I agree. I think that, while there is often a strong one-way correlation between nerds and smart people, the inverse is not necessarily true.
Some of the smartest people in my high school were NOT nerds. True, they didn't take some of the ridiculous college math courses that we nerds did. However they did get straight-As and took AP courses in the natural sciences, history, calculus, languages, etc. They were usually involved in some kind of varsity sport that had a low jock-factor (like tennis or soccer). While they were popular, they seemed to float above the social hierarchy, never taking part in the beatings or humiliation but never exactly seeking a nerd with whom to hang out. They generally got ridiculous scores on their SATs and went on to the Ivy League.
They were popular because they weren't pretentious, they were self-confident, and they knew how to talk to somebody without scaring or boring the shit out of them. Which none of us geeks quite had a handle on yet . . .
...NASA proposes a $300 million project to build a gigantic "Welcome to Earth! We value our children, please abduct safely!" sign on the moon. This is to remind alien vacationers (who come speedin' down that local group highway like nobody's business) to slow down a spell, and think carefully before they start carrying off our kids and probing them.
Seriously, does anyone else think this is a waste of resources? Give that $150 million to Highlift for Pete's sake...
Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger.
My big challenges are (1) existing code that wasn't designed for unit testing, (2) testing with databases, (3) testing that involves user interaction and (4) testing that involves multi-tasking. I like unit testing, but it is hard to apply to every task.
Unit testing is a limited tool that can be very useful for certain things. Some of its limitations can be overcome by spending time writing elaborate test fixtures, but many (like 3 and 4 above) cannot.
I guess my point is -- don't be afraid to write stupid, obvious unit tests. The point of unit testing is that it allows you to make massive, frightening changes to your code -- and then ensure that, as far as the outside world is concerned, your module still behaves the same way.
After I got some experience with it, I simply started thinking of it as just another tool in our test suite, along with the Robot-based GUI tests and more complex, human-assisted test code.
> The first and major problem is not that the methods exist - everyone can cut and paste the spec document - but ensuring that nothing else exists.
Understood. But then the question was why, in this particular instance, JUnit was insufficient for that purpose.
I mean, its Java. You can use reflection to figure out everything you would need about a class, including any nonconformant methods it may have. Just build a collection of methods that ought to be in the API, get the collection that actually are in the API, and if there's any difference, fail.
The article claimed that JUnit's assumptions about the classloader were incompatible with Jini. I can believe this -- I've encountered a lot of weirdnesses with JUnit's threading model (my most recent project involves a lot of asynchronous communication between peers). Really stupid things too -- like a test will run in a different thread when you fire off a batch of them, but if you run a single test it works in the AWT thread and can lock your GUI.
Barry gave a tremendously entertaining (if disorganized) talk. His main points were:
Spam is a stupid, boring problem that smart people shouldn't have to think about. "Why should some of the best minds in computing be forced to have a conference about this stuff?"
The arms race between spammers and anti-spammers is going to get much worse before it gets better. We can come up with all kinds of cool technology to block spam, but spammers have a very direct financial incentive to dodge that technology in increasingly innovative ways.
The only feasible, permanent solution will be a fix at the social and economic level, not technological.
Barry's proposal for that last point was a fundamental change in the economics of spam, as follows:
Create a coalition of ISPs with the will to implement and enforce these changes.
Legitimize spam by selling "spam accounts" (with unlimited email quotas, etc) as a premium service.
Create a system where ISP A can invoice ISP B for excessive load on the ISP A's system due to spam sent from ISP B.
ISP B passes the cost on to their customer (if he's a legit spammer) or sics the law on him for theft of services (if he's not).
Basically, it boiled down to "Spam is currently in a gray area legally, so let's legitimize spam in order to divide the spammers into legal spammers (who pay handsomely for the privilege) and illegal spammers (who do hard time, just like people who cheat a utility company).
Challenging proposal, and great fun to hear him speak.
