That process definitely would come to an "average", but how useful is that? One thing this does show you, is that even in memory that is "working" there could be a huge discrepancy in performance within the same product, ie. you never know what you're going to get. If Geil would go on record saying "Yes that's defective, and anyone who has a similar problem will be able to exchange their product hassle free" then it's all good; just go out and buy one, and if you get a "bad" one just exchange it till you get a good one.
But more likely this product is "working" and does not come with overclocking guarantees. So then buying one becomes a gamble. You may end up with a good one, you may end up with a bad one, and you wont know till you get it. Then add in the time it takes to purchase, restocking fees (You know it's bad, but technically it's functional), shipping (if you order over the internet), and the unknown factor of how many times you'll need to exchange it till you find a good one. Doesn't matter if their average is high, because that could mean they have a whole bunch of overperformers and underperformers. Much better and much more reliable would be precision, ie. achieving the same results over and over again.
Just think, one manufacturer could win this shootout by having the highest clocking memory. But what if that manufacturer has less precision, so about 10-20% of buyers would end up with bad memory like Tom's did. Then you have manufacturer #2 that scored lower "on average", but has higher precision so you're much more likely to get the same results that Tom does. Which one is the real winner? Hard to tell, honestly.
I actually wondered about this, since at the beginning of the article they portrayed him just how we'd expect; "I can do this, so I will. Users are stupid and deserve it. I make money, don't care about the consequences for others." Later it seems to change tones "I'm thinking of stopping, joining the army, going to college, getting out of this poor place and making something of myself."
It made me pause. Should I feel sorry for this guy? I'd just been imagining how hard it would be to track him down, turn his "bots" against him (what happened to "zombies"? Liked that better), or just post all his personal info on the net and see what it gets him. Should I now recant those feelings now that he's "thinking about quitting"? No. Regardless of whether he were to change his perspective now, or think about maybe possibly change it later, his actions have consequences. If he's caught, he should get those consequences.
In the end, he's done horrible things and should reap the rewards, whether its prison time or some kind of crazy no-tech probation (Mitnick style) plus having to uninstall every spyware he ever installed (how long does it take to do 10000 pc's by hand?) it would be counter productive to spare him this. I hope they do catch him, and every script kiddie like him, and that they are punished in one way or another. I'm not being vindictive (ok, not comletely vindictive). I believe it will help everyone for these people to be caught.
Support for my argument from the article; when this kid's not on the net for one day, all his friends call to see if he's busted by the feds. I'm guessing some of these kids are worried about their own operations. What kind of an impact would it make for one of their members to be taken down? What impact would it make on the next AOL chatter that receives a virus?
Half cocked indeed... I hope this kid gets caught. Speaking of which, doesn't *anyone* live near Roland?
I remember an incident while I was living in japan. Some kid was studying for the final high school tests (the ones that determine basically where you can go to college, and therefore what your place is in japanese life [simplified]) and he went a little crazy. Cut off the heads of his parents? Somebody, and put them in front of his school. Crazy stuff.
The pressure is incredible from the factors you described (which is a good summary from an outsider's point of view, I had the same ideas while there). It's funny, my friends' views of japan and japanese people are very different from mine. They think of japanese people as very polite, very happy/smiley. They do act that way a lot of the time. But underneath it I see something else.
I don't mean to say that japanese people are all fake. I just see the immense cultural pressures as affecting a lot of the population. It is a good guess at an explanation for things like the suicides and the general sexual perversion. Whether it's different from other cultures is always hard to say, but for me it does feel distinctly different. Almost orwellian/big brother-ish. But then, at that point I'm going off into a rant. Good post, parent.
Holy crap, I'm most impressed by that "Desktop Organization" video. How incredibly useful would it be to have that view? If I've got many windows open, my options are usually either to minimize what I've got (hopefully it's just below what I'm working on), or alt+tab until I find it (which means I have to go through a small icon list), or use the taskbar. Having that kind of "lay everything out on the table for a second" view would be incredible.
Really shows what happens when it's no longer "eye candy" but more usability. I can't wait to use these kinds of features on a daily basis, and also to see what other useful things they'll come up with.
The cube idea... neat, helps with spatial awareness. I'd rather have something less fancy, maybe a filmstrip (the never ending horizontal desktop... cut into frames). But still neat (and still not meaningless eye candy). Cool.
I've been using a cheap pair of Sony behind-the-ear's at work for a while. Easy to put on, decent sound (little muddy), cheap, and doesn't look like my other phones. At home it's Sennheiser HD497's, incredible sound (good alternative to Grado SR-60's I hear). The 497's are about 60-70, and they're open design so you can basic hear everything around you not muffled at all. Same with the sony behind-the-ears, you can still hear around you and you can simply pause the music to hear people.
I tried the Sennheiser PXC-250's, same physical design as the 100's but with active noise cancelling. Even with the noise canceling *off*, the phone physically blocked out a lot of noise (surprisingly). Good for music, bad for coworkers.
Personally, I'd got with behind the ear Koss porta pro's (KSC55's probably). They're slightly less intrusive than over-the-head phones, that series of koss's are supposed to be the best bargain phones (ie. under $30), and they're really easy to pull down to your neck when a coworker wants to talk. That's important, as at my 1 year review one of my feedback from coworkers was "he's always wearing his headphones". Programming for 8-10 hours straight in the only office in the building without a window of any kind? Heck yes. I'm still going to wear phones, but I have to be careful not to appear "unapproachable" to the higher-ups. Aww, screw it. I'm doing important work, they don't need to disturb me.
