So why is it that citizens can't stalk one another while we pay governments to stalk every single one of us?
"Driving is a privilege" is no more sensible than "walking around outside is a privilege." How about "appearing in a public place without having every minute detail of your appearance and habits scanned and logged forever along with the same information about everyone else in a location and medium unknown and inaccessible to you... is a privilege."
[...] Had it been built on a solid MVC platform, the project should have taken a couple of days. Having to re-write much of the system to generate different HTML isn't exactly a design I'd brag about. [...]
Good Christ Almighty. Here I sit debugging a Swing P.O.S. and now you've made me remember Struts. MVC doesn't have a thing to do with modularity or flexibility. It's a design decision, and one that is almost invariably insane in web applications.
It's people like you that think that methodologies or models can substitute for talent and intelligence.
9. Road Kill
A woman placed her
laptop on top of her car while she got in. She forgot about the laptop, which slid off the back of her car, and she then reversed straight over it and reported hearing a 'crunch'.
I left a (company owned) T40 on top of my car when driving hurriedly to meet a friend - Tasman Dr / 237 / to Milpitas. 7-10 miles maybe. I took the right turn from N 1st onto the 237 ramp at a pretty good clip.
I got where I was going, got out of my car, and there was the laptop sitting on the right side of the rooftop exactly where I had left it.
I guess the rubber footies were still pretty clean and sticky. Eh? Thank God I didn't make any hard left turns.
I certainly could have used it to help heat my cabin (in Fairbanks) this winter, except for the power bill.
That laptop went on a coworker's 700 mile dogsled/snowmobile trip, by the way. Me, my X40 gets gentler treatment. Oh, and the laptop's drive was mostly dead afterward.
I loved my Casio FIVA, which would run 6-8 hr on a Li battery (till the battery pushed up the daisies), and weighed 3 lbs with battery... It was "fast enough" because my concern was with size and weight.
I have an X40 now and I still get good run time from it, more like 4-6 hr. It's around 4 lb w/o the dock, but right now I almost always carry the dock with the multiburner in it.
Still, I wish there were much more emphasis on low-power laptop designs.
The other day I was fiddling with a laptop that had dual 2GHz processors or something like that. Ehh? I mean, it's great that they can cram all that into a "moderately" small package, but still, you need Nomex pants to use it in your lap.
My cabin doesn't have *any* kind of high-speed internet, despite being on a hill loaded with $250,000 houses (expensive for Fairbanks). Obviously the private sector has completely failed me and other folks on the DSL wait list.
If municipalities want to become involved in supplying and/or mandating local internet service, fine by me. It's one step down from water and power in importance nowadays.
This government activity more than bypasses my "libertarian" filter.
By making it temporarily inconvenient for Joe Listener to burn CDs, this scheme will create an incentive for *more* piracy.
People don't want CDs any more. They want some convenient/useful format. And few people will want to go to the trouble to digitally capture the audio at 1x and segment it based upon someone's track times. Then, I suppose, someone will develop a player that "plays" over USB2 or something.
So, to hell with it - we'll just get a copy from someone who bothered.
I hate paying $15 for CDs that have two or three catchy tracks on them, so normally I buy used CDs. That is a bummer for the artists, but I can't own 800 ripped CDs any other way.
It is well known that most successful open source development is not motivated by money, and conversely, throwing money and developers at a project leads to... Mozilla. Even if ESR was the first to say it, open source development is driven by ego and social standing. Having a good-paying day job doesn't make your development cool, and cool is the currency in question. How many successful developers are out there who can't even afford a new computer on their own?
Lots.
Free software *is* free because people do it for free.
I have every email that I've ever received since 1992, with some exceptions for work accounts, and if I'd just thrown them out on the "if it's more than a year old..." principle, I'd have missed one of the best email romances any geek has ever had.
As someone else mentioned, use DGSI's gold MAM-A. They are clearly labeled on the spindle.
