'd advertise this stuff to average Joes and Janes because the levy effectively makes it "OK" to download and burn music. It's a step in the direction of socialized music, which the red-fearing brainwashed Americans are quick to attack but really, it's not such a bad thing. Yes, it means we're involuntarily supporting the garbage "artists" that make up 90% of the industry, assuming any of the funds ever make it through the administrative jungle, but if it means the RIAA can't sue me anymore, I'm quite happy! It might be protection money in some sense, but the cost is low compared to the amounts they extort in court settlements.
Now I just want to see it used in court, where the 8 or 80 year old defendant says "Your Honor, I am legally allowed to pirate music thanks to the blank media levy. The various associations representing the artists made their money when I bought the pack of media at Best Buy, long before I ever burned a single audio file." The cherry on top would be for the CRIA attorneys' heads to explode. They are the ones who pushed for a levy in the first place.
I wonder how long we'll have to wait until they implement something similar for video copying. Here's 10 cents per DVD-R disc, eff you MPAA!
I'm absolutely certain (without proof) that the act of blogging predates these hypocrites!
The difference is that back in the day, you had to be well-versed in the technology to pull it off. You couldn't just download Wordpress, wear a yuppie shirt and call yourself a genius back then, you had to write your own scripts/software, or do it by hand with HTML and a whole lot of patience.
I know I was doing it, with a randy assortment of little management apps and batch files (I was a DOS geek at the time). My design skills were puke, but it's safe to say my site was updated extremely often for a vanity site; more than my present blog, that's for sure. This was in 1996, the good old days when the biggest MP3 stash online was bongo.tamu.edu and animated gifs were all the rage.
Did I make any money with that early "blog" ? Hell no! Does that disqualify me as a blogger ? To the WSJ, probably!
I don't understand this logic that a "full featured" operating system has to be slow. What the hell are you OS designers doing that's eating up all the juice ? Just because Windows XP preloads a gazillion binaries doesn't mean it's a good idea.
An operating system's job is to mediate access to hardware and software resources. The fact that every modern OS is madly bloated is just proof that the world's OS developers are ADHD suburban twits getting lazy and gratuitous with fluffy GUI features, when really they should be focusing on two core things: device drivers and the almighty scheduler.
Just think about it: Windows Vista is, on average, 10% slower than XP for generic tasks and gaming. Why the hell is that ? Someone fucked with the kernel and stuck things in it that don't belong there, like that ever-annoying popup security model.
It's like any other optimization job: you tighten the hell out of the most frequently-called code snippets like the scheduler and memory manager. If your scheduler is so contorted and polluted that it can't even fit in the L1 Cache anymore, you should be beaten with your keyboard!
The BeOS guys probably had a plan, along with some good brains and coding skill, and they stuck to that plan. If a feature isn't in the plan, it doesn't get coded; the system stays lean and fast, and you let the application developers handle all the shiny stuff. That's how it used to be, and still is in some circles... but not Windows nor Linux. That's where we went wrong.
I've always said it, and I'll keep saying it until malware takes my baby away, but every time someone makes a smarter anti-virus, some teenager will create a better virus. It's the computer equivalent to pesticide: it kills one batch of bugs, but the next generation grows immune.
Meanwhile, I avoid ALL forms of anti-malware tools, and magically I rarely get infected. When I do, I notice pretty quickly because I actually pay attention to what my PC is doing. If a certain task (or game) is used to running smoothly, and all of a sudden it starts wigging out, I'll know something is up. It's not like malware has ever cared to be spartan when it comes to CPU and memory usage.
If McAfee could stop selling anti-virus software, and instead just sell a book or instructive video on how to not be stupid and how to not click on all those sexy ActiveX prompts, well first of all they'd go out of business because they're a sloppy ass company, but secondly maybe some people would actually develop the ability to not click everything under the sun.
