We're no longer dictators of taste; we are listening to what readers want
I am a reader. I want books that are written on paper, so that I can read them in a well-lit room for 12 straight hours and not completely destroy my eyes. I want books I can carry anywhere, and curl up with, and accidently leave on a bus. I want books that when I purchase them, they are mine to read and enjoy and loan out and hoard.
Books published in pieces are not a new idea. They're an old Victorian idea. Dickens wrote his novels in serial. It's neither a better nor worse idea then books as we have them now -- it's merely different.
Novels that play with reality are not a new idea. It's know as post-modernism. Read something by Jorje Borjes, and you'll see the same "cyber-concept" written long before computers where prevelant.
I've never been an Anti-Katz poster, but JonKatz, please check your literary history before writing about all these new ideas. These are old ideas. It's only a new distribution.
I am, among other things, an English Major. As far as I'm concerned, books have always had creative interaction between reader and writer. The writer puts in something, the reader takes out something.
The only new twist that the internet adds to this is that it's easier to communicate with the writer about the writing. Or you could contribute to the progress of a story by commenting on the writing if the writer publishes in bits. But through magazines and other literary forums, you've ALWAYS been able to do this. The internet provides easier access to do so. I'm not even convinced that allowing the connected masses to contribute to a story will really improve the quality of the writing.
This isn't some revolutionary cyber-writing change. Writing continues to evolve as it always has. Revolutionary changes -- like the creation of a new genre with Gibson's Neuromancer -- happen infrequently. The eBook is not one these changes.
Check out KL Group'sJClass PageLayout. Quoting from the product page, it will "Output directly to the Java AWT Printer, Acrobat PDF, HTML, PostScript Level 2, or PCL 5."
I admit that I'm biased, but it's still worth checking out the eval.
If the portion that you're outsourcing can be neatly separated from the rest of the system, then out-sourcing can be a huge advantage. All you need then are the well documented API's and instructions, and it's like buying an off-the-shelf component.
This of course, assumes that the company you're outsourcing to is competant. Meaning that as with anything, they should be thoroughly checked out prior to signing the contract.
However, the statement that you can do it better and faster in house bothers me. The compnay I work for sells software components. Our biggest source of competition is not other component vendors, but the attitude that we get from many developers that no matter how good are product may be, they can still do it better and faster. That's sounds strongly of an ego trip to me.
I mean, most software is not incredibly revolutionary. As a developer, I consider myself competant enough to build almost anything. But on the other hand, that's probably true of most other competant developers. Just because you CAN do it, doesn't mean that you NEED to do it, or that you SHOULD do it.
The movie industry (and, come to think of it, many others) could support dozens of alternative OS's by offering this.
I mean, depending on the scale of the project, a few K per release is peanuts compared to the cost of doing it yourself. And they wouldn't have to spend too much on customer support -- they can just train their staff to say "We don't actually support that, however, you can check out X from Y.com and that might help you."
Over here in Canada, at the University of Waterloo we have an interesting compromise between work and school. It's called the co-op program -- I know a lot of schools are starting to do this, but UW was built upon this concept -- nearly half the school is in it.
The way it works here is that every 4 months (including during the summer) students switch off between school and work. The school helps you find a job -- our co-op employment rate, even for the non-tech degrees, is somewhere in the 90s. An added bonus is that you usually make more than enough in co-op to pay for your next 4 months of school.
UW is both a well known and well respected geek school. We've consistantly placed in the top 10 in the ACM programming contest (usually beating MIT). Plus grads are very hirable, and (in my experience) are generally good coders. It makes for a good mix of theoretical and practical.
The system is by no means perfect. Despite high standards, there are still idiots who come through it. And uprooting your life every four months with no vacation is not fun. Plus, there is a bit of a feeling around campus of being a factory for employees. But overall, it's a decent system.
Does anyone really think the whole ebook concept will take off? I mean, a few years ago, they were putting the Collective Works of Shakespeare and other classics on CD-ROMs, only for people to discover that they really hated reading books online.
I love reading novels. If I didn't have a job, I'd probably read non-stop all day. On vacations, I can easily read about 500-800 pages per day. I can't do that online -- the potential eyestrain of reading a paperback in a well-lit room is nothing compared to intently staring at a monitor. Not to mention that I can't read an eBook on the bus, in the park, while I'm cooking, in bed, in the bath tub, etc. Laptops and Palms are not this convenient.
The current eBook model seems to assume that people read while seated at a desk. That seems reasonable if the book is merely a reference -- I like being able to search manuals while coding. But real readers read everywhere.
Microsoft can try to control eBooks all they want, but I don't see hardcore readers buying into the concept.
What do you want your users to use Linux for?
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Linux Demos?
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Having worked as a tech person in a marketing department, (i.e., I had to write all the damn demos) I can tell you that flashy does not always sell. It may draw a crowd, but it won't always convince people.
If the purpose of the demo is to get regular people to say "Hey, Linux is cool" and walk away, then an OpenGL screen-saver-like thing is fine.
But if you want people to think about USING Linux, then you have to think about what kinds of applications they use. Quake is a good idea -- people play games, and it'll draw people in. But then show off StarOffice or WP, Netscape, and maybe The Gimp or CorelDraw, because that's what people actually use. And then pitch them about the cost, get someone in the crowd to use the apps, so that they see for themselves that it's easy to use.
