The safest and most effective way to relieve the stress levels of the products that you create is to document them.
Imagine what you believe is an good level of documentation and multiply it times ten!
If you are in the software creation business then your natural comfort level of what is an adequate level of documentation is much too low.
The best way to do documentation is to get one of the speech to text systems, like Dragon or IBM. Train it till you get to the point where it puts the vast majority of what you say into the correct words on the screen. Get a fast enough processor so that there is no or very little delay between what you say and the appearance of the text.
Get another computer that has the application and the source code that you've written. Put it next to the text-to-speech PC. Don't multitask speech-to-text and your display of the source.
Now get a picture of someone whom you feel stongly attracted to and put it between the two PCs. Pretend that that person is seriously interested in you and your work.
Start the text-to-speech program. Look at the picture and the code screen. Start describing in long precise detail what you did, why you did it, how it works, and why it is so cool that you did it this way. Pretend real hard that the person in the picture between the PCs is seriously interested. Keep talking. Describe why all the other programmers are not doing it right and why your code is so much better. Read the lines of code occasionally.
Go on for hours. Occasionally ramble about things that are off-subject. It doesn't matter.
When you reach the end of your code description. Stop the text-to-speech program.
DON'T Edit It! Attach the text file of your description to the end of your source code with comment characters or symbols at the beginning of each line if necessary.
You have documented your work in a 21st century style. Your users will be able to follow it and they will get great satisfaction and productivity from your having done it in this way.
One last thing. No matter what anyone says about the 10000 lines of 'comments' attached to the end of your source code file, Don't go back to the 1970's method of code documentation. It doesn't work. This method is superior. Memory is pennies a megabyte. Disk storage of the file is a dollar per gigabyte. Long detailed documentation is priceless.
Thank you,
Simonetta
The new century, the new technology, the new way of doing the same old shit.
Their prices are about 1/3 less than the other stores.
Plus, there is an amazing variety of people who shop there. Especially the WinCo in Beaverton Mall. Many people call this the 'International Store' because there are so many people from many different countries and backgrounds always shopping there.
Thirty years ago Beaverton was an "Happy Days" (1970s TV show) and an "Ozzie And Harriet" (1950s TV show) type of place. Now it's one of the most international cities on the West Coast. And without a trace of cosmopolitianism or hipness, a real feat.
Yet another person who's not going to buy an iPod.
Not exactly.
It's more Yet another person who's not going to buy an iPod but is going to get all the function and utility of the iPod experience and is willing to share the technical tips on how to do it to anyone who is interested.
"...Nobody cares..."
Not exactly correct there either. Millions of people who would buy an iPod if they weren't so expensive care. And they are willing to trade time to learn about the less costly alternatives, AND they are willing to give lots of money to the people who both provide them with alternatives and provide them with the information that they need to chose the one alternative to the iPod that is best for them.
Steven Jobs brought us the Mac computer. But it was just too expensive. Bill Gates created a inexpensive alternative and all the 'nobody cares' people made him the richest person on the planet.
I really kluged it. The adaptor plug from the outside looks the same as the ones on a Walkman, but after getting it home I found that the standard Walkman plug won't fit onto this power jack in the CD player. "Shit, chumped again," thought I. "A proprietary jack to make everyone buy a $25 AC adaptor for a $20 CD player."
I carefully opened the unit and mapped the connections with an DVM ohmmeter. Then I desoldered the connector, attached three wires to the now-empty holes on the circuit board, reassembled the unit, and soldered a standard mini power-jack to the wires. Then I used hot glue to attach the new AC jack to the side of the CD player. It worked, to my relief.
Then I got an automobile cigarette lighter plug and installed an LM317 adjustable voltage regulator chip in it that was adjusted (with two resistors) to +6 Volts (what the CD player requires). Then I spray painted a set of good headphones to be the same color as my hair so the cops won't notice that I'm wearing them and give me a big honking ticket.
Result: $25 car stereo with ten hours of music on each 14 cent CDr. I know I'm really cheap and sleazy, but what can I do?
Your comment about the disadvantages of using a CD player as a personal stereo are true and poignant. However, your argument that a $400 iPod is inherently superior than a $20 CD player with a mini CD stack is dependent on the unspoken assumption that there is an extra $400 to spend on a personal stereo.
If there is, then, yes, your reasoning trumps mine. But if all you have is $20 for a personal stereo, then having a CD player is far better than having no iPod.
The iPod is the latest of the Steve Jobs lifestyle accessories collection. Which is cool if you're a billlonaire who loves toys. Unfortunately Mr. Jobs fails to realize the extent that his presence in the media extolling cool toys that make him a ton of money is really getting irritating to all the rest of us on Planet Techno. We tolerate him because we know that he's more often right, AND his toys will be available in a few years at a small fraction of the Jobs price.
However, I've got 4000 CD quality songs on my 4.1 x 2.4 x.62" iPod with tracking of my favorite songs, play counts, custom playlists without re-burning CDs.
Your point is interesting, but the cost issue still is most important for me.
The MP3 CD player is about three times larger than the iPod, still small but not shirt pocket size. The internal media storage of the iPod is a real plus, but storing 4000 songs on DVD-ROM takes only five disks. Assuming about five megabytes per song, it is about 28 CDs (a quarter stack). Larger, but still not an overwhelming issue.