As it stands, I am of ZERO value to malware authors because my PC doesn't get involved in their spam/botnets, nor do I spread the plague to my friends and coworkers. I'm also worth ZERO to the anti-virus companies. If more people could self-police their PC like me, it would put a dent in both the virus and anti-virus businesses and as a result, it would slow the evolution of malware.
If two kids are fighting over a silly toy, when you take away the toy, they find something else to occupy them. Virus authors are no different. Businesses are no different. Humankind as a whole is no different.
Well then why don't you come change the oil and timing belt on my Ford and I'll load Office 2007 on your PC:)
People are quick to bitch about Microsoft's actions, but what the hell is a non-tech-savvy user doing installing a trial of Office 2007 anyway ? If they already have 2000 or 2003 preinstalled on their system, they should stick with that. The compatibility readers are available for free, as they've always been since Office 95! If a person doesn't know that, and doesn't think of backing up their important files on a regular basis, or AT THE VERY LEAST backing up before replacing a major piece of software, welllll... too bad so sad, they should have gotten someone qualified to do it for them. We techs didn't go to school, read every technical journal known to man, and spend man-years practicing our fine art for NOTHING, so why does the average joe assume he can do everything we do ?
Hey there sonny, when you're as old as I am (27), and you find that your brain forgets stuff because it's so full of techno bullshit, you too will appreciate the weekly re-runs:)
The best part about history is how they teach the useless bits, like the early military and colonial aspects of a nation. Kids know all about the founding fathers and world wars, but what the hell do they know about the thousands of other influential people and events that didn't carry weapons or invade other people's land ?
This isn't just US history, it's the same here in Canada. What the hell do I care about some inbred french colonist from the dark ages whose claim to fame was simply being wealthier than the other bums ? History repeats itself, so why aren't we teaching kids about the smart, revolutionary and forward-thinking people of the past ? It takes a lot more than guns and money to build a future.
Choose CS or IT should not be an Ask Slashdot, it should be your own decision. What do you WANT to be doing ? Do you want to do cerebral research stuff, or would you be happier fixing computers and working with users ? What kind of demand is there in your area, and would you be willing to relocate for a true CS position ?
IT is cheap and plentiful, and you can find work in a heartbeat (as long as you're not too picky). CS is a whole different ballgame, it's somewhat ethereal and from a retarded middle manager's perspective, it doesn't directly translate into profits. On the other hand, there are quite a few retarded managers who demand CS qualifications for glorified IT work (particularly government and other big-money-small-brain entities).
You might as well have asked Vi vs Emacs.... you'd get the same kind of fuzzy, emotional, largely useless response.
Crackers will crack whatever exists. The kiddies might be obsessed with popularity, but the real genius crackers merely hunger for the challenge. They don't do it for money (or pussy lol), they do it because they can.
If that's truly how your code works, you need to fire your boss!
Every project should budget resources to future-proof the actual code by cleaning it up and writing adequate documentation, and I don't mean a cookie-cutter paragraph for every single function. I mean do what needs to be done to ensure that the next time you have to work on that code, you won't waste twice as much time re-learning what it does.
Managers who ship code the minute it compiles are either assuming the project will never be revisited, or (most likely) they are complete imbeciles.
I'm doing exactly that these days, I left the locally painful field of consulting and joined a small (but feisty) web dev firm about a month ago. At this point, every project I touch usually starts with some level of refactoring, or at the very least reformatting because the last guy's coding style is reminiscent of an HTML file bounced between a Frontpage twit and a Dreamweaver twit several times. The best part is that CSS is used, but often times it's hard-coded right in the tags rather than an actual stylesheet, so changing one color involves hunting dozens of bits of crap all over the place.
Elegant code can be elusive, because well, if we didn't need to get creative with the code, we'd all be out of our jobs. The important thing is to consider who's going to work on that code, write it so that anyone can read through it and make edits without slaughtering cute furry animals. You will thank yourself two years from now, when a client asks you to change some widget or toggle a default value and it takes you 15 minutes instead of 15 hours.