(I think it's outside the scope of the OP's requirements, but I can't say enough about the HD497's. Music sounds incredibly different listened with those compared to cheap phones, cars, computer speakers, etc. There's just a whole lot more there that you never realized. Love it, I want to listen to music all over again just in these phones.)
Sony MDR-G52LP's, $20, ok but not as good as the Koss (so I've heard). Little muddy.
Koss KSC55, ~$20, behind the ear, titanium diaphram, cheap and good
Grado SR-60's, ~$70, bigger over the head, "best under $100"-kine (open design, can hear everything)
Sennheiser HD497's, ~$70, more bigger over the head, "the other best under $100"-kine (open design, can hear everything)
*Don't pay attention to frequency response numbers, 20-20000hz. Means nothing. Go try some phones, goto the Apple store and plug your personal ipod into the bose triports and listen to something you know well. If you're not rushed, you might notice a big difference.
I've been trying to figure this one out, and I was waiting for the slashdot crowd to weigh in. The only thing I can figure is that this is a loss-leader (without the loss) kind of deal. Notice the "automatic updates", so the pack will morph over time. I'm sure new programs will be added, and more little google-bits will find their way in.
It is many things that most people probably should be using. They're all available free separately (minus NAV, but yuck), and the only thing this really gives you (besides the screensaver... where else is that??) is convenience.
So: -users use google pack instead of downloading each one. it's convenient, it works. -later, google adds more google apps and starts expanding the "pack" into a platform.
You are right in that software does have real value. What makes this more complicated is what others have already mentioned; do we own this software? If someone owns a truck, and I pay them $100 for the right to use their truck, is that taxable property I own? Software companies have been attempting to redefine what exactly it is we're paying for, and that's cause a lot of strife. This seems to be a "have your cake and eat it too" situation.
If we only are borrowing a license, then we don't own anything, so it'd seem like a "property" tax wouldn't apply (excepting for the poster above with his leased-truck example). If we do own the software and can be taxed on it, it seems to break the arguments that software companies are only selling us "licenses".
It would seem at first glance that either we can't be taxed and this is an innappropriate bill, or we can be taxed and we therefore also have more rights to the software than we previously thought. I don't think anyone will argue the value of the software, but we'll still argue the taxable nature of it.
"An effective way to produce good graduates is to help the slackers flunk out early."
So true, yet from what I've seen that's very hard to do. Most students will do just enough to scrape by, so whereever the line is drawn you'll see them floating just above it. I see that universities have 2 approaches; either draw the bar very high and focus on a small amount of high quality/motivated students, or be less-exclusive and baby the kids some. Basically, from a college standpoint it seems like they've added something (internet), measured it, and found negative effects. Say, more internet = lower grades (completely untrue, no in the article, but useful for this argument). Are they going to say "we should weed out the bad ones by slowly and subtly lowering their grades and concentration." Ahh, very tricky of them. The college is already made that kind of decision. Either they're a high level school and are weeding kids out in real ways (hard classes) vs. subliminal ways (wifi, internet, free beer just outside the classrooms, free GTA3 for each student). Or they're a lower level school and they want to help kids help themselves.
So take away that wifi, eliminate those notebooks in the classroom, no talking in class! Help me, help you. Help me, help you... etc etc etc.
I agree with you. From a pragmatic point of view, AJAX is something that just works. Java can do many of the same things, but I always hated when websites use java in their pages. The load time is really annoying. I always sit there wondering what's chewing up my CPU cycles, then I see some cheesy javascript counter at the bottom of the page.
Google maps is such a great example. You go there, it works, and it's a great interface. It's not as nice as google earth, but I don't want a client/server map app. I don't want to go to a public computer, work computer, friend's computer (etc) and say "I wish I had that app on this computer". I just go to the web application, do what I need to, and close it.
With the huge focus on web applications, I believe this is just the start of a trend. We should be seeing some web application-specific API's popping up among browsers. Remember when mozilla was an application platform, not just an internet browser? That was the justification (IIRC) for XUL instead of native UI's; mozilla was going to be an app platform that everyone could utilize. Instead of XUL and mozilla specific, now we have AJAX that's cross platform.
Yes, we had IFRAMES. Yes, we had Java (and flash, for that matter). But instead of "this is no good, we could already do this", my thought is "Yeah! Almost all of the browsers AGREED on something that we actually need, and made things just a bit easier in a way that actually makes sense! A miracle!".
Plus, this should kill off old browsers in a way that XHTML/css never could. For that alone, thank you.
I guess it's the product of too many fictional movies. Or too many non-ficational admittances. But I believe the government knows (and does, and has) much more than we know about.
Maybe they do have solid proof of ESP. Maybe they did capture alien craft. Maybe there really is a football-sized computer cluster from the 70's monitoring all communications and red-flagging potential communists (in which case, we're all there).
Doesn't really matter. But I do believe some day I'll catch wind of something (even something small) they couldn't hide anymore. And it'll be neat. But it wont really be a surprise.