But the cost of the stereo and the media is really different for the same functionality. 28 CDRs at 14 cents each is about $4 US and the CD stereo is $20. $400 vs. $24 for a package that is about four times as large. And 52x CD burners going for $40 meets the advantages of FireWire and USB2. Plus CDs are the universal media. Everybody will be able to read them with their computer.
There still are real advantages to having a stereo and complete music collection in the size of a pack of cigarettes or cell phone. But in five years, iPod clones will be selling for $20, the Apple units won't be collectable, Apple will stop supporting them, batteries will be unavailable, and something else really expensive will be cool.
Another example of using retail strategies developed on the internet in new ways would be to use Ebay auction techniques to sell movie admissions.
There's no way to justify anymore charging the same price for every movie at every evening show. If a theatre has thirty seats available Monday night for "See Quim, Do Quim" and they have been getting an average of five people per show on weekday evening screenings for admission prices of $8.50, then it is foolish not to offer these tickets on a local 'Ebay'-type of auction. Many people would not pay $8.50 for the 9:35 Wednesday night show but would pay $2.50.
This is just money that the theatre owners are throwing away. I also believe that there are only three or so corporations that own about 90% of the first-run theatres in the USA. They would certainly have enough clout to make new arrangements with the major movie distributors.
Basicly it all comes down to corporate FUD. There's lots of money to be made by just trying new ways of marketing. But corporate centralization and consolidation has just petrified everyone.
At least the USA is not as bad, stupid, and backward as Germany. Christ, people are going to jail there for selling candy bars on Sunday or for announcing in the newspaper that they are reducing the price on an item that is perishable and has been greatly overstocked.
I never cease to be amazed when so many smart people get all twisted over such stupid things. The Germans would rule the world if they could just remember to take their medication.
Yes, thank you for your reply. I'm old enough to realize that the Sunday paper (which, in Oregon, comes out on Saturday morning) has all the grocery specials.
What I would like is a website like PriceWatch.com, only where the local grocery stores upload the information of what's on sale in their stores that week instead of electronic retailers uploading their sales.
Then I would like it expanded so that I could split a large order with someone in my neighborhood and make a dual purchase. For example, if 'Googles' are normally $1.79 each, and are on sale at $5.95 for 10 at Bozo's, and I only use two a month, then I would be able to split a purchase with someone else on the website who also only uses several a month.
This is the promise of the internet's coming effect on retailing. It will be a combination of Pricewatch.com to get information on lowest prices and Ebay to make ad hoc one-time retail buying connections with other people who are not retailers with a fixed store location.
This could be expanded to a courier service for people driving to a location several hundred miles away and have room to carry an extra ten kilo package (open and inspected to verify that it is not illegal,ect...). The long term potential of the internet is to make the exchange of information profitable in ways and in scales that were not possible previously.
It just seems that grocery stores are the most backward of all the major retailers in coming up with new ways to provide their service to their customers. They aren't the absolute worst; that 'honor' can only go to the public school system. But they aren't that far behind.
Yes, the Albertson's chain went to a customer ID card about eight months ago. I suspected at the time that it was a way to raise the general level of prices on all the items without pissing off all their customers at the same time.
This is more-or-less what has happened. If you use a card (the cashier scans the barcode on the plastic card) then you get the sale items at about 20% less than the standard price. But at normal price, almost every item in the store is 20% higher than the other stores in the area.
In my neighborhood there are seven major grocery stores within a mile radius of my apartment, so I can take advantage of weekly sales.
That is, if I can find out about these weekly sales. I want to be able to go to a website and find out what each store is having on sale this week, and, what the normal non-sale cost is for each item for each store.
The stores treat this information like it was top-secret military data. They threaten anyone who records prices for comparison with arrest. There are signs all over the stores: "No cameras", "no notebooks".
Such contempt for the general public makes me very uncomfortable whenever I go into grocery stores nowdays. I've reduced my shopping at Safeway by about 95% and at Albertson's by at least 60% in the past year. The checkers are amiable but extremely slow. The management is scientifically selected to be crypto-fascist pinhead morons and the whole experience of 'doing' these stores is unpleasent. And I'm just a normal shopper: not a shoplifter or scammer.
The worst grocery store in the country has got to be Safeway. They constantly do bait-and-switch with items that are advertised at reduced price only to have you pay extra at checkout because the fine print shows that the item was not the sale item. Like for example, big signs saying that "Flavor Fresh" brand frozen peas are 79 cents for a pound. So you grab a pack only to be charged $1.29 at the register. Turns out that the peas you grabbed were "FlavorPac" brand which looks like exactly the same package AND was placed directly under the sign saying "Flavor Fresh" peas were on sale.
This happened to me so many times at Safeway that I call it the 'Safeway Shuffle' at the checkout; where they send someone back to check the price when you complain that you were overcharged. I was at the point where I was bringing a caliper to measure the width of the barcode line and comparing it to the barcode on the sale announcement, when I realized that there was a simpler and more elegant solution. Just get the fuck out of Safeway and don't go back!
I'm still amazed that they're still in business. But many places in California, they're the only store for miles around.