Remember, regular people care not about their OS -- for them, the computer is simply a tool, not a political statement.
There are something like 200 separate languages in India. There are at least an additional 500 dialects of these languages. The variations in these dialects are so great the people in one village have trouble understanding people in the neighbouring village, even though they speak the same language. Historically, Indians tended to marry and socialize with in the same language-group and tiny kingdoms, so not a lot of effort was made in communications.
Although Indians now tend to be multilingual, there really wasn't any common language in India. Then the British came along, grouped all the princedoms in the Indian subcontinent into a single country, and created the government and international business there. So English became the language of business and law, and therefore education because you needed English to get ahead.
Hindi didn't really become a national language in India until the movie industry took off. (Fun Fact: the Indian movie industry, by volume, is bigger than Hollywood.) Hindi movies -- splashy musical formula-films -- became immensely popular. So people learned and used Hindi to understand the movies better. (Seriously.)
Currently, English and Hindi are the only nationally spoken languages in India. State languages (i.e., Gujarati in Gujarat, Bengali in Bengal, etc.) are widely used and spoken at the state level.
I have ADD, and you're all missing some info
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Video Games and ADD
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First off, Attention Deficit Disorder is a misleading name for this condition. People with ADD ocillate wildly between periods of intense concentration, and periods of intense distractibility. (Yes, everyone does this, but more so in people with ADD.) The hyperactivity bit is a variant of ADD known as ADHD (Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.) It's a combination of ADD and hyperactivity.
So the fact that kids with ADD or ADHD can calmly sit and play video games is not a cure by any means. The kids are in a hyperfocus period. This is pretty common, since when presented with (depending on the type of ADD) something new, different and/or high-stimulation, most ADD'ers will go into hyperfocus mode.
That said, the interesting part of the article is that they are working with the ADD to provide biofeedback therapy. See, that's important for ADD -- it's not curable, so any treatment has to work with the ADD. Most treatments for ADD work initially because the treatment itself is novel, and thus brings on a state of hyperfocus. They later fail because soon it's not new anymore. (This is why ADD is difficult to test for -- the novelty of the tests temporarily cure the distractiblity.) This one, however, can probably remain novel for the 40 sessions needed to perform the treatment.
More therapies like this would be great. ADD has some tremendous advantages, (symptoms of genius and creativity are the same as the symptoms of ADD - both Einstein and Mozart may have had it, and I think many geeks may have it too) so curing ADD would be a major detriment. But some people with extreme cases of ADD are so distractable (or they hyperfocus at bad times) that it's difficult for them to function in society. Therapies like this could probably lessen the annoying bits of ADD, but maintain the beneficial parts.
For more info on ADD, read "Driven to Distraction". Don't remember the authors, but they're 2 pyschologists who have ADD themselves, so it's a great perspective.
When your hands and wrists start telling you that they don't like coding non-stop everyday, it's time to stop coding non-stop everyday. It's hard to believe, but life exists away from computers.
The poster above made an excellent point about compulsiveness. There are students at my school who, after their 4 years of undergrad, are so crippled by RSI and carpal tunnel that they can't work in the field they studied. The first day of the first year programming class is now a lecture on RSI and how to avoid it.
A friend, who doubted the existance of RSI, once asked me how it is that RSI exists now, but didn't exists years ago, because otherwise secretaries would have suffered from it as far back as the 40's and 50's. I pointed out that secretaries in the 40's and 50's worked 8 hours a day, and didn't type when they got home.
In addition to recognition software and therapy, you've got to learn to chill....
Re:K&R on optimization; tips -- memory
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Optimizing Java?
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Inserting a disclaimer here: I currently work for KL Group, the makers of JProbe.
Anyway, KL has published some articles and delivered some lecture's about performance-tuning Java, particularly in the area of memory use.
They are fairly helpful. Some of the points made in these articles are the same as what woggo made above, others are also useful information. These can be found off the JProbe page, but I've included two of them below.
Our CTO, Ed Lycklama, gave a talk entitled "Designing for Performance on the Java Platform" at JavaOne this year. There's a graphical and a text on the KL site.
I think part of this is just a PR play so that they can tell the DOJ that their products run on all sorts of OS's.
However, this may be an attempt to make the whole C#/.NET framework actually functional. (Or at least, functional on paper.) C# is supposedly platform independant and interoperable with Common Language Standard (CLS) compliant languages. But it's only independant across.NET platforms, and currently the CLS compliant languages are Visual C++ and VB.
By making their products run on Linux, they can still advertise themselves as platform-independant and language interoperable. Whether or not this is actually true depends on whether or not MainSoft can pull this off.
Personally, I see this as a PR play, and that MainSoft will crumble trying to support the independance facade.
Personally I don't believe that this has done any harm to Apple, the Mac freaks are going to buy the stuff no matter what Apple does, and no
one else gives a damn anyway. So I don't see any 'material harm' being done either way.
The material harm in leaking the info prior to the big release is a marketing/branding issue. First impressions last a long time, so when a company releases a new product, they try to control the first impression as much as possible. This is doubly important when you're releasing something, like the cube, that's very different.
Basically, if pictures of the cube were widely available for too long, people would form their own impressions of it BEFORE Apple could explain the purpose of the cube. Worse, competitors could find ways to dismiss the product before its release. (e.g., You're not Borg. Why would you want a cube?)