Indexing C++ files... if it's not unintentional (?), then I can imagine some Google employee thinking, "It's not mainstream, but it's so easy to do and the geeks will love it." But it also makes me wonder, how many google employees use this daily? I guess I wonder if this is a program to capture the masses, or something so germane that it's a no-brainer for everyone (techies included).
Imagine... a company that makes products that appeal equally to completely new computer-averse users, and old techies. That's quite some accomplishment.
Ironically, I looked up this article because my mom just asked me which button to press in firefox to install the GDS (since the buttons are different than the picture of IExplorer). I love it.
If I were a dietician and I didn't think a certain food was good for others, I probably would go on a crusade against it. My friend is a dietician and does exactly this (and I smile as I eat whatever she tells me not to).
I'm a computer engineer, and I spend time daydreaming about how computers could be better, and lamenting about the ways that they're not. Then I do a little work to try to bring them one step closer that goal (however I can).
If a company makes a bad program that's used by many people and does bad things (like annoying filetype appropriations, or tricky install/uninstall procedures) then it ticks me off. I will uninstall it, and that'll solve the problem for me. But I am not the only person defining my field, so it matters to me what is popular and being used. I like that Firefox is gaining popularity and may someday overtake Internet Explorer. I'll love it when medium to small business shun Exchange in favor of a better alternative. Not because I hate those companies, but because I believe the software field will be a better place when this happens; one step closer to better computing.
I could be apathetic, and that would make things easier for me. But I didn't get into computers because they were easy, or because I liked them exactly how they are. I got into it to change things.
My friends and I used to rent old movies in a search to find some truly horrible ones. Don't ask me why we did this. Some were bombs, others boring. I'd have to rate Evil Dead (the first one) as my #2 worst movie.
The worst I've seen is Dead Alive (or "Braindead"). A sumatran rat monkey bites a grandmother, and her geeky son decides... "Well, she's a zombie now. Better not let the neighbors find out". There is no explaining this movie or the extreme ridiculousness of it. It was filmed in New Zealand, and one of the most notable details is that the camera is *always* a little too close to the actors. It's like tilting your head sideways when something is tilted on screen, except you keep trying to back up.
But this is the incredible part... my friend eventually looked up the director. Guess who it is? It really is worth click on this link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103873/. I guess it wasn't a bad start for this director!
I agree that Helpdesk doesn't have much to do softare/network engineer. I also have to say that it's how I got my first programming lead position.
I started as helpdesk second year of college. I did this for about a year, meanwhile I was bored enough to start learning the technologies that they used (web applications) and starting dabbling with it. I would show my boss little things I'd done, just for personal satisfaction really. He started giving me a few minor tasks, and I was able to breeze through them at this point. That led me up to the point where the main programmer left, and I got moved up to programmer lead.
Granted, this was in a small company... that's the key. In a large (or well-managed) company, they would have hired a real programmer with experience. But I was able to do the job, I was already there (known), and I was cheaper than hiring another outside guy. I was underpaid, but I also am able to put some good things on my resume, so I'm leaving college with some nice points under "Experience" on my CV.
If you're still in college, I would recommend trying this. If you're out with a degree, start a bit further up the ladder. Helpdesk, for an aspiring software engineer, is not that fun.
Re:An online-DEMO of some NEWER stuff
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The Face Detector
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For other people interested in playing around with Face detection, you can take a look at OpenCV ( http://www.intel.com/research/mrl/research/opencv/ ). It's a general purpose image processing library, but it also has some classifiers. I'm using it right now with a webcam to detect faces for some research I'm working on, using the HAAR classifiers. Not too robust, but interesting. It detects my eyes using small scaled subsections, then tracks them using object tracking methods.
It's useful for a lot of things. Too quickly we think that it not useful if it can't recognize individual faces. But I'm using it for research, hopefully ending up in a kiosk. If a kiosk knows if there's a person (doesn't matter who, specifically) in front of it, it can respond more intelligently. There are lots of applications for "there's a face here", and not just "john's face is here".
While neat, this idea seems counter productive. The point is to create a *brand* around a product, so that enterprise users can trust in both. If we didn't need a brand (ie. a name they trust), everyone would simply choose the best product and go. Which they're not doing yet.
Linux is something even businesses know now. If you remove that from the name, you've just eliminated an asset. It's like the choice of debian. It's not just the technology, but also the fact that debian has a great reputation (I've never used it, and I already feel like a fan simply from what I've heard... someday I'll try it if I ever throw out Slackware). So while putting "Linux" in the name may be cliche nowadays, it also makes too much sense to change simply for personal taste.
While it would be really fun to give it a neat name (Like nemo, or Oliver, or Crush the OS), this product is being made to fulfill the needs of the enterprise. So throw linux in the title and give it a nice professional logo. And make it work.
... That having been said, who's for naming it Nemo? Anyone?
I agree this is the current state of affairs. I also agreed in non-compete, non-disclosure, and signing my IP over to them when I started my job. So yes, I'm getting paid and in return they take my IP from me.
But is this the way it should work? I'd say (judging from what I've read, and the comments here) that it's pretty common. Is this the best thing for all parties involved? I'm not talking about a "Do they work that way now?" or even a "What can we change?" point of view. The first has been answered and the second is too complicated. But If we had to do it over again, is this what we would choose? If not, what are the alternatives?
I say "we" meaning from both the company's point of view and the employee. How do we balance the rights of the employee with the company's need to make money and survive? Is there a better balance than mandatory IP surrendering?