I suspect CD readers will be available for a loooooong time, because so much content is archived on them. It is likely that the 5-1/4" standard will last for at least 10s of years and everything will be backward compatible.
It would be nice if some DVD manufacturer would take it upon itself to describe its media's archival characteristics - then I think most companies would jump on the bandwagon.
No, there are many circumstances in which a publisher will allow an author exclusive control over some or all of his/her electronic rights, even if that is not the standard policy of the publisher. Some publishers won't; some will. It also depends whether the author's wishes conflict with the needs of the market. In nonfiction, I think you will find particular latitude among academic and professional publishers, the more reputable ones anyway.
I don't know where you get the phrase "corporate publisher landshark" from, but it damn sure doesn't apply to all publishers. By and large, publishing is a collegial business. The distribution system is fouled up, but that screws the publishers (not just the authors).
Actually I am planning to put the entirety of my Perl slides as well as Effective Perl Programming online, as time permits. I don't think this will negatively affect sales. Frankly (this probably sounds immodest, but so be it) the customers I am looking for will need the paper version so they can wear it out.
Authors in the reference and cookbook business are SOL anyway, because the internet will inevitably shrivel that market down to the size of the completely internet illiterate. It's a funny thing, though. Even my 60-something year old mom can send email and surf the web now.
As far as permission in my contract goes... I suspect that my contract with A-W (now AWL or Pearson, depending which rung of the ladder you look at) gives them sufficient electronic rights to enable Amazon to create a searchable text, but I don't know whether it does or doesn't. I do know that Amazon has sold many, many copies of my book, and with luck this will help sell more. It doesn't seem to me that it could hurt.
One thing that many/.-ers may not be aware of is that some publishers (by no means *all*) will give authors considerable flexibility in their contract terms. Some things are typically non-negotiable, like international translations and royalties (it's just too complicated anyway), but many other aspects, including various types of exclusivity, can be adjusted to suit both parties.
Many authors are fearful that the value in their books is in the information and not in its physical presentation. In my experience, that is not yet the case. I would never, for example, use a computerized version of Joy of Cooking (and besides, it would have the sucky "new" recipes in it, nevermind requiring me to have a splashproof computer near the stove). There are some horrible books that people do consider disposable - Java "references" that are out of date when they hit the shelves, for example - but other more carefully written programming texts are not much fun to read on a glowing computer screen. Nor do they look good on a bookshelf.;-)
Please, if you're actually using a pay service and a pay music appliance, please use a real non-sucking service like GraceNote. Don't suffer through FreeDB. I think what happened to CDDB was terrible, but on the other hand, I have about 2000 spelling errors to correct in the titles of the 700 or so CDs I have ripped at home so far, and nevermind that no one can agree what a performer's name is. It isn't worth it. Ugh.
Why is it every methodology is wrong, er, right?
on
Software Fashion
·
· Score: 1
Flowcharts, structured, waterfall, object-oriented (object-oriented programming, object-oriented design, object-oriented analysis), SEI levels, requirements-driven, use cases, design patterns, extreme, aspect-oriented....
Me, I am still waiting for a compiler that gives good error messages, and shared objects that work.
It's an excellent, reliable, well-supported, well-documented format.
Currently I am ripping CDs with this somewhat involved process: cdr2dao giving me a.cdr/.toc, then sox to convert.cdr to.wav, then flac on that. My CDs compress to about 250MB (they are not all 70 minute epics) on average so I can archive gobs of them in a spare hundred or two GB (10+ on a DVD-R), but I can still recover the exact original. Meanwhile I can make 192kbps oggs for playback.
Go FLAC! The good (lossless) format seems to have won out!
Slashdot Mirror
!!!!!!!!111!!!!!one
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"Driving is a privilege" is no more sensible than "walking around outside is a privilege." How about "appearing in a public place without having every minute detail of your appearance and habits scanned and logged forever along with the same information about everyone else in a location and medium unknown and inaccessible to you ... is a privilege."