Take the Linux Watch for example. Many of us probably looked at the picture before reading the IBM release. And a lot of us thought "That's cute, but why would I want a watch that can run a webserver but can't tell the time?" So we formed our own impression and dismissed IBM as idiotic. But IBM's purpose was to prove that Linux could be scaled down to a wristwatch. Had this been an actual product, IBM would have lost potential business from the people who dismissed the watch without reading the purpose. A controlled launch helps to alliviate some of these problems.
Was Apple being a tad hyper? Probably. But they're taking a risk in releasing such a different product, and it's understandable that they want to manage the release as much as they can.
Opensource is great because it allows them to totally review whatever goes on in the OS and to tweak it to no end.
Just to elaborate on this, one of the questions should probably be: But if everyone can see all the source code for my OS, won't that make me more vulnerable?
Historically, (i.e., before computers where widespread) big corporations relied on secrecy to maintain security. To some extent, they still do. Like trade secrets. Or when I used to work for a bank, the data backup tapes where taken offsite, but you need clearence to know where.
So I think your big challenge is to explain how Open means More Secure. Ideas to do this would be:
More known security holes in Windoze than Linux
Faster turnaround time for security fixes in Linux (1000's of developers working on it simultaneously.)
Ability to view and modify source code means that corporations can add further security if they choose to.
But add proof to all of that -- numbers, surveys, etc.. And be sure to mention that they will need to have someone monitor fixes and patches.
And it came up on slashdot on Monday, July 24th. Read the article right here.
If I recall correctly, (the post I read this in is buried somewhere) the experiment is going fairly well so far. Though mind you, between the novelty of it, and the strengh of the Stephen King Name, it's difficult to say how good a test this will be.
I'm a tech, but I work in the marketing department. (Someone has to explain things to them.) It gives me an interesting perspective on how management works.
The personality and style of management has a big effect on how the company works. If they play "schoolground" tactics now, they're not going to stop. They're either going to get away with it and never stop, or get caught and be replaced -- though there's no guarantee about who will replace them. People tend to hire people who are like themselves, ergo bad management tends to hire more bad management.
Even though your co-workers are great, you're working environment may be on a downswing. I'd leave. Chances are, other people have been thinking about it too, and are waiting for someone to make a first move. And if you do well at another company, you may be able to bring some of them in as well. Besides, just because you don't work with them doesn't mean you can't talk to them.
As for blowing the whistle, think about the potential effects on the company, and therefore on your co-workers. (I can't say what it wil be without know more.) Will it bankrupt the place and put everyone out of work? Are you comfortable with that? Is the ethics of the licensing issue as important to you as the consequences to your coworkers? If so, blow it but quit at the same time. You're a geek -- it's not like you're unemployable.
I'm not so sure that you did "everything" you could. I know you brought up the issue, but as far as I can tell, you only brought it up once. Management types, particularly the infantile ones, are always too good about responding to things unless they get constant reminders. The good ones respond right away, but the bad ones forget, don't always understand the issue and dismiss it, internally think "geeks always worry about the most trivial details," etc. It sucks that you can't just bring something up once and expect action, but remember that management doesn't always know how to see things from your perspective.
I know most geeks aren't always good at reading people (or don't have time to), but it's possible that you might have been able to foresee the idiocy. But when in doubt, if it's an important issue, don't assume that they realize that. Pester them until you see proof of action.
It's a nasty situation to be in, and I wish you lots of luck.
Corporations have always been in the business of education and training. Big companies have internal training departments, online CBTs, libraries full of stuff, internal courses, etc. Smaller companies have some similar material on hand, and then they outsource other programs. Naturally, they try and direct training towards the company goals. For example, if I worked at M$, I'd probably be able to learn lots about how Windows can do everything I'd ever want it to do, <sarcasm> but very little about Linux. Not that I'd necessarily have time to take advantage of all this training, but if I really wanted or needed it, I could probably find something eventually. Similarly, if a company used only VisualAge as its IDE, I'd be able to learn that, but I wouldn't be able to learn anything else, unless it was on my own.
Moreover, at large companies, outsiders can sign up for courses on other products. For example, Rational has it's Rational University. And if someone publishes a (favourable) whitepaper related to using a company's products, it will be available from that company. This is how companies can encourage people to try their product, in the hopes that they will like it and buy it.
So is it a conflict of interest? Not if you're intelligent enough to know every bit of education is coloured with the teacher's or provider's own personal biases. Just because they want you to see things a certain way doesn't mean you have to. It's called critical thinking. Just because I learned how to code C++ with gcc in emacs doesn't mean I can't code C++ with the Borland compiler in vi -- once I learn vi. I can reapply the knowledge.
Okay, the unwilling to think and learn will never venture out of the one comfy environment they're in, but frankly, the unwilling to think and learn aren't (IMHO) worth protecting from the big, bad corporate interests.
Mind you, I think corporate interests at the university level and lower are not such a good thing. As the texan points out, some education is better than no education, but when you are first acquiring the ability to think critically, I think it's best to keep things as objective as possible. Obviously, that's difficult. For example, my first professional coding experience was in Java. So I initially preferred it to C++. Then I had to do some seriously hard-core stuff in C++ and became more familiar with it. So I came to like C++ as well, but given a situation where there was no disadvantage to using either language, I'd probably go with Java because it's easier for me. But I'd still use C++ if it were more appropriate, and frankly, nothing in the standard JDK beats the STL.