There is a third and more likely explanation. They are using this fake "war on terror" as an excuse to create a surveillance state for the sole purpose of controlling everyone, and destroying anyone who gets in their way. Period. It has nothing to do with stopping terrorism or crime, quite the opposite - it is designed so that they have the monopoloy on both.
Mmmm... I find that prospect to be significantly *less* likely. A vast conspiracy to turn the U.S. into a police state couldn't succeed, at least not without significant cultural and systemic changes. The problem for would-be oligarchs is that there are simply too many checks and balances in our system. Petty political feuding is the backbone of freedom, in that any overt attempt to significantly curtail civic freedoms would be quickly shot down -- not through popular uprising, but simply because for every John Ashcroft there is a Tom Daschle, eager to gain power and prestige by tapping into popular resentment.
What I fear far more is the slippery slope towards tyranny of the majority, greased by politicians attempting to maximize both their votes and their influence within the bureaucracy (e.g. the Justice Department). In such a state, reason and justice take a back seat to the howling of the mob. People are scared right now, and they're willing to let a few suffer for the illusion of safety and security. The worst thing to fear is not a shadowy government conspiracy -- it is the apathy and moral laziness of a people who have forgotten the principles upon which their country was founded.
Seriously though, the advent of projects like Freenet makes this legislation a complete farce. ANY subversive and violent organization who wants to communicate securely and confidentially over the Internet can do so, in a myriad number of ways, with a little bit of research, and have a fairly high chance of escaping detection by a Carnivore-type system.
There's only two possible explanations for this bill: 1) Ignorance on the part of those drafting the legislation, and 2) Terrorism being used as a pretext to clamp down on other criminal activity that would otherwise be difficult to investigate and prosecute, due to Fourth Amendment restrictions.
I don't know which explanation worries and frightens me more.
I DO pay -- $20 / month for emusic.com. And I'd be willing to pay even more (say $35-$40 / mo) for something with a more comprehensive catalog.
However, here's the catch: it's gotta be subscription, not pay-per-download, and it's gotta be unrestricted usage. Gone are the days when I would pay $16.95 for a shitty cd. The key thing for me (and I think most other people) about p2p or emusic is being able to explore a much bigger world of music without having to risk paying for something I don't like.
If they try to pass *anything* else off as competition for p2p, they're delusional.
I work in an office with several dozen graphic designers, and don't know a single one who uses a wheel mouse anymore. If they need to do precision work, they use a Wacom tablet, just like they did before the advent of the optical mouse.
There certainly are women gamers; I've met a few in real life. However, the problem is that there aren't many in Derby, England, where Core Designs is located.
Game testers are seldom, if ever, hired from outside a city. Game testing is usually a part-time, low-wage position with no benefits; few QA managers in the gaming industry have the resources, experience, or desire to pursue them as a valuable commodity. Certainly, if they're offering typical game tester wages, they probably won't find many lower-income young female action gamers with plenty of spare time in a rural Midland city.
If they want more female game testers for Tomb Raider, they'll just have to offer more money, to attract candidates from other cities.
Erm, no I wouldn't, because it isn't - the principle is that no-one has the right to force a person to trade with someone whom that person doesn't want to trade.
And that's a fine principle. Unfortunately, in practice, we must make concessions to the fact that in our society, the inability to trade cuts that person off from interaction with society. All arguments about decency and responsibility aside, that means we are alienating a segment of our population that could otherwise be productive and useful. And because companies are, by definition, selfish entities, we must compel them to behave in a manner that takes into account the greater good of the society.
Compare the lifetime economic output of a fully-integrated blind person minus the burden that integration places on society, versus the lifetime drain of a dependent non-productive blind person on their relatives and the State. It simply makes good economic sense to place measured, reasonable requirements on major businesses that they help integrate the disabled.
That said, I think this specific case is borderline. Unless there are fares that Southwestern only makes available over the web.
