Dang, I thought maybe they had produced a dual-processor board that would support an Intel and and AMD processor at the same time. THAT would be impressive.
89% sounds like a very good success ratio for the date and time test. However, RTFA and you'll see that only eleven people participated, most of them female.
And we all know that programmers have no frickin idea how to satisfy a woman.
I have been using GIMP for a long time but when I switched to PhotoShop I suddenly got a lot better at doing graphics. It isn't any one feature that I can point to the Photoshop has or does better then the GIMP it is just the interface in photoshop is somehow easer.
I have never used Photoshop. I have used the GIMP for a long time, and I like it. It has improved greatly from the early days. But I am not a graphics person either. I know some who are, and who have tried GIMP, but they swear by Photoshop. I have to believe them, it seems to be the consensus. And honestly, it probably will always be like that. Look at what Photoshop is - THE standard. It became the standard by being the best. It costs a lot, yet people STILL swear by it. They are very focused on making their product better and better, and they have the money and resources to do that. Good for them. Speaking of money and resources, I can't justify spending the money on Photoshop. I don't need Photoshop. Heck, I used to manipulate images with Xpaint! Now that took skill.:)
But really, GIMP serves a great purpose. It is a very powerful program that is free. I do find some things frustrating with it, but there are very few programs that don't have that "feature".:) (I think the only exception is Irfanview) For power Photoshop users, GIMP might not be the solution, just as OpenOffice.org doesn't have some of the advanced features that 10% of the people need and use. But the GIMP rocks, and I don't have to break the law or sell a kidney to get a good image manipulation program.
Did everyone miss the fact that this is one of their concerns: "...violation and could take revenue away from paid download music services."
We now have the RIAA defending and fight for music download services? Funny how the worm turns, it only took them about 10 years to recognize music downloads as "valid".
Imagine if Judge Jackson's original ruling had stood. It said that MS had to be split into two wholly independent companies: one for the OS, and another for all applications. We would quite possibly have MSOffice (and all sorts of other apps) for Linux today, because the apps division would only care about selling their apps as widely as possible.
it's OpenOffice.org (which is incredibly stupid-sounding and I wish they'd figure out a way to fix that)
You mean like dropping the ".org"? I call it Open Office. I know it officially has the.org on the end, but it's stupid to say it. Yet another bad name for open source software.
So will FFWD and RWD still work on these? Obviously, a special player will be needed. Yawn. (sorry if all the BS is covered in the article, I can't get to it). All this means is that people who copy movies will be paying less for the priviledge.
An OS that's based on Linux, yet with the UI and ease-of-use similar to OSX.
Why? How about a UI with the ease-of-use of... Google? In every offering from Google that I have used, I have found the UI to be very good. I don't get OSX. I don't think it is easy to use. I tried it, I don't like it. It just doesn't work for me.
Google seems to have the right UI people in place. That can only help them.
For an established artist, there are 2 possibilities. The first is that they have their own label. If this is the case, they will still use one of the major labels for distribution, and they have to pay all those little people that made things happen, but they're pocketing more cash. The second possibility is that the record company convinced them to stay by offering a MUCH better contract, which ends up being about as much as having their own label minus the hassle.
Ahh. But you are missing the 3rd and 4th options.
3. The record company decides the artist is no longer desirable, and releases the album quietly and on a budget, thus ensuring that it will die. They control what gets played on the radio, so nobody will hear it.
4. The record company decides the artist is no longer desirable, and refuses to release the album. See the most recent Fiona Apple incident. Unless the fans rise up, protest, and beg, the album will never see the light of day.
Here is how it works: find an artist with a somewhat established base of fans or someone who can make a couple of radio-friendly songs. A sure thing. Sign them to a 2 record deal. Market the bejeezus out of them. Make sure everyone knows their name and their hit. Play it 24/7 on the radio. Sell a million copies. Stick their face and name all over sheep-ville: MTV, E!, People, etc. etc. Hype the crap out of their 2nd album, don't put much into it. It will probably sell well. Then drop the artist. Move on to next flavor of the month.