I've thought about this a lot, since I had the same kind of commute before. I didn't have the money at the time, but I've always been a fan of detachable in-line skates. There's a few manufacturers (and I do mean a few, they're rare). Hypno makes the best (italian designer, a few retailers in US)... they're last-year models and surplus are affordable, comparable to nice regular in-lines. There's another company, but I can't remember the name.
You skate to the train station, take a few seconds to detach the wheels (they mount on a rail), then walk. they're supposed to be comfortable for walking, look like normal shoes. (Well, what italians see as normal). Note, I've never used one so I don't know comfort/skate performance.
Big deciding factor for this is if you're opposed to excercise. I'd like this, but you really have to be ready to skate 6 miles.
Soln 2: Obtain gas-powered weed-whacker engine. Mount on collapsable scooter. Try to survive. I would *definately* try this. I've wanted to for years... cheap, fast, small, powerful, deadly. It's like the best entertainment you've ever almost been killed by.
I definately use javascript, never the same scheme twice. I'd suggest scrambling the emails into randomly sized segments (you can do this once per email, copy the contents into a DB or the actual page) for JS to put back together.
Does anyone see a vulnerability with this? I know anything can be hacked, given enough time, but I really don't see how a spammer would get around the simple javascript thing (besides executing all scripts on all pages). Any Ideas how it could be abused?
I would recommend Half-Life as a good title... it changed ways I looked at games when I first played it.
GTA3 is another good title. Both of these weren't completely different from anything that came before, but they managed to balance certain aspects of their gameplay that were never quite balanced before. Definately recommended.
I have to agree... out of all the editors I've used, textpad is the best one. It does have a lot of nifty little features (like automatic DOS/UNIX CRLF handling), but I'd say the best part was just the text editing itself. Every action just seems to make sense, and it really does help out a lot. I'd try it out. This is the only commercial program I've considered buying a license for, it's that good.
When I was looking for a wm, I tried IceWM since they claim "Optional use of mouse." Everything is supposed to be accessable by the keyboard. The keybindings are similar to a lot of windows keybindings, if you've learned any of those, but also they have other keys to use, and it seems pretty comprehensive. It also seems to be a decent WM all around, so give it a try.
I own a Dell Inspiron 3200. It's a bit old now... P2-233, came with 64mb/3gig. But it was a good laptop, and worked well. It was sitting innocently enough by a window one day when it decided to rain while I was out. The water poured out of the case when it was tipped sideways... had to let that dry out for a while. But 3 months of drying later, and a new keyboard, it worked great. I've dropped it from 2 to 3 feet a bunch of times, on corners and sides, tops and bottoms. Never even had a bad sector or plastic crack. It was in the back of a minivan once, on top of a bunch of luggage in a backpack with 10-20lbs of books and it fell out when the door was opened... 6 ft fall onto asphalt, with a load of books on top to boot.
I've used my laptop as a doorstop, rain gauge (see above), hammer (had to hammer a contact on a car battery), and a bunch of other un-intended uses. I've replaced a keyboard and opened it up a few times, but it's kept working without any other damage. Pretty solid laptop... aptly named "Lazarus"... keeps coming back from the dead. I read that PC Mag laptop hell test, Dell used to win every time. I guess that kinda paid off for me.
I chose my laptop because reviews said it was more durable. I spent more money on it, but much less than I would have if I'd had to replace the laptop as many times as I've abused it. My investment was worth it. That's my story.
When I was reading the article, I couldn't help but think of a project I headed up for a little over a year. It was a small project (6 month) that an technologically ignorant sales person headed up the initial interaction design document. He spent time with the customer detailing the specifications as much as he knew how. But still the requirements were very vague, and I needed constant phone calls to finish the project.
What hit me was this: the client was not able to actually specify what they wanted. They would ask for a vague section of the project, then I'd ask detailed questions pertaining to the interaction and behavior. And they would give me direct and specific answers that were in direct contrast to what they wanted when they saw it. They would see what they had asked for, and realize then that it's not really what they wanted. In this case, there really was no way to find out what they wanted (*really* wanted, not just what they wanted this week) other than showing them a demo. If I could script a simple mock of every feature and demo it to them immediately after they requested it, it would have saved me a whole lot of time. As it was, the project looks nothing like the original specification (not just more detail, but fundamental changes to the behavior and requirements) and it's just a mess (and still not done, after more than a year).
Cooper (really badly paraphrased) places more emphasis on pre-coding work. But it seemed to me that there are situations where a client lacks the ability not just to communicate what they want, but to envision a system and even know what they need. If a customer is unable to sufficiently help you in pre-coding work, then it's on code and actual demo that will enable them to *realize* what they need, and give feedback.
It has a very good analogy to my parents building their house. They wanted an island in the kitchen that was a little oversized. After it was realized, they found that there wasn't enough room for cabinets in back of the island. They knew they wanted a bigger island, but did not know the implications of what they wanted and the end results. If they had a virtual tour, or even a few feet of plywood, they could have seen that they really didn't want that. They lacked the knowledge or experience to specify what they really wanted.
I believe with a company that's on top of it's own business process and that has a good handle on the behaviour they're trying to automate will work well with Cooper's methods. Having a detailed requirements document makes work so much easier. But with some customers, there is *no way* to have a perfect plan before code is layed. So having a little code layed out and getting feedback early is the next best thing. What do you guys think? (Esp what other experiences have you had with the two methods?)
