In the US, they've just launched the "Snickers Marathon". I kid you not. So it might be that they've realized they did the renaming wrong and are getting ready to reverse it.
When you need to be able to query for the intersection of multiple dimensions, the solution is to build your relational database using a star schema. You don't need any kind of special "object relational" anything, and the end result can be quite elegant.
Guess what? If you use Qt the way you use GCC or emacs--as a part of your build environment--then Qt is free. For example, if you build an internal map editor for your arcade game and use Qt, Qt is free.
Contrariwise--if you use GCC or emacs the way people tend to use Qt, and link against them, then you fall under the GPL and have to ship source. And people have done just that--made special versions of GCC (Apple), or special versions of emacs.
So the situations are exactly comparable. Furthermore, the FSF explicitly encourages developers to use the GPL for their libraries, in order to give more of an advantage to free software. See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-not-lgpl.html
Look, your original rant was about SUVs versus fuel-efficient cars.
I took the statistics for the first--SUVs--and the statistics for the second--mid-size cars such as the Prius.
I took the *relevant* measure, which is fatality rates per billion miles of travel, and compared them. SUVs turned out worse. End of story.
That SUVs might not be so bad compared with other classes of vehicle I didn't even consider, that SUVs might be safer the heavier they are, that fatality rates might be worse for lighter cars of the same class--all of that may be true, but is utterly irrelevant to the point of contention, which was your claim that SUVs were safer than fuel-efficient cars. Nice attempt at smokescreening, though.
As to the statistics being old, feel free to post more recent statistics if you can find them. Ball's in your court.
Where before, in order to have the library think you're "you" all you needed was a card (which can be faked, stolen, etc), now you need the same fingerprint - much harder to do.
When someone steals your library card, the card can be cancelled. What are you going to do when someone steals your fingerprint, huh? Cut your finger off?
KDE "just works" for outline fonts in as much as Linux can be said to work with outline fonts. The brokenness you cite is brokenness of Linux, not KDE.
I should also mention that Mandrake has a rather flaky KDE, in my experience. The menu editor in Mandrake 10 doesn't work reliably either. It works fine on Debian, however.
And it's not like my Mac always deals with font families properly either...
"Caring" means solving problems, not closing your eyes and pretending that the world is going to go backwards and conserve anything.
And since the claim I was replying to was a claim that DIVX failed because people wanted to converve resources and not throw away DVDs unnecessarily, you are presumably in agreement with me that Americans don't give a crap about conservation, and that the original claim was nonsense.
First off, it's misleading to talk about IBM hiring practices as if they're uniform. The people you'll find in Software Group are very different from the ones you'll find in IBM Global Services, and different again from the ones who work on PowerPC chip designs. The skill levels are different, the proportion of temps to contractors is different.
It also doesn't matter if IBM as a whole is making a profit; if a particular group isn't meeting its targets, that group almost certainly won't be hiring. If nobody's buying Foo software this year, the Foo piece of Software Group's going to have a hiring freeze.
Also, consulting makes much heavier use of supplementals, because of the nature of the business. One year IGS needs a few thousand people to run the entire IT infrastructure for the Olympics, the next year it doesn't. One year there are 30,000 people on call for Y2K, the next year there aren't. One year government decides every healthcare organization needs to implement HIPAA in six months, the next year it doesn't.
In spite of how much attention consulting companies pay to keeping a good flow of upcoming work, in reality the levels of staffing they need are always going to be highly variable, so short term contracts are the industry norm. It costs too much to always be hiring and firing permanent employees, and you can't keep paying unused techs for 2 years to keep them on hand for when you'll next need that many. Hence at any big consulting company, a large proportion of the staff is made up of contractors. If you don't like it, don't work in enterprise consulting. You might find SMB more to your liking--contractors aren't such a necessity there.
(My opinions do not necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions.)
I still don't see that memorizing the names of design patterns is useful or desirable.
It's not like there's one definitive list of names of design patterns, managed by a standards body. If you're actually going to communicate, you first need to negotiate which pattern language you're concerned with and whose catalog of design patterns you're even talking about, before you start throwing codenames around.