Oh, this is great. Now we are going to get all the noob devleopers who have the attention span and reading comprehension of a 6 year old parroting "We don't need specs. Linus said so on Slashdot."
Having been in software development for 12 years now, I thought "he is crazy". But no, once again his comments are taken out of context. Let me summarize, for those 6 year olds: if you are a kernel developer, don't blindly follow a spec. Linus does not speak for all of software devlopment, nor all software projects. If you take his word as gospel you are a fool. I see two real problems in the industry:
1. People want to call themselves sofware "engineers" yet they don't have any inkling of what engineering is. They are programmers. Engineers don't scoff at specs and hack stuff together at the last minute. And I don't think every piece of software needs to be engineered, in fact most probably don't. But don't call yourself an engineer if what you do rejects everything engineering is about.
2. If you have seen a well written spec, you would know that they are invaluable. The problem is that you have the wrong people writing specs, or that you don't give the right people the time to write them. Get the crap out the door as fast as you can. If it is broken, we'll fix it later. Someone new on the project? Sit with them for 10 minutes and explain EVERYTHING to them. Then throw them into the fire.
And for the record, I barely remember the last time I saw a decently written spec. I'll bet it was about 8 years and 3 companies ago.
Or, as in the infamous McDonalds hot coffee case to which you are perhaps alluding, the company may have known about the problem for years and refused to do anything about it.
Well, I was alluding to that, just because it is so well known. But I didn't want to use it as an example for that reason. But in general, lawsuits have dehumanized us.
Hacking (or any programming) is neither art or science. It's applied engineering. And applied engineering is what it is.
Nope. Programming is definitely NOT engineering. Not even necessarily software engineering. Some programming is part of software engineering, but not even close to all of it.
How can people claim any ownership to the title "engineering" when they refuse to follow any kind of process. Refuse to plan. Refuse to design. Refuse to analyze. Refuse to manage anything. Refuse to follow standards. Refuse to be rigorous in their duties.
People love to throw around the title "software engineer" when they mean "programmer". Don't get me wrong, not every piece of software needs to be engineered. Not even close. But most programmers in my 12 years of experience aren't engineers, period. But most of them wanted to be called "software engineers".
Hacking may have some engineering elements and even some artistic elements. But most of it is brute force application of technique.
On a more serious note, this is more expansion of the culture of victimization and the lack of responsibility that is taking over the Western world. Nothing is ever our fault, we muyst always find someone else to hold responsible for problems that we should be tough enough and capable enough to not get into or to solve ourselves.
Fear and greed, and a lack of compassion. That is what causes these things.
Let's say theoretically, someone goes to a restaurant, orders a cup of coffee, and the lid isn't put on properly. The person spills hot coffee all over themselves.
Which is more likely to happen:
the restaurant apologizes, helps the person clean up, and gives them their meal for free OR
the restaurant denies any liability, and immediately asks the person to sign a form saying they aren't responsible. They refuse to even apologize, for fear it will indicate they are at fault. This angers the person, so they seek revenge. Lawyers get involved. The media gets involved. It turns into a ridiculous circus.
Companies are afraid to be sued, because people are greedy. Companies won't admit ANYTHING for fear it will demonstrate some sort of fault. People are greedy, and know they can sue pretty much anyone they want. There will always be a scumbag lawyer or two to help mix things up, because they always seem to win in situations like this.
Thoreau said, "A man is only as rich as the number of things he can let alone." Who cares how much money you make if you're so swamped you can't enjoy it? I am considering a career change for this very reason. Life's too flipping short.
Yeah, well, I know rich people who are burned out, and normal people who are burned out. The rich people at least get to enjoy something. It really really sucks to be burned out AND not have money. And nothing quite kicks a job you love in the nuts more than not being able to live while doing it. My wife studied what she loves: French and linguistics. She taught for several years, but that job had more downs than ups. She had to quit (what she loved) to keep her sanity.