So, yes, I'm pissed that companies are collecting all this information about customers without allowing the customers to use it for their benefit. The internet really has changed everything: people really do expect a mutually benefitial relationship from all this information gathering.
This is the point that the business and management people just don't seem to understand. In the coming years, companies that share information with their customers will prosper and those that hoard and hide information will not.
Why didn't they just take him out in the back behind the dumpster and kill him?
It seems reasonable to me to do this to some piece-of-shit who steals $64000 from people's bank accounts.
We don't need people like this around. There's too many people in the world already. And we don't really need to spend $20,000 a year to warehouse these assholes in prisons. We just don't need these people. Fuck 'em: just kill 'em. Don't even give it a second thought. Kill his kids too, they're probally just assholes as well.
Now I know that there is a arbritary number of Centigrade degrees between water freezing and boiling (100 there are, physics majors may disagree).
But there are not enough degrees in the human comfort range,and this is where Centigrade is not as good as Fahrenheit temperature scale.
I suspect, but I'm not sure, that the range 0 to 100 degrees in Fahrenheit is the absolute maximum range that a man can do a full day's work outside. Below 0 deg F, it's too cold regardless of the amount of clothing. Above 100 degrees, it's too hot.
Centigrade is a pain because there are not enough degrees in the range that the most important; the human comfort zone. Weather temperature is never expressed in tenths of degrees Centigrade.
I've never understood why some people claim that the Centigrade scale is 'better, more advanced' than the Fahrenheit scale.
Everybody in the world should just switch back to Fahrenheit.
I have wondered if it were possible to make a program that could help determine the shape of the corrective lens needed for a vision defect.
Since with high resolution monitors and 256 (or more)levels of gray available, it should be possible to create an 'eye chart' that looks bleary and out-of-focus to a normally-sighted person but sharp and clearly-focused to someone with deformed vision.
I imagine a program where the user can adjust the software implementations (precise changes on the screen regards to the blurring of the chart characters that mimic the effect of an individual lens) of the various corrective lens stages of an eye exam. When the user is seeing clear and focused characters on the eye chart, the program would know from the distortions of the normal chart needed to create this clarity exactly what the eyeware prescription would need to be for this individual user.
The user could send the eyeglass perscription to a off-shore eyeware maker and get perscription glasses made at a tiny fraction of inflated American prices. Or order the glasses made by the method developed by the subject of this article.
I've often wondered if it would be easier to program computers with Chinese characters.
Perhaps each character could represent a low-level primitive function with standardized send and return parameters.
Perhaps parallel computers could be 'programmed' with Chinese characters having the horizontal characters represent threads and the vertical arrangement of characters represent something else. The pre-compilier would rearrange the characters for their optimal parallel process and the main compilier turn the optimal processes into machine language.
We need to start thinking of ways to get order-of-magnitude increases in the productivity of programmers that matches the great increases in computer hardware productivity.
There is a Malthusian parallel to computer progress: Software productivity increases arithemeticly slowly while hardware productivity increases exponentially.
I believe that C programming language is based on English.
In English any word can be any part of speech without change (or minimal change) depending on its position in a sentence.
for example; 'oh fuck! This fucking fuck is fucked!' as opposed to 'Is Fucking fuck this fucked!' A subtle difference in emphasis; but comprehensible and even acceptable usage in some circles.
In C almost anything will compile, but what it does can be difficult to figure out. For example:
int * (foo) bar(*)
vs.
* (foo) * int bar(*)
I don't believe that C would be in its present form if it had not been developed initially by native English speakers. The examples above are lame, but the point is the same.
I'll beat that price!
on
Space Burial
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
For only $10,000 US (deposited in my Swiss bank account before your transistion to the next world), I will...
receive your ashes from the cremation facility,
and...
Give you a multi-colored ink-jet printed certificate that your ashes will be on the next space-shuttle flight and scattered into low-earth orbit. Where they will cause millions of tiny little twinkles that commemorate your life...
and...
Make sure that your ashes (in real life) don't make a big mess in the parking lot behind my apartment.
Hordes of Commodore 64 users are expected to download the system.
Does anyone still use the Commodore 64 for anything serious? At best I would assume that it would be used as a gaming platform for people obsessed with the simple games for the Commodore that were released twenty years ago.
Or it would be used as an extended embedded system with a composite video (television) but no need for extensive disk storage.
I was one of the Commodore 64's biggest fans. But even I switched to MS-DOS and IBM PC in the late 1980's. With ten-year old 286 and 386 laptops selling for $50, why would anyone want to spend time developing and using a Commodore 64 now?
Open source Linux is not free in the sense that a large institution can get increased productivity for no expended resources, like money.
It is so different from the 'standard' Windows norm that is used extensively that a large cost is incurred by retraining all your computer users and contracting for expensive Linux software engineers and technicians to link all the scattered, incomplete, and poorly documented pieces into a working solution for the organization.
If the code usage license itself weren't free and the source wasn't available, then Linux/Open Source wouldn't have any chance at all at replacing the commercial software solutions.
This letter and the examples following below convince me that the push to convert to Linux-Open Source will not come from the developed world's corporate environment, but, rather, from the undeveloped world.
