I did not pursue a CS degree, and I guess at this point I wouldn't even consider one, except perhaps for laughs.
I spent my twenties as a journalist and bandsman in the military, then studying music in college. Yeah, music, The Degree That Garners No Wage.
But...
I messed around with computers since my teens. I started programming on TRS-80 Model III systems for a science museum. And I never stopped. Not even when I went to college to study music, not even when I studied journalism. I'm one of *those* guys.
Today, I have 10 years of corporate programming experience under my belt. I worked as a consultant in QA and Tech Support prior to gaining my first programming job, and found those experiences worthwhile. And I've only worked for two projects in those 10 years, which should give you an idea of my retention rate (companies want to hang onto me.. I've even survived several mergers).
Some of the folks who did not make it on my projects had degrees. They had certifications. They did not have experience, and they did not demonstrate competence.
At my last job, none of us were under 30 years old. At my current job, we have a better balance of young vs. old, although the older folks mentor the younger ones.
In my experience, the people with the degree really couldn't think on their feet well enough to write even the simplest bits of software, yet demanded more money. The folks with certifications were even worse. If you displayed either of these on a resume, I would try to figure out if you got it after you gained experience (for the sake of having a degree... I live in an area that often requires a degree as a precondition for employment... stupid government rules). I'd ultimately look at what you can do, not what a piece of paper says.
Oh, age? I don't personally care how old or young you are. If you can do the job, great. If you're older, you can probably work with customers better, because you're likely to be a little more patient (at least up to a point). If you're younger, you're probably willing to try some weird things that might be interesting, and at least have the drive to work at a crazy pace. If I were an employer, I'd figure out how best to make use of your faculties, regardless of age.
Get the degree if you want, but you should really ask if that's the kind of work you want to do. Are you really driven to do this kind of work? If you aren't, you will burn out. This kind of work will consume you very quickly. You must have a passion for it.
If you want a calendar and e-mail solution, you might want to take a peek at Citadel.
Yes, it has a web interface, but you do not have to use it (just as Exchange). It offers IMAP, POP3, and SMTP protocols for working with mail. Currently, a company named Bynari even has an Outlook plugin that works with it, although I do not know how well.
You'll need to install it on a Unix-like machine rather than Windows. You can decide for yourself if that's good or bad.
But, maintenance is significantly easier than Exchange, and it offers calendaring in a standards-compliant way.
If you want, you can try it out for yourself (although outbound e-mail is necessarily disabled because spammers would otherwise abuse it) at Uncensored, where you can also ask support-related questions.
It has a very long history, and a pretty stable pedigree. The developers also try to be as responsive as possible... and it's open-sourced. Of course.
Some folks think of it as one of the internet's best kept secrets. Give it a spin and decide for yourself.
There's a relatively inexpensive product for which you can purchase a license called 'WinINSTALL'. Not a lot of people seem to know about it for some reason, but the currently available version of the product makes it relatively painless to completely rebuild a PC's OS, complete with applications and various profile settings (shortcuts, your favorite background images, and so on).
It doesn't have the pain associated with image solutions; you don't have to worry about re-imaging your machines every time you change the software that you want installed on the boxes (although you do have to deal with setting up the software packages, which can be a little bit of a pain, depending on what you're installing, and how friendly your vendors have been towards corporate environments). You can even reset the employee's PC from you own PC, without having to visit their box. It just needs to be turned on.
It doesn't require you have some incredible mondo-server to make it run; you can use pretty much any Windows 2000 or better machine. Certainly, any of the machines being cranked out today can handle WinINSTALL. Hell, I've seen it work on circa-1999 machines without issue (I think that's about 500Mhz Pentiums with 64 megs of RAM). It's slow on such machines, but it seemed to work.
It's also likely to be around for a while; the product was first introduced to the Windows market back when Windows 3.11 was popular, maybe even before then. It used to win a lot of awards, but I think it just fell off everyone's radar over the years.
I am a programmer, and I've occasionally looked over the Citadel code. It's not a hodge-podge at all... it's reasonably well designed to handle a variety of protocols, to include its own proprietary protocol, using a kind of plug-in architecture. Frankly, although I don't generally like C code, I find this code is very well thought out.
Furthermore, it consolidates your services to two executables (the Citadel server and the web interface server), rather than the several you'd otherwise have if you tried to cobble something together yourself (smtp, pop3, imap, something proprietary, and perhaps an html server like apache with whatever mods you'd need thereafter).
As a backend solution, it's probably the finest offering available for open source software. It's absurdly easy to maintain, easy to update, easy to install (http://easyinstall.citadel.org/ and easy to back up or restore (copy the database files, even while Citadel is running, then copy the database logs), and the Citadel folks take problems seriously.
I wonder if the original poster could kindly expand on that hodge-podge comment... I know that the folks who work on Citadel take the issue very seriously, and would love to understand what problems someone may be having with it. From what I've seen of their reaction to people's issues in the support forum on http://uncensored.citadel.org/ they take their offering very seriously, so I'm sure they'd love to more clearly understand any issues you might be having with it.
Admittedly, there still isn't a really great front-end that takes advantage of all of Citadel's abilities. The Citadel team has opted to focus more on developing the WebCit interface to help deal with this problem, as I understand it. The team has tried working with some others towards a client-side solution, but those efforts have not quite taken off yet. Still, I think there's some serious effort underway to make everything work more smoothly, they're just not quite there yet.
Big business isn't into cool. They can't afford it. It's one of the signals that indicate when your business has shifted from being a small company to a large company.
It's pretty simple, really.