But, funny thing. The rich people I know seem to enjoy $400 shirts and bragging about... spending money. I know one guy who is rich. I mean RICH. He has to buy things, that is all he knows how to do. $350k for a car? People oooh and ahhhh over it - then they get on with their lives. He has a trophy wife, but is always out at the strip clubs. He is successful - more successful than I will probably ever be in my entire life. He has spent more on 1 car than I have earned in my entire career of 12 years. And he is younger than me. He has things I will never have. But this morning, before I left home, I peeked in on my daughter sleeping in her crib. I stood there just watching her for a few minutes. He can keep his fucking car.
I found out recently that it's legal in my country (Netherlands) to download music and movies . As long as i'm not uploading anything, i'm perfectly safe. This doesn't go for software though. Downloading that is still illegal.
How do you get your Linux distro? Or freeware? Or are you referring to copyrighted software, without the expressed written consent of the copyright holder?
I know what you meant, but I think it is VERY important to be exact on these things. Is it illegal to download software from the internet? It is illegal to download music? If your initial reaction is "yes", then you are buying into the proprietary group-think. ALWAYS qualify your statements. It will maybe open someone else's eyes and mind.
I *still* contend that there is some kind of "logic" that audo-moderates posts with certain keywords in it. Come on, my post was OBVIOUSLY a joke. I even put the wink at the end. There have been several other posts I have made in the past that were *immediately* moderated -1 flamebait, then later moderated up as funny or informative. If I had the time to post test messages with various keywords I would. Just curious - has anyone else experienced this?
Pudge for writing the code to convert... 60k stories
To be more efficient, you could have filtered for uniqueness. Then you would have only had to filter about 50k stories. But I guess if you knew how to filter for unique stories, you wouldn't work at Slashdot.;)
I've had a problem with Firefox lately (starting around build 1.04, which may just be coincidental with a new malevolent popup technique being invented) on both my Windows and OSX boxes. Specifically, there are certain ads that cause Firefox to crash hard, and they aren't just bad ads from porn sites. I've occasionally gotten them on Blues News and NY Times for example...... If this isn't resolved soon, I just might have to give AdBlock another shot. I'm trying to be a good netizen, but when you're ads kill my browser, you leave me with little choice!
I noticed some of these too. Quite annoying. Instead of using Adblock or something similar, first try downloading a good hosts file for blocking ads. Info and links
But laziness can sure lead to dumbness. People rely on their cellphones for everything, therefore, they don't think about and plan things out ahead of time. I have seen this time and time again - normally with just annoying results. I have friends who refuse to plan to meet at a particular place or time. I always get the "I'll call you". Then when something goes wrong (someone's phone dies, they forget it, etc) it is a total clusterF.
It leads to that instant gratification mentality. Like the old internet story about the woman who called a towtruck because she was locked out of her car. The towtruck driver gets there, and she explains how her thingy quit working and she couldn't get into her car. Her thingy was the keyless entry. So the towtruck driver took the key, unlocked the door, and drove off.
I mean, it is wireless. You have to go chasing it after throwing it across the room in anger. At least with wired controllers, your range is limited.:)
I don't know how many 2600 controllers I went through. Of course, they were crappily made, and those damn plastic tabs that pushed the L, R, U and D controls would always break. I actually took one apart and used it like a gamepad once. It wasn't set up to be used like that though, so it was really tough.
Users keep their passwords on post-it notes stuck to their monitors.
I don't have them stuck to my monitor, but I do have passwords on post-its. At least for a shotr time. When I create (or receive) a new password that doesn't follow my story-rule* in my head, then I write it down. I remember it better that way. But I write it down amongst other words/doodles/passwordy words/etc so it doesn't stand out as a password. Once I remember it, it goes into my txt file of other passwords, stored in a password protected zip file, and the paper is destroyed. That zip password is never written down, and one I'll always remember. (see story-rule*) Of course, the file is named something like meeting_minutes.zip or notes.zip or something boring looking.
