So - if I was going to teach a high-school class, I would have them make computers out of physical devices - gears, tinkertoys, or even paper.
Good idea. I can't think of a better starting point for researching this kind of exercise than learning about Turing machines. I became most enamored of Turing machines when I learned that, in theory, you could build one entirely out of, say, wood.
It bothers me somewhat that as computers become more and more complex, there are further layers of complexity which hide the dirty details. As computers continue to grow in sophistication, this process is inevitable, but it's a shame that most kids growing up with computers today won't have the same exposure to things at the chip level as was the case 15 or 20 years ago.
I was originally planning on just making another glib Citizen Kane reference, but since this thread is nothing but trolls, I thought I'd at least say something meaningful about the article.
"Handhelds need a window system, and inventing a new one seems very boring to me" muses Boss Jim Gettys. Umm, maybe, but I'm dubious about the prospect of not refining one of the most important parts of the handheld experience because it involves a certain amount of gruntwork.
Gettys also notes that "X11 was developed on VAX 11/750's with 2 megabytes of RAM". True, but there are plenty of fundamental differences between an early VAX and a handheld, even if both have similar amounts of RAM.
Gettys says he is "willing to spend memory on toolkits if they recover as much memory by making a set of applications smaller". That may be a sensible strategy with something with the scope of a handheld, but I'm not sure X is the ideal candidate -- X was originally designed as a "do everything" protocol, and that means plenty of extra overhead to implement such frills as a window manager or widget set.
I'm reminded of the recent discussion about the desirability of reusable components in an OS - how they're great when they work properly, but that they can introduce all sorts of headaches when versions of different applications get out of sync with one another. You'd think that reusable components would be a natural approach for handhelds, but then again, I've seen Windows CE handhelds crash often enough that I'm still a little suspiscious.
As for the possibility of adapting Gnome or KDE to handhelds, I'm not holding my breath. I've finally become a Gnome convert, but it took a Pentium III with 128MB to convince me.
I love programs run by the government the signing up for which "would be strictly voluntary.
I wouldn't stress too much, since the USPS isn't a government organization. They get a big fat subsidy, but are an independent organization, just like any other delivery service.
It does still irk me that they get to have a.gov address, even if all it does is redirect you to the.com.
Regardless of where you stand on the ethics of Napster, you have to admit some of the people quoted in the Salon article Just Don't Get It. My favorite (from Erwin Drake):
Napster is supplying burglar tools to a public that is not aware of the circumstances. That same public, if it can not afford a car or a home, knows it can not have them. They can not download that car or home. That would be theft if it were technically feasible.
Id is not being hypocritical by releasing quake for linux, but not making it open source.
Umm, actually Quake *is* open source (GPL). I suspect that in a few years, Q2 and Q3A will be as well.
There are any number of reasons why iD might not want to release their sources right off the bat. Chief among these is that they are a business, and their primary responsibility will always have to be making money for the stockholders. Aside from retail sales, iD does a good bit of its business from licensing its game engines to other companies. Even if other companies were scrupulous enough not to lift any of the engine code directly, were it made publically available from day one, you can bet there would be a lot of competitors scrutinizing that code and trying to implement similar clean-room versions.
iD may not have the most altruistic business model around, but it's still a pretty good one: profit from the cutting edge tech for a couple of years, then give it to the community when something better comes along.
Keeping things closed-source for a while also helps keep the multi-player gaming experience more honest and enjoyable for everyone. There have been problems with cheaters in online games since day one, but they become MUCH worse when mischief-makers have complete access to the sources.
But even for web searches, I'm coming to the conclusion that Altavista is just sucky. Firstly, it's way out of date, half the links are broken and it's still indexing my homepage as having content that was changed over two months ago. But mostly I get annoyed that the search page refreshes itself every 5 minutes.