This free learning may start users on an initial preference for CodeWarrior and C++. So what? Anyone who's intelligent and willing to learn will eventually learn other tools. Eventually, they may appreciate, and possibly come to prefer these other tools. But this isn't a conflict of interest. The user gets to learn something, the company gets a chance to make sales, and as long users realises that the fact that they know and use a tool does not make it inherently superior to everything else, everyone's happy.
While we're talking about non-Outlook email clients that LOOK like Outlook, are there any non-Outlook email clients that WORK with Outlook's corporate workgroup stuff? Or does someone know where the API to build such a thing is?
The reason I ask is that I'm forced to use Outlook at work so that we can all schedule meetings conveniently over the Exchange Server. Outlook used as a personal client is not bad since I could fully manage all 50 billion of my email accounts from 1 program. The corporate networking mode won't allow you to send email from different accounts unless you shut down the program and login again under a different user profile.
Does anyone know of any Outlook compatible email clients that will let you do this? Or point me to the appropriate API's to build such a thing?
You wouldn't want to port if you didn't think you'd make money off it. Not all untapped markets are profitable.
And the cost is not just the cost of the box and the dev tool licenses. To do any kind of a port, you have to factor in a whole bunch of costs, for example:
Paying the developers to actually do the port
Cost of training the sales force
Cost of advertising and PR
Cost of other evangelizing activity, such as Mac-specific tradeshows
Cost of tracking the effectiveness of marketing to Mac users
Cost of training the support staff
Cost of maintenence to the OS in future releases (what if they make a big change so that things are no longer easy to port?)
Cost of writing and publishing Mac-specific docs (or subsections of docs)
Cost of devoting resources to supporting the Mac that would otherwise be used elsewhere
Overall, it adds up big time. So unless you have proof (usually in the form of market research) that there are enough people out there who will buy the product, and enough people out there to sustain sales in the product, such that it will become and remain profitable over time, it's just not worth doing a port. Possible does not equal profitable.
I think, however, this new ease of porting between UNIX and MacOS may mean that companies will be able to take existing software that runs on UNIX and port it to the Mac. So for companies who started off with a Win32 product and later did a port (or rewrite) to support UNIX, or who have some flavour of UNIX and Win32 as their 2 major platforms will now have an easier time supporting the Mac. Instead of a complete re-write, they can just port -- which is cheaper, but still more a lot more expensive than the cost of the box, the software and the developers.
But once again, this assumes that there's an actual market demand FOR a Mac port.
There is no "Constitution" in Canada; nothing like what the States has, anyhow.
Check your facts. From 1867 to 1982, the Canadian Constitution was the British North America Act. That is, it was the act that Britain passed which made Canada a Dominion. It lived in London, and therefore any changes to it had to be made by the British Parliament. For example, in 1929 Nellie McClung et al. had women declared as persons under the law by going to London and arguing before the Privy Council.
In 1982, Prime Minsister Pierre Trudeau brough the Canadian constitution home to Canada, under the Constition Act which meant that we could change and rewrite it without the approval of the British Parliament. This Act, plus the subsequent amendments and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms make up the Canadian Constitution.
And if there were, it would have a very different idea of what it considers basic rights.
You're both right and wrong. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms (written in 1982) is actually quite similar to the Bill of Rights -- partly because it took a lot of its ideas FROM the Bill of Rights. There are some key differences, however:
The American Bill of Rights forms everything as a negative right. Thus, Americans don't have the right TO free speech -- they have the right to NOT have their rights to free speech taken away. This is part of the reason why in the States, free speech issues are particularly messy, and things like Gun Control Laws are hard to pass.
The first thing in the Charter states that all of our Guaranteed Freedoms are subject to "Reasonable Limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society" This allows for things like laws against hate literature.
So Sydney is NOT asking the Canadian Government to defend American rights in a more enlightened manner, he's asking them to defend OUR rights, in a more enlightened manner. Which makes sense since (IMHO) our rights were granted to us in a more enlightened manner. (Mind you, we had 200 years of the American example to learn from.) There is no inherent hypocracy in the article.
The only thing that annoys me more than Americans who spout off incorrect garbage about Canada are Canadians who spout off incorrect garbage about Canada.
Gordon Ross said that this had been tried a few years back with SIFT (?), and that it didn't work out.
SIFT stands for Secure Internet Filtering Technologies Consortium. (Yes, I see that they forgot the C.) They are somehow affiliated with what was known as the NCSA (National Computer Security Association), but this is now known as ICSA which appears to be some kind of a legitimate security (i.e., antivirus, cryptography) company.
Once upon a time, SIFT provided a big booklet on managing Employee internet access, but the site must have been reorganized, because it's gone.
I got this info searching About.com, which lead me some site off netmom.com. There's all kinds of info and links related to the issue here. Keep in mind that these are people whe support things like COPA...
It always amazes me to see how outraged people get over internet scams. (DISCLAIMER: I believe scamming honest people is bad.) It's like any new business model -- if you convince people to give you money, someone will find a way to take advantage of that.
For years we've had scams in newspapers, magazines, comic books (think Sea Monkeys), informercials, special TV offers, telemarketing scams, etc. Is it inethical? -- yes. But is the internet any different?