Who needs checkpoints at the borders and airports when you can have them every 1/4 mile!
Or 1/3 km, or whatever.
Anyway, along with secret RFID tags in flu and childhood vaccines, this is something we here in the States should really look into.
[...] Had it been built on a solid MVC platform, the project should have taken a couple of days. Having to re-write much of the system to generate different HTML isn't exactly a design I'd brag about. [...]
Good Christ Almighty. Here I sit debugging a Swing P.O.S. and now you've made me remember Struts. MVC doesn't have a thing to do with modularity or flexibility. It's a design decision, and one that is almost invariably insane in web applications.
It's people like you that think that methodologies or models can substitute for talent and intelligence.
Pppppffft.
Right, that malaprop annoys the living hell out of me too. But, you know, everyone says "K-Mart's" anyway. S's rule.
I certainly could have used it to help heat my cabin (in Fairbanks) this winter, except for the power bill.
That laptop went on a coworker's 700 mile dogsled/snowmobile trip, by the way. Me, my X40 gets gentler treatment. Oh, and the laptop's drive was mostly dead afterward.
I loved my Casio FIVA, which would run 6-8 hr on a Li battery (till the battery pushed up the daisies), and weighed 3 lbs with battery ... It was "fast enough" because my concern was with size and weight.
I have an X40 now and I still get good run time from it, more like 4-6 hr. It's around 4 lb w/o the dock, but right now I almost always carry the dock with the multiburner in it.
Still, I wish there were much more emphasis on low-power laptop designs.
The other day I was fiddling with a laptop that had dual 2GHz processors or something like that. Ehh? I mean, it's great that they can cram all that into a "moderately" small package, but still, you need Nomex pants to use it in your lap.
http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0059065/
When you can't get high-speed internet access in an affluent suburban area simply because your provider doesn't give a shit, you'll change your mind.
Who comes up with these brilliant ideas?
My cabin doesn't have *any* kind of high-speed internet, despite being on a hill loaded with $250,000 houses (expensive for Fairbanks). Obviously the private sector has completely failed me and other folks on the DSL wait list.
If municipalities want to become involved in supplying and/or mandating local internet service, fine by me. It's one step down from water and power in importance nowadays.
This government activity more than bypasses my "libertarian" filter.
By making it temporarily inconvenient for Joe Listener to burn CDs, this scheme will create an incentive for *more* piracy.
People don't want CDs any more. They want some convenient/useful format. And few people will want to go to the trouble to digitally capture the audio at 1x and segment it based upon someone's track times. Then, I suppose, someone will develop a player that "plays" over USB2 or something.
So, to hell with it - we'll just get a copy from someone who bothered.
I hate paying $15 for CDs that have two or three catchy tracks on them, so normally I buy used CDs. That is a bummer for the artists, but I can't own 800 ripped CDs any other way.
It is well known that most successful open source development is not motivated by money, and conversely, throwing money and developers at a project leads to ... Mozilla. Even if ESR was the first to say it, open source development is driven by ego and social standing. Having a good-paying day job doesn't make your development cool, and cool is the currency in question. How many successful developers are out there who can't even afford a new computer on their own?
Lots.
Free software *is* free because people do it for free.
Idiot.
I don't care how 1337 you are: If you want to write software that users want, you can't rely on your *theories* of what users want.
Don't hold the opinions of your non-developer users in contempt. If you think otherwise, you have your head up your ass.
-joseph
I have every email that I've ever received since 1992, with some exceptions for work accounts, and if I'd just thrown them out on the "if it's more than a year old..." principle, I'd have missed one of the best email romances any geek has ever had.
As someone else mentioned, use DGSI's gold MAM-A. They are clearly labeled on the spindle.
I suspect CD readers will be available for a loooooong time, because so much content is archived on them. It is likely that the 5-1/4" standard will last for at least 10s of years and everything will be backward compatible.