I don't think Altavista will autorefresh if you use it in text mode. It doesn't seem to send any meta-refresh tags that way, plus it's a much faster loading, easier to read interface. Text mode used to not even have banner ads, but Junkbuster takes care of those easily enough.
If taking the API of UNIX and copying the API, using the same set of commands, using the same compilers and other userspace applications that unix uses doesn't make you unix, then WHAT EXACTLY are you? Ashamed of your proud UNIX roots?
"Unix" is a registered trademark of (I think) the XOpen Group. That's why companies like Sun and HP call their operating systems Solaris and HP/UX, rather than "Unix" (even though they are functionally very Unix-like).
For those who like Paul Barman and C64 (I'm really glad to see both of them merit an appearance on/.!), might I also recommend the following:
Del The Funky Homosapien - Del has a definite obsession with comics, manga, and video games. The song "Proto-Culture" on his latest album "Both Sides of the Brain" is an homage to console gaming, referencing everything from Colecovision to Dreamcast.
Buck 65. This MC from Canada goes off on all sorts of interesting topics. (i.e. "Making Love With Your Disk Drive"). You can get Buck 65's album (and lots of other great underground hip-hop) at sandbox.pair.com.
My site contains a couple of original mp3 tracks that could be construed as geek rap, as well as some other goodies for any other hip-hoppers out there. Check it out.
What you idiots fail to realize is that George Lucas made this movie for one audience solely. Children
I hear that excuse touted time and time again to explain the disappointment of Episode I. I don't buy it -- there are countless examples of children's movies which are still intelligent, witty, and interesting to adults.
For instance: "The Neverending Story", "The Princess Bride", "Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory", "Watership Down", and "Chicken Run" (go see this -- it's elite) are all kid's movies on one level, but none of them are the least bit dumbed down - they all have enough character and plot sophistication to make them three-dimensional stories, and most are peppered with plenty of jokes for the grown-ups. Even films with less sophisticated scripts, like "Tron" or "The Black Hole" don't have the dumbed-down feel that permeates Episode I.
I have no doubt that George Lucas knows how to sell action figures to kids better than I do, but that's not the same as making good movies.
Nope, search responses have ip addresses in them, they also have a unique identifier to allow the network to pass push requests around when you can't directly connect to the end router. fake ip's and working push stuff makes the whole thing a little more anon.
So is it the case that Media Enforcer can only report searches, and not actual downloads? That doesn't establish copyright infringement any more than you can convict someone of burglary because they were seen walking "suspisciously" around a building at night.
And could we get customized weapons skins? As in, could I skin the railgun, make it look like I'm carrying around a wombat instead wildly firing projectiles out of its butt?
You can already customize weapon models and skins in Quake II (I haven't played Q3A)...
Can anyone tell me the origin of the phrase "maze of twisty passages all alike"?
I believe this has its heritage right in the original Collosal Cave Adventure, in which there are "a maze of twisty passages", "a twisty maze of passages", and soforth. This device was also used in the maze in Zork I, and the phrase has just generally made its way into hacker-speak...
Re:Microsoft tries to stop experimentation with Li
on
Copyrant
·
· Score: 1
The following was posted on comp.os.linux.advocacy -- I don't have the actual issue of InfoWorld to check the quote.
p. 117, Infoworld, June 5, 2000:
regarding Microsoft's un-announced policy of no longer including a CD-ROM with computers sold with a Microsoft operating system installed...
QUOTE:
"The lack of a CD-ROM will clearly serve as a disincentive to anyone wishing to experiment with Linux."
An IT manager at a large manufacturer says that's exactly what Microsoft officials told him. "I spoke to some of my contacts there, and found out that the medialess format is primarily designed to be a firewall against competitors like Linux," he wrote, explaining it will make it harder to have a back-out strategy in place if an experimental Linux deployment gets into trouble."
I don't see what's wrong with Illiad merchandising his strip. It is, after all, his, and if he wants to license Pitr out to companies, what's wrong with it?