Agreed, the XBox IS a superior system. And frankly, given Microsoft's great track record of listening to their developers, you would think that they would have a much better market share. But there are a couple of problems:
1) The XBox has a narrow target market. The high price point, the games that Microsoft has chosen to flog, and the huge clunky controller pretty much limits the XBox to the 18-30 year old male demographic, as opposed to the much broader appeal (i.e. 8-30 year olds) that the PS2 has. If a game developer must choose between one console or the other, they're going to choose the one with the biggest potential market.
2) The XBox came out at a time when everybody had just spent money on a PS2. There was a significant lag between when the PS2 really hit its stride in the market (i.e. almost immediately) and when the XBox did (after people started feeling like they could spend money on another console, and after a decent number of games hit). The XBox has never caught up to the PS2's install base, because they never had the breadth of games, because they had a smaller install base... ad infinitum.
Microsoft is throwing money at the problem, trying to break this vicious cycle by buying a better selection of games. They will have to spend a staggering amount of cash, though, and I doubt they'll make it back.
If you really are seeing performance difference in/rendering/ between moz and pheonix, its because you don't have enough memory (ie its having all the other moz features in memory thats causing the trouble).
512 meg had better be enough memory. I don't thrash when I load a huge table, so I doubt that's actually the problem.
My current daily-use build of Mozilla is 1.1. Did gecko gain significant rendering improvements that were folded into 1.2?
I switched to Mozilla for casual browsing a few months ago (gestures and tabs; I can't ever go back). But for web applications (phpMyAdmin, etc) I stuck with IE. Why? Because Mozilla is much, much slower than IE at rendering the huge nested tables and complex forms that such applications often use.
I just popped open Phoenix and pointed it at a phpMyAdmin instance. Ahhhhhh.... very smooth, running almost as quickly as IE. Beautiful.
Now if only someone could fold these rendering performance optimizations into Mozilla proper, so that I might have my themes, bookmarks, gestures, tabs, and mail reader back. I don't give a hoot about startup time as long as I've got the system tray nubbin, just give me that optimized renderer!
A lot of companies (my own included) are suspicious of small consultants that charge far less than the competition on fixed-price contracts. One reason is, I think, a subconscious perception of quality -- "this is worth X to us, but you're charging X/4, therefore your results will be 1/4 the quality of what we want". But another is definitely "ownership" -- we want to feel like we own you, that our project will be more important to you than the other things on your plate, and that you'll go that extra mile to satisfy us, precisely because we are paying you so much. Although the costs of fixed-price consultant contracts have been pushed lower and lower by this economy, they still aren't commoditized yet in a lot of customers' minds; we still want the comfort of feeling like we've got a "temporary hire" who will make the effort to understand our business and the problem that we need them to solve. We want them to be every bit as motivated and aggressive as our employees, and we're willing to pay a premium to make sure that happens.
> 'In this day of massive corporate fraud and corporate governance that only serves to entrench > bad management, it is now more imperative than ever that the Board act appropriately and > demonstrate its duty of loyalty and care to shareholders,' [Josh Schechter, a partner in > Steel Partners] wrote in June."
"When honor is lost, it is relief to die; Death is but a sure retreat from infamy. Your duty to Lord Josh is clear, Gerald-san -- take your key to Heaven and Hell and open the path to honor. That is the way of the samurai; that is the way of bushido."
Sorry Xeno; I was going to show, but had to cancel at the last minute (personal matters).
Who the hell picks these places on meetup.com, anyway? There's tons of great places to meet in this city, and they pick a crap bar in *Dormont*. I voted for it, but frankly that bar just seemed like the least evil choice on the list (Dunkin' Donuts?? WTF????).
Quite simply, Pittsburgh's meetup.com choices sucked. A lot of people's comments here seem to indicate that our city was by no means alone in that distinction. I think that if we had a better choice of venues (e.g. the Roman Room in the South Side, the Squirrel Cage in Sq.Hill, etc) we would've had a much bigger draw.
meetup is very, very flawed, in that the people who actually live in the city don't get to pick the venues.