One pattern I've used to great effect is to provide a thin API translation layer for old code, allowing the underlying code to have its API completely redesigned to make it more usable for new code. Now that Java has varargs and generics, I can only hope that Sun will start using this pattern. Now, do I know what its official name is in your pattern library of choice? Not a clue.
I reckon it's taken them this long to decide the name and what it should look like. Now all their engineers are about to start the longest weekender in history.
Yes, here on Bizarro Earth, a single example of a few Americans caring about the environment easily trumps the counter-example of the vast majority of Americans--and is a logically valid argument too!
That font he was talking about was some crappy bitmap font, not a proper Type 1 or TrueType font. I wouldn't Windows bitmap fonts to work, and frankly I don't care...
KDE works for Type 1 and TrueType. That's good enough for me.
Use KDE's font installer to install and manage fonts, it just works. Handles TrueType and Type 1 fonts, just drag and drop to install.
There's TeX and LaTeX and METAFONT... but for those, I suggest you use pdftex and pdflatex and use Type 1 fonts, rather than going through the whole "building multiple sizes of METAFONT-rendered bitmaps" thing. Ideally, use the native PDF fonts to keep your PDFs down in size.
There are also various old bitmap X fonts hanging around on my system. I don't deliberately use any of them, but I leave 'em there in case there are applications I need that don't handle scaleable TTF/Type1 yet.
Ballmer said: "The hottest company right now -- the one nobody thinks can do any wrong -- may just be a one-hit wonder."
"As opposed to us--we're a two-hit wonder. Sure, Xbox is a distant third in the worldwide console market, SQL server is way behind DB2 and Oracle, WinCE hasn't been a hit, Windows Server is just a small fragment of the Internet server market, Exchange can't even fight off Lotus Notes successfully, WebTV crashed and burned, nobody used Passport, Bob was a laughing stock, Windows for Pen Computing died, Tablet PC is struggling to survive, everyone uses MP3 instead of WMA, iPod still rules the MP3 player market, and our popular mouse design was just a rebadged HP mouse... but back in the 90s we created Microsoft Office and put DOS/Windows on the desktop! That's two hits! Which gives us 100% more wonder than Google!"
I think the 48-hour DVDs failed more because people didn't like the idea of throwing away that much.
Yes, here on Bizarro Earth Americans are well known for their concern for the environment. That's why President Gore was re-elected, nobody drives SUVs, and Americans no longer produce more trash per capita than any other industrialized nation. And that's why DIVX failed--on Bizarro Earth.
The NY Times and the WSJ are essential reading for decision-makers. You'll find both being read in any town big enough to rate a single traffic light. The Time's core audience, like that of the WSJ, is at a level where subscription fees are the norm.
Right. My take on this is that they want to squeeze money from the few who care what the NYT thinks (i.e. politicians and CEOs), and use that money to subsidize keeping the actual news free for everyone else.
The point is people *can't* make autopackage interoperate with the other packaging systems, because of the way autopackage is designed. For instance, there's no way to make Debian's alien utility unpack and install autopackage files, because there aren't any markers or specifications for what it should do to extract the contents from the autopackage. The only option is use autopackage itself, i.e. run the scripts.
Autopackage packages are incredibly badly designed. It's a bunch of shell script hackery, and there's no way to extract it other than to run all the scripts.
I've spent a lot of time looking Consumer Reports' car reviews, and frankly, their reviews have no basis in reality.
Quite possibly, but that has nothing whatsoever to do with their vehicle reliability ratings, which were what was being discussed.
Consumer Reports get their reliability data by polling all their members and having them fill out detailed questionnaires about the vehicles they own. Possible bias on the part of their reviewers doesn't come into it.
Also, I suspect that inconsistency between Consumer Reports reviews is not likely to be a deliberate bias; more likely, they have a team of reviewers who have different opinions about what "quiet" is.