Now I don't believe in shrink-wrapped code patterns, but I do believe in a sane level of abstraction and organization. Most importantly, I try to keep things simple on the surface, by using descriptive names and short inline blurbs that explain the trickier aspects of a function, or give usage examples. Now this is one particular peeve I find with much of the C++ code in the open-source world, it's undocumented and spread out over a gazillion little files. I'm sure people have arguments for that sort of thing, but I fail to see the point in having ten one-page files when they would logically work better as one. It sometimes seems like people break up their C++ files into smaller chunks arbitrarily, rather than pursuing any particular goal like code reuse, team development or development-style-of-the-month. It's far easier to scroll through a long document or use text-search, than it is to wrestle a dozen open tabs, each featuring interlocked code.
Well then those fans should be pelted with Timbits!
A sign of maturity in a band, or any art form, is evolution and experimentation. If you cease to innovate, you cease to be an artist. If the only motivation is selling more copies, then it's just a product, and they are not a band but merely manufacturers.
The telecommunications industry isn't a competitive market, at least not in North America. There's nothing about a government-mandated cartel that looks anything like healthy competition. When a viable competitor comes along, the giant telecoms wag their favorite lobbyist's tail and get the government to help them squash the newcomer. We'd have cheaper telecoms if the little guys stood any chance.
I don't know very many people who look at their 300$ monthly telecom bills and say "God do I ever love my phone, cable, cell and internet providers". Gee, with a fast internet connection, I could do VoIP and IPTV and cut that bill in half. With a WiFi phone I could be down to 1/4 of the original cost, assuming this new hyperfast internet access costs no more or less than the current crappy DSL and Cable offerings. I could even offer these solutions to others, and start an IP telecom business on the cheap, but there is no way in hell I could ever have enough money to defend myself in court against a batallion of Big Bell lawyers. There is effectively no competition, because nobody can afford to play.
It's funny that you mention Dell. They just laid off about 10% of their workforce because they didn't meet their earnings forecast. Just because you're moving record units doesn't mean you're making record profits.
Bus speeds do suck, but as consumers we haven't made a case for faster buses, at least not where it matters to the manufacturers: the bottom line. It took forever to get PCI-Express into homes, because the average human doesn't know the first thing about the system bus. They just know their old gadgets don't fit in the new computer. We need a killer app.
The same applies to RAM... people used to bitch and moan about having to buy all new DDR ram back in the day, and again with DDR2. They don't see a direct correlation to real-world performance (which honestly, is quite minimal), so they have a hard time throwing money at something they can't see. I hear people every week who ask me "If I put another gig of ram, how much faster will my PC be ?" and all I can answer is "depends". People don't want fuzzy answers, they want "X dollars will get you Y more zingzangs" and most things in a PC are just theoretical limits, highly dependent on a number of variables like what other hardware you have, and what kind of user you are.
Now if we could have some neat thingy like live high-def (1080i/p) streaming TV, or some hot new game, or any other must-have feature that explicitly needs fast busses, only then will there be any sort of acknowledgment from the industry giants and mainstream adoption.
Slashdot Mirror
Yup... I don't know what I'd do without my Dutch proxy server. Worth every penny!
As for the big woofers, they might attract thieves and cause problems that way :)
:)
That was my initial reaction. Tapes are hard to sell, but stereos move like hotcakes. If someone were to case my car, they'd be going for the ear-candy first, grabbing the computer gadgets second because of the "why not" factor.
In fact, my stereo might actually make the tapes safer, because the thieves would have a full load of amps and speakers, they'd have no room left to grab the tapes
Actually if anti-virus peddlers are "creating the market", so to speak, that makes it easier to beat them up because they get doubly hurt by each unprotected PC; they lose a victim and a customer at the same time, but talking paranoid won't help at all. It doesn't matter who writes the viruses, what matters is that there is a financial incentive to do it. If we can take away that incentive, we take away the motivation behind this underground industry.