Linux-Open Source will be adopted there first because there won't be the money available to buy Microsoft or other large private closed software solutions. As the developing world's entities grow larger and richer over the years, they will become the force that will be most successful at convincing wealthy corporations to develop parallel open-source software stuctures to Microsoft-SAF-Oracle, ect...
In this light, it is to Microsoft's advantage that the entities with limited resources for software in the developing world continue to use easily pirated software. People will use pirated Windows when they are poor and as they get more resources they will buy licenced versions of the same software in order to reduce linkage costs with global institutions that have used proprietary software since day one.
It would be in the interests of the open-source community to demand software companies put as much copy protection and install encryption techniques as possible on their products!
I've been thinking about what would happen if Win2000 source started to circulate for some time.
There are many people out there who really like Windows, even those who know Linux and are advanced technically. There are also many people who love Windows and hate Linux.
It is possible that some people will use the source of Win2000 to actually change several of the interface issues that are beginning to seriously affect productivity in the Windows environment. For example, the inability to use the long path name that is the current directory in one program and easily transfer it to the File:Open box of another program. Crawling through endless directory listings when you want to move a file from one program to another really eats a lot of time. Many people would pay to 'fix' the interface issues in Windows that probably can only be addresses by recompiling.
Would virus writers use access to the source to search for new ways to destroy data? Sure. What can anyone do about it? Well, as a start, punish them. It's common for virus writers (according to the New York Times Magazine) to post their 'research' on sites for script kiddies to implement. That way they are not legally liable for releasing a virus.
Bullshit! This is conspiracy to create fraud and grand theft vandalism. If Tommy Chong can go to jail for selling painted glass tubes, then why aren't these teenage virus writer Bozos in jail for causing millions of dollars in damage by writing criminal source code? Virus damage will start to actually fall when the people who cause the damage are convinced to cease this activity, perhaps by just killing a few of them in order to encourage them to find more acceptable hobbies like smoking weed or getting laid.
Even if the Windows source is actually somewhere on-line, what difference would it make? Anyone who recompiled it with changes wouldn't be able to sell or distribute it. Having an improved recompilied custom version of Windows would make you a criminal anywhere in the world. Plus it's a huge and extraordinarily complex program. All in all, it might be better just to learn Linux.
Still, some people would study Windows source and make illegal and discrete alternate distributions. The code would fork repeatedly from the current Microsoft release of Win2000 and over the course of twenty or thirty years become a hybrid of Windows, Linux, and Mac.
Or buy into Wackenhut or Corrections Corporation of America. These creeps run private corporate prison camps in the USA. What with the RIAA getting ready to throw tens of thousands of college students in private corporate prisons for the crime of listening to music, you can expect to see big gains in their stock price!
Especially when they start to cut back on the overhead by shipping their 'product' to distant third world countries where the costs of human storage are rock-bottom.
God bless America, land of the free and home of the brave!
I use Opera 7. It does a good job at blocking pop-ups and I can zoom the text size easily.
But it doesn't work with Ebay. My password is rejected everytime I use Opera and accepted everytime I use Internet Explorer 5.
Also whenever I use Yahoo! mail with Opera and I am entering my password, the prompt JUMPS to the user name box and the characters that I type appear appended to my user name. Again this doesn't happen in Internet Explorer.
I sure wish they could fix this nonsense.
If you want stock gain, buy into a company that does really nasty things to people. For instance, the company that makes Tasers, those guns that shoot darts that police use to zap protesting college students with 50000 volts of electricity, has seen their stock price go from $2 to over $120 in a year.
This reminds me of the story from 14 years ago of an engineer who claimed to have invented the microprocessor in 1970 before Ted Hoff.
He had a lot of papers to 'prove' his claim and was asking for a mere billion or so from Intel and Motorola.
He got his 15 minutes of fame and disappeared.
If that was you reading this now, hey, no offense buddy...
Still the idea of some small American company going up against five of the largest Japanese electronic keiretsu is absurd, especially if they try to do it in Japan. What a waste of paper.
Thank you for taking the time to answer my message.
I tend to throw a lot of 'chum' out onto Slashdot to try and prod the readers to write thoughtful and focused replys like your response. Calling the entire community of record store business 'stupid' is an example of going overly broad. If anything, the 'gatekeeper' service that you and the other independent record store owners makes you smarter than most of the rest of us. In retrospect, it is the big chains that are acting stupid and irresponibly timid.
The 'gatekeeper' function, when you find a way to make an income from it, will be the service that people will be willing to pay for as the price of music continues to fall. It's a large part of what people were actually paying for when they bought the physical disk in the record store. Digitization of any media tends to break it into pieces in a manner that was not possible (and therefore not even conceived of) before the digitization process. Here the gatekeeper service is being seperated from the disk distribution service. As the price of music goes down, either by P2P (Kazaa piracy) or by bands uploading their product to home-built web sites to avoid RIAA contracts, the value of the gatekeeper service will go up because an ever-increasing amount of unfocused product becomes available.
Ironically, the data from Kazaa downloads and files offered for share would provide a way to start applying scientific statistical analysis to the gatekeeper service.
Slashdot Mirror
The safest and most effective way to relieve the stress levels of the products that you create is to document them.
Imagine what you believe is an good level of documentation and multiply it times ten!
If you are in the software creation business then your natural comfort level of what is an adequate level of documentation is much too low.