A new, small company comes up with a really cool product that nobody ever thought of, or at least never bothered to try to sell. The company is innovative, smart, hip, and all those happy adjectives.
They continue improving their spiffy product, making it easier to use, better, stronger, faster, able to brush your teeth, or whatever. They don't generally branch too far into other directions, unless they're forced to by some competing company who is doing a better job... but even then, they'll still be innovative.
Eventually, if the company is smart, has the right people in it, and manages to play its cards right, it might set the standard for the kind of product it provides. Everyone else is expected to live up to them as a standard. When this happens, you start to see the suck happen.
The company will continue to try to improve their products, but they won't generally stray too far away from their core product, because they often have too many investors who expect that core to provide them with a return for their investment. Plus, they've spent so much time and effort grasping that domain, they can't easily or quickly move the company in another direction. You kind of wind up seeing everything from the perspective of that product, which limits your ability to be creative.
As the company gets bigger, the problem continues. In time, the only thing that can cause the huge company to shift direction is a significant threat to their core product by a competing technology.. something that makes your technology obsolete, but works in a completely different fashion.
The biggest threat to Microsoft will not be an operating system. Not directly. It will be a shift in thinking. One possible threat is the open-source phemonemon, with its variety of operating systems (to include the current darling, Linux) and applications and such.
Another possible threat might be very small computers.. pocket-sized or so.. that distributes our current workloads to even more granular levels, which seems to be what has a number of companies excited right now (except nobody has managed to pull this off properly yet).
Your cellphone holds your telephone numbers, and maybe communicates with a series of servers to acquire other phone numbers as needed, eliminating the need for phone books. Then, while you're talking to your friend, the two of you decide to meet at a favorite restaurant on Saturday around noon, so you forward the appointment to your clock at home, which will cause your phone to ring (or send e-mail, or whatever mode it becomes set for as you go about your day) about fifteen minutes prior to your appointment with a text message telling you where you need to be. Meanwhile, you've been taking some notes concerning the conversation on your tablet, and after some thought, you realize that you need some comments from another friend, but know that he's busy with something. So you send the notes on your tablet to your friend via e-mail (or whatever technology is most appropriate), which automatically finds its way to your friend in some appropriate way (maybe he's really quirky, and has set up a tablet in his bathroom so when he's on the john, he can review such notes).
I think that's the sort of thing that has a great chance to rock Microsoft's world. Get rid of chaining people to desktops, and if you do this quickly and effectively enough, Microsoft will crumble.
Re:Alternative fuels in the US
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239 MPG Car
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· Score: 1
Truth be told, I tend to use public transportation more than my car. I use the car for places I cannot use public transportation for. It hardly ever gets used. It's almost a waste to have purchased it, except I do occasionally like to get out to the mountains or shop outside the DC area, or whatever.
So, yeah, I'm actually doing something (else), it simply isn't on topic.
I'd be interested in looking over that list of biodiesel filling stations, just to see what their prices are. I did not see that list. If none of them are near me, though, time will likely prevent me from filling up.
Alternative fuels in the US
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239 MPG Car
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· Score: 4, Interesting
When I purchased my diesel Beetle, someone suggested I look into BioDiesel. As far as I can tell, the only way I would be able to use BioDiesel in my car would be to purchase the stuff in bulk and store it somewhere. I don't think I can legally do that in my condominium. And at $1.90 to $3.00 a gallon, I don't think I can afford it compared to the $1.55 a gallon (or so) that I will generally pay for standard diesel.
I work in the DC area, so reducing emissions would seem to be a priority here. Except that someone apparently removed funding for BioDiesel. Someone who, I think, currently lives in the White House. Someone who, I think, has more of an interest in preserving oil company interests (being something of an oil man himself) than protecting even his own health.
The last link is particularly nice. While I will fault the US government for doing anything substantive, they at least have provided a lot of interesting research on the topic.
The comment happened exactly as I described. I studied music at UNC-Asheville for four years, working towards a major in Music with an emphasis on composition. Having the opportunity to take the film scoring course delighted me to no end, as it gave me skills and understanding I might never have otherwise gained.
Maybe some people like 90210 (I guess), but I would have thought I had expressed reverence for Koyannisqatsi, not irreverence. For those who like the soap-opera, my apologies; I am not a fan of television programming in general, and could easily have chosen anything, but selected 90210 because it was a sequence of numbers.
Long ago, when studying film scoring as part of my degree towards music, our final project for the course was to write music for a portion of Koyaanisqatsi.
I had to write music for the very end, when the rocket goes into the air, and explodes, falling, before an image of a native American work of art fades into view (then the credits).
Thinking about the film's point, I thought I'd write some of the most contrived music I could imagine for the rocket scene. To that end, I serialized the '90210' zip code (in not-so-fond memory of the soap-opera bearing that name) into musical notes, using that sequence to guide everything, from the rhythms, harmonies, and melodies of the poor score. It had precisely the effect I wanted. A work of music utterly devoid of soul.
It's amusing to me, now, to learn that Philip Glass rejected serialism when he was only 19 years old. I knew what I was doing to the movie was dirty, but I had no idea of the full depths I had sunk.
He took a terrible Japanese film and redubbed it with his own words to make the film considerably more enjoyable. Pretty heavy editing, that could have gotten him in some kind of trouble if Hollywood manages to succeed in their bid to keep people from editing movies.
For a little while, I worked for a large chain of restaurants who were changing over to a new point of sales system (POS).
Each restaurant was instructed to package the original POS and mail it back to the company's headquarters.
One of these restaurants decided they should really clean up the POS before sending it back, and ran the thing through the dishwasher. The dishwashers for this restaurant run fairly hot, causing the plastic to warp and buckle, effectively ruining the POS.
