If you have make the horrible error of trying to open a network drive when the network it's on is no longer available (you know, like the huge number of people who use wifi on their laptops), Finder will freeze for minutes at a time.
Sadly that's not the finders' fault. It has more to do with insisting on having drives mounted as kernel devices when all I wanted to do was copy one damn file from one damn machine. This is the one area where OSX has always sucked much worse than that peer networking (and unc file conventions) that appeared as part of Windows 95.
Unfortunately, and despite the efforts of things like Fuse, I don't see Apple fessing up to their file sharing sucking dogs balls in order to fix it. And not to forget, this would take engineers off some damn phone project as well.
Mind you - there's a startup in there... make file sharing for OSX that doesn't hugely suck.
I have an ADVC-55. It is a thing of rare wonder. Best of all you put the video in one end, firewire in the other... and that's it. You're up. No power bricks, no pissing around, it just goes.
I last used it about a year ago, but remember it being appreciably better than I thought it would be. It even has an almost debian like (gui) packaging thing that... works. Functioning X server too, but not rootless IIRC.
As a former member of the original Exchange group, I will make a prediction right now that NOBODY will come up with anything usable with the Exchange protocals that they can use to make a competing application.
Stop the press - software engineer, sorry, programmer... comes onto Slashdot and says "Ha! I wrote the shittest code you've ever fucking seen! Even with written protocols you have sod all chance of implementing something that interoperates... good luck suckaz!"
Sir, madame, whatever... I commend you for your honesty, truly a Slashdot first!
Not "Steve Ballmer is a Tool" but "Which tool did they use to make the presentation"? It appears to be a happy halfway house between custom built flash and the horror that is PPT on the web.
In fact if anyone can think of such things I'd be keen to know in general... not just in this specific case.
obtaining accurate specs for these programs has become a huge challenge... When I asked my boss (the head Sales manager) for specs, he responded saying that it was my responsibility to determine what was needed."
You're trolling, right? I hope so.
Yes, it is hard. Much harder than actually writing the code. Yes, it is your problem. Software Engineering is a profession. That's why you and I get paid the big (in theory) bucks... to make hard things your problem. And solve that problem.
Without going into too much depth the process you have described (accurate specs, make software, test software against spec) is known as the waterfall model and is famously difficult to do for non-trivial projects. Can be done, don't get me wrong, but very very hard. Better, probably, would be to take an iterative approach: Take the word doc and bash together a prototype (RealBasic, Ruby on Rails, whatever); drop the prototype in front of the users and make notes as they say "nooo! not like that, it needs to do X, Y and Z"; feed back into the prototype and try again. Finally use this prototype as a "living" requirements document. The hard part is persuading the pointy haired types that that prototype is, in fact, not the completed piece of software. Yeah, good luck with that.
Not wishing to sound offensive but it sounds like your company needs to hire someone with more experience to act as a project manager. There's nothing wrong with writing code to spec (no matter how it's translated) and letting it be someone else's job to keep the project on track and ensure the users get what they want. And, in case you hadn't noticed, this job is hard f'kin work.
And let me know if you still think the ODF is merely a 'memory dump in angle brackets'. I have read and understood. I repent. It basically is XML with styling and if it's here already we're not going to get any better. Embedding ODF readers in browsers would be quicker and cleaner than further extending CSS all the way out to spreadsheets and what have you. Well... here's hoping.
Well thank Christ for that, I appear to have dragged someone who knows what they're talking about out of retirement. No "PM" system on Slashdot, obviously.
Right. I have some reading to do. Nice post, thanks.
Since ODF is an open and free standard, converters can be written between ODF and XHTML+CSS
This may be true, but I suspect it's not. The combination of XHTML and CSS are very much about putting the information in once place, along with information about what the information *is*, and a description of how to display it somewhere else. It's going to take a big leap for a manufacturer of word processors to separate "this word is italicised" from "this word is italicised because that's how it displays on this one medium". I know styles, and even rudimentary style inheritence have been a part of word processors for a long time, but taking it seriously and providing a GUI that makes it intuitive for Rhonda in HR to understand what she's doing is a non-trivial pastime.