The best way to do documentation is to get one of the speech to text systems, like Dragon or IBM. Train it till you get to the point where it puts the vast majority of what you say into the correct words on the screen. Get a fast enough processor so that there is no or very little delay between what you say and the appearance of the text.
Get another computer that has the application and the source code that you've written. Put it next to the text-to-speech PC. Don't multitask speech-to-text and your display of the source.
Now get a picture of someone whom you feel stongly attracted to and put it between the two PCs. Pretend that that person is seriously interested in you and your work.
Start the text-to-speech program. Look at the picture and the code screen. Start describing in long precise detail what you did, why you did it, how it works, and why it is so cool that you did it this way. Pretend real hard that the person in the picture between the PCs is seriously interested. Keep talking. Describe why all the other programmers are not doing it right and why your code is so much better. Read the lines of code occasionally.
Go on for hours. Occasionally ramble about things that are off-subject. It doesn't matter.
When you reach the end of your code description.
Stop the text-to-speech program.
DON'T Edit It! Attach the text file of your description to the end of your source code with comment characters or symbols at the beginning of each line if necessary.
You have documented your work in a 21st century style. Your users will be able to follow it and they will get great satisfaction and productivity from your having done it in this way.
One last thing. No matter what anyone says about the 10000 lines of 'comments' attached to the end of your source code file, Don't go back to the 1970's method of code documentation. It doesn't work. This method is superior. Memory is pennies a megabyte. Disk storage of the file is a dollar per gigabyte. Long detailed documentation is priceless.
Thank you,
Simonetta
The new century, the new technology, the new way of doing the same old shit.
I love the WinCo.
Their prices are about 1/3 less than the other stores.
Plus, there is an amazing variety of people who shop there. Especially the WinCo in Beaverton Mall. Many people call this the 'International Store' because there are so many people from many different countries and backgrounds always shopping there.
Thirty years ago Beaverton was an "Happy Days" (1970s TV show) and an "Ozzie And Harriet" (1950s TV show) type of place. Now it's one of the most international cities on the West Coast. And without a trace of cosmopolitianism or hipness, a real feat.
Yet another person who's not going to buy an iPod.
Not exactly.
It's more Yet another person who's not going to buy an iPod but is going to get all the function and utility of the iPod experience and is willing to share the technical tips on how to do it to anyone who is interested.
"...Nobody cares..."
Not exactly correct there either. Millions of people who would buy an iPod if they weren't so expensive care. And they are willing to trade time to learn about the less costly alternatives, AND they are willing to give lots of money to the people who both provide them with alternatives and provide them with the information that they need to chose the one alternative to the iPod that is best for them.
Steven Jobs brought us the Mac computer. But it was just too expensive. Bill Gates created a inexpensive alternative and all the 'nobody cares' people made him the richest person on the planet.
How'd you replace the AC adaptor?
I really kluged it. The adaptor plug from the outside looks the same as the ones on a Walkman, but after getting it home I found that the standard Walkman plug won't fit onto this power jack in the CD player. "Shit, chumped again," thought I. "A proprietary jack to make everyone buy a $25 AC adaptor for a $20 CD player."
I carefully opened the unit and mapped the connections with an DVM ohmmeter. Then I desoldered the connector, attached three wires to the now-empty holes on the circuit board, reassembled the unit, and soldered a standard mini power-jack to the wires. Then I used hot glue to attach the new AC jack to the side of the CD player. It worked, to my relief.
Then I got an automobile cigarette lighter plug and installed an LM317 adjustable voltage regulator chip in it that was adjusted (with two resistors) to +6 Volts (what the CD player requires). Then I spray painted a set of good headphones to be the same color as my hair so the cops won't notice that I'm wearing them and give me a big honking ticket.
Result: $25 car stereo with ten hours of music on each 14 cent CDr. I know I'm really cheap and sleazy, but what can I do?
Your comment about the disadvantages of using a CD player as a personal stereo are true and poignant. However, your argument that a $400 iPod is inherently superior than a $20 CD player with a mini CD stack is dependent on the unspoken assumption that there is an extra $400 to spend on a personal stereo.
If there is, then, yes, your reasoning trumps mine. But if all you have is $20 for a personal stereo, then having a CD player is far better than having no iPod.
The iPod is the latest of the Steve Jobs lifestyle accessories collection. Which is cool if you're a billlonaire who loves toys. Unfortunately Mr. Jobs fails to realize the extent that his presence in the media extolling cool toys that make him a ton of money is really getting irritating to all the rest of us on Planet Techno.
We tolerate him because we know that he's more often right, AND his toys will be available in a few years at a small fraction of the Jobs price.
However, I've got 4000 CD quality songs on my 4.1 x 2.4 x .62" iPod with tracking of my favorite songs, play counts, custom playlists without re-burning CDs.
Your point is interesting, but the cost issue still is most important for me.
The MP3 CD player is about three times larger than the iPod, still small but not shirt pocket size. The internal media storage of the iPod is a real plus, but storing 4000 songs on DVD-ROM takes only five disks. Assuming about five megabytes per song, it is about 28 CDs (a quarter stack). Larger, but still not an overwhelming issue.