In another incident (same place), a certain restaurant had been hording hard-drives from the new POS (we would occasionally send a hard-drive with an image of the original OS to resolve problems, and these guys still had two of the old ones, which we wanted to reuse). I politely asked that they return the hard-drives in the same boxes we sent them in.
Instead, they returned them in one of those plastic FedEx bags. However, they were thoughtful enough to include the silicon gel pack.
Needless to say, the hard-drives were very thoroughly dead, with no hope for redemption.
I wish I had seen this earlier. As it stands, likely nobody will notice this.
The very first historial electronic work of music is not Carlos, but Edgar Varese.
He wrote for theremins in the early 1930's, and wrote the very well known Poeme Electronique for the Phillips pavilion at the 1958 World's Fair in Brussels (his last completed composition).
Varese was very well known for his innovative work in electronic music.
I used to use a protractor and ruler to do geometry in school. Damned fine tools... capable of giving a more precise measurement than any calculator or PDA if they're really nice, and does something more than visually expresses the concepts; it gives you a hands-on feel. This contributes to depth-of-processing, which in turn helps aid memory.
Whatever... we already have cashiers who are incapable of performing basic arithmetic when the register dies, I suppose this sort of thing should come as no shock.
But then again, I have to consider the views of the ancient Greeks, as writing was becoming more popular. Some folks had concerns that it would prevent people from memorizing the old stories, since you could simply look up the stories in a book or something instead of having to recall it from memory.
This sort of thing seems to always happen with certain technologies. As they aid us, we lose some skills, only to gain new ones.
So... ideas as to what new skills we'll gain from these advances? Stronger fact-finding skills perhaps? A facility with logic? Better pattern-matching skills?
My comments were focused not on the quality of music in general (as you'll find if you look at some of my other comments in this thread), but on the music generated by the music industry in particular.
Yes, this is a very subjective topic. But it honestly shouldn't take a tremendous amount of musical study to see that the music industry doesn't generate a lot of innovative, interesting music. It creates corporate rock. It squeezes various formulas to extract money from people who manage to fit the formulae well-enough (which, it would seem, leaves me out, thankfully).
The idea for this special brand of musical hell was created by Bruce Springstein in the 70's, back when the music industry nearly died before... or did most of us forget this. Mr. Springstein found that when he tuned his compositions for a specific set of demographics, he could consistently generate the sort of audience he was looking for. Prior to Springstein, such an idea was unheard of; people wrote music hoping it would sell, and branding was accomplished by building up the band's image; a band's inertia kept things going. But this model started to fail in the 70's, and out of desperation, the music industry discovered Springstein's trick and started mass-producing it.
[And I do not write this to pick on Springstein... if I wanted to pick on any music artist, I'd pick on Phil Collins, Tori Amos, Michael Jackson, or Roger Whitaker, since I find all of these guys to be quite vile to my tastes.]
Now it's the 2000's, and people have (likely) caught on to the formulae. They want music tuned to their interests and tastes, which means you need to tune your formulae (if you insist on continuing with such a program) to a smaller crowd if you want to survive.
Of course, this works against radio (as mentioned in the article), since radio wants the mega-hits.
So, you can look at what those mega-hits had in common, and figure out why Pink Floyd's "Dark Side Of The Moon" continues to survive (and strongly at that) today. To do that, you have to study music. And after you've studied music, learning what all the great works of music have in common, you could return to the mega hits by applying QUALITY to the music.
Some of those old hits survive because they're their cream of the crop. They've managed to draw people's interest, and stay on top for literally decades. Today's drivel generally doesn't last very long before you want something else. You want mega-hits... apply quality.
Your general logic looks all nice and fine, except that musical quality can be judged by metrics beyond whether you like a given work or not. I have, many times, listened to quality music that I would never care to purchase for myself. The trick to pulling this off is to actually study music carefully, to see what the greater works have in common with each other.
By way of some examples, I can't stand most of John Cage's music, but I appreciate its quality. And while Scott Joplin was easily the best Ragtime composer around, his one attempt at an opera (Treemonisha, if I recall) simply doesn't make it; he tried to apply his Ragtime forms to the opera style, which simply doesn't work since an opera lasts far longer than a ragtime tune, and ragtime forms extended out that long will bore you.
I guess I'm saying that the current set of formulae leads to generally crappy music. You want more hits, study what makes people continue to listen to certain works of music, and apply *that* formula. Then market the hell out of it.
Heh... I've noticed that the earlier albums for a group often seem better than the later ones. There are some notable exceptions to this rule, though, such as The Beatles and Dead Can Dance.
That's why I think the more serious production money should be reserved for the folks who demonstrate that they would put it to better use. Use the production money for innovation, not polishing. There's something wonderfully alive in that raw sound. Don't kill it... draw it out!
As such, 'Trance' music, African rhythmic drumming, and such are not included. They aren't obnoxious. Although, to you, it seems it is (you did, after all, quote 'obnoxiously').
And if you think today's youth would appreciate a Bali singer's peculiar intonation system (when compared to Western ideas of intonation), you would be deluded. Hell, most folks today have become so used to hearing music in even-temperment they couldn't imagine the purity of sound available to them if some decent musicians would go to the trouble to use just-intonation. Listening to Eastern music, for today's youth, is inconceivable, with its unique tonal system.
My musical education, since you're trolling, includes some ethomusicology, and damn near a BA in music, with an emphasis on composition. I take music quite seriously, and would like to see the art form grow in this country.