Because having to look out for the sponsors' interests invariably compromises the artist's control over the strip. Let's say a fictional comics artist sells the rights to make Corageous Cat baseball caps. A month later, he is struck with the idea for a brilliant storyline that results in Corageous Cat dying, or taking an extended absence from the strip (this may be because the strip's creator thinks such a storyline would have great dramatic impact, or it may be simply because he is tired of that character, and thinks the strip would be better without him). But when the baseball cap manufacturer hears this news, they won't be happy -- who wants to buy merchandise featuring a character who isn't in the strip anymore? So there's a conflict of interests about what directions the strip can take.
This situation is compounded in the case of UF. Why? Because (unlike the baseball caps), there is a close correlation between UF's subject matter and its advertisers. This seriously compromises UF's ability to be an editorial cartoon or offer critical commentary. What if Microsoft drives a truckload of money up to Iliad's doorstep in exchange for some merchandising rights. Do you honestly think the comic would continue its Microsoft-bashing in full force, or would that angle get toned down in order to preserve cashflow?
First of all, since when has CARTOONS been considered art?
Art Spiegelman. Neil Gaiman. Peter Bagge. Robert Crumb. Bill Griffith. Walt Kelley. George Herremen(sp?). Roy Lichtenstein. Robert Williams. Shall I continue?
I won't say I *hate* User Friendly, but I don't think it's very creative, well-drawn, or funny. In a lot of ways, I think that Iliad may be the next Scott Adams: both of them are much better at marketing than cartooning.
What they are patenting is using a registry to check the system for newer packagese against a database on the internet, and then at the user's discretion download those packages and automatically install them off the internet.
That's exactly what apt does. Typing 'apt-get dist-upgrade' will go out on the net and upgrade all of the packages on your system to the latest version.
I really don't see the need for ISO images for distibutions anymore
I think ISO images of distributions are quite useful. I only have a dial-up connection at home, but there's a T1 at work. Even though I don't pay for connect time on my home phone line, I still don't want to spend several hours whenever I want to set up or upgrade a machine. Even on machines at work, where there IS a fast net connection, I find it faster to do the initial install off of CD, and then do an 'apt-get upgrade' to bring all the packages up to the latest version.
Last week I installed a bunch of Debian-based servers at work. They're new machines with 3COM 3c905C NICs, a card which wasn't supported with the Debian driver floppy I was using. It's hard to do a network install without a working network interface. I did a CD install, rebuilt the kernel with the newer drivers, and had the machines in production in less than fifteen minutes.
The ISO images also make a great promotional tool for Linux/BSD. When I put a strain on someone's server to the tune of 650MB, I try to return the favor by making as many copies of the CD as possible, to keep a few on hand at work and at the office, to share with potentially interested people. At work, I've talked with sales reps or short-term contractors when the subject of Linux has come up, and they've said something like "it sounds interesting, but I haven't had a chance to check it out". It's a nice feeling to be able to reach into a desk drawer and give them a recent copy of the CD to try out.
I agree with you that network installs are a great thing, but even with a fast connection, they can still take longer from scratch than doing the basic install from CD. And servers still time out or move around. When you've got a CD in your hand, you have a much better idea of what to expect.
IMHO Perl has no real domain in which it is better than everything else - so why is it so popular?
"Why I Like Perl":
It makes a great Swiss army knife. Whenever I need to throw together some sort of administrative/utility program where ease of development and maintainance are more important than raw performance (which is often the case), Perl makes a great choice. 95% of the things I used to do in shell script, I now do in Perl instead (the exceptions mostly being system scripts where I'm espescially paranoid about security or stability).
Perl is easily portable to lots of environments. I've had the same Perl code run on Unix, Win95, and Netware systems with only a couple of lines changed.
A lot of the Perl metaphor is shared with Unix and C (both conceptually and syntactically). There have been countless times where a Perl insight has proved useful when working with core Unix tools, and vice-versa.