If McDonalds weren't making tons of money selling their crap, they would stop and find something else to do, like war-mongering or somethin'.
Every single bank I've dealt with, has done some sort of semi-secure bill registration. In some cases I even had to call a human being to add a bill to my account. If someone breaks into my online banking, the worst they could do is overpay my bills. That's very evil, but it doesn't benefit the intruder much at all, save for the sadistic pleasure of giving my money to my worst enemy: Rogers Telecom. If your bank lets anyone send money anywhere, you need to start shopping for a new bank.
Mind you, I'm in Canada. Things are different here. I'm obviously biased, but it seems I hear about so many stupid scams in the USA because of the unbridled capitalism and the mentality that government should not get involved. Not enough rules leads to an unbalanced game. Up here in the great north, there's a laundry list of consumer rights agencies, many of them government-funded, that will brow-beat banks into doing the right thing for their customer.
Oh, that's too easy. The 386 had no on-die cache, so screw it. All later Intel processors have had anywhere from 8kb (486) to 32kb (P-III). Even more interesting is how the P-IV's cache dropped to 20kb. When truly profiling a piece of code, be it an OS kernel or a realtime process, the standard is to tune it for an 8+8kb cache... half data, half instruction.
Spilling beyond the L1 cache can make a tenfold difference in loop performance if it doesn't stall much. In many cases, just reordering instructions to tiptoe around memory stalls can double or triple the speed of a tight loop. These types of optimizations become more and more important as we more toward bursty, high-latency memory like DDR2 and DDR3.
Few people code in assembler these days, but there is definitely a need for low-level gurus in select areas of the industry, and I'm not even talking about embedded systems, just PCs.
Well then, call me a murderer but I think there's a certain charm to seeing my old game ROMS being traded through the intertubes. I'd rather see people enjoying my creations "illegally" than to watch them rot away in a New Mexico landfill like so many other Atari titles.
I guess that's the difference between creating for love of the art vs working for money. Eons ago, game programmers were "ninjas"; today, most of them are just wage-slaves in a big faceless machine. Warren Spector, John Carmack, Shigeru Miyamoto, Hideo Kojima... good lord, Sid Meier! Brilliant people who lust for the challenge and push the genres that everyone else merely copies.
The people who are pissed off about abandonware and casual piracy are people who don't like what they do for a living. All the money in the world won't make them happy.
These are all common-sense tips, but having them all automated and tallied is a great little helper. I'll most definitely be checking all my current sites with YSlow to see how my design practices hold up.
Especially for "indie" sites with small audiences, responsiveness can be a big selling point because you don't have that brand "power" to draw people in, but a snappy site will be noticed.
Amen brother.
Right... so what does Vista do for YOU, better than XP did five years ago ?
I remember a long long time ago, I was surfing on a puny little 96mb 200mhz Pentium. The World Wide Web may have changed a bit since then, but it's still just a bunch of text with a few pictures mixed in. A quad-core 3.2ghz monster doesn't do it 64 times faster today, instead we throw more garbage at it to "make use" of the extra power.
The problem with Moore's law is simple: computers may evolve quickly, but humans sure don't. We're as dumb as we were ten years ago. Life on earth is pretty much the same as it was before, it just costs more money now. We consume more and more, and produce less and less. Why aren't these "thinking machines" doing our work for us ? Productivity is supposed to have increased, but what have we done with the excess ?
If anything, cheap laptops are a roadblock to progress. We're right on track to becoming telecom slaves, just the way they want us.
When supposed bastions of higher learning are overtly advocating suppression of rights and the veritable amputation of knowledge, it's time to start shopping for a new alma mater.