But the cost of the stereo and the media is really different for the same functionality. 28 CDRs at 14 cents each is about $4 US and the CD stereo is $20. $400 vs. $24 for a package that is about four times as large. And 52x CD burners going for $40 meets the advantages of FireWire and USB2. Plus CDs are the universal media. Everybody will be able to read them with their computer.
There still are real advantages to having a stereo and complete music collection in the size of a pack of cigarettes or cell phone. But in five years, iPod clones will be selling for $20, the Apple units won't be collectable, Apple will stop supporting them, batteries will be unavailable, and something else really expensive will be cool.
Last week at BestBuy I found a CD player for $20.00 that reads MP3 files on CD-Rs and CD-RWs.
I got one and it plays my 15 cent CD-Rs with ten hours of music just fine. (although slow to start MP3 disks).
I had to replace to weird AC adapter connector though, because it was impossible to find a cheap AC adapter that fit the custom connector on it.
Another example of using retail strategies developed on the internet in new ways would be to use Ebay auction techniques to sell movie admissions.
There's no way to justify anymore charging the same price for every movie at every evening show. If a theatre has thirty seats available Monday night for "See Quim, Do Quim" and they have been getting an average of five people per show on weekday evening screenings for admission prices of $8.50, then it is foolish not to offer these tickets on a local 'Ebay'-type of auction. Many people would not pay $8.50 for the 9:35 Wednesday night show but would pay $2.50.
This is just money that the theatre owners are throwing away. I also believe that there are only three or so corporations that own about 90% of the first-run theatres in the USA. They would certainly have enough clout to make new arrangements with the major movie distributors.
Basicly it all comes down to corporate FUD. There's lots of money to be made by just trying new ways of marketing. But corporate centralization and consolidation has just petrified everyone.
At least the USA is not as bad, stupid, and backward as Germany. Christ, people are going to jail there for selling candy bars on Sunday or for announcing in the newspaper that they are reducing the price on an item that is perishable and has been greatly overstocked.
I never cease to be amazed when so many smart people get all twisted over such stupid things. The Germans would rule the world if they could just remember to take their medication.
Yes, thank you for your reply. I'm old enough to realize that the Sunday paper (which, in Oregon, comes out on Saturday morning) has all the grocery specials.
What I would like is a website like PriceWatch.com, only where the local grocery stores upload the information of what's on sale in their stores that week instead of electronic retailers uploading their sales.
Then I would like it expanded so that I could split a large order with someone in my neighborhood and make a dual purchase. For example, if 'Googles' are normally $1.79 each, and are on sale at $5.95 for 10 at Bozo's, and I only use two a month, then I would be able to split a purchase with someone else on the website who also only uses several a month.
This is the promise of the internet's coming effect on retailing. It will be a combination of Pricewatch.com to get information on lowest prices and Ebay to make ad hoc one-time retail buying connections with other people who are not retailers with a fixed store location.
This could be expanded to a courier service for people driving to a location several hundred miles away and have room to carry an extra ten kilo package (open and inspected to verify that it is not illegal,ect...). The long term potential of the internet is to make the exchange of information profitable in ways and in scales that were not possible previously.
It just seems that grocery stores are the most backward of all the major retailers in coming up with new ways to provide their service to their customers. They aren't the absolute worst; that 'honor' can only go to the public school system. But they aren't that far behind.
Yes, the Albertson's chain went to a customer ID card about eight months ago. I suspected at the time that it was a way to raise the general level of prices on all the items without pissing off all their customers at the same time.
This is more-or-less what has happened. If you use a card (the cashier scans the barcode on the plastic card) then you get the sale items at about 20% less than the standard price. But at normal price, almost every item in the store is 20% higher than the other stores in the area.
In my neighborhood there are seven major grocery stores within a mile radius of my apartment, so I can take advantage of weekly sales.
That is, if I can find out about these weekly sales. I want to be able to go to a website and find out what each store is having on sale this week, and, what the normal non-sale cost is for each item for each store.
The stores treat this information like it was top-secret military data. They threaten anyone who records prices for comparison with arrest. There are signs all over the stores: "No cameras", "no notebooks".
Such contempt for the general public makes me very uncomfortable whenever I go into grocery stores nowdays. I've reduced my shopping at Safeway by about 95% and at Albertson's by at least 60% in the past year. The checkers are amiable but extremely slow. The management is scientifically selected to be crypto-fascist pinhead morons and the whole experience of 'doing' these stores is unpleasent. And I'm just a normal shopper: not a shoplifter or scammer.
The worst grocery store in the country has got to be Safeway. They constantly do bait-and-switch with items that are advertised at reduced price only to have you pay extra at checkout because the fine print shows that the item was not the sale item. Like for example, big signs saying that "Flavor Fresh" brand frozen peas are 79 cents for a pound. So you grab a pack only to be charged $1.29 at the register. Turns out that the peas you grabbed were "FlavorPac" brand which looks like exactly the same package AND was placed directly under the sign saying "Flavor Fresh" peas were on sale.
This happened to me so many times at Safeway that I call it the 'Safeway Shuffle' at the checkout; where they send someone back to check the price when you complain that you were overcharged. I was at the point where I was bringing a caliper to measure the width of the barcode line and comparing it to the barcode on the sale announcement, when I realized that there was a simpler and more elegant solution. Just get the fuck out of Safeway and don't go back!