> The "web service" model that Microsoft and IBM > has pushed has nothing to do with.NET (though, > from a technical perspective, it may very well > be implemented in.NET on the server side, it > could equally be implemented in PHP, Java, > etc), but rather standards such as SOAP and > friends.
[putting on devil's advocate hat]
Have you tried building a SOAPy web service using Apache and Java? It's a pain in the butt to configure and set up, and then you have to worry about SOAP compatibility issues. Whereas with VS.NET it's a snap to get a hello-worldy service up and running within a few minutes.
The one area in which Microsoft possesses real competency is making it ridiculously easy for developers to get up and running quickly, and to build solutions "the Microsoft way" in minimal time. If they want widespread adoption of web services, they want such things to spread as quickly as possible. They may well believe (and they may well be correct) that.NET solutions built and deployed using VS are the quickest way to maximum market penetration, since there are a whole lot of "programmers" out there that possess only the virtues of Laziness and Impatience, lacking the all-important Hubris to temper their slothful ways.
No big surprise
on
.NET for Apache
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Microsoft needs maximum market penetration for.NET, otherwise the initiative fails. EVERYBODY has to play in this particular sandbox, or MS' dream of a services-based software market (with far better growth potential for a monopoly than a product-based market) is bust. IIS is *one product*, one that, in the grand scheme of things, it would be worth sacrificing if it meant.NET ubiquity. The majority of the web runs on Apache, therefore for Microsoft to not support.NET on Apache is to lose the majority of the web. QED.
What makes me curious is what platforms they'll support Apache on . ..
Heh, I really miss the days when I could just spend a few hours making ANSI logos with TheDraw, and then receive dozens of download megs from some grateful BBS admin.
Or living down the dorm hallway from a Razor1911 courier, and trading beer for a leech account. I had a crack at a lot of games that I would *never* have even seen, let alone played, thanks to that.
I can understand Geocities' squelching of their freeloaders in an attempt to make money, however nobody can link to Geocities site anymore without it going offline. That's just stupid. Geocities used to have a really high public profile due to the number of cool or weird sites that would pop up on it; now, I can't even remember the last time I saw a Geocities site.
Time for/. to implement a formal no-linking policy for Geocities. Stop giving them free ad impressions!
I read about these ticketing-lights in a Car & Driver editorial a few months ago. It seems that they are not installed to improve safety, but to generate more income for the state. They cost much less per ticket than a patrol car and policeman would.
Well, in this case, I'm all for the DC local gov't using this as an excuse to nail suburbanites speeding through the city. DC is in a unique situation, in that the vast majority of the people that use its transit resources are commuting in from another "state", and work for an entity from which the city can't derive any tax revenue (the fed). The city gov't is constantly cash-strapped, and when they can't pay their teachers enough the fed takes over the school board and drives the schools even further into the ground. DC residents are basically second-class citizens in their own city, so don't expect them to shed much of a tear when some asshole Aggie bureaucrat has to pony up a few bucks every month because he likes to run every fucking red light on his way to work in the morning. Even now, when a cleaned-up police force means you can't tip the cop $20 to get out of a ticket, it's still too expensive to chase down (and get revenue from) all the traffic violations that happen every rush hour.
Ahem. Anyway, I agree with your points, and I wouldn't worry about this lasting much longer. All it'll take is some congressman's kid to get nailed six times in a month, and the fed will lean HARD on the city to abandon this scheme. They really hate it when the natives get uppity about what they consider their private playground.
One of the better ideas for a disposable phone that I've seen came out of a student contest run by [IIRC] Metropolis magazine.
It consisted of a thick "business card" phone -- a circuit printed on plastic and wrapped in paper, slightly larger than your average business card. The phone had about 60 minutes of talk time, couldn't receive calls, and had a single large button on one side. The idea was that you could buy a sheet of these phones for about $5-10 per, print your business card on them, and "burn" your own number into the phone. Pressing the button on the phone dialed that number.