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That process definitely would come to an "average", but how useful is that? One thing this does show you, is that even in memory that is "working" there could be a huge discrepancy in performance within the same product, ie. you never know what you're going to get. If Geil would go on record saying "Yes that's defective, and anyone who has a similar problem will be able to exchange their product hassle free" then it's all good; just go out and buy one, and if you get a "bad" one just exchange it till you get a good one.
But more likely this product is "working" and does not come with overclocking guarantees. So then buying one becomes a gamble. You may end up with a good one, you may end up with a bad one, and you wont know till you get it. Then add in the time it takes to purchase, restocking fees (You know it's bad, but technically it's functional), shipping (if you order over the internet), and the unknown factor of how many times you'll need to exchange it till you find a good one. Doesn't matter if their average is high, because that could mean they have a whole bunch of overperformers and underperformers. Much better and much more reliable would be precision, ie. achieving the same results over and over again.
Just think, one manufacturer could win this shootout by having the highest clocking memory. But what if that manufacturer has less precision, so about 10-20% of buyers would end up with bad memory like Tom's did. Then you have manufacturer #2 that scored lower "on average", but has higher precision so you're much more likely to get the same results that Tom does. Which one is the real winner? Hard to tell, honestly.
I actually wondered about this, since at the beginning of the article they portrayed him just how we'd expect; "I can do this, so I will. Users are stupid and deserve it. I make money, don't care about the consequences for others." Later it seems to change tones "I'm thinking of stopping, joining the army, going to college, getting out of this poor place and making something of myself."
It made me pause. Should I feel sorry for this guy? I'd just been imagining how hard it would be to track him down, turn his "bots" against him (what happened to "zombies"? Liked that better), or just post all his personal info on the net and see what it gets him. Should I now recant those feelings now that he's "thinking about quitting"? No. Regardless of whether he were to change his perspective now, or think about maybe possibly change it later, his actions have consequences. If he's caught, he should get those consequences.
In the end, he's done horrible things and should reap the rewards, whether its prison time or some kind of crazy no-tech probation (Mitnick style) plus having to uninstall every spyware he ever installed (how long does it take to do 10000 pc's by hand?) it would be counter productive to spare him this. I hope they do catch him, and every script kiddie like him, and that they are punished in one way or another. I'm not being vindictive (ok, not comletely vindictive). I believe it will help everyone for these people to be caught.
Support for my argument from the article; when this kid's not on the net for one day, all his friends call to see if he's busted by the feds. I'm guessing some of these kids are worried about their own operations. What kind of an impact would it make for one of their members to be taken down? What impact would it make on the next AOL chatter that receives a virus?
Half cocked indeed... I hope this kid gets caught. Speaking of which, doesn't *anyone* live near Roland?
I remember an incident while I was living in japan. Some kid was studying for the final high school tests (the ones that determine basically where you can go to college, and therefore what your place is in japanese life [simplified]) and he went a little crazy. Cut off the heads of his parents? Somebody, and put them in front of his school. Crazy stuff.
The pressure is incredible from the factors you described (which is a good summary from an outsider's point of view, I had the same ideas while there). It's funny, my friends' views of japan and japanese people are very different from mine. They think of japanese people as very polite, very happy/smiley. They do act that way a lot of the time. But underneath it I see something else.
I don't mean to say that japanese people are all fake. I just see the immense cultural pressures as affecting a lot of the population. It is a good guess at an explanation for things like the suicides and the general sexual perversion. Whether it's different from other cultures is always hard to say, but for me it does feel distinctly different. Almost orwellian/big brother-ish. But then, at that point I'm going off into a rant. Good post, parent.
Holy crap, I'm most impressed by that "Desktop Organization" video. How incredibly useful would it be to have that view? If I've got many windows open, my options are usually either to minimize what I've got (hopefully it's just below what I'm working on), or alt+tab until I find it (which means I have to go through a small icon list), or use the taskbar. Having that kind of "lay everything out on the table for a second" view would be incredible.
Really shows what happens when it's no longer "eye candy" but more usability. I can't wait to use these kinds of features on a daily basis, and also to see what other useful things they'll come up with.
The cube idea... neat, helps with spatial awareness. I'd rather have something less fancy, maybe a filmstrip (the never ending horizontal desktop... cut into frames). But still neat (and still not meaningless eye candy). Cool.
(Links at the bottom)
I've been using a cheap pair of Sony behind-the-ear's at work for a while. Easy to put on, decent sound (little muddy), cheap, and doesn't look like my other phones. At home it's Sennheiser HD497's, incredible sound (good alternative to Grado SR-60's I hear). The 497's are about 60-70, and they're open design so you can basic hear everything around you not muffled at all. Same with the sony behind-the-ears, you can still hear around you and you can simply pause the music to hear people.
I tried the Sennheiser PXC-250's, same physical design as the 100's but with active noise cancelling. Even with the noise canceling *off*, the phone physically blocked out a lot of noise (surprisingly). Good for music, bad for coworkers.