As for dancing to music, I have never been moved enough by so-called 'house' music to feel the desire to dance to it. I have danced (privately, where no-one else could see me <grin>) to music that moves me. I'm probably not a great dancer anyway, and I doubt I could find crowds of people interested in dancing to a 5/4 beat (for example).
As for being 'an aged man clawing at the past', if the present cannot provide music worth listening to, perhaps this is indeed true. However, occasionally, I have managed to find a modern gem or two out there (however, never in the mainstream). Toby Twining has recently released an album that promises to be good (complete with just-intonation, vocal techniques that are non-western, and tone-rows, to name a few interesting techniques), and sometimes I manage to find some really cool stuff amongst the rabble (Chrystal Belle Scrodd comes to mind). None of these artists I've mentioned will be popularized by the mainstream media, although you might find Toby Twining's work in the stores (maybe, if you're lucky.. I was). I do not consider them part of the music 'industry', hence, not a focus of my previous comment.
As for defining 'good' music, admittedly, it's in the ear of the beholder. However, when different artists are all doing damn near exactly the same thing, when the innovation is lost, the music ceases to be 'good' anymore. And without some training in music appreciation, kids will continue to grow up thinking that this drek is wonderful, when there's a wide world of wonderful music waiting for them out of the mainstream.
It doesn't help that the music industry neardly died in the 70's, and in a desparate attempt to avoid that disaster, they learned (from Bruce Springstein) the so-called 'art' of marketing. Build music that fits a formula that a good cross-segment of society likes, and you'll sell a lot of records.
Unfortunately, like so many greedy people, they went too far. The honed, refined, and adhered to the formula to such an extent that now the vast majority of the music you hear today is drivel.
The article would place some of the blame for this on radio, however the music industry embraced this soulless form of corp-o-rock.
The music industry could start earning more income, perhaps, by improving the quality of the music it generates.
Sure, production value has improved, but today's music sounds much like a movie with great special effects but no plot; it lacks substance. The industry has concentrated so hard on vacuous marketing techniques aimed at various demographics, as well as absurd lobbying activities amongst politicians that it should truly come as no surprise that folks have become disgusted with today's music, by and large.
Truly, look at what they're coming up with these days; the better tunes are rehashed oldies (where they've taken advantage of improved production techniques to bring you better sounding copies of old tunes that folks are familiar with). And even some of those are downright offensive with 'corporate appeal'.
I could only think of two more possible solutions to their problems (although it may be too late).
First, recognize that the Baby Boomers are getting older. You aren't going to see that kind of explosive buying power again (at least not until the next major disaster that wipes out a third of the population, making room for another baby boom). So don't even bother. Go with a wider range of musicians and spend a little less money on production (something that's getting easier these days). Quick little hint: scarcity of resources breeds artistic endeavor. Some of the most clever bits of music ever crafted came from truly small production budgets. No need to starve their resources, though, just force your talent to grow their techniques and composition skills before exposing them to the big production dollars.
Second, instead of lobbying your congressman for these truly insulting and offensive abuses of law, put your money into the education system to improve the state of music education in our schools. If folks have no appreciation for music, what makes you think they're going to bother to listen to any of it? Branding? Today's youth barely grasps the concept of counterpoint (multiple melodies played on top of each other), can't appreciate a good groove (preferring an obnoxiously repetitive 'beat' instead), and do not have an iota of an appreciate for music without lyrics.
Y'know, you don't necessarily need to put together a password full of random noise to have something secure. Sometimes, something algorythmically determined to come up with a 'sounding' word without actually using a dictionary (with the occasional number or special character) can work very effectively, yet allow a user to remember the password (cutting down on post-it note insecurities).
You'd be surprised the sort of research that goes into coming up with something like this, too. Not just the program, but the specifications for what makes a safe kind of password (y'know, taking into account stuff like the likelihood of someone writing the text down somewhere, or choosing a lame password, or whatever).
Not that I blame him, and not that he's not completely without merit here, but I don't really think RealNames had a viable product to begin with (as several of the comments last time suggested).
If anything, I think this company failed to adapt to changes in technologies.
After all, in IE, you may use google's taskbar to provide a keyword-search right there on your browser. And in Mozilla, you have the sidebar with google enabled. So why bother using 'keywords' to search for stuff when you have something much more stable in google?
In any event, they probably shouldn't have tried to put so many eggs in the Microsoft basket. Yet, I'm unsure they would have had much choice... where else could they have gone?
Hmm.. and Microsoft wishes to convince folks that a monopoly such as theirs is a *good* thing?
Can you imagine using this technology to insert your favorite politician in a porn video? George Bush Does Dallas.
Used within a survellance camera, it could detect motion without getting tricked by that tree near the air vent.
It could also be used in surgical situations where a specialist located in another state can more easily study facets of the video being provided to him (cutting out noise, if you will).
You could do some really weird video editing where you could create a scene of a person standing in a verdant field in the middle of summer with snow falling within his 'mask'.
Items recorded in this way (presuming the mask is also recorded) could perhaps be admissable evidence that helps the court focus on a specific action that might otherwise get missed.
It might also provide a less-expensive way to make 3-D videos. Precursor to holographic movies?
Slashdot Mirror
I did not pursue a CS degree, and I guess at this point I wouldn't even consider one, except perhaps for laughs.
I spent my twenties as a journalist and bandsman in the military, then studying music in college. Yeah, music, The Degree That Garners No Wage.
But...
I messed around with computers since my teens. I started programming on TRS-80 Model III systems for a science museum. And I never stopped. Not even when I went to college to study music, not even when I studied journalism. I'm one of *those* guys.