This is, of course, insanely useful. A first-contact client can phone you back with very little effort, without having to pay for the call. 911 emergency phones can be given away or sold in stores. Vending machines could let you key in any number you liked (say, your SO) and print up a batch of phones for you.
I think it's on ultra-low-end applications like these that disposable cell phones will really find their stride. Even if Hop-On was legitimate, they'd have a hard time competing against companies like Cricket. Service is already a commodity, and people seem to like the flexibility and robustness of NON-disposable phones.
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I agree. I think that, while there is often a strong one-way correlation between nerds and smart people, the inverse is not necessarily true.
Some of the smartest people in my high school were NOT nerds. True, they didn't take some of the ridiculous college math courses that we nerds did. However they did get straight-As and took AP courses in the natural sciences, history, calculus, languages, etc. They were usually involved in some kind of varsity sport that had a low jock-factor (like tennis or soccer). While they were popular, they seemed to float above the social hierarchy, never taking part in the beatings or humiliation but never exactly seeking a nerd with whom to hang out. They generally got ridiculous scores on their SATs and went on to the Ivy League.
They were popular because they weren't pretentious, they were self-confident, and they knew how to talk to somebody without scaring or boring the shit out of them. Which none of us geeks quite had a handle on yet . . .
...NASA proposes a $300 million project to build a gigantic "Welcome to Earth! We value our children, please abduct safely!" sign on the moon. This is to remind alien vacationers (who come speedin' down that local group highway like nobody's business) to slow down a spell, and think carefully before they start carrying off our kids and probing them.
Seriously, does anyone else think this is a waste of resources? Give that $150 million to Highlift for Pete's sake...
-Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials
My big challenges are (1) existing code that wasn't designed for unit testing, (2) testing with databases, (3) testing that involves user interaction and (4) testing that involves multi-tasking. I like unit testing, but it is hard to apply to every task.
Unit testing is a limited tool that can be very useful for certain things. Some of its limitations can be overcome by spending time writing elaborate test fixtures, but many (like 3 and 4 above) cannot.
I guess my point is -- don't be afraid to write stupid, obvious unit tests. The point of unit testing is that it allows you to make massive, frightening changes to your code -- and then ensure that, as far as the outside world is concerned, your module still behaves the same way.
After I got some experience with it, I simply started thinking of it as just another tool in our test suite, along with the Robot-based GUI tests and more complex, human-assisted test code.
> The first and major problem is not that the methods exist - everyone can cut and paste the spec document - but ensuring that nothing else exists.
Understood. But then the question was why, in this particular instance, JUnit was insufficient for that purpose.
I mean, its Java. You can use reflection to figure out everything you would need about a class, including any nonconformant methods it may have. Just build a collection of methods that ought to be in the API, get the collection that actually are in the API, and if there's any difference, fail.
The article claimed that JUnit's assumptions about the classloader were incompatible with Jini. I can believe this -- I've encountered a lot of weirdnesses with JUnit's threading model (my most recent project involves a lot of asynchronous communication between peers). Really stupid things too -- like a test will run in a different thread when you fire off a batch of them, but if you run a single test it works in the AWT thread and can lock your GUI.
Barry's proposal for that last point was a fundamental change in the economics of spam, as follows:
Basically, it boiled down to "Spam is currently in a gray area legally, so let's legitimize spam in order to divide the spammers into legal spammers (who pay handsomely for the privilege) and illegal spammers (who do hard time, just like people who cheat a utility company).
Challenging proposal, and great fun to hear him speak.