The internet makes it a lot easier for Joe Schmoe to start up a business. It makes it equally easy for Joe Schmoe's evil twin to start up a scam. As long as there are gullible people, there will always be someone to take advantage of it.
Face it -- there are a lot of dumb people out there.
Slashdot Mirror
We're no longer dictators of taste; we are listening to what readers want
I am a reader. I want books that are written on paper, so that I can read them in a well-lit room for 12 straight hours and not completely destroy my eyes. I want books I can carry anywhere, and curl up with, and accidently leave on a bus. I want books that when I purchase them, they are mine to read and enjoy and loan out and hoard.
Books published in pieces are not a new idea. They're an old Victorian idea. Dickens wrote his novels in serial. It's neither a better nor worse idea then books as we have them now -- it's merely different.
Novels that play with reality are not a new idea. It's know as post-modernism. Read something by Jorje Borjes, and you'll see the same "cyber-concept" written long before computers where prevelant.
I've never been an Anti-Katz poster, but JonKatz, please check your literary history before writing about all these new ideas. These are old ideas. It's only a new distribution.
I am, among other things, an English Major. As far as I'm concerned, books have always had creative interaction between reader and writer. The writer puts in something, the reader takes out something.
The only new twist that the internet adds to this is that it's easier to communicate with the writer about the writing. Or you could contribute to the progress of a story by commenting on the writing if the writer publishes in bits. But through magazines and other literary forums, you've ALWAYS been able to do this. The internet provides easier access to do so. I'm not even convinced that allowing the connected masses to contribute to a story will really improve the quality of the writing.
This isn't some revolutionary cyber-writing change. Writing continues to evolve as it always has. Revolutionary changes -- like the creation of a new genre with Gibson's Neuromancer -- happen infrequently. The eBook is not one these changes.
This is primarily available on *NIX, but KL also has a C/C++ component called PageFormatter which has very similar functionality to JClass PageLayout.
Once again, it's not free and I admit that I'm biased, but it's still a good tool, and it can't hurt to download an eval to see for yourself.
Check out KL Group's JClass PageLayout. Quoting from the product page, it will "Output directly to the Java AWT Printer, Acrobat PDF, HTML, PostScript Level 2, or PCL 5."
I admit that I'm biased, but it's still worth checking out the eval.
If the portion that you're outsourcing can be neatly separated from the rest of the system, then out-sourcing can be a huge advantage. All you need then are the well documented API's and instructions, and it's like buying an off-the-shelf component.
This of course, assumes that the company you're outsourcing to is competant. Meaning that as with anything, they should be thoroughly checked out prior to signing the contract.
However, the statement that you can do it better and faster in house bothers me. The compnay I work for sells software components. Our biggest source of competition is not other component vendors, but the attitude that we get from many developers that no matter how good are product may be, they can still do it better and faster. That's sounds strongly of an ego trip to me.
I mean, most software is not incredibly revolutionary. As a developer, I consider myself competant enough to build almost anything. But on the other hand, that's probably true of most other competant developers. Just because you CAN do it, doesn't mean that you NEED to do it, or that you SHOULD do it.
The movie industry (and, come to think of it, many others) could support dozens of alternative OS's by offering this.
I mean, depending on the scale of the project, a few K per release is peanuts compared to the cost of doing it yourself. And they wouldn't have to spend too much on customer support -- they can just train their staff to say "We don't actually support that, however, you can check out X from Y.com and that might help you."
Over here in Canada, at the University of Waterloo we have an interesting compromise between work and school. It's called the co-op program -- I know a lot of schools are starting to do this, but UW was built upon this concept -- nearly half the school is in it.
The way it works here is that every 4 months (including during the summer) students switch off between school and work. The school helps you find a job -- our co-op employment rate, even for the non-tech degrees, is somewhere in the 90s. An added bonus is that you usually make more than enough in co-op to pay for your next 4 months of school.
UW is both a well known and well respected geek school. We've consistantly placed in the top 10 in the ACM programming contest (usually beating MIT). Plus grads are very hirable, and (in my experience) are generally good coders. It makes for a good mix of theoretical and practical.
The system is by no means perfect. Despite high standards, there are still idiots who come through it. And uprooting your life every four months with no vacation is not fun. Plus, there is a bit of a feeling around campus of being a factory for employees. But overall, it's a decent system.
Does anyone really think the whole ebook concept will take off? I mean, a few years ago, they were putting the Collective Works of Shakespeare and other classics on CD-ROMs, only for people to discover that they really hated reading books online.
I love reading novels. If I didn't have a job, I'd probably read non-stop all day. On vacations, I can easily read about 500-800 pages per day. I can't do that online -- the potential eyestrain of reading a paperback in a well-lit room is nothing compared to intently staring at a monitor. Not to mention that I can't read an eBook on the bus, in the park, while I'm cooking, in bed, in the bath tub, etc. Laptops and Palms are not this convenient.
The current eBook model seems to assume that people read while seated at a desk. That seems reasonable if the book is merely a reference -- I like being able to search manuals while coding. But real readers read everywhere.
Microsoft can try to control eBooks all they want, but I don't see hardcore readers buying into the concept.
Having worked as a tech person in a marketing department, (i.e., I had to write all the damn demos) I can tell you that flashy does not always sell. It may draw a crowd, but it won't always convince people.