It's bad enough that universities sell your info to credit firms, telemarketers and foreign governments. Selling out to the DMCA abusers, while being a logical next step, is pretty much the last nail in the coffin. The greatest minds are those who aren't caged in by the artificial boundaries of corporate anti-culture.
Now I'm not advocating the free flow of copyrighted material on campus (at least, not in this post), but I believe the network admins should simply filter P2P traffic to the best (or least) of their ability, just for QoS reasons, and quietly enjoy their status of common carrier that they've always had. It is not the admins' job to defend someone else's copyrights. A million lawyers with a million DMCA laws might annoy the hell out of you, but there is nothing they can do against anyone but the actual person committing the crime. Don't let their money tell you otherwise.
I really wish they'd advertise this stuff to average Joes and Janes because the levy effectively makes it "OK" to download and burn music. It's a step in the direction of socialized music, which the red-fearing brainwashed Americans are quick to attack but really, it's not such a bad thing. Yes, it means we're involuntarily supporting the garbage "artists" that make up 90% of the industry, assuming any of the funds ever make it through the administrative jungle, but if it means the RIAA can't sue me anymore, I'm quite happy! It might be protection money in some sense, but the cost is low compared to the amounts they extort in court settlements.
Now I just want to see it used in court, where the 8 or 80 year old defendant says "Your Honor, I am legally allowed to pirate music thanks to the blank media levy. The various associations representing the artists made their money when I bought the pack of media at Best Buy, long before I ever burned a single audio file." The cherry on top would be for the CRIA attorneys' heads to explode. They are the ones who pushed for a levy in the first place.
I wonder how long we'll have to wait until they implement something similar for video copying. Here's 10 cents per DVD-R disc, eff you MPAA!
I'm absolutely certain (without proof) that the act of blogging predates these hypocrites!
The difference is that back in the day, you had to be well-versed in the technology to pull it off. You couldn't just download Wordpress, wear a yuppie shirt and call yourself a genius back then, you had to write your own scripts/software, or do it by hand with HTML and a whole lot of patience.
I know I was doing it, with a randy assortment of little management apps and batch files (I was a DOS geek at the time). My design skills were puke, but it's safe to say my site was updated extremely often for a vanity site; more than my present blog, that's for sure. This was in 1996, the good old days when the biggest MP3 stash online was bongo.tamu.edu and animated gifs were all the rage.
Did I make any money with that early "blog" ? Hell no! Does that disqualify me as a blogger ? To the WSJ, probably!
I don't understand this logic that a "full featured" operating system has to be slow. What the hell are you OS designers doing that's eating up all the juice ? Just because Windows XP preloads a gazillion binaries doesn't mean it's a good idea.
An operating system's job is to mediate access to hardware and software resources. The fact that every modern OS is madly bloated is just proof that the world's OS developers are ADHD suburban twits getting lazy and gratuitous with fluffy GUI features, when really they should be focusing on two core things: device drivers and the almighty scheduler.
Just think about it: Windows Vista is, on average, 10% slower than XP for generic tasks and gaming. Why the hell is that ? Someone fucked with the kernel and stuck things in it that don't belong there, like that ever-annoying popup security model.
It's like any other optimization job: you tighten the hell out of the most frequently-called code snippets like the scheduler and memory manager. If your scheduler is so contorted and polluted that it can't even fit in the L1 Cache anymore, you should be beaten with your keyboard!
The BeOS guys probably had a plan, along with some good brains and coding skill, and they stuck to that plan. If a feature isn't in the plan, it doesn't get coded; the system stays lean and fast, and you let the application developers handle all the shiny stuff. That's how it used to be, and still is in some circles... but not Windows nor Linux. That's where we went wrong.
I've always said it, and I'll keep saying it until malware takes my baby away, but every time someone makes a smarter anti-virus, some teenager will create a better virus. It's the computer equivalent to pesticide: it kills one batch of bugs, but the next generation grows immune.