Personally, I'd got with behind the ear Koss porta pro's (KSC55's probably). They're slightly less intrusive than over-the-head phones, that series of koss's are supposed to be the best bargain phones (ie. under $30), and they're really easy to pull down to your neck when a coworker wants to talk. That's important, as at my 1 year review one of my feedback from coworkers was "he's always wearing his headphones". Programming for 8-10 hours straight in the only office in the building without a window of any kind? Heck yes. I'm still going to wear phones, but I have to be careful not to appear "unapproachable" to the higher-ups. Aww, screw it. I'm doing important work, they don't need to disturb me.
(I think it's outside the scope of the OP's requirements, but I can't say enough about the HD497's. Music sounds incredibly different listened with those compared to cheap phones, cars, computer speakers, etc. There's just a whole lot more there that you never realized. Love it, I want to listen to music all over again just in these phones.)
Sony MDR-G52LP's, $20, ok but not as good as the Koss (so I've heard). Little muddy.
Koss KSC55, ~$20, behind the ear, titanium diaphram, cheap and good
Grado SR-60's, ~$70, bigger over the head, "best under $100"-kine (open design, can hear everything)
Sennheiser HD497's, ~$70, more bigger over the head, "the other best under $100"-kine (open design, can hear everything)
*Don't pay attention to frequency response numbers, 20-20000hz. Means nothing. Go try some phones, goto the Apple store and plug your personal ipod into the bose triports and listen to something you know well. If you're not rushed, you might notice a big difference.
I've been trying to figure this one out, and I was waiting for the slashdot crowd to weigh in. The only thing I can figure is that this is a loss-leader (without the loss) kind of deal. Notice the "automatic updates", so the pack will morph over time. I'm sure new programs will be added, and more little google-bits will find their way in.
It is many things that most people probably should be using. They're all available free separately (minus NAV, but yuck), and the only thing this really gives you (besides the screensaver... where else is that??) is convenience.
So:
-users use google pack instead of downloading each one. it's convenient, it works.
-later, google adds more google apps and starts expanding the "pack" into a platform.
Seems to make sense...
You are right in that software does have real value. What makes this more complicated is what others have already mentioned; do we own this software? If someone owns a truck, and I pay them $100 for the right to use their truck, is that taxable property I own? Software companies have been attempting to redefine what exactly it is we're paying for, and that's cause a lot of strife. This seems to be a "have your cake and eat it too" situation.
If we only are borrowing a license, then we don't own anything, so it'd seem like a "property" tax wouldn't apply (excepting for the poster above with his leased-truck example). If we do own the software and can be taxed on it, it seems to break the arguments that software companies are only selling us "licenses".
It would seem at first glance that either we can't be taxed and this is an innappropriate bill, or we can be taxed and we therefore also have more rights to the software than we previously thought. I don't think anyone will argue the value of the software, but we'll still argue the taxable nature of it.
"An effective way to produce good graduates is to help the slackers flunk out early."
So true, yet from what I've seen that's very hard to do. Most students will do just enough to scrape by, so whereever the line is drawn you'll see them floating just above it. I see that universities have 2 approaches; either draw the bar very high and focus on a small amount of high quality/motivated students, or be less-exclusive and baby the kids some. Basically, from a college standpoint it seems like they've added something (internet), measured it, and found negative effects. Say, more internet = lower grades (completely untrue, no in the article, but useful for this argument). Are they going to say "we should weed out the bad ones by slowly and subtly lowering their grades and concentration." Ahh, very tricky of them. The college is already made that kind of decision. Either they're a high level school and are weeding kids out in real ways (hard classes) vs. subliminal ways (wifi, internet, free beer just outside the classrooms, free GTA3 for each student). Or they're a lower level school and they want to help kids help themselves.
So take away that wifi, eliminate those notebooks in the classroom, no talking in class! Help me, help you. Help me, help you... etc etc etc.
I agree with you. From a pragmatic point of view, AJAX is something that just works. Java can do many of the same things, but I always hated when websites use java in their pages. The load time is really annoying. I always sit there wondering what's chewing up my CPU cycles, then I see some cheesy javascript counter at the bottom of the page.
Google maps is such a great example. You go there, it works, and it's a great interface. It's not as nice as google earth, but I don't want a client/server map app. I don't want to go to a public computer, work computer, friend's computer (etc) and say "I wish I had that app on this computer". I just go to the web application, do what I need to, and close it.
With the huge focus on web applications, I believe this is just the start of a trend. We should be seeing some web application-specific API's popping up among browsers. Remember when mozilla was an application platform, not just an internet browser? That was the justification (IIRC) for XUL instead of native UI's; mozilla was going to be an app platform that everyone could utilize. Instead of XUL and mozilla specific, now we have AJAX that's cross platform.
Yes, we had IFRAMES. Yes, we had Java (and flash, for that matter). But instead of "this is no good, we could already do this", my thought is "Yeah! Almost all of the browsers AGREED on something that we actually need, and made things just a bit easier in a way that actually makes sense! A miracle!".
Plus, this should kill off old browsers in a way that XHTML/css never could. For that alone, thank you.
I guess it's the product of too many fictional movies. Or too many non-ficational admittances. But I believe the government knows (and does, and has) much more than we know about.
Maybe they do have solid proof of ESP. Maybe they did capture alien craft. Maybe there really is a football-sized computer cluster from the 70's monitoring all communications and red-flagging potential communists (in which case, we're all there).
Doesn't really matter. But I do believe some day I'll catch wind of something (even something small) they couldn't hide anymore. And it'll be neat. But it wont really be a surprise.