Slashdot Mirror
In the US, they've just launched the "Snickers Marathon". I kid you not. So it might be that they've realized they did the renaming wrong and are getting ready to reverse it.
When you need to be able to query for the intersection of multiple dimensions, the solution is to build your relational database using a star schema. You don't need any kind of special "object relational" anything, and the end result can be quite elegant.
Guess what? If you use Qt the way you use GCC or emacs--as a part of your build environment--then Qt is free. For example, if you build an internal map editor for your arcade game and use Qt, Qt is free.
Contrariwise--if you use GCC or emacs the way people tend to use Qt, and link against them, then you fall under the GPL and have to ship source. And people have done just that--made special versions of GCC (Apple), or special versions of emacs.
So the situations are exactly comparable. Furthermore, the FSF explicitly encourages developers to use the GPL for their libraries, in order to give more of an advantage to free software. See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-not-lgpl.html
Look, your original rant was about SUVs versus fuel-efficient cars.
I took the statistics for the first--SUVs--and the statistics for the second--mid-size cars such as the Prius.
I took the *relevant* measure, which is fatality rates per billion miles of travel, and compared them. SUVs turned out worse. End of story.
That SUVs might not be so bad compared with other classes of vehicle I didn't even consider, that SUVs might be safer the heavier they are, that fatality rates might be worse for lighter cars of the same class--all of that may be true, but is utterly irrelevant to the point of contention, which was your claim that SUVs were safer than fuel-efficient cars. Nice attempt at smokescreening, though.
As to the statistics being old, feel free to post more recent statistics if you can find them. Ball's in your court.
http://www.nhtsa.dot.gov/cars/rules/regrev/evaluat e/809662.html
Prorated Fatal Crash Involvements Per Billion Miles:
Mid-size car (e.g. the Prius you mock): 9.46
Mid-size SUV: 13.68
So, the chances of being in a fatal crash are about 30% higher for an SUV, on a per-mile-traveled basis.
*plonk*
I was going by the raw statistics of those Communists at the NHTSA.
You're aware that SUVs are far more dangerous, both to their occupants and to other people, than those "tiny" cars, right?
But not impossible.
http://www.ccc.de/biometrie/fingerabdruck_kopiereWhen someone steals your library card, the card can be cancelled. What are you going to do when someone steals your fingerprint, huh? Cut your finger off?
KDE "just works" for outline fonts in as much as Linux can be said to work with outline fonts. The brokenness you cite is brokenness of Linux, not KDE.
I should also mention that Mandrake has a rather flaky KDE, in my experience. The menu editor in Mandrake 10 doesn't work reliably either. It works fine on Debian, however.
And it's not like my Mac always deals with font families properly either...
And since the claim I was replying to was a claim that DIVX failed because people wanted to converve resources and not throw away DVDs unnecessarily, you are presumably in agreement with me that Americans don't give a crap about conservation, and that the original claim was nonsense.
Do yourself a favor and watch "Fahrenheit 9-11".
First off, it's misleading to talk about IBM hiring practices as if they're uniform. The people you'll find in Software Group are very different from the ones you'll find in IBM Global Services, and different again from the ones who work on PowerPC chip designs. The skill levels are different, the proportion of temps to contractors is different.
It also doesn't matter if IBM as a whole is making a profit; if a particular group isn't meeting its targets, that group almost certainly won't be hiring. If nobody's buying Foo software this year, the Foo piece of Software Group's going to have a hiring freeze.
Also, consulting makes much heavier use of supplementals, because of the nature of the business. One year IGS needs a few thousand people to run the entire IT infrastructure for the Olympics, the next year it doesn't. One year there are 30,000 people on call for Y2K, the next year there aren't. One year government decides every healthcare organization needs to implement HIPAA in six months, the next year it doesn't.
In spite of how much attention consulting companies pay to keeping a good flow of upcoming work, in reality the levels of staffing they need are always going to be highly variable, so short term contracts are the industry norm. It costs too much to always be hiring and firing permanent employees, and you can't keep paying unused techs for 2 years to keep them on hand for when you'll next need that many. Hence at any big consulting company, a large proportion of the staff is made up of contractors. If you don't like it, don't work in enterprise consulting. You might find SMB more to your liking--contractors aren't such a necessity there.