Meanwhile, I avoid ALL forms of anti-malware tools, and magically I rarely get infected. When I do, I notice pretty quickly because I actually pay attention to what my PC is doing. If a certain task (or game) is used to running smoothly, and all of a sudden it starts wigging out, I'll know something is up. It's not like malware has ever cared to be spartan when it comes to CPU and memory usage.
If McAfee could stop selling anti-virus software, and instead just sell a book or instructive video on how to not be stupid and how to not click on all those sexy ActiveX prompts, well first of all they'd go out of business because they're a sloppy ass company, but secondly maybe some people would actually develop the ability to not click everything under the sun.
As it stands, I am of ZERO value to malware authors because my PC doesn't get involved in their spam/botnets, nor do I spread the plague to my friends and coworkers. I'm also worth ZERO to the anti-virus companies. If more people could self-police their PC like me, it would put a dent in both the virus and anti-virus businesses and as a result, it would slow the evolution of malware.
If two kids are fighting over a silly toy, when you take away the toy, they find something else to occupy them. Virus authors are no different. Businesses are no different. Humankind as a whole is no different.
So you're saying the RSA key fob isn't another useless insecure layer of crap ? Have you even HEARD their sales pitch ?
Well then why don't you come change the oil and timing belt on my Ford and I'll load Office 2007 on your PC :)
People are quick to bitch about Microsoft's actions, but what the hell is a non-tech-savvy user doing installing a trial of Office 2007 anyway ? If they already have 2000 or 2003 preinstalled on their system, they should stick with that. The compatibility readers are available for free, as they've always been since Office 95! If a person doesn't know that, and doesn't think of backing up their important files on a regular basis, or AT THE VERY LEAST backing up before replacing a major piece of software, welllll... too bad so sad, they should have gotten someone qualified to do it for them. We techs didn't go to school, read every technical journal known to man, and spend man-years practicing our fine art for NOTHING, so why does the average joe assume he can do everything we do ?
Hey there sonny, when you're as old as I am (27), and you find that your brain forgets stuff because it's so full of techno bullshit, you too will appreciate the weekly re-runs :)
The best part about history is how they teach the useless bits, like the early military and colonial aspects of a nation. Kids know all about the founding fathers and world wars, but what the hell do they know about the thousands of other influential people and events that didn't carry weapons or invade other people's land ?
This isn't just US history, it's the same here in Canada. What the hell do I care about some inbred french colonist from the dark ages whose claim to fame was simply being wealthier than the other bums ? History repeats itself, so why aren't we teaching kids about the smart, revolutionary and forward-thinking people of the past ? It takes a lot more than guns and money to build a future.
Choose CS or IT should not be an Ask Slashdot, it should be your own decision. What do you WANT to be doing ? Do you want to do cerebral research stuff, or would you be happier fixing computers and working with users ? What kind of demand is there in your area, and would you be willing to relocate for a true CS position ?
IT is cheap and plentiful, and you can find work in a heartbeat (as long as you're not too picky). CS is a whole different ballgame, it's somewhat ethereal and from a retarded middle manager's perspective, it doesn't directly translate into profits. On the other hand, there are quite a few retarded managers who demand CS qualifications for glorified IT work (particularly government and other big-money-small-brain entities).
You might as well have asked Vi vs Emacs.... you'd get the same kind of fuzzy, emotional, largely useless response.
Crackers will crack whatever exists. The kiddies might be obsessed with popularity, but the real genius crackers merely hunger for the challenge. They don't do it for money (or pussy lol), they do it because they can.
If that's truly how your code works, you need to fire your boss!
Every project should budget resources to future-proof the actual code by cleaning it up and writing adequate documentation, and I don't mean a cookie-cutter paragraph for every single function. I mean do what needs to be done to ensure that the next time you have to work on that code, you won't waste twice as much time re-learning what it does.
Managers who ship code the minute it compiles are either assuming the project will never be revisited, or (most likely) they are complete imbeciles.