The thing that bothers me is not the software, but rather what we're doing with the results of people's labour... mankind's f'kin intellectual property. I hate that it's currently tied into giving Microsoft a couple of billion dollars every month, and I hate that when historians come to find out what happened they're going to find a big black hole in our knowledge base. But if we are to replace this clearly shitty state of affairs I'd rather it were with something appreciably better rather than merely different.
I had been thinking that ODF was "obviously" a good thing until I read the rant by Opera's CTO about how shit both standards are (a memory dump between angle brackets), and how the correct way would be to go for XHTML with CSS formatting.
Like, seriously, why not? Have we not been here before, going "so we need to separate content from display" and was not the eventual solution actually rather good. It took ten years or so to get adopted, but nobody is denying that css has made the web a less obnoxious place. There are no technical reasons why it can't be extended to all aspects of "office" publishing/collaboration, and indeed a book has been published using XML+CSS.
I know that ODF is "here now", and it must be an improvement over Office's internal format... but I'm concerned that standardising on ODF will come to bite us, the IT industry, in our collective butts sooner rather than later. We need something clear. Obvious. Simple. And from this some genuine innovation will come - remember that?
This all seems well and good, but wouldn't it be trivial for someone to pull a DNS cache poisoning stunt and redirect openid.mydomain.com to their servers instead? From what I recall of SSL/TLS the thing that prevents this from happening is if one has a certificate and the client implementation actually bothers to check it... but nobody has a certificate, they're expensive and a pain in the arse.
So, seriously, what stops this from being the most exploitable authentication system ever?
The whole point of the open source movement is to allow alternative approaches to flourish and be chosen (or not) on their merits. It's what OSS does to raise quality. The biggest problem KDE and Gnome always had was that they continually trod on each others' toes. So, let them go their separate ways - let KDE be configurable and Gnome be "designed for idiots". See who wins. Either which way the variety is good for OSS itself.
I can't imagine a company putting something as vital as email entirely outside it's walls...
Y'know, five years from now we'll be saying that you can imagine a company doing something that vital itself. It's going to be a bad time to be a sysadmin, believe me.
I was about to post and say the same thing (ObAol: me too!). There also seems to be quite a lot of these:
"enables the enforcement of the usage policy set by content owners"
In the article. Which to me says "if the content industry says so, then yes". Clearly Vista was designed to serve the content industry and not the consumer. But then that's not exactly news, is it?
I for one am not sure I like the possible directions this research could take.
Well, quite. Gene replacement therapy with ones that aren't compatible with life. At all. A project run by the US DOD. "Bound to end in tears" doesn't even start to cover it. Great.
Yes indeed it is. The cool kids see externally provided services and say "mashup! mashup! mashup!", the old timers see them and say "risk! risk! risk!".
Nothing at all is stopping you from running proprietary code on a GNU/Linux system Exactly. I looked at this and thought "yeah, it's called userland". I'm quite happy to believe Dvorak is this stupid but not Ballmer et al.
As an aside I've been off on holiday and have come back to see this deal... and I'm not sure I fully get it. Like, if MS want to let SLES be more interoperable surely all they need to do is open their protocol specs up more - which, IIRC, they actually have to do under the antitrust settlement. Next thing I know MS are giving Novell money...
If Apple released a new iPod with FairPlay 2.0 that didn't play any FairPlay 1.0 files, the torches and pitchforks would be out.
But that's because PlaysForSure only ever sold about eight songs. Breaking FairPlay would involve fucking over probably a couple of hundred thousand consumers... and putting the future of iTMS in danger, to say the least.
....were on slashdot a few years back hand soldering resistors onto logic boards to get their first batch out the door? If it was, well, way to go back bedroom hardware hackers! There is hope beyond yet another godforsaken web project yet:)
Slashdot Mirror
If you have make the horrible error of trying to open a network drive when the network it's on is no longer available (you know, like the huge number of people who use wifi on their laptops), Finder will freeze for minutes at a time.
Sadly that's not the finders' fault. It has more to do with insisting on having drives mounted as kernel devices when all I wanted to do was copy one damn file from one damn machine. This is the one area where OSX has always sucked much worse than that peer networking (and unc file conventions) that appeared as part of Windows 95.