* My story-rule is something I came up with to create passwords. You build a story around something, and your password comes out of that. It morphs from there, to where even knowing the original story won't get you the password. Hypothetical example: I read Slashdot. Slashdot has this thing called karma. I always liked the phrase "my karma ran over your dogma". Make password karmaoverdogma. Too plain. Rule: remove all vowels, except a. password is karmavrdgma. Now capitalize the first and last letters. Password is KarmavrdgmA. Once I get the story down, it is easy to recreate the password. Really all I have to remember is "karma over dogma", and the rules.
Now, next time I have to change my password, I can either change a rule (capitalize the 2nd letter from the front and back - kArmavrdgMa) or I can institute a new rule - stick a double digit at the end. KarmavrdgmA11. Next time, I could change it to 22, then 33, etc.
Part of the power in this is the reminders. In the password file I mentioned that I have, I don't actually put the passwords. I put keys to the story. So this one might be "My karma ran over your dogma, a, cap, 11". I like these kinds of methods because they would be hard to crack, and I can remind myself without giving away too much info. I could write down my reminders and it would be virtually meaningless to anyone but me.
I still remember a password that an intern set up back in '94. It was "CIrpotb,". The first letter to the words in the Pearl Jam song Jeremey "Clearly I remember picking on the boy," (with the comma at the end.
I understand that Microsoft wants to keep the files that Office creates in a closed format. But, in order to prevent this sort of thing from happening, why not offer an open format as an option in the "Save As" dialog box?
For the same reason they didn't offer open formats in the first place.
How do they prevent it from happening? Strongarm or shady business practices. Just like always.
Slashdot Mirror
Dang, I thought maybe they had produced a dual-processor board that would support an Intel and and AMD processor at the same time. THAT would be impressive.
And we all know that programmers have no frickin idea how to satisfy a woman.
like shooting karma-fish in a slash-barrel. :)
I have never used Photoshop. I have used the GIMP for a long time, and I like it. It has improved greatly from the early days. But I am not a graphics person either. I know some who are, and who have tried GIMP, but they swear by Photoshop. I have to believe them, it seems to be the consensus. And honestly, it probably will always be like that. Look at what Photoshop is - THE standard. It became the standard by being the best. It costs a lot, yet people STILL swear by it. They are very focused on making their product better and better, and they have the money and resources to do that. Good for them. Speaking of money and resources, I can't justify spending the money on Photoshop. I don't need Photoshop. Heck, I used to manipulate images with Xpaint! Now that took skill. :)
But really, GIMP serves a great purpose. It is a very powerful program that is free. I do find some things frustrating with it, but there are very few programs that don't have that "feature". :) (I think the only exception is Irfanview) For power Photoshop users, GIMP might not be the solution, just as OpenOffice.org doesn't have some of the advanced features that 10% of the people need and use. But the GIMP rocks, and I don't have to break the law or sell a kidney to get a good image manipulation program.
We now have the RIAA defending and fight for music download services? Funny how the worm turns, it only took them about 10 years to recognize music downloads as "valid".
Can you forget something which you have never known?
Riiiiiiiiiiiight.
You mean like dropping the ".org"? I call it Open Office. I know it officially has the .org on the end, but it's stupid to say it. Yet another bad name for open source software.
woo hoo?
Why? How about a UI with the ease-of-use of... Google? In every offering from Google that I have used, I have found the UI to be very good. I don't get OSX. I don't think it is easy to use. I tried it, I don't like it. It just doesn't work for me.
Google seems to have the right UI people in place. That can only help them.
Ahh. But you are missing the 3rd and 4th options.
3. The record company decides the artist is no longer desirable, and releases the album quietly and on a budget, thus ensuring that it will die. They control what gets played on the radio, so nobody will hear it.
4. The record company decides the artist is no longer desirable, and refuses to release the album. See the most recent Fiona Apple incident. Unless the fans rise up, protest, and beg, the album will never see the light of day.
Here is how it works: find an artist with a somewhat established base of fans or someone who can make a couple of radio-friendly songs. A sure thing. Sign them to a 2 record deal. Market the bejeezus out of them. Make sure everyone knows their name and their hit. Play it 24/7 on the radio. Sell a million copies. Stick their face and name all over sheep-ville: MTV, E!, People, etc. etc. Hype the crap out of their 2nd album, don't put much into it. It will probably sell well. Then drop the artist. Move on to next flavor of the month.