Mmmm... I find that prospect to be significantly *less* likely. A vast conspiracy to turn the U.S. into a police state couldn't succeed, at least not without significant cultural and systemic changes. The problem for would-be oligarchs is that there are simply too many checks and balances in our system. Petty political feuding is the backbone of freedom, in that any overt attempt to significantly curtail civic freedoms would be quickly shot down -- not through popular uprising, but simply because for every John Ashcroft there is a Tom Daschle, eager to gain power and prestige by tapping into popular resentment.
What I fear far more is the slippery slope towards tyranny of the majority, greased by politicians attempting to maximize both their votes and their influence within the bureaucracy (e.g. the Justice Department). In such a state, reason and justice take a back seat to the howling of the mob. People are scared right now, and they're willing to let a few suffer for the illusion of safety and security. The worst thing to fear is not a shadowy government conspiracy -- it is the apathy and moral laziness of a people who have forgotten the principles upon which their country was founded.
Whatever will the terrorists
do?
Seriously though, the advent of projects like Freenet makes this legislation a complete farce. ANY subversive and violent organization who wants to communicate securely and confidentially over the Internet can do so, in a myriad number of ways, with a little bit of research, and have a fairly high chance of escaping detection by a Carnivore-type system.
There's only two possible explanations for this bill: 1) Ignorance on the part of those drafting the legislation, and 2) Terrorism being used as a pretext to clamp down on other criminal activity that would otherwise be difficult to investigate and prosecute, due to Fourth Amendment restrictions.
I don't know which explanation worries and frightens me more.
I DO pay -- $20 / month for emusic.com. And I'd be willing to pay even more (say $35-$40 / mo) for something with a more comprehensive catalog.
However, here's the catch: it's gotta be subscription, not pay-per-download, and it's gotta be unrestricted usage. Gone are the days when I would pay $16.95 for a shitty cd. The key thing for me (and I think most other people) about p2p or emusic is being able to explore a much bigger world of music without having to risk paying for something I don't like.
If they try to pass *anything* else off as competition for p2p, they're delusional.
I work in an office with several dozen graphic designers, and don't know a single one who uses a wheel mouse anymore. If they need to do precision work, they use a Wacom tablet, just like they did before the advent of the optical mouse.
The Intuos2 has 2540 dpi... mmmm.....
I just know I've seen this particular robot before.
There certainly are women gamers; I've met a few in real life. However, the problem is that there aren't many in Derby, England, where Core Designs is located.
Game testers are seldom, if ever, hired from outside a city. Game testing is usually a part-time, low-wage position with no benefits; few QA managers in the gaming industry have the resources, experience, or desire to pursue them as a valuable commodity. Certainly, if they're offering typical game tester wages, they probably won't find many lower-income young female action gamers with plenty of spare time in a rural Midland city.
If they want more female game testers for Tomb Raider, they'll just have to offer more money,
to attract candidates from other cities.
And that's a fine principle. Unfortunately, in practice, we must make concessions to the fact that in our society, the inability to trade cuts that person off from interaction with society. All arguments about decency and responsibility aside, that means we are alienating a segment of our population that could otherwise be productive and useful. And because companies are, by definition, selfish entities, we must compel them to behave in a manner that takes into account the greater good of the society.
Compare the lifetime economic output of a fully-integrated blind person minus the burden that integration places on society, versus the lifetime drain of a dependent non-productive blind person on their relatives and the State. It simply makes good economic sense to place measured, reasonable requirements on major businesses that they help integrate the disabled.
That said, I think this specific case is borderline. Unless there are fares that Southwestern only makes available over the web.
Agreed, the XBox IS a superior system. And frankly, given Microsoft's great track record of listening to their developers, you would think that they would have a much better market share. But there are a couple of problems:
... ad infinitum.
1) The XBox has a narrow target market. The high price point, the games that Microsoft has chosen to flog, and the huge clunky controller pretty much limits the XBox to the 18-30 year old male demographic, as opposed to the much broader appeal (i.e. 8-30 year olds) that the PS2 has. If a game developer must choose between one console or the other, they're going to choose the one with the biggest potential market.