It would be nice if some DVD manufacturer would take it upon itself to describe its media's archival characteristics - then I think most companies would jump on the bandwagon.
-joseph
Installing SP2 on top of my X40's XP was a Bad Idea.
Anyway, I'll restore the original XP when I partition it for Linux.
-j
No, there are many circumstances in which a publisher will allow an author exclusive control over some or all of his/her electronic rights, even if that is not the standard policy of the publisher. Some publishers won't; some will. It also depends whether the author's wishes conflict with the needs of the market. In nonfiction, I think you will find particular latitude among academic and professional publishers, the more reputable ones anyway.
I don't know where you get the phrase "corporate publisher landshark" from, but it damn sure doesn't apply to all publishers. By and large, publishing is a collegial business. The distribution system is fouled up, but that screws the publishers (not just the authors).
-joseph
Actually I am planning to put the entirety of my Perl slides as well as Effective Perl Programming online, as time permits. I don't think this will negatively affect sales. Frankly (this probably sounds immodest, but so be it) the customers I am looking for will need the paper version so they can wear it out.
... I suspect that my contract with A-W (now AWL or Pearson, depending which rung of the ladder you look at) gives them sufficient electronic rights to enable Amazon to create a searchable text, but I don't know whether it does or doesn't. I do know that Amazon has sold many, many copies of my book, and with luck this will help sell more. It doesn't seem to me that it could hurt.
/.-ers may not be aware of is that some publishers (by no means *all*) will give authors considerable flexibility in their contract terms. Some things are typically non-negotiable, like international translations and royalties (it's just too complicated anyway), but many other aspects, including various types of exclusivity, can be adjusted to suit both parties.
;-)
Authors in the reference and cookbook business are SOL anyway, because the internet will inevitably shrivel that market down to the size of the completely internet illiterate. It's a funny thing, though. Even my 60-something year old mom can send email and surf the web now.
As far as permission in my contract goes
One thing that many
Many authors are fearful that the value in their books is in the information and not in its physical presentation. In my experience, that is not yet the case. I would never, for example, use a computerized version of Joy of Cooking (and besides, it would have the sucky "new" recipes in it, nevermind requiring me to have a splashproof computer near the stove). There are some horrible books that people do consider disposable - Java "references" that are out of date when they hit the shelves, for example - but other more carefully written programming texts are not much fun to read on a glowing computer screen. Nor do they look good on a bookshelf.
-joseph
What does your splash screen say? "Welcome to RedHat Linux?"
Please, if you're actually using a pay service and a pay music appliance, please use a real non-sucking service like GraceNote. Don't suffer through FreeDB. I think what happened to CDDB was terrible, but on the other hand, I have about 2000 spelling errors to correct in the titles of the 700 or so CDs I have ripped at home so far, and nevermind that no one can agree what a performer's name is. It isn't worth it. Ugh.
Flowcharts, structured, waterfall, object-oriented (object-oriented programming, object-oriented design, object-oriented analysis), SEI levels, requirements-driven, use cases, design patterns, extreme, aspect-oriented ....
Me, I am still waiting for a compiler that gives good error messages, and shared objects that work.
Everyone needs a ruggedized 6 million candlepower flashlight with an adjustable 40 degree wide to 2 degree spot beam ... right? I would certainly accept one as a gift. The only catch is it's just a bit pricey.
It's an excellent, reliable, well-supported, well-documented format.
.cdr/.toc, then sox to convert .cdr to .wav, then flac on that. My CDs compress to about 250MB (they are not all 70 minute epics) on average so I can archive gobs of them in a spare hundred or two GB (10+ on a DVD-R), but I can still recover the exact original. Meanwhile I can make 192kbps oggs for playback.
Currently I am ripping CDs with this somewhat involved process: cdr2dao giving me a
Go FLAC! The good (lossless) format seems to have won out!
-joseph