Today, I have 10 years of corporate programming experience under my belt. I worked as a consultant in QA and Tech Support prior to gaining my first programming job, and found those experiences worthwhile. And I've only worked for two projects in those 10 years, which should give you an idea of my retention rate (companies want to hang onto me.. I've even survived several mergers).
Some of the folks who did not make it on my projects had degrees. They had certifications. They did not have experience, and they did not demonstrate competence.
At my last job, none of us were under 30 years old. At my current job, we have a better balance of young vs. old, although the older folks mentor the younger ones.
In my experience, the people with the degree really couldn't think on their feet well enough to write even the simplest bits of software, yet demanded more money. The folks with certifications were even worse. If you displayed either of these on a resume, I would try to figure out if you got it after you gained experience (for the sake of having a degree... I live in an area that often requires a degree as a precondition for employment... stupid government rules). I'd ultimately look at what you can do, not what a piece of paper says.
Oh, age? I don't personally care how old or young you are. If you can do the job, great. If you're older, you can probably work with customers better, because you're likely to be a little more patient (at least up to a point). If you're younger, you're probably willing to try some weird things that might be interesting, and at least have the drive to work at a crazy pace. If I were an employer, I'd figure out how best to make use of your faculties, regardless of age.
Get the degree if you want, but you should really ask if that's the kind of work you want to do. Are you really driven to do this kind of work? If you aren't, you will burn out. This kind of work will consume you very quickly. You must have a passion for it.
If you want a calendar and e-mail solution, you might want to take a peek at Citadel.
Yes, it has a web interface, but you do not have to use it (just as Exchange). It offers IMAP, POP3, and SMTP protocols for working with mail. Currently, a company named Bynari even has an Outlook plugin that works with it, although I do not know how well.
You'll need to install it on a Unix-like machine rather than Windows. You can decide for yourself if that's good or bad.
But, maintenance is significantly easier than Exchange, and it offers calendaring in a standards-compliant way.
If you want, you can try it out for yourself (although outbound e-mail is necessarily disabled because spammers would otherwise abuse it) at Uncensored, where you can also ask support-related questions.
It has a very long history, and a pretty stable pedigree. The developers also try to be as responsive as possible... and it's open-sourced. Of course.
Some folks think of it as one of the internet's best kept secrets. Give it a spin and decide for yourself.
... especially if you're using XP.
There's a relatively inexpensive product for which you can purchase a license called 'WinINSTALL'. Not a lot of people seem to know about it for some reason, but the currently available version of the product makes it relatively painless to completely rebuild a PC's OS, complete with applications and various profile settings (shortcuts, your favorite background images, and so on).
It doesn't have the pain associated with image solutions; you don't have to worry about re-imaging your machines every time you change the software that you want installed on the boxes (although you do have to deal with setting up the software packages, which can be a little bit of a pain, depending on what you're installing, and how friendly your vendors have been towards corporate environments). You can even reset the employee's PC from you own PC, without having to visit their box. It just needs to be turned on.
It doesn't require you have some incredible mondo-server to make it run; you can use pretty much any Windows 2000 or better machine. Certainly, any of the machines being cranked out today can handle WinINSTALL. Hell, I've seen it work on circa-1999 machines without issue (I think that's about 500Mhz Pentiums with 64 megs of RAM). It's slow on such machines, but it seemed to work.
It's also likely to be around for a while; the product was first introduced to the Windows market back when Windows 3.11 was popular, maybe even before then. It used to win a lot of awards, but I think it just fell off everyone's radar over the years.
You can find more information about it here:
http://www.ondemandsoftware.com/
This is a product designed to deal with problems like this.
Ditto what athos-mn is saying here.
I am a programmer, and I've occasionally looked over the Citadel code. It's not a hodge-podge at all... it's reasonably well designed to handle a variety of protocols, to include its own proprietary protocol, using a kind of plug-in architecture. Frankly, although I don't generally like C code, I find this code is very well thought out.
Furthermore, it consolidates your services to two executables (the Citadel server and the web interface server), rather than the several you'd otherwise have if you tried to cobble something together yourself (smtp, pop3, imap, something proprietary, and perhaps an html server like apache with whatever mods you'd need thereafter).
As a backend solution, it's probably the finest offering available for open source software. It's absurdly easy to maintain, easy to update, easy to install (http://easyinstall.citadel.org/ and easy to back up or restore (copy the database files, even while Citadel is running, then copy the database logs), and the Citadel folks take problems seriously.
I wonder if the original poster could kindly expand on that hodge-podge comment... I know that the folks who work on Citadel take the issue very seriously, and would love to understand what problems someone may be having with it. From what I've seen of their reaction to people's issues in the support forum on http://uncensored.citadel.org/ they take their offering very seriously, so I'm sure they'd love to more clearly understand any issues you might be having with it.
Admittedly, there still isn't a really great front-end that takes advantage of all of Citadel's abilities. The Citadel team has opted to focus more on developing the WebCit interface to help deal with this problem, as I understand it. The team has tried working with some others towards a client-side solution, but those efforts have not quite taken off yet. Still, I think there's some serious effort underway to make everything work more smoothly, they're just not quite there yet.
Big business isn't into cool. They can't afford it. It's one of the signals that indicate when your business has shifted from being a small company to a large company.
It's pretty simple, really.
A new, small company comes up with a really cool product that nobody ever thought of, or at least never bothered to try to sell. The company is innovative, smart, hip, and all those happy adjectives.
They continue improving their spiffy product, making it easier to use, better, stronger, faster, able to brush your teeth, or whatever. They don't generally branch too far into other directions, unless they're forced to by some competing company who is doing a better job... but even then, they'll still be innovative.