I'm still amazed that they're still in business. But many places in California, they're the only store for miles around.
So, yes, I'm pissed that companies are collecting all this information about customers without allowing the customers to use it for their benefit. The internet really has changed everything: people really do expect a mutually benefitial relationship from all this information gathering.
This is the point that the business and management people just don't seem to understand. In the coming years, companies that share information with their customers will prosper and those that hoard and hide information will not.
Why didn't they just take him out in the back behind the dumpster and kill him?
It seems reasonable to me to do this to some piece-of-shit who steals $64000 from people's bank accounts.
We don't need people like this around. There's too many people in the world already. And we don't really need to spend $20,000 a year to warehouse these assholes in prisons. We just don't need these people. Fuck 'em: just kill 'em. Don't even give it a second thought. Kill his kids too, they're probally just assholes as well.
Now I know that there is a arbritary number of Centigrade degrees between water freezing and boiling (100 there are, physics majors may disagree).
But there are not enough degrees in the human comfort range,and this is where Centigrade is not as good as Fahrenheit temperature scale.
I suspect, but I'm not sure, that the range 0 to 100 degrees in Fahrenheit is the absolute maximum range that a man can do a full day's work outside. Below 0 deg F, it's too cold regardless of the amount of clothing. Above 100 degrees, it's too hot.
Centigrade is a pain because there are not enough degrees in the range that the most important; the human comfort zone. Weather temperature is never expressed in tenths of degrees Centigrade.
I've never understood why some people claim that the Centigrade scale is 'better, more advanced' than the Fahrenheit scale.
Everybody in the world should just switch back to Fahrenheit.
We should call these 'interactive pens' or 'pen-i'.
That way we can truthfully say:
"I do all my productive work now with my pen-is!"
I have wondered if it were possible to make a program that could help determine the shape of the corrective lens needed for a vision defect.
Since with high resolution monitors and 256 (or more)levels of gray available, it should be possible to create an 'eye chart' that looks bleary and out-of-focus to a normally-sighted person but sharp and clearly-focused to someone with deformed vision.
I imagine a program where the user can adjust the software implementations (precise changes on the screen regards to the blurring of the chart characters that mimic the effect of an individual lens) of the various corrective lens stages of an eye exam. When the user is seeing clear and focused characters on the eye chart, the program would know from the distortions of the normal chart needed to create this clarity exactly what the eyeware prescription would need to be for this individual user.
The user could send the eyeglass perscription to a off-shore eyeware maker and get perscription glasses made at a tiny fraction of inflated American prices. Or order the glasses made by the method developed by the subject of this article.
I've often wondered if it would be easier to program computers with Chinese characters.
Perhaps each character could represent a low-level primitive function with standardized send and return parameters.
Perhaps parallel computers could be 'programmed' with Chinese characters having the horizontal characters represent threads and the vertical arrangement of characters represent something else. The pre-compilier would rearrange the characters for their optimal parallel process and the main compilier turn the optimal processes into machine language.
We need to start thinking of ways to get order-of-magnitude increases in the productivity of programmers that matches the great increases in computer hardware productivity.
There is a Malthusian parallel to computer progress: Software productivity increases arithemeticly slowly while hardware productivity increases exponentially.
I believe that C programming language is based on English.
In English any word can be any part of speech without change (or minimal change) depending on its position in a sentence.
for example; 'oh fuck! This fucking fuck is fucked!' as opposed to 'Is Fucking fuck this fucked!' A subtle difference in emphasis; but comprehensible and even acceptable usage in some circles.
In C almost anything will compile, but what it does can be difficult to figure out. For example:
int * (foo) bar(*)
vs.
* (foo) * int bar(*)
I don't believe that C would be in its present form if it had not been developed initially by native English speakers. The examples above are lame, but the point is the same.
For only $10,000 US (deposited in my Swiss bank account before your transistion to the next world), I will...
receive your ashes from the cremation facility,
and...
Give you a multi-colored ink-jet printed certificate that your ashes will be on the next space-shuttle flight and scattered into low-earth orbit. Where they will cause millions of tiny little twinkles that commemorate your life...
and...
Make sure that your ashes (in real life) don't make a big mess in the parking lot behind my apartment.
Hordes of Commodore 64 users are expected to download the system.
Does anyone still use the Commodore 64 for anything serious? At best I would assume that it would be used as a gaming platform for people obsessed with the simple games for the Commodore that were released twenty years ago.
Or it would be used as an extended embedded system with a composite video (television) but no need for extensive disk storage.
I was one of the Commodore 64's biggest fans. But even I switched to MS-DOS and IBM PC in the late 1980's. With ten-year old 286 and 386 laptops selling for $50, why would anyone want to spend time developing and using a Commodore 64 now?
It is so different from the 'standard' Windows norm that is used extensively that a large cost is incurred by retraining all your computer users and contracting for expensive Linux software engineers and technicians to link all the scattered, incomplete, and poorly documented pieces into a working solution for the organization.
If the code usage license itself weren't free and the source wasn't available, then Linux/Open Source wouldn't have any chance at all at replacing the commercial software solutions.