If the purpose of the demo is to get regular people to say "Hey, Linux is cool" and walk away, then an OpenGL screen-saver-like thing is fine.
But if you want people to think about USING Linux, then you have to think about what kinds of applications they use. Quake is a good idea -- people play games, and it'll draw people in. But then show off StarOffice or WP, Netscape, and maybe The Gimp or CorelDraw, because that's what people actually use. And then pitch them about the cost, get someone in the crowd to use the apps, so that they see for themselves that it's easy to use.
Remember, regular people care not about their OS -- for them, the computer is simply a tool, not a political statement.
Here's the deal on Hindi.
There are something like 200 separate languages in India. There are at least an additional 500 dialects of these languages. The variations in these dialects are so great the people in one village have trouble understanding people in the neighbouring village, even though they speak the same language. Historically, Indians tended to marry and socialize with in the same language-group and tiny kingdoms, so not a lot of effort was made in communications.
Although Indians now tend to be multilingual, there really wasn't any common language in India. Then the British came along, grouped all the princedoms in the Indian subcontinent into a single country, and created the government and international business there. So English became the language of business and law, and therefore education because you needed English to get ahead.
Hindi didn't really become a national language in India until the movie industry took off. (Fun Fact: the Indian movie industry, by volume, is bigger than Hollywood.) Hindi movies -- splashy musical formula-films -- became immensely popular. So people learned and used Hindi to understand the movies better. (Seriously.)
Currently, English and Hindi are the only nationally spoken languages in India. State languages (i.e., Gujarati in Gujarat, Bengali in Bengal, etc.) are widely used and spoken at the state level.
First off, Attention Deficit Disorder is a misleading name for this condition. People with ADD ocillate wildly between periods of intense concentration, and periods of intense distractibility. (Yes, everyone does this, but more so in people with ADD.) The hyperactivity bit is a variant of ADD known as ADHD (Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.) It's a combination of ADD and hyperactivity.
So the fact that kids with ADD or ADHD can calmly sit and play video games is not a cure by any means. The kids are in a hyperfocus period. This is pretty common, since when presented with (depending on the type of ADD) something new, different and/or high-stimulation, most ADD'ers will go into hyperfocus mode.
That said, the interesting part of the article is that they are working with the ADD to provide biofeedback therapy. See, that's important for ADD -- it's not curable, so any treatment has to work with the ADD. Most treatments for ADD work initially because the treatment itself is novel, and thus brings on a state of hyperfocus. They later fail because soon it's not new anymore. (This is why ADD is difficult to test for -- the novelty of the tests temporarily cure the distractiblity.) This one, however, can probably remain novel for the 40 sessions needed to perform the treatment.
More therapies like this would be great. ADD has some tremendous advantages, (symptoms of genius and creativity are the same as the symptoms of ADD - both Einstein and Mozart may have had it, and I think many geeks may have it too) so curing ADD would be a major detriment. But some people with extreme cases of ADD are so distractable (or they hyperfocus at bad times) that it's difficult for them to function in society. Therapies like this could probably lessen the annoying bits of ADD, but maintain the beneficial parts.
For more info on ADD, read "Driven to Distraction". Don't remember the authors, but they're 2 pyschologists who have ADD themselves, so it's a great perspective.
Sometimes, just a plain, simple calculator would be nice, too.
But my phone has a calculator....
When your hands and wrists start telling you that they don't like coding non-stop everyday, it's time to stop coding non-stop everyday. It's hard to believe, but life exists away from computers.
The poster above made an excellent point about compulsiveness. There are students at my school who, after their 4 years of undergrad, are so crippled by RSI and carpal tunnel that they can't work in the field they studied. The first day of the first year programming class is now a lecture on RSI and how to avoid it.
A friend, who doubted the existance of RSI, once asked me how it is that RSI exists now, but didn't exists years ago, because otherwise secretaries would have suffered from it as far back as the 40's and 50's. I pointed out that secretaries in the 40's and 50's worked 8 hours a day, and didn't type when they got home.
In addition to recognition software and therapy, you've got to learn to chill....
Inserting a disclaimer here: I currently work for KL Group, the makers of JProbe.
Anyway, KL has published some articles and delivered some lecture's about performance-tuning Java, particularly in the area of memory use.
They are fairly helpful. Some of the points made in these articles are the same as what woggo made above, others are also useful information. These can be found off the JProbe page, but I've included two of them below.
How do you plug Java Memory Leaks? This was published in Dr. Dobbs Journal.
Our CTO, Ed Lycklama, gave a talk entitled "Designing for Performance on the Java Platform" at JavaOne this year. There's a graphical and a text on the KL site.
I think part of this is just a PR play so that they can tell the DOJ that their products run on all sorts of OS's.
However, this may be an attempt to make the whole C#/.NET framework actually functional. (Or at least, functional on paper.) C# is supposedly platform independant and interoperable with Common Language Standard (CLS) compliant languages. But it's only independant across .NET platforms, and currently the CLS compliant languages are Visual C++ and VB.
By making their products run on Linux, they can still advertise themselves as platform-independant and language interoperable. Whether or not this is actually true depends on whether or not MainSoft can pull this off.
Personally, I see this as a PR play, and that MainSoft will crumble trying to support the independance facade.