Eventually, if the company is smart, has the right people in it, and manages to play its cards right, it might set the standard for the kind of product it provides. Everyone else is expected to live up to them as a standard. When this happens, you start to see the suck happen.
The company will continue to try to improve their products, but they won't generally stray too far away from their core product, because they often have too many investors who expect that core to provide them with a return for their investment. Plus, they've spent so much time and effort grasping that domain, they can't easily or quickly move the company in another direction. You kind of wind up seeing everything from the perspective of that product, which limits your ability to be creative.
As the company gets bigger, the problem continues. In time, the only thing that can cause the huge company to shift direction is a significant threat to their core product by a competing technology.. something that makes your technology obsolete, but works in a completely different fashion.
The biggest threat to Microsoft will not be an operating system. Not directly. It will be a shift in thinking. One possible threat is the open-source phemonemon, with its variety of operating systems (to include the current darling, Linux) and applications and such.
Another possible threat might be very small computers.. pocket-sized or so.. that distributes our current workloads to even more granular levels, which seems to be what has a number of companies excited right now (except nobody has managed to pull this off properly yet).
Your cellphone holds your telephone numbers, and maybe communicates with a series of servers to acquire other phone numbers as needed, eliminating the need for phone books. Then, while you're talking to your friend, the two of you decide to meet at a favorite restaurant on Saturday around noon, so you forward the appointment to your clock at home, which will cause your phone to ring (or send e-mail, or whatever mode it becomes set for as you go about your day) about fifteen minutes prior to your appointment with a text message telling you where you need to be. Meanwhile, you've been taking some notes concerning the conversation on your tablet, and after some thought, you realize that you need some comments from another friend, but know that he's busy with something. So you send the notes on your tablet to your friend via e-mail (or whatever technology is most appropriate), which automatically finds its way to your friend in some appropriate way (maybe he's really quirky, and has set up a tablet in his bathroom so when he's on the john, he can review such notes).
I think that's the sort of thing that has a great chance to rock Microsoft's world. Get rid of chaining people to desktops, and if you do this quickly and effectively enough, Microsoft will crumble.
Truth be told, I tend to use public transportation more than my car. I use the car for places I cannot use public transportation for. It hardly ever gets used. It's almost a waste to have purchased it, except I do occasionally like to get out to the mountains or shop outside the DC area, or whatever.
So, yeah, I'm actually doing something (else), it simply isn't on topic.
I'd be interested in looking over that list of biodiesel filling stations, just to see what their prices are. I did not see that list. If none of them are near me, though, time will likely prevent me from filling up.
When I purchased my diesel Beetle, someone suggested I look into BioDiesel. As far as I can tell, the only way I would be able to use BioDiesel in my car would be to purchase the stuff in bulk and store it somewhere. I don't think I can legally do that in my condominium. And at $1.90 to $3.00 a gallon, I don't think I can afford it compared to the $1.55 a gallon (or so) that I will generally pay for standard diesel.
I work in the DC area, so reducing emissions would seem to be a priority here. Except that someone apparently removed funding for BioDiesel. Someone who, I think, currently lives in the White House. Someone who, I think, has more of an interest in preserving oil company interests (being something of an oil man himself) than protecting even his own health.
Anyway, here's a couple of useful links:
BioDiesel.Org
US Government's Alternative Fuels Data Center Homepage
The last link is particularly nice. While I will fault the US government for doing anything substantive, they at least have provided a lot of interesting research on the topic.
Flamebait?
The comment happened exactly as I described. I studied music at UNC-Asheville for four years, working towards a major in Music with an emphasis on composition. Having the opportunity to take the film scoring course delighted me to no end, as it gave me skills and understanding I might never have otherwise gained.
Maybe some people like 90210 (I guess), but I would have thought I had expressed reverence for Koyannisqatsi, not irreverence. For those who like the soap-opera, my apologies; I am not a fan of television programming in general, and could easily have chosen anything, but selected 90210 because it was a sequence of numbers.
Long ago, when studying film scoring as part of my degree towards music, our final project for the course was to write music for a portion of Koyaanisqatsi.
I had to write music for the very end, when the rocket goes into the air, and explodes, falling, before an image of a native American work of art fades into view (then the credits).
Thinking about the film's point, I thought I'd write some of the most contrived music I could imagine for the rocket scene. To that end, I serialized the '90210' zip code (in not-so-fond memory of the soap-opera bearing that name) into musical notes, using that sequence to guide everything, from the rhythms, harmonies, and melodies of the poor score. It had precisely the effect I wanted. A work of music utterly devoid of soul.
It's amusing to me, now, to learn that Philip Glass rejected serialism when he was only 19 years old. I knew what I was doing to the movie was dirty, but I had no idea of the full depths I had sunk.
Anyone remember Woody Allen's _What's Up, Tiger Lily_ film?
He took a terrible Japanese film and redubbed it with his own words to make the film considerably more enjoyable. Pretty heavy editing, that could have gotten him in some kind of trouble if Hollywood manages to succeed in their bid to keep people from editing movies.
Then there's Mystery Science Theater 3000...
Heh...
For a little while, I worked for a large chain of restaurants who were changing over to a new point of sales system (POS).
Each restaurant was instructed to package the original POS and mail it back to the company's headquarters.
One of these restaurants decided they should really clean up the POS before sending it back, and ran the thing through the dishwasher. The dishwashers for this restaurant run fairly hot, causing the plastic to warp and buckle, effectively ruining the POS.