This letter and the examples following below convince me that the push to convert to Linux-Open Source will not come from the developed world's corporate environment, but, rather, from the undeveloped world.
Linux-Open Source will be adopted there first because there won't be the money available to buy Microsoft or other large private closed software solutions. As the developing world's entities grow larger and richer over the years, they will become the force that will be most successful at convincing wealthy corporations to develop parallel open-source software stuctures to Microsoft-SAF-Oracle, ect...
In this light, it is to Microsoft's advantage that the entities with limited resources for software in the developing world continue to use easily pirated software. People will use pirated Windows when they are poor and as they get more resources they will buy licenced versions of the same software in order to reduce linkage costs with global institutions that have used proprietary software since day one.
It would be in the interests of the open-source community to demand software companies put as much copy protection and install encryption techniques as possible on their products!
I've been thinking about what would happen if Win2000 source started to circulate for some time.
There are many people out there who really like Windows, even those who know Linux and are advanced technically. There are also many people who love Windows and hate Linux.
It is possible that some people will use the source of Win2000 to actually change several of the interface issues that are beginning to seriously affect productivity in the Windows environment. For example, the inability to use the long path name that is the current directory in one program and easily transfer it to the File:Open box of another program. Crawling through endless directory listings when you want to move a file from one program to another really eats a lot of time. Many people would pay to 'fix' the interface issues in Windows that probably can only be addresses by recompiling.
Would virus writers use access to the source to search for new ways to destroy data? Sure. What can anyone do about it? Well, as a start, punish them. It's common for virus writers (according to the New York Times Magazine) to post their 'research' on sites for script kiddies to implement. That way they are not legally liable for releasing a virus.
Bullshit! This is conspiracy to create fraud and grand theft vandalism. If Tommy Chong can go to jail for selling painted glass tubes, then why aren't these teenage virus writer Bozos in jail for causing millions of dollars in damage by writing criminal source code? Virus damage will start to actually fall when the people who cause the damage are convinced to cease this activity, perhaps by just killing a few of them in order to encourage them to find more acceptable hobbies like smoking weed or getting laid.
Even if the Windows source is actually somewhere on-line, what difference would it make? Anyone who recompiled it with changes wouldn't be able to sell or distribute it. Having an improved recompilied custom version of Windows would make you a criminal anywhere in the world. Plus it's a huge and extraordinarily complex program. All in all, it might be better just to learn Linux.
Still, some people would study Windows source and make illegal and discrete alternate distributions. The code would fork repeatedly from the current Microsoft release of Win2000 and over the course of twenty or thirty years become a hybrid of Windows, Linux, and Mac.
Or buy into Wackenhut or Corrections Corporation of America. These creeps run private corporate prison camps in the USA. What with the RIAA getting ready to throw tens of thousands of college students in private corporate prisons for the crime of listening to music, you can expect to see big gains in their stock price!
Especially when they start to cut back on the overhead by shipping their 'product' to distant third world countries where the costs of human storage are rock-bottom.
God bless America, land of the free and home of the brave!
I use Opera 7. It does a good job at blocking pop-ups and I can zoom the text size easily.
But it doesn't work with Ebay. My password is rejected everytime I use Opera and accepted everytime I use Internet Explorer 5.
Also whenever I use Yahoo! mail with Opera and I am entering my password, the prompt JUMPS to the user name box and the characters that I type appear appended to my user name. Again this doesn't happen in Internet Explorer.
I sure wish they could fix this nonsense.
If you want stock gain, buy into a company that does really nasty things to people. For instance, the company that makes Tasers, those guns that shoot darts that police use to zap protesting college students with 50000 volts of electricity, has seen their stock price go from $2 to over $120 in a year.
This reminds me of the story from 14 years ago of an engineer who claimed to have invented the microprocessor in 1970 before Ted Hoff.
He had a lot of papers to 'prove' his claim and was asking for a mere billion or so from Intel and Motorola.
He got his 15 minutes of fame and disappeared.
If that was you reading this now, hey, no offense buddy...
Still the idea of some small American company going up against five of the largest Japanese electronic keiretsu is absurd, especially if they try to do it in Japan. What a waste of paper.
Thank you for taking the time to answer my message.
I tend to throw a lot of 'chum' out onto Slashdot to try and prod the readers to write thoughtful and focused replys like your response. Calling the entire community of record store business 'stupid' is an example of going overly broad. If anything, the 'gatekeeper' service that you and the other independent record store owners makes you smarter than most of the rest of us. In retrospect, it is the big chains that are acting stupid and irresponibly timid.
The 'gatekeeper' function, when you find a way to make an income from it, will be the service that people will be willing to pay for as the price of music continues to fall. It's a large part of what people were actually paying for when they bought the physical disk in the record store.
Digitization of any media tends to break it into pieces in a manner that was not possible (and therefore not even conceived of) before the digitization process. Here the gatekeeper service is being seperated from the disk distribution service. As the price of music goes down, either by P2P (Kazaa piracy) or by bands uploading their product to home-built web sites to avoid RIAA contracts, the value of the gatekeeper service will go up because an ever-increasing amount of unfocused product becomes available.
Ironically, the data from Kazaa downloads and files offered for share would provide a way to start applying scientific statistical analysis to the gatekeeper service.