Unfortunately, and despite the efforts of things like Fuse, I don't see Apple fessing up to their file sharing sucking dogs balls in order to fix it. And not to forget, this would take engineers off some damn phone project as well.
Mind you - there's a startup in there... make file sharing for OSX that doesn't hugely suck.
Dave
I have an ADVC-55. It is a thing of rare wonder. Best of all you put the video in one end, firewire in the other ... and that's it. You're up. No power bricks, no pissing around, it just goes.
Dave
I had one. It was OK. Sure as shit wasn't one of the 50 best tech products of all time though. Voodoo1? The first Geforce cards? Maybe.
Dave
I last used it about a year ago, but remember it being appreciably better than I thought it would be. It even has an almost debian like (gui) packaging thing that ... works. Functioning X server too, but not rootless IIRC.
Dave
Stop the press - software engineer, sorry, programmer
Sir, madame, whatever
Dave
Not "Steve Ballmer is a Tool" but "Which tool did they use to make the presentation"? It appears to be a happy halfway house between custom built flash and the horror that is PPT on the web.
... not just in this specific case.
:)
In fact if anyone can think of such things I'd be keen to know in general
With that in mind I'll actually go watch it now
Dave
You're trolling, right? I hope so.
Yes, it is hard. Much harder than actually writing the code. Yes, it is your problem. Software Engineering is a profession. That's why you and I get paid the big (in theory) bucks
Without going into too much depth the process you have described (accurate specs, make software, test software against spec) is known as the waterfall model and is famously difficult to do for non-trivial projects. Can be done, don't get me wrong, but very very hard. Better, probably, would be to take an iterative approach: Take the word doc and bash together a prototype (RealBasic, Ruby on Rails, whatever); drop the prototype in front of the users and make notes as they say "nooo! not like that, it needs to do X, Y and Z"; feed back into the prototype and try again. Finally use this prototype as a "living" requirements document. The hard part is persuading the pointy haired types that that prototype is, in fact, not the completed piece of software. Yeah, good luck with that.
Not wishing to sound offensive but it sounds like your company needs to hire someone with more experience to act as a project manager. There's nothing wrong with writing code to spec (no matter how it's translated) and letting it be someone else's job to keep the project on track and ensure the users get what they want. And, in case you hadn't noticed, this job is hard f'kin work.
Dave
Although you would not be hard pressed to fail to find a worse candidate. None the less, point taken.
Dave
Read:t roductionToTheFormatInternalsr matODFVsMSXML
... here's hoping.
http://old.opendocumentfellowship.org/Articles/In
http://old.opendocumentfellowship.org/Articles/Fo
And let me know if you still think the ODF is merely a 'memory dump in angle brackets'.
I have read and understood. I repent. It basically is XML with styling and if it's here already we're not going to get any better. Embedding ODF readers in browsers would be quicker and cleaner than further extending CSS all the way out to spreadsheets and what have you. Well
Dave
Well thank Christ for that, I appear to have dragged someone who knows what they're talking about out of retirement. No "PM" system on Slashdot, obviously.
Right. I have some reading to do. Nice post, thanks.
Dave
Since ODF is an open and free standard, converters can be written between ODF and XHTML+CSS
... mankind's f'kin intellectual property. I hate that it's currently tied into giving Microsoft a couple of billion dollars every month, and I hate that when historians come to find out what happened they're going to find a big black hole in our knowledge base. But if we are to replace this clearly shitty state of affairs I'd rather it were with something appreciably better rather than merely different.
This may be true, but I suspect it's not. The combination of XHTML and CSS are very much about putting the information in once place, along with information about what the information *is*, and a description of how to display it somewhere else. It's going to take a big leap for a manufacturer of word processors to separate "this word is italicised" from "this word is italicised because that's how it displays on this one medium". I know styles, and even rudimentary style inheritence have been a part of word processors for a long time, but taking it seriously and providing a GUI that makes it intuitive for Rhonda in HR to understand what she's doing is a non-trivial pastime.
The thing that bothers me is not the software, but rather what we're doing with the results of people's labour
Dave
I had been thinking that ODF was "obviously" a good thing until I read the rant by Opera's CTO about how shit both standards are (a memory dump between angle brackets), and how the correct way would be to go for XHTML with CSS formatting.