The modules built into Perl and available on CPAN have saved me countless hours of re-inventing the wheel. Using a well-written module results in programs getting written faster, and the resulting code is cleaner and easier to maintain.
In conclusion, Perl just makes my life easier as a programmer. It's not the end-all of languages (I think that as anything but an academic excercise, a Perl-OS is an absurd idea), but to me it's very intuitive, concise, and flexible. I've used Perl for everything from simple glue scripts to fairly heavy-duty CGI to other sorts of network programming to database administration tools.
For more complex tasks than a simple CGI script Perl seems unwieldly, and even now technologies such as ASP and JSP are taking over the server-side processing domain.
I just finished working on a fairly large webbable database that was implemented using PHP and Oracle. PHP worked nicely for the task, and so far stability and performance look great, but I'm pretty confident the same project could have been done using Perl/DBI instead. On the other hand, I do NOT envy the people where I work who do ASP; it blows up on them all the time, and even the stable/production ASP systems require way more babysitting then I've ever seen on a web database using Perl as intermediary.
Nah, I got respect for most of the EEs I've met, including several who dropped their EE major and switched to comp sci because the EE courseload was kicking their ass. I'm an experienced Unix admin, skilled Perl programmer, and decent C coder, but in the EE curriculum, anything at or beyond the level of DiffEQ just makes my brain hurt something fierce. And some of those wave functions... *shudder*
The Metallica item only provides further evidence for my theory that any time a rock band releases an album featuring accompaniment by a symphony orchestra, it is a sure sign that they have run out of actual ideas and vitality and are just in it to prod the cash cow along for another couple of years.
To me, Metallica's actions only demonstrate exactly how boring and corporate they have become. We need more outspoken musicians like Chuck D to come forward and say that Napster is GOOD because it provides free PR and exposure, and makes life difficult for has-beens and no-talent musicians who would rather grow fat on royalties than work (and create) for a living like the rest of us.
I'd like to see artists start putting stickers on CD covers reading "Yes! It Works With Napster!"
(For what it's worth, I was a Metallica fan from way back -- I have most everything up until "And Justice For All" on vinyl. I started to lose interest when they entered their adult contemporary metal phase, and it's all been downhill since then as far as I'm concerned).
Slashdot Mirror
So - if I was going to teach a high-school class, I would have them make computers out of physical devices - gears, tinkertoys, or even paper.
Good idea. I can't think of a better starting point for researching this kind of exercise than learning about Turing machines. I became most enamored of Turing machines when I learned that, in theory, you could build one entirely out of, say, wood.
It bothers me somewhat that as computers become more and more complex, there are further layers of complexity which hide the dirty details. As computers continue to grow in sophistication, this process is inevitable, but it's a shame that most kids growing up with computers today won't have the same exposure to things at the chip level as was the case 15 or 20 years ago.
I was originally planning on just making another glib Citizen Kane reference, but since this thread is nothing but trolls, I thought I'd at least say something meaningful about the article.
"Handhelds need a window system, and inventing a new one seems very boring to me" muses Boss Jim Gettys. Umm, maybe, but I'm dubious about the prospect of not refining one of the most important parts of the handheld experience because it involves a certain amount of gruntwork.
Gettys also notes that "X11 was developed on VAX 11/750's with 2 megabytes of RAM". True, but there are plenty of fundamental differences between an early VAX and a handheld, even if both have similar amounts of RAM.
Gettys says he is "willing to spend memory on toolkits if they recover as much memory by making a set of applications smaller". That may be a sensible strategy with something with the scope of a handheld, but I'm not sure X is the ideal candidate -- X was originally designed as a "do everything" protocol, and that means plenty of extra overhead to implement such frills as a window manager or widget set.
I'm reminded of the recent discussion about the desirability of reusable components in an OS - how they're great when they work properly, but that they can introduce all sorts of headaches when versions of different applications get out of sync with one another. You'd think that reusable components would be a natural approach for handhelds, but then again, I've seen Windows CE handhelds crash often enough that I'm still a little suspiscious.