Having been in software development for 12 years now, I thought "he is crazy". But no, once again his comments are taken out of context. Let me summarize, for those 6 year olds: if you are a kernel developer, don't blindly follow a spec. Linus does not speak for all of software devlopment, nor all software projects. If you take his word as gospel you are a fool. I see two real problems in the industry:
1. People want to call themselves sofware "engineers" yet they don't have any inkling of what engineering is. They are programmers. Engineers don't scoff at specs and hack stuff together at the last minute. And I don't think every piece of software needs to be engineered, in fact most probably don't. But don't call yourself an engineer if what you do rejects everything engineering is about.
2. If you have seen a well written spec, you would know that they are invaluable. The problem is that you have the wrong people writing specs, or that you don't give the right people the time to write them. Get the crap out the door as fast as you can. If it is broken, we'll fix it later. Someone new on the project? Sit with them for 10 minutes and explain EVERYTHING to them. Then throw them into the fire.
And for the record, I barely remember the last time I saw a decently written spec. I'll bet it was about 8 years and 3 companies ago.
Well, I was alluding to that, just because it is so well known. But I didn't want to use it as an example for that reason. But in general, lawsuits have dehumanized us.
Nope. Programming is definitely NOT engineering. Not even necessarily software engineering. Some programming is part of software engineering, but not even close to all of it.
How can people claim any ownership to the title "engineering" when they refuse to follow any kind of process. Refuse to plan. Refuse to design. Refuse to analyze. Refuse to manage anything. Refuse to follow standards. Refuse to be rigorous in their duties.
People love to throw around the title "software engineer" when they mean "programmer". Don't get me wrong, not every piece of software needs to be engineered. Not even close. But most programmers in my 12 years of experience aren't engineers, period. But most of them wanted to be called "software engineers".
Hacking may have some engineering elements and even some artistic elements. But most of it is brute force application of technique.
Fear and greed, and a lack of compassion. That is what causes these things.
Let's say theoretically, someone goes to a restaurant, orders a cup of coffee, and the lid isn't put on properly. The person spills hot coffee all over themselves.
Which is more likely to happen:
the restaurant apologizes, helps the person clean up, and gives them their meal for free
OR
the restaurant denies any liability, and immediately asks the person to sign a form saying they aren't responsible. They refuse to even apologize, for fear it will indicate they are at fault. This angers the person, so they seek revenge. Lawyers get involved. The media gets involved. It turns into a ridiculous circus.
Companies are afraid to be sued, because people are greedy. Companies won't admit ANYTHING for fear it will demonstrate some sort of fault. People are greedy, and know they can sue pretty much anyone they want. There will always be a scumbag lawyer or two to help mix things up, because they always seem to win in situations like this.
Yeah, well, I know rich people who are burned out, and normal people who are burned out. The rich people at least get to enjoy something. It really really sucks to be burned out AND not have money. And nothing quite kicks a job you love in the nuts more than not being able to live while doing it. My wife studied what she loves: French and linguistics. She taught for several years, but that job had more downs than ups. She had to quit (what she loved) to keep her sanity.
But, funny thing. The rich people I know seem to enjoy $400 shirts and bragging about ... spending money. I know one guy who is rich. I mean RICH. He has to buy things, that is all he knows how to do. $350k for a car? People oooh and ahhhh over it - then they get on with their lives. He has a trophy wife, but is always out at the strip clubs. He is successful - more successful than I will probably ever be in my entire life. He has spent more on 1 car than I have earned in my entire career of 12 years. And he is younger than me. He has things I will never have. But this morning, before I left home, I peeked in on my daughter sleeping in her crib. I stood there just watching her for a few minutes. He can keep his fucking car.
How do you get your Linux distro? Or freeware? Or are you referring to copyrighted software, without the expressed written consent of the copyright holder?