I'm doing exactly that these days, I left the locally painful field of consulting and joined a small (but feisty) web dev firm about a month ago. At this point, every project I touch usually starts with some level of refactoring, or at the very least reformatting because the last guy's coding style is reminiscent of an HTML file bounced between a Frontpage twit and a Dreamweaver twit several times. The best part is that CSS is used, but often times it's hard-coded right in the tags rather than an actual stylesheet, so changing one color involves hunting dozens of bits of crap all over the place.
Elegant code can be elusive, because well, if we didn't need to get creative with the code, we'd all be out of our jobs. The important thing is to consider who's going to work on that code, write it so that anyone can read through it and make edits without slaughtering cute furry animals. You will thank yourself two years from now, when a client asks you to change some widget or toggle a default value and it takes you 15 minutes instead of 15 hours.
Now I don't believe in shrink-wrapped code patterns, but I do believe in a sane level of abstraction and organization. Most importantly, I try to keep things simple on the surface, by using descriptive names and short inline blurbs that explain the trickier aspects of a function, or give usage examples. Now this is one particular peeve I find with much of the C++ code in the open-source world, it's undocumented and spread out over a gazillion little files. I'm sure people have arguments for that sort of thing, but I fail to see the point in having ten one-page files when they would logically work better as one. It sometimes seems like people break up their C++ files into smaller chunks arbitrarily, rather than pursuing any particular goal like code reuse, team development or development-style-of-the-month. It's far easier to scroll through a long document or use text-search, than it is to wrestle a dozen open tabs, each featuring interlocked code.
Well then those fans should be pelted with Timbits!
A sign of maturity in a band, or any art form, is evolution and experimentation. If you cease to innovate, you cease to be an artist. If the only motivation is selling more copies, then it's just a product, and they are not a band but merely manufacturers.
The telecommunications industry isn't a competitive market, at least not in North America. There's nothing about a government-mandated cartel that looks anything like healthy competition. When a viable competitor comes along, the giant telecoms wag their favorite lobbyist's tail and get the government to help them squash the newcomer. We'd have cheaper telecoms if the little guys stood any chance.
I don't know very many people who look at their 300$ monthly telecom bills and say "God do I ever love my phone, cable, cell and internet providers". Gee, with a fast internet connection, I could do VoIP and IPTV and cut that bill in half. With a WiFi phone I could be down to 1/4 of the original cost, assuming this new hyperfast internet access costs no more or less than the current crappy DSL and Cable offerings. I could even offer these solutions to others, and start an IP telecom business on the cheap, but there is no way in hell I could ever have enough money to defend myself in court against a batallion of Big Bell lawyers. There is effectively no competition, because nobody can afford to play.
It's funny that you mention Dell. They just laid off about 10% of their workforce because they didn't meet their earnings forecast. Just because you're moving record units doesn't mean you're making record profits.
Bus speeds do suck, but as consumers we haven't made a case for faster buses, at least not where it matters to the manufacturers: the bottom line. It took forever to get PCI-Express into homes, because the average human doesn't know the first thing about the system bus. They just know their old gadgets don't fit in the new computer. We need a killer app.
The same applies to RAM... people used to bitch and moan about having to buy all new DDR ram back in the day, and again with DDR2. They don't see a direct correlation to real-world performance (which honestly, is quite minimal), so they have a hard time throwing money at something they can't see. I hear people every week who ask me "If I put another gig of ram, how much faster will my PC be ?" and all I can answer is "depends". People don't want fuzzy answers, they want "X dollars will get you Y more zingzangs" and most things in a PC are just theoretical limits, highly dependent on a number of variables like what other hardware you have, and what kind of user you are.
Now if we could have some neat thingy like live high-def (1080i/p) streaming TV, or some hot new game, or any other must-have feature that explicitly needs fast busses, only then will there be any sort of acknowledgment from the industry giants and mainstream adoption.