2) The XBox came out at a time when everybody had just spent money on a PS2. There was a significant lag between when the PS2 really hit its stride in the market (i.e. almost immediately) and when the XBox did (after people started feeling like they could spend money on another console, and after a decent number of games hit). The XBox has never caught up to the PS2's install base, because they never had the breadth of games, because they had a smaller install base
Microsoft is throwing money at the problem, trying to break this vicious cycle by buying a better selection of games. They will have to spend a staggering amount of cash, though, and I doubt they'll make it back.
512 meg had better be enough memory. I don't thrash when I load a huge table, so I doubt that's actually the problem.
My current daily-use build of Mozilla is 1.1. Did gecko gain significant rendering improvements that were folded into 1.2?
I switched to Mozilla for casual browsing a few months ago (gestures and tabs; I can't ever go back). But for web applications (phpMyAdmin, etc) I stuck with IE. Why? Because Mozilla is much, much slower than IE at rendering the huge nested tables and complex forms that such applications often use.
I just popped open Phoenix and pointed it at a phpMyAdmin instance. Ahhhhhh.... very smooth, running almost as quickly as IE. Beautiful.
Now if only someone could fold these rendering performance optimizations into Mozilla proper, so that I might have my themes, bookmarks, gestures, tabs, and mail reader back. I don't give a hoot about startup time as long as I've got the system tray nubbin, just give me that optimized renderer!
A lot of companies (my own included) are suspicious of small consultants that charge far less than the competition on fixed-price contracts. One reason is, I think, a subconscious perception of quality -- "this is worth X to us, but you're charging X/4, therefore your results will be 1/4 the quality of what we want". But another is definitely "ownership" -- we want to feel like we own you, that our project will be more important to you than the other things on your plate, and that you'll go that extra mile to satisfy us, precisely because we are paying you so much. Although the costs of fixed-price consultant contracts have been pushed lower and lower by this economy, they still aren't commoditized yet in a lot of customers' minds; we still want the comfort of feeling like we've got a "temporary hire" who will make the effort to understand our business and the problem that we need them to solve. We want them to be every bit as motivated and aggressive as our employees, and we're willing to pay a premium to make sure that happens.
> 'In this day of massive corporate fraud and corporate governance that only serves to entrench
> bad management, it is now more imperative than ever that the Board act appropriately and
> demonstrate its duty of loyalty and care to shareholders,' [Josh Schechter, a partner in
> Steel Partners] wrote in June."
"When honor is lost, it is relief to die; Death is but a sure retreat from infamy.
Your duty to Lord Josh is clear, Gerald-san -- take your key to Heaven and Hell
and open the path to honor. That is the way of the samurai; that is the way of bushido."
Sorry Xeno; I was going to show, but had to cancel at the last minute (personal matters).
Who the hell picks these places on meetup.com, anyway? There's tons of great places to meet in this city, and they pick a crap bar in *Dormont*. I voted for it, but frankly that bar just seemed like the least evil choice on the list (Dunkin' Donuts?? WTF????).
Quite simply, Pittsburgh's meetup.com choices sucked. A lot of people's comments here seem to indicate that our city was by no means alone in that distinction. I think that if we had a better choice of venues (e.g. the Roman Room in the South Side, the Squirrel Cage in Sq.Hill, etc) we would've had a much bigger draw.
meetup is very, very flawed, in that the people who actually live in the city don't get to pick the venues.
> The "web service" model that Microsoft and IBM .NET (though, .NET on the server side, it
.NET solutions built and deployed using VS are the quickest way to maximum market penetration, since there are a whole lot of "programmers" out there that possess only the virtues of Laziness and Impatience, lacking the all-important Hubris to temper their slothful ways.
> has pushed has nothing to do with
> from a technical perspective, it may very well
> be implemented in
> could equally be implemented in PHP, Java,
> etc), but rather standards such as SOAP and
> friends.