Indexing C++ files... if it's not unintentional (?), then I can imagine some Google employee thinking, "It's not mainstream, but it's so easy to do and the geeks will love it." But it also makes me wonder, how many google employees use this daily? I guess I wonder if this is a program to capture the masses, or something so germane that it's a no-brainer for everyone (techies included).
Imagine... a company that makes products that appeal equally to completely new computer-averse users, and old techies. That's quite some accomplishment.
Ironically, I looked up this article because my mom just asked me which button to press in firefox to install the GDS (since the buttons are different than the picture of IExplorer). I love it.
If I were a dietician and I didn't think a certain food was good for others, I probably would go on a crusade against it. My friend is a dietician and does exactly this (and I smile as I eat whatever she tells me not to).
I'm a computer engineer, and I spend time daydreaming about how computers could be better, and lamenting about the ways that they're not. Then I do a little work to try to bring them one step closer that goal (however I can).
If a company makes a bad program that's used by many people and does bad things (like annoying filetype appropriations, or tricky install/uninstall procedures) then it ticks me off. I will uninstall it, and that'll solve the problem for me. But I am not the only person defining my field, so it matters to me what is popular and being used. I like that Firefox is gaining popularity and may someday overtake Internet Explorer. I'll love it when medium to small business shun Exchange in favor of a better alternative. Not because I hate those companies, but because I believe the software field will be a better place when this happens; one step closer to better computing.
I could be apathetic, and that would make things easier for me. But I didn't get into computers because they were easy, or because I liked them exactly how they are. I got into it to change things.
My friends and I used to rent old movies in a search to find some truly horrible ones. Don't ask me why we did this. Some were bombs, others boring. I'd have to rate Evil Dead (the first one) as my #2 worst movie.
The worst I've seen is Dead Alive (or "Braindead"). A sumatran rat monkey bites a grandmother, and her geeky son decides... "Well, she's a zombie now. Better not let the neighbors find out". There is no explaining this movie or the extreme ridiculousness of it. It was filmed in New Zealand, and one of the most notable details is that the camera is *always* a little too close to the actors. It's like tilting your head sideways when something is tilted on screen, except you keep trying to back up.
But this is the incredible part... my friend eventually looked up the director. Guess who it is? It really is worth click on this link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103873/. I guess it wasn't a bad start for this director!
I agree that Helpdesk doesn't have much to do softare/network engineer. I also have to say that it's how I got my first programming lead position.
I started as helpdesk second year of college. I did this for about a year, meanwhile I was bored enough to start learning the technologies that they used (web applications) and starting dabbling with it. I would show my boss little things I'd done, just for personal satisfaction really. He started giving me a few minor tasks, and I was able to breeze through them at this point. That led me up to the point where the main programmer left, and I got moved up to programmer lead.
Granted, this was in a small company... that's the key. In a large (or well-managed) company, they would have hired a real programmer with experience. But I was able to do the job, I was already there (known), and I was cheaper than hiring another outside guy. I was underpaid, but I also am able to put some good things on my resume, so I'm leaving college with some nice points under "Experience" on my CV.
If you're still in college, I would recommend trying this. If you're out with a degree, start a bit further up the ladder. Helpdesk, for an aspiring software engineer, is not that fun.
It's useful for a lot of things. Too quickly we think that it not useful if it can't recognize individual faces. But I'm using it for research, hopefully ending up in a kiosk. If a kiosk knows if there's a person (doesn't matter who, specifically) in front of it, it can respond more intelligently. There are lots of applications for "there's a face here", and not just "john's face is here".
While neat, this idea seems counter productive. The point is to create a *brand* around a product, so that enterprise users can trust in both. If we didn't need a brand (ie. a name they trust), everyone would simply choose the best product and go. Which they're not doing yet.
... That having been said, who's for naming it Nemo? Anyone?
Linux is something even businesses know now. If you remove that from the name, you've just eliminated an asset. It's like the choice of debian. It's not just the technology, but also the fact that debian has a great reputation (I've never used it, and I already feel like a fan simply from what I've heard... someday I'll try it if I ever throw out Slackware). So while putting "Linux" in the name may be cliche nowadays, it also makes too much sense to change simply for personal taste.
While it would be really fun to give it a neat name (Like nemo, or Oliver, or Crush the OS), this product is being made to fulfill the needs of the enterprise. So throw linux in the title and give it a nice professional logo. And make it work.
I agree this is the current state of affairs. I also agreed in non-compete, non-disclosure, and signing my IP over to them when I started my job. So yes, I'm getting paid and in return they take my IP from me.
But is this the way it should work? I'd say (judging from what I've read, and the comments here) that it's pretty common. Is this the best thing for all parties involved? I'm not talking about a "Do they work that way now?" or even a "What can we change?" point of view. The first has been answered and the second is too complicated. But If we had to do it over again, is this what we would choose? If not, what are the alternatives?
I say "we" meaning from both the company's point of view and the employee. How do we balance the rights of the employee with the company's need to make money and survive? Is there a better balance than mandatory IP surrendering?
I've thought about this a lot, since I had the same kind of commute before. I didn't have the money at the time, but I've always been a fan of detachable in-line skates. There's a few manufacturers (and I do mean a few, they're rare). Hypno makes the best (italian designer, a few retailers in US)... they're last-year models and surplus are affordable, comparable to nice regular in-lines. There's another company, but I can't remember the name.