As for the possibility of adapting Gnome or KDE to handhelds, I'm not holding my breath. I've finally become a Gnome convert, but it took a Pentium III with 128MB to convince me.
I love programs run by the government the signing up for which "would be strictly voluntary.
I wouldn't stress too much, since the USPS isn't a government organization. They get a big fat subsidy, but are an independent organization, just like any other delivery service.
It does still irk me that they get to have a .gov address, even if all it does is redirect you to the .com.
Regardless of where you stand on the ethics of Napster, you have to admit some of the people quoted in the Salon article Just Don't Get It. My favorite (from Erwin Drake):
Napster is supplying burglar tools to a public that is not aware of the circumstances. That same public, if it can not afford a car or a home, knows it can not have them. They can not download that car or home. That would be theft if it were technically feasible.
That just makes my head hurt.
What the heck is a Nintendo Star Cube?
The Star Cube is going to be Nintendo's next game console -- it was recently renamed from "Dolphin".
I think that they should include this feature in the next version: When your computer does find intelligent life, it opens up a chat window.
HEY EARTHLING, U WANT 2 CYBER?
ANYBODY KNOW WHERE I CAN FIND L33T DNA C0DEZ?
Id is not being hypocritical by releasing quake for linux, but not making it open source.
Umm, actually Quake *is* open source (GPL). I suspect that in a few years, Q2 and Q3A will be as well.
There are any number of reasons why iD might not want to release their sources right off the bat. Chief among these is that they are a business, and their primary responsibility will always have to be making money for the stockholders. Aside from retail sales, iD does a good bit of its business from licensing its game engines to other companies. Even if other companies were scrupulous enough not to lift any of the engine code directly, were it made publically available from day one, you can bet there would be a lot of competitors scrutinizing that code and trying to implement similar clean-room versions.
iD may not have the most altruistic business model around, but it's still a pretty good one: profit from the cutting edge tech for a couple of years, then give it to the community when something better comes along.
Keeping things closed-source for a while also helps keep the multi-player gaming experience more honest and enjoyable for everyone. There have been problems with cheaters in online games since day one, but they become MUCH worse when mischief-makers have complete access to the sources.
But even for web searches, I'm coming to the conclusion that Altavista is just sucky. Firstly, it's way out of date, half the links are broken and it's still indexing my homepage as having content that was changed over two months ago. But mostly I get annoyed that the search page refreshes itself every 5 minutes.
I don't think Altavista will autorefresh if you use it in text mode. It doesn't seem to send any meta-refresh tags that way, plus it's a much faster loading, easier to read interface. Text mode used to not even have banner ads, but Junkbuster takes care of those easily enough.
Look for Afreey LD-2020 instead. It's the same player.
According to this page, the firmware on the latest versions of this player are no longer hackable. Caveat Emptor.
If taking the API of UNIX and copying the API, using the same set of commands, using the same compilers and other userspace applications that unix uses doesn't make you unix, then WHAT EXACTLY are you? Ashamed of your proud UNIX roots?
"Unix" is a registered trademark of (I think) the XOpen Group. That's why companies like Sun and HP call their operating systems Solaris and HP/UX, rather than "Unix" (even though they are functionally very Unix-like).
Some good cyberpoints, but I can't help but cyberreact dubiously to a cyberbody so cyberattached to cyber-buzzwords in the cyberyear 2000.
For those who like Paul Barman and C64 (I'm really glad to see both of them merit an appearance on /.!), might I also recommend the following:
There's a program called sftp in the ssh package that lets you do file transfers over ssh.
scp (secure copy), also part of the standard ssh package, also works well for moving files around securely.
What you idiots fail to realize is that George Lucas made this movie for one audience solely. Children
I hear that excuse touted time and time again to explain the disappointment of Episode I. I don't buy it -- there are countless examples of children's movies which are still intelligent, witty, and interesting to adults.