[putting on devil's advocate hat]
Have you tried building a SOAPy web service using Apache and Java? It's a pain in the butt to configure and set up, and then you have to worry about SOAP compatibility issues. Whereas with VS.NET it's a snap to get a hello-worldy service up and running within a few minutes.
The one area in which Microsoft possesses real competency is making it ridiculously easy for developers to get up and running quickly, and to build solutions "the Microsoft way" in minimal time. If they want widespread adoption of web services, they want such things to spread as quickly as possible. They may well believe (and they may well be correct) that
Microsoft needs maximum market penetration for .NET, otherwise the initiative fails. EVERYBODY has to play in this particular sandbox, or MS' dream of a services-based software market (with far better growth potential for a monopoly than a product-based market) is bust. IIS is *one product*, one that, in the grand scheme of things, it would be worth sacrificing if it meant .NET ubiquity. The majority of the web runs on Apache, therefore for Microsoft to not support .NET on Apache is to lose the majority of the web. QED.
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What makes me curious is what platforms they'll support Apache on . .
Heh, I really miss the days when I could just spend a few hours making ANSI logos with TheDraw, and then receive dozens of download megs from some grateful BBS admin.
Or living down the dorm hallway from a Razor1911 courier, and trading beer for a leech account. I had a crack at a lot of games that I would *never* have even seen, let alone played, thanks to that.
It would appear so.
/. to implement a formal no-linking policy for Geocities. Stop giving them free ad impressions!
I can understand Geocities' squelching of their freeloaders in an attempt to make money, however nobody can link to Geocities site anymore without it going offline. That's just stupid. Geocities used to have a really high public profile due to the number of cool or weird sites that would pop up on it; now, I can't even remember the last time I saw a Geocities site.
Time for
I read about these ticketing-lights in a Car & Driver editorial a few months ago. It seems that they are not installed to improve safety, but to generate more income for the state. They cost much less per ticket than a patrol car and policeman would.
Well, in this case, I'm all for the DC local gov't using this as an excuse to nail suburbanites speeding through the city. DC is in a unique situation, in that the vast majority of the people that use its transit resources are commuting in from another "state", and work for an entity from which the city can't derive any tax revenue (the fed). The city gov't is constantly cash-strapped, and when they can't pay their teachers enough the fed takes over the school board and drives the schools even further into the ground. DC residents are basically second-class citizens in their own city, so don't expect them to shed much of a tear when some asshole Aggie bureaucrat has to pony up a few bucks every month because he likes to run every fucking red light on his way to work in the morning. Even now, when a cleaned-up police force means you can't tip the cop $20 to get out of a ticket, it's still too expensive to chase down (and get revenue from) all the traffic violations that happen every rush hour.
Ahem. Anyway, I agree with your points, and I wouldn't worry about this lasting much longer. All it'll take is some congressman's kid to get nailed six times in a month, and the fed will lean HARD on the city to abandon this scheme. They really hate it when the natives get uppity about what they consider their private playground.
One of the better ideas for a disposable phone that I've seen came out of a student contest run by [IIRC] Metropolis magazine.
It consisted of a thick "business card" phone -- a circuit printed on plastic and wrapped in paper, slightly larger than your average business card. The phone had about 60 minutes of talk time, couldn't receive calls, and had a single large button on one side. The idea was that you could buy a sheet of these phones for about $5-10 per, print your business card on them, and "burn" your own number into the phone. Pressing the button on the phone dialed that number.
This is, of course, insanely useful. A first-contact client can phone you back with very little effort, without having to pay for the call. 911 emergency phones can be given away or sold in stores. Vending machines could let you key in any number you liked (say, your SO) and print up a batch of phones for you.
I think it's on ultra-low-end applications like these that disposable cell phones will really find their stride. Even if Hop-On was legitimate, they'd have a hard time competing against companies like Cricket. Service is already a commodity, and people seem to like the flexibility and robustness of NON-disposable phones.