In another incident (same place), a certain restaurant had been hording hard-drives from the new POS (we would occasionally send a hard-drive with an image of the original OS to resolve problems, and these guys still had two of the old ones, which we wanted to reuse). I politely asked that they return the hard-drives in the same boxes we sent them in.
Instead, they returned them in one of those plastic FedEx bags. However, they were thoughtful enough to include the silicon gel pack.
Needless to say, the hard-drives were very thoroughly dead, with no hope for redemption.
I wish I had seen this earlier. As it stands, likely nobody will notice this.
The very first historial electronic work of music is not Carlos, but Edgar Varese.
He wrote for theremins in the early 1930's, and wrote the very well known Poeme Electronique for the Phillips pavilion at the 1958 World's Fair in Brussels (his last completed composition).
Varese was very well known for his innovative work in electronic music.
How disturbing.
I used to use a protractor and ruler to do geometry in school. Damned fine tools... capable of giving a more precise measurement than any calculator or PDA if they're really nice, and does something more than visually expresses the concepts; it gives you a hands-on feel. This contributes to depth-of-processing, which in turn helps aid memory.
Whatever... we already have cashiers who are incapable of performing basic arithmetic when the register dies, I suppose this sort of thing should come as no shock.
But then again, I have to consider the views of the ancient Greeks, as writing was becoming more popular. Some folks had concerns that it would prevent people from memorizing the old stories, since you could simply look up the stories in a book or something instead of having to recall it from memory.
This sort of thing seems to always happen with certain technologies. As they aid us, we lose some skills, only to gain new ones.
So... ideas as to what new skills we'll gain from these advances? Stronger fact-finding skills perhaps? A facility with logic? Better pattern-matching skills?
A clear, cogent explanation for how Magneto has been able to float around for all those comics.
Now if they could only explain how The Flash manages to run so quickly without eating the entire national surplus...
My comments were focused not on the quality of music in general (as you'll find if you look at some of my other comments in this thread), but on the music generated by the music industry in particular.
.
Yes, this is a very subjective topic. But it honestly shouldn't take a tremendous amount of musical study to see that the music industry doesn't generate a lot of innovative, interesting music. It creates corporate rock. It squeezes various formulas to extract money from people who manage to fit the formulae well-enough (which, it would seem, leaves me out, thankfully).
The idea for this special brand of musical hell was created by Bruce Springstein in the 70's, back when the music industry nearly died before... or did most of us forget this. Mr. Springstein found that when he tuned his compositions for a specific set of demographics, he could consistently generate the sort of audience he was looking for. Prior to Springstein, such an idea was unheard of; people wrote music hoping it would sell, and branding was accomplished by building up the band's image; a band's inertia kept things going. But this model started to fail in the 70's, and out of desperation, the music industry discovered Springstein's trick and started mass-producing it.
[And I do not write this to pick on Springstein... if I wanted to pick on any music artist, I'd pick on Phil Collins, Tori Amos, Michael Jackson, or Roger Whitaker, since I find all of these guys to be quite vile to my tastes.]
Now it's the 2000's, and people have (likely) caught on to the formulae. They want music tuned to their interests and tastes, which means you need to tune your formulae (if you insist on continuing with such a program) to a smaller crowd if you want to survive.
Of course, this works against radio (as mentioned in the article), since radio wants the mega-hits.
So, you can look at what those mega-hits had in common, and figure out why Pink Floyd's "Dark Side Of The Moon" continues to survive (and strongly at that) today. To do that, you have to study music. And after you've studied music, learning what all the great works of music have in common, you could return to the mega hits by applying QUALITY to the music.
Some of those old hits survive because they're their cream of the crop. They've managed to draw people's interest, and stay on top for literally decades. Today's drivel generally doesn't last very long before you want something else. You want mega-hits... apply quality.
Your general logic looks all nice and fine, except that musical quality can be judged by metrics beyond whether you like a given work or not. I have, many times, listened to quality music that I would never care to purchase for myself. The trick to pulling this off is to actually study music carefully, to see what the greater works have in common with each other.
By way of some examples, I can't stand most of John Cage's music, but I appreciate its quality. And while Scott Joplin was easily the best Ragtime composer around, his one attempt at an opera (Treemonisha, if I recall) simply doesn't make it; he tried to apply his Ragtime forms to the opera style, which simply doesn't work since an opera lasts far longer than a ragtime tune, and ragtime forms extended out that long will bore you.
I guess I'm saying that the current set of formulae leads to generally crappy music. You want more hits, study what makes people continue to listen to certain works of music, and apply *that* formula. Then market the hell out of it
Heh... I've noticed that the earlier albums for a group often seem better than the later ones. There are some notable exceptions to this rule, though, such as The Beatles and Dead Can Dance.
That's why I think the more serious production money should be reserved for the folks who demonstrate that they would put it to better use. Use the production money for innovation, not polishing. There's something wonderfully alive in that raw sound. Don't kill it... draw it out!
Alright, what the heck, I'll feed the troll.
You'll note that I wrote obnoxiously repetitive.
As such, 'Trance' music, African rhythmic drumming, and such are not included. They aren't obnoxious. Although, to you, it seems it is (you did, after all, quote 'obnoxiously').
And if you think today's youth would appreciate a Bali singer's peculiar intonation system (when compared to Western ideas of intonation), you would be deluded. Hell, most folks today have become so used to hearing music in even-temperment they couldn't imagine the purity of sound available to them if some decent musicians would go to the trouble to use just-intonation. Listening to Eastern music, for today's youth, is inconceivable, with its unique tonal system.