... but I'm concerned that standardising on ODF will come to bite us, the IT industry, in our collective butts sooner rather than later. We need something clear. Obvious. Simple. And from this some genuine innovation will come - remember that?
Like, seriously, why not? Have we not been here before, going "so we need to separate content from display" and was not the eventual solution actually rather good. It took ten years or so to get adopted, but nobody is denying that css has made the web a less obnoxious place. There are no technical reasons why it can't be extended to all aspects of "office" publishing/collaboration, and indeed a book has been published using XML+CSS.
I know that ODF is "here now", and it must be an improvement over Office's internal format
Dave
I'm sorry, you're lost ... Fark's down the hall, two doors down on the left.
This all seems well and good, but wouldn't it be trivial for someone to pull a DNS cache poisoning stunt and redirect openid.mydomain.com to their servers instead? From what I recall of SSL/TLS the thing that prevents this from happening is if one has a certificate and the client implementation actually bothers to check it ... but nobody has a certificate, they're expensive and a pain in the arse.
So, seriously, what stops this from being the most exploitable authentication system ever?
Dave
Linus, that is.
The whole point of the open source movement is to allow alternative approaches to flourish and be chosen (or not) on their merits. It's what OSS does to raise quality. The biggest problem KDE and Gnome always had was that they continually trod on each others' toes. So, let them go their separate ways - let KDE be configurable and Gnome be "designed for idiots". See who wins. Either which way the variety is good for OSS itself.
Dave
I'll be absolutely stoked if IBM made the whole thing up. Best ... astrotuf ... ever!!
But somehow I don't think so. Somehow I think she's just kinda knackered.
Dave
I can't imagine a company putting something as vital as email entirely outside it's walls...
Y'know, five years from now we'll be saying that you can imagine a company doing something that vital itself. It's going to be a bad time to be a sysadmin, believe me.
Dave
Am I hearing a resounding yes?
I was about to post and say the same thing (ObAol: me too!). There also seems to be quite a lot of these:
"enables the enforcement of the usage policy set by content owners"
In the article. Which to me says "if the content industry says so, then yes". Clearly Vista was designed to serve the content industry and not the consumer. But then that's not exactly news, is it?
Dave
I for one am not sure I like the possible directions this research could take.
Well, quite. Gene replacement therapy with ones that aren't compatible with life. At all. A project run by the US DOD. "Bound to end in tears" doesn't even start to cover it. Great.
Dave
Yes indeed it is. The cool kids see externally provided services and say "mashup! mashup! mashup!", the old timers see them and say "risk! risk! risk!".
Dave
Jak and Daxter (not Jak 2 under any circumstances)
Ratchet and Clank 2
Rez, for an evening, get some weed in
Wipeout Pure if you can borrow a PSP
Nothing at all is stopping you from running proprietary code on a GNU/Linux system
... and I'm not sure I fully get it. Like, if MS want to let SLES be more interoperable surely all they need to do is open their protocol specs up more - which, IIRC, they actually have to do under the antitrust settlement. Next thing I know MS are giving Novell money...
Exactly. I looked at this and thought "yeah, it's called userland". I'm quite happy to believe Dvorak is this stupid but not Ballmer et al.
As an aside I've been off on holiday and have come back to see this deal
Go figure.
Dave
If Apple released a new iPod with FairPlay 2.0 that didn't play any FairPlay 1.0 files, the torches and pitchforks would be out.
... and putting the future of iTMS in danger, to say the least.
But that's because PlaysForSure only ever sold about eight songs. Breaking FairPlay would involve fucking over probably a couple of hundred thousand consumers
Dave
Unfortunately, the mental bandwidth already belongs to iPod, it will be hard to dislodge them in favor of Zune.
Yes, but you could have said the same about "PlayStation" a few years ago. Sure, they've not won yet, but they're doing a fine job.
Dave
....were on slashdot a few years back hand soldering resistors onto logic boards to get their first batch out the door? If it was, well, way to go back bedroom hardware hackers! There is hope beyond yet another godforsaken web project yet :)
Dave