Personally I don't believe that this has done any harm to Apple, the Mac freaks are going to buy the stuff no matter what Apple does, and no one else gives a damn anyway. So I don't see any 'material harm' being done either way.
The material harm in leaking the info prior to the big release is a marketing/branding issue. First impressions last a long time, so when a company releases a new product, they try to control the first impression as much as possible. This is doubly important when you're releasing something, like the cube, that's very different.
Basically, if pictures of the cube were widely available for too long, people would form their own impressions of it BEFORE Apple could explain the purpose of the cube. Worse, competitors could find ways to dismiss the product before its release. (e.g., You're not Borg. Why would you want a cube?)
Take the Linux Watch for example. Many of us probably looked at the picture before reading the IBM release. And a lot of us thought "That's cute, but why would I want a watch that can run a webserver but can't tell the time?" So we formed our own impression and dismissed IBM as idiotic. But IBM's purpose was to prove that Linux could be scaled down to a wristwatch. Had this been an actual product, IBM would have lost potential business from the people who dismissed the watch without reading the purpose. A controlled launch helps to alliviate some of these problems.
Was Apple being a tad hyper? Probably. But they're taking a risk in releasing such a different product, and it's understandable that they want to manage the release as much as they can.
Opensource is great because it allows them to totally review whatever goes on in the OS and to tweak it to no end.
Just to elaborate on this, one of the questions should probably be: But if everyone can see all the source code for my OS, won't that make me more vulnerable?
Historically, (i.e., before computers where widespread) big corporations relied on secrecy to maintain security. To some extent, they still do. Like trade secrets. Or when I used to work for a bank, the data backup tapes where taken offsite, but you need clearence to know where.
So I think your big challenge is to explain how Open means More Secure. Ideas to do this would be:
But add proof to all of that -- numbers, surveys, etc.. And be sure to mention that they will need to have someone monitor fixes and patches.
And it came up on slashdot on Monday, July 24th. Read the article right here.
If I recall correctly, (the post I read this in is buried somewhere) the experiment is going fairly well so far. Though mind you, between the novelty of it, and the strengh of the Stephen King Name, it's difficult to say how good a test this will be.
I'm a tech, but I work in the marketing department. (Someone has to explain things to them.) It gives me an interesting perspective on how management works.
The personality and style of management has a big effect on how the company works. If they play "schoolground" tactics now, they're not going to stop. They're either going to get away with it and never stop, or get caught and be replaced -- though there's no guarantee about who will replace them. People tend to hire people who are like themselves, ergo bad management tends to hire more bad management.
Even though your co-workers are great, you're working environment may be on a downswing. I'd leave. Chances are, other people have been thinking about it too, and are waiting for someone to make a first move. And if you do well at another company, you may be able to bring some of them in as well. Besides, just because you don't work with them doesn't mean you can't talk to them.
As for blowing the whistle, think about the potential effects on the company, and therefore on your co-workers. (I can't say what it wil be without know more.) Will it bankrupt the place and put everyone out of work? Are you comfortable with that? Is the ethics of the licensing issue as important to you as the consequences to your coworkers? If so, blow it but quit at the same time. You're a geek -- it's not like you're unemployable.
I'm not so sure that you did "everything" you could. I know you brought up the issue, but as far as I can tell, you only brought it up once. Management types, particularly the infantile ones, are always too good about responding to things unless they get constant reminders. The good ones respond right away, but the bad ones forget, don't always understand the issue and dismiss it, internally think "geeks always worry about the most trivial details," etc. It sucks that you can't just bring something up once and expect action, but remember that management doesn't always know how to see things from your perspective.
I know most geeks aren't always good at reading people (or don't have time to), but it's possible that you might have been able to foresee the idiocy. But when in doubt, if it's an important issue, don't assume that they realize that. Pester them until you see proof of action.
It's a nasty situation to be in, and I wish you lots of luck.
Corporations have always been in the business of education and training. Big companies have internal training departments, online CBTs, libraries full of stuff, internal courses, etc. Smaller companies have some similar material on hand, and then they outsource other programs. Naturally, they try and direct training towards the company goals. For example, if I worked at M$, I'd probably be able to learn lots about how Windows can do everything I'd ever want it to do, <sarcasm> but very little about Linux. Not that I'd necessarily have time to take advantage of all this training, but if I really wanted or needed it, I could probably find something eventually. Similarly, if a company used only VisualAge as its IDE, I'd be able to learn that, but I wouldn't be able to learn anything else, unless it was on my own.
Moreover, at large companies, outsiders can sign up for courses on other products. For example, Rational has it's Rational University. And if someone publishes a (favourable) whitepaper related to using a company's products, it will be available from that company. This is how companies can encourage people to try their product, in the hopes that they will like it and buy it.
So is it a conflict of interest? Not if you're intelligent enough to know every bit of education is coloured with the teacher's or provider's own personal biases. Just because they want you to see things a certain way doesn't mean you have to. It's called critical thinking. Just because I learned how to code C++ with gcc in emacs doesn't mean I can't code C++ with the Borland compiler in vi -- once I learn vi. I can reapply the knowledge.
Okay, the unwilling to think and learn will never venture out of the one comfy environment they're in, but frankly, the unwilling to think and learn aren't (IMHO) worth protecting from the big, bad corporate interests.