My musical education, since you're trolling, includes some ethomusicology, and damn near a BA in music, with an emphasis on composition. I take music quite seriously, and would like to see the art form grow in this country.
As for dancing to music, I have never been moved enough by so-called 'house' music to feel the desire to dance to it. I have danced (privately, where no-one else could see me <grin>) to music that moves me. I'm probably not a great dancer anyway, and I doubt I could find crowds of people interested in dancing to a 5/4 beat (for example).
As for being 'an aged man clawing at the past', if the present cannot provide music worth listening to, perhaps this is indeed true. However, occasionally, I have managed to find a modern gem or two out there (however, never in the mainstream). Toby Twining has recently released an album that promises to be good (complete with just-intonation, vocal techniques that are non-western, and tone-rows, to name a few interesting techniques), and sometimes I manage to find some really cool stuff amongst the rabble (Chrystal Belle Scrodd comes to mind). None of these artists I've mentioned will be popularized by the mainstream media, although you might find Toby Twining's work in the stores (maybe, if you're lucky.. I was). I do not consider them part of the music 'industry', hence, not a focus of my previous comment.
As for defining 'good' music, admittedly, it's in the ear of the beholder. However, when different artists are all doing damn near exactly the same thing, when the innovation is lost, the music ceases to be 'good' anymore. And without some training in music appreciation, kids will continue to grow up thinking that this drek is wonderful, when there's a wide world of wonderful music waiting for them out of the mainstream.
It doesn't help that the music industry neardly died in the 70's, and in a desparate attempt to avoid that disaster, they learned (from Bruce Springstein) the so-called 'art' of marketing. Build music that fits a formula that a good cross-segment of society likes, and you'll sell a lot of records.
Unfortunately, like so many greedy people, they went too far. The honed, refined, and adhered to the formula to such an extent that now the vast majority of the music you hear today is drivel.
The article would place some of the blame for this on radio, however the music industry embraced this soulless form of corp-o-rock.
The music industry could start earning more income, perhaps, by improving the quality of the music it generates.
Sure, production value has improved, but today's music sounds much like a movie with great special effects but no plot; it lacks substance. The industry has concentrated so hard on vacuous marketing techniques aimed at various demographics, as well as absurd lobbying activities amongst politicians that it should truly come as no surprise that folks have become disgusted with today's music, by and large.
Truly, look at what they're coming up with these days; the better tunes are rehashed oldies (where they've taken advantage of improved production techniques to bring you better sounding copies of old tunes that folks are familiar with). And even some of those are downright offensive with 'corporate appeal'.
I could only think of two more possible solutions to their problems (although it may be too late).
First, recognize that the Baby Boomers are getting older. You aren't going to see that kind of explosive buying power again (at least not until the next major disaster that wipes out a third of the population, making room for another baby boom). So don't even bother. Go with a wider range of musicians and spend a little less money on production (something that's getting easier these days). Quick little hint: scarcity of resources breeds artistic endeavor. Some of the most clever bits of music ever crafted came from truly small production budgets. No need to starve their resources, though, just force your talent to grow their techniques and composition skills before exposing them to the big production dollars.
Second, instead of lobbying your congressman for these truly insulting and offensive abuses of law, put your money into the education system to improve the state of music education in our schools. If folks have no appreciation for music, what makes you think they're going to bother to listen to any of it? Branding? Today's youth barely grasps the concept of counterpoint (multiple melodies played on top of each other), can't appreciate a good groove (preferring an obnoxiously repetitive 'beat' instead), and do not have an iota of an appreciate for music without lyrics.
Y'know, you don't necessarily need to put together a password full of random noise to have something secure. Sometimes, something algorythmically determined to come up with a 'sounding' word without actually using a dictionary (with the occasional number or special character) can work very effectively, yet allow a user to remember the password (cutting down on post-it note insecurities).
One such program that does this sort of thing is agp, available at http://www.adel.nursat.kz/apg.
You'd be surprised the sort of research that goes into coming up with something like this, too. Not just the program, but the specifications for what makes a safe kind of password (y'know, taking into account stuff like the likelihood of someone writing the text down somewhere, or choosing a lame password, or whatever).
This all sounds like sour grapes to me.
Not that I blame him, and not that he's not completely without merit here, but I don't really think RealNames had a viable product to begin with (as several of the comments last time suggested).
If anything, I think this company failed to adapt to changes in technologies.
I wonder if this is happening because of google.
After all, in IE, you may use google's taskbar to provide a keyword-search right there on your browser. And in Mozilla, you have the sidebar with google enabled. So why bother using 'keywords' to search for stuff when you have something much more stable in google?
In any event, they probably shouldn't have tried to put so many eggs in the Microsoft basket. Yet, I'm unsure they would have had much choice... where else could they have gone?
Hmm.. and Microsoft wishes to convince folks that a monopoly such as theirs is a *good* thing?
Maybe this sort of thing could help Inigo Montoya find that man who killed his father.
Read this article about the sort of folks more likely to be laid off. Here's its headline:
Can you imagine using this technology to insert your favorite politician in a porn video? George Bush Does Dallas.
Used within a survellance camera, it could detect motion without getting tricked by that tree near the air vent.
It could also be used in surgical situations where a specialist located in another state can more easily study facets of the video being provided to him (cutting out noise, if you will).
You could do some really weird video editing where you could create a scene of a person standing in a verdant field in the middle of summer with snow falling within his 'mask'.
Items recorded in this way (presuming the mask is also recorded) could perhaps be admissable evidence that helps the court focus on a specific action that might otherwise get missed.
It might also provide a less-expensive way to make 3-D videos. Precursor to holographic movies?