(My opinions do not necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions.)
Well, personally I see C++ as a dumbed-down and overcomplicated Objective-C. But does that actually tell you anything useful?
I still don't see that memorizing the names of design patterns is useful or desirable.
It's not like there's one definitive list of names of design patterns, managed by a standards body. If you're actually going to communicate, you first need to negotiate which pattern language you're concerned with and whose catalog of design patterns you're even talking about, before you start throwing codenames around.
One pattern I've used to great effect is to provide a thin API translation layer for old code, allowing the underlying code to have its API completely redesigned to make it more usable for new code. Now that Java has varargs and generics, I can only hope that Sun will start using this pattern. Now, do I know what its official name is in your pattern library of choice? Not a clue.
I reckon it's taken them this long to decide the name and what it should look like. Now all their engineers are about to start the longest weekender in history.
Yes, here on Bizarro Earth, a single example of a few Americans caring about the environment easily trumps the counter-example of the vast majority of Americans--and is a logically valid argument too!
That font he was talking about was some crappy bitmap font, not a proper Type 1 or TrueType font. I wouldn't Windows bitmap fonts to work, and frankly I don't care...
KDE works for Type 1 and TrueType. That's good enough for me.
Use KDE's font installer to install and manage fonts, it just works. Handles TrueType and Type 1 fonts, just drag and drop to install.
There's TeX and LaTeX and METAFONT... but for those, I suggest you use pdftex and pdflatex and use Type 1 fonts, rather than going through the whole "building multiple sizes of METAFONT-rendered bitmaps" thing. Ideally, use the native PDF fonts to keep your PDFs down in size.
There are also various old bitmap X fonts hanging around on my system. I don't deliberately use any of them, but I leave 'em there in case there are applications I need that don't handle scaleable TTF/Type1 yet.
"As opposed to us--we're a two-hit wonder. Sure, Xbox is a distant third in the worldwide console market, SQL server is way behind DB2 and Oracle, WinCE hasn't been a hit, Windows Server is just a small fragment of the Internet server market, Exchange can't even fight off Lotus Notes successfully, WebTV crashed and burned, nobody used Passport, Bob was a laughing stock, Windows for Pen Computing died, Tablet PC is struggling to survive, everyone uses MP3 instead of WMA, iPod still rules the MP3 player market, and our popular mouse design was just a rebadged HP mouse... but back in the 90s we created Microsoft Office and put DOS/Windows on the desktop! That's two hits! Which gives us 100% more wonder than Google!"
Yes, here on Bizarro Earth Americans are well known for their concern for the environment. That's why President Gore was re-elected, nobody drives SUVs, and Americans no longer produce more trash per capita than any other industrialized nation. And that's why DIVX failed--on Bizarro Earth.
Right. My take on this is that they want to squeeze money from the few who care what the NYT thinks (i.e. politicians and CEOs), and use that money to subsidize keeping the actual news free for everyone else.
If they are so obvious, why don't you post a few?
The point is people *can't* make autopackage interoperate with the other packaging systems, because of the way autopackage is designed. For instance, there's no way to make Debian's alien utility unpack and install autopackage files, because there aren't any markers or specifications for what it should do to extract the contents from the autopackage. The only option is use autopackage itself, i.e. run the scripts.
Autopackage packages are incredibly badly designed. It's a bunch of shell script hackery, and there's no way to extract it other than to run all the scripts.
Quite possibly, but that has nothing whatsoever to do with their vehicle reliability ratings, which were what was being discussed.
Consumer Reports get their reliability data by polling all their members and having them fill out detailed questionnaires about the vehicles they own. Possible bias on the part of their reviewers doesn't come into it.
Also, I suspect that inconsistency between Consumer Reports reviews is not likely to be a deliberate bias; more likely, they have a team of reviewers who have different opinions about what "quiet" is.