For instance: "The Neverending Story", "The Princess Bride", "Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory", "Watership Down", and "Chicken Run" (go see this -- it's elite) are all kid's movies on one level, but none of them are the least bit dumbed down - they all have enough character and plot sophistication to make them three-dimensional stories, and most are peppered with plenty of jokes for the grown-ups. Even films with less sophisticated scripts, like "Tron" or "The Black Hole" don't have the dumbed-down feel that permeates Episode I.
I have no doubt that George Lucas knows how to sell action figures to kids better than I do, but that's not the same as making good movies.
Nope, search responses have ip addresses in them, they also have a unique identifier to allow the network to pass push requests around when you can't directly connect to the end router. fake ip's and working push stuff makes the whole thing a little more anon.
So is it the case that Media Enforcer can only report searches, and not actual downloads? That doesn't establish copyright infringement any more than you can convict someone of burglary because they were seen walking "suspisciously" around a building at night.
And could we get customized weapons skins? As in, could I skin the railgun, make it look like I'm carrying around a wombat instead wildly firing projectiles out of its butt?
You can already customize weapon models and skins in Quake II (I haven't played Q3A)...
Can anyone tell me the origin of the phrase "maze of twisty passages all alike"?
I believe this has its heritage right in the original Collosal Cave Adventure, in which there are "a maze of twisty passages", "a twisty maze of passages", and soforth. This device was also used in the maze in Zork I, and the phrase has just generally made its way into hacker-speak...
The following was posted on comp.os.linux.advocacy -- I don't have the actual issue of InfoWorld to check the quote.
p. 117, Infoworld, June 5, 2000:
regarding Microsoft's un-announced policy of no longer including a CD-ROM
with computers sold with a Microsoft operating system installed...
QUOTE:
"The lack of a CD-ROM will clearly serve as a disincentive to anyone
wishing to experiment with Linux."
An IT manager at a large manufacturer says that's exactly what Microsoft
officials told him. "I spoke to some of my contacts there, and found out
that the medialess format is primarily designed to be a firewall against
competitors like Linux," he wrote, explaining it will make it harder to
have a back-out strategy in place if an experimental Linux deployment gets
into trouble."
END QUOTE
I don't see what's wrong with Illiad merchandising his strip. It is, after all, his, and if he wants to license Pitr out to companies, what's wrong with it?
Because having to look out for the sponsors' interests invariably compromises the artist's control over the strip. Let's say a fictional comics artist sells the rights to make Corageous Cat baseball caps. A month later, he is struck with the idea for a brilliant storyline that results in Corageous Cat dying, or taking an extended absence from the strip (this may be because the strip's creator thinks such a storyline would have great dramatic impact, or it may be simply because he is tired of that character, and thinks the strip would be better without him). But when the baseball cap manufacturer hears this news, they won't be happy -- who wants to buy merchandise featuring a character who isn't in the strip anymore? So there's a conflict of interests about what directions the strip can take.
This situation is compounded in the case of UF. Why? Because (unlike the baseball caps), there is a close correlation between UF's subject matter and its advertisers. This seriously compromises UF's ability to be an editorial cartoon or offer critical commentary. What if Microsoft drives a truckload of money up to Iliad's doorstep in exchange for some merchandising rights. Do you honestly think the comic would continue its Microsoft-bashing in full force, or would that angle get toned down in order to preserve cashflow?
First of all, since when has CARTOONS been considered art?
Art Spiegelman. Neil Gaiman. Peter Bagge. Robert Crumb. Bill Griffith. Walt Kelley. George Herremen(sp?). Roy Lichtenstein. Robert Williams. Shall I continue?
I won't say I *hate* User Friendly, but I don't think it's very creative, well-drawn, or funny. In a lot of ways, I think that Iliad may be the next Scott Adams: both of them are much better at marketing than cartooning.