I know what you meant, but I think it is VERY important to be exact on these things. Is it illegal to download software from the internet? It is illegal to download music? If your initial reaction is "yes", then you are buying into the proprietary group-think. ALWAYS qualify your statements. It will maybe open someone else's eyes and mind.
It is also only a matter of time before content providers start suing and/or sending people to jail under the DMCA for doing this.
I *still* contend that there is some kind of "logic" that audo-moderates posts with certain keywords in it. Come on, my post was OBVIOUSLY a joke. I even put the wink at the end. There have been several other posts I have made in the past that were *immediately* moderated -1 flamebait, then later moderated up as funny or informative. If I had the time to post test messages with various keywords I would. Just curious - has anyone else experienced this?
To be more efficient, you could have filtered for uniqueness. Then you would have only had to filter about 50k stories. But I guess if you knew how to filter for unique stories, you wouldn't work at Slashdot. ;)
I noticed some of these too. Quite annoying. Instead of using Adblock or something similar, first try downloading a good hosts file for blocking ads. Info and links
But laziness can sure lead to dumbness. People rely on their cellphones for everything, therefore, they don't think about and plan things out ahead of time. I have seen this time and time again - normally with just annoying results. I have friends who refuse to plan to meet at a particular place or time. I always get the "I'll call you". Then when something goes wrong (someone's phone dies, they forget it, etc) it is a total clusterF.
It leads to that instant gratification mentality. Like the old internet story about the woman who called a towtruck because she was locked out of her car. The towtruck driver gets there, and she explains how her thingy quit working and she couldn't get into her car. Her thingy was the keyless entry. So the towtruck driver took the key, unlocked the door, and drove off.
Urban legend, but it is where we are headed.
I don't know how many 2600 controllers I went through. Of course, they were crappily made, and those damn plastic tabs that pushed the L, R, U and D controls would always break. I actually took one apart and used it like a gamepad once. It wasn't set up to be used like that though, so it was really tough.
(tinfoilhat)
More frequent updates, so that they can slowly lay the groundwork for mandatory upgrades to Vista?
(/tinfoilhat)
I don't have them stuck to my monitor, but I do have passwords on post-its. At least for a shotr time. When I create (or receive) a new password that doesn't follow my story-rule* in my head, then I write it down. I remember it better that way. But I write it down amongst other words/doodles/passwordy words/etc so it doesn't stand out as a password. Once I remember it, it goes into my txt file of other passwords, stored in a password protected zip file, and the paper is destroyed. That zip password is never written down, and one I'll always remember. (see story-rule*) Of course, the file is named something like meeting_minutes.zip or notes.zip or something boring looking.
* My story-rule is something I came up with to create passwords. You build a story around something, and your password comes out of that. It morphs from there, to where even knowing the original story won't get you the password. Hypothetical example: I read Slashdot. Slashdot has this thing called karma. I always liked the phrase "my karma ran over your dogma". Make password karmaoverdogma. Too plain. Rule: remove all vowels, except a. password is karmavrdgma. Now capitalize the first and last letters. Password is KarmavrdgmA. Once I get the story down, it is easy to recreate the password. Really all I have to remember is "karma over dogma", and the rules.
Now, next time I have to change my password, I can either change a rule (capitalize the 2nd letter from the front and back - kArmavrdgMa) or I can institute a new rule - stick a double digit at the end. KarmavrdgmA11. Next time, I could change it to 22, then 33, etc.
Part of the power in this is the reminders. In the password file I mentioned that I have, I don't actually put the passwords. I put keys to the story. So this one might be "My karma ran over your dogma, a, cap, 11". I like these kinds of methods because they would be hard to crack, and I can remind myself without giving away too much info. I could write down my reminders and it would be virtually meaningless to anyone but me.
I still remember a password that an intern set up back in '94. It was "CIrpotb,". The first letter to the words in the Pearl Jam song Jeremey "Clearly I remember picking on the boy," (with the comma at the end.
For the same reason they didn't offer open formats in the first place.
How do they prevent it from happening? Strongarm or shady business practices. Just like always.