You skate to the train station, take a few seconds to detach the wheels (they mount on a rail), then walk. they're supposed to be comfortable for walking, look like normal shoes. (Well, what italians see as normal). Note, I've never used one so I don't know comfort/skate performance.
Big deciding factor for this is if you're opposed to excercise. I'd like this, but you really have to be ready to skate 6 miles.
Soln 2: Obtain gas-powered weed-whacker engine. Mount on collapsable scooter. Try to survive. I would *definately* try this. I've wanted to for years... cheap, fast, small, powerful, deadly. It's like the best entertainment you've ever almost been killed by.
I definately use javascript, never the same scheme twice. I'd suggest scrambling the emails into randomly sized segments (you can do this once per email, copy the contents into a DB or the actual page) for JS to put back together.
Does anyone see a vulnerability with this? I know anything can be hacked, given enough time, but I really don't see how a spammer would get around the simple javascript thing (besides executing all scripts on all pages). Any Ideas how it could be abused?
I would recommend Half-Life as a good title... it changed ways I looked at games when I first played it.
GTA3 is another good title. Both of these weren't completely different from anything that came before, but they managed to balance certain aspects of their gameplay that were never quite balanced before. Definately recommended.
Tried out bittorrent for the first time... I'm impressed. 200-300k DL on a cable that usually gets 112. Gotta start using this more often...
I have to agree... out of all the editors I've used, textpad is the best one. It does have a lot of nifty little features (like automatic DOS/UNIX CRLF handling), but I'd say the best part was just the text editing itself. Every action just seems to make sense, and it really does help out a lot. I'd try it out. This is the only commercial program I've considered buying a license for, it's that good.
When I was looking for a wm, I tried IceWM since they claim "Optional use of mouse." Everything is supposed to be accessable by the keyboard. The keybindings are similar to a lot of windows keybindings, if you've learned any of those, but also they have other keys to use, and it seems pretty comprehensive. It also seems to be a decent WM all around, so give it a try.
I own a Dell Inspiron 3200. It's a bit old now... P2-233, came with 64mb/3gig. But it was a good laptop, and worked well. It was sitting innocently enough by a window one day when it decided to rain while I was out. The water poured out of the case when it was tipped sideways... had to let that dry out for a while. But 3 months of drying later, and a new keyboard, it worked great. I've dropped it from 2 to 3 feet a bunch of times, on corners and sides, tops and bottoms. Never even had a bad sector or plastic crack. It was in the back of a minivan once, on top of a bunch of luggage in a backpack with 10-20lbs of books and it fell out when the door was opened... 6 ft fall onto asphalt, with a load of books on top to boot.
I've used my laptop as a doorstop, rain gauge (see above), hammer (had to hammer a contact on a car battery), and a bunch of other un-intended uses. I've replaced a keyboard and opened it up a few times, but it's kept working without any other damage. Pretty solid laptop... aptly named "Lazarus"... keeps coming back from the dead. I read that PC Mag laptop hell test, Dell used to win every time. I guess that kinda paid off for me.
I chose my laptop because reviews said it was more durable. I spent more money on it, but much less than I would have if I'd had to replace the laptop as many times as I've abused it. My investment was worth it. That's my story.
When I was reading the article, I couldn't help but think of a project I headed up for a little over a year. It was a small project (6 month) that an technologically ignorant sales person headed up the initial interaction design document. He spent time with the customer detailing the specifications as much as he knew how. But still the requirements were very vague, and I needed constant phone calls to finish the project.
What hit me was this: the client was not able to actually specify what they wanted. They would ask for a vague section of the project, then I'd ask detailed questions pertaining to the interaction and behavior. And they would give me direct and specific answers that were in direct contrast to what they wanted when they saw it. They would see what they had asked for, and realize then that it's not really what they wanted. In this case, there really was no way to find out what they wanted (*really* wanted, not just what they wanted this week) other than showing them a demo. If I could script a simple mock of every feature and demo it to them immediately after they requested it, it would have saved me a whole lot of time. As it was, the project looks nothing like the original specification (not just more detail, but fundamental changes to the behavior and requirements) and it's just a mess (and still not done, after more than a year).
Cooper (really badly paraphrased) places more emphasis on pre-coding work. But it seemed to me that there are situations where a client lacks the ability not just to communicate what they want, but to envision a system and even know what they need. If a customer is unable to sufficiently help you in pre-coding work, then it's on code and actual demo that will enable them to *realize* what they need, and give feedback.
It has a very good analogy to my parents building their house. They wanted an island in the kitchen that was a little oversized. After it was realized, they found that there wasn't enough room for cabinets in back of the island. They knew they wanted a bigger island, but did not know the implications of what they wanted and the end results. If they had a virtual tour, or even a few feet of plywood, they could have seen that they really didn't want that. They lacked the knowledge or experience to specify what they really wanted.
I believe with a company that's on top of it's own business process and that has a good handle on the behaviour they're trying to automate will work well with Cooper's methods. Having a detailed requirements document makes work so much easier. But with some customers, there is *no way* to have a perfect plan before code is layed. So having a little code layed out and getting feedback early is the next best thing. What do you guys think? (Esp what other experiences have you had with the two methods?)