What they are patenting is using a registry to check the system for newer packagese against a database on the internet, and then at the user's discretion download those packages and automatically install them off the internet.
That's exactly what apt does. Typing 'apt-get dist-upgrade' will go out on the net and upgrade all of the packages on your system to the latest version.
I really don't see the need for ISO images for distibutions anymore
I think ISO images of distributions are quite useful. I only have a dial-up connection at home, but there's a T1 at work. Even though I don't pay for connect time on my home phone line, I still don't want to spend several hours whenever I want to set up or upgrade a machine. Even on machines at work, where there IS a fast net connection, I find it faster to do the initial install off of CD, and then do an 'apt-get upgrade' to bring all the packages up to the latest version.
Last week I installed a bunch of Debian-based servers at work. They're new machines with 3COM 3c905C NICs, a card which wasn't supported with the Debian driver floppy I was using. It's hard to do a network install without a working network interface. I did a CD install, rebuilt the kernel with the newer drivers, and had the machines in production in less than fifteen minutes.
The ISO images also make a great promotional tool for Linux/BSD. When I put a strain on someone's server to the tune of 650MB, I try to return the favor by making as many copies of the CD as possible, to keep a few on hand at work and at the office, to share with potentially interested people. At work, I've talked with sales reps or short-term contractors when the subject of Linux has come up, and they've said something like "it sounds interesting, but I haven't had a chance to check it out". It's a nice feeling to be able to reach into a desk drawer and give them a recent copy of the CD to try out.
I agree with you that network installs are a great thing, but even with a fast connection, they can still take longer from scratch than doing the basic install from CD. And servers still time out or move around. When you've got a CD in your hand, you have a much better idea of what to expect.
IMHO Perl has no real domain in which it is better than everything else - so why is it so popular?
"Why I Like Perl":
In conclusion, Perl just makes my life easier as a programmer. It's not the end-all of languages (I think that as anything but an academic excercise, a Perl-OS is an absurd idea), but to me it's very intuitive, concise, and flexible. I've used Perl for everything from simple glue scripts to fairly heavy-duty CGI to other sorts of network programming to database administration tools.
For more complex tasks than a simple CGI script Perl seems unwieldly, and even now technologies such as ASP and JSP are taking over the server-side processing domain.
I just finished working on a fairly large webbable database that was implemented using PHP and Oracle. PHP worked nicely for the task, and so far stability and performance look great, but I'm pretty confident the same project could have been done using Perl/DBI instead. On the other hand, I do NOT envy the people where I work who do ASP; it blows up on them all the time, and even the stable/production ASP systems require way more babysitting then I've ever seen on a web database using Perl as intermediary.
I get really sick of EEs who say they are geeks.
Nah, I got respect for most of the EEs I've met, including several who dropped their EE major and switched to comp sci because the EE courseload was kicking their ass. I'm an experienced Unix admin, skilled Perl programmer, and decent C coder, but in the EE curriculum, anything at or beyond the level of DiffEQ just makes my brain hurt something fierce. And some of those wave functions... *shudder*
The Metallica item only provides further evidence for my theory that any time a rock band releases an album featuring accompaniment by a symphony orchestra, it is a sure sign that they have run out of actual ideas and vitality and are just in it to prod the cash cow along for another couple of years.
To me, Metallica's actions only demonstrate exactly how boring and corporate they have become. We need more outspoken musicians like Chuck D to come forward and say that Napster is GOOD because it provides free PR and exposure, and makes life difficult for has-beens and no-talent musicians who would rather grow fat on royalties than work (and create) for a living like the rest of us.
I'd like to see artists start putting stickers on CD covers reading "Yes! It Works With Napster!"
(For what it's worth, I was a Metallica fan from way back -- I have most everything up until "And Justice For All" on vinyl. I started to lose interest when they entered their adult contemporary metal phase, and it's all been downhill since then as far as I'm concerned).