Mind you, I think corporate interests at the university level and lower are not such a good thing. As the texan points out, some education is better than no education, but when you are first acquiring the ability to think critically, I think it's best to keep things as objective as possible. Obviously, that's difficult. For example, my first professional coding experience was in Java. So I initially preferred it to C++. Then I had to do some seriously hard-core stuff in C++ and became more familiar with it. So I came to like C++ as well, but given a situation where there was no disadvantage to using either language, I'd probably go with Java because it's easier for me. But I'd still use C++ if it were more appropriate, and frankly, nothing in the standard JDK beats the STL.
This free learning may start users on an initial preference for CodeWarrior and C++. So what? Anyone who's intelligent and willing to learn will eventually learn other tools. Eventually, they may appreciate, and possibly come to prefer these other tools. But this isn't a conflict of interest. The user gets to learn something, the company gets a chance to make sales, and as long users realises that the fact that they know and use a tool does not make it inherently superior to everything else, everyone's happy.
While we're talking about non-Outlook email clients that LOOK like Outlook, are there any non-Outlook email clients that WORK with Outlook's corporate workgroup stuff? Or does someone know where the API to build such a thing is?
The reason I ask is that I'm forced to use Outlook at work so that we can all schedule meetings conveniently over the Exchange Server. Outlook used as a personal client is not bad since I could fully manage all 50 billion of my email accounts from 1 program. The corporate networking mode won't allow you to send email from different accounts unless you shut down the program and login again under a different user profile.
Does anyone know of any Outlook compatible email clients that will let you do this? Or point me to the appropriate API's to build such a thing?
You wouldn't want to port if you didn't think you'd make money off it. Not all untapped markets are profitable.
And the cost is not just the cost of the box and the dev tool licenses. To do any kind of a port, you have to factor in a whole bunch of costs, for example:
Overall, it adds up big time. So unless you have proof (usually in the form of market research) that there are enough people out there who will buy the product, and enough people out there to sustain sales in the product, such that it will become and remain profitable over time, it's just not worth doing a port. Possible does not equal profitable.
I think, however, this new ease of porting between UNIX and MacOS may mean that companies will be able to take existing software that runs on UNIX and port it to the Mac. So for companies who started off with a Win32 product and later did a port (or rewrite) to support UNIX, or who have some flavour of UNIX and Win32 as their 2 major platforms will now have an easier time supporting the Mac. Instead of a complete re-write, they can just port -- which is cheaper, but still more a lot more expensive than the cost of the box, the software and the developers.
But once again, this assumes that there's an actual market demand FOR a Mac port.
There is no "Constitution" in Canada; nothing like what the States has, anyhow.
Check your facts. From 1867 to 1982, the Canadian Constitution was the British North America Act. That is, it was the act that Britain passed which made Canada a Dominion. It lived in London, and therefore any changes to it had to be made by the British Parliament. For example, in 1929 Nellie McClung et al. had women declared as persons under the law by going to London and arguing before the Privy Council.
In 1982, Prime Minsister Pierre Trudeau brough the Canadian constitution home to Canada, under the Constition Act which meant that we could change and rewrite it without the approval of the British Parliament. This Act, plus the subsequent amendments and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms make up the Canadian Constitution.
And if there were, it would have a very different idea of what it considers basic rights.
You're both right and wrong. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms (written in 1982) is actually quite similar to the Bill of Rights -- partly because it took a lot of its ideas FROM the Bill of Rights. There are some key differences, however:
So Sydney is NOT asking the Canadian Government to defend American rights in a more enlightened manner, he's asking them to defend OUR rights, in a more enlightened manner. Which makes sense since (IMHO) our rights were granted to us in a more enlightened manner. (Mind you, we had 200 years of the American example to learn from.) There is no inherent hypocracy in the article.
The only thing that annoys me more than Americans who spout off incorrect garbage about Canada are Canadians who spout off incorrect garbage about Canada.
Gordon Ross said that this had been tried a few years back with SIFT (?), and that it didn't work out.
SIFT stands for Secure Internet Filtering Technologies Consortium. (Yes, I see that they forgot the C.) They are somehow affiliated with what was known as the NCSA (National Computer Security Association), but this is now known as ICSA which appears to be some kind of a legitimate security (i.e., antivirus, cryptography) company.
Once upon a time, SIFT provided a big booklet on managing Employee internet access, but the site must have been reorganized, because it's gone.
I got this info searching About.com, which lead me some site off netmom.com. There's all kinds of info and links related to the issue here. Keep in mind that these are people whe support things like COPA...
It always amazes me to see how outraged people get over internet scams. (DISCLAIMER: I believe scamming honest people is bad.) It's like any new business model -- if you convince people to give you money, someone will find a way to take advantage of that.
For years we've had scams in newspapers, magazines, comic books (think Sea Monkeys), informercials, special TV offers, telemarketing scams, etc. Is it inethical? -- yes. But is the internet any different?
The internet makes it a lot easier for Joe Schmoe to start up a business. It makes it equally easy for Joe Schmoe's evil twin to start up a scam. As long as there are gullible people, there will always be someone to take advantage of it.
Face it -- there are a lot of dumb people out there.
If Brazil really wants to steal a cool sounding dot com, how come they didn't go after Amazon.com?
I mean, who really has a better right to it -- the country that has encompassed the huge river and rainforest for decades, or a bookstore?
Trademark, shmademark. Revoke that sucker.