I was wondering... Obama's energy policy (and yes, I read it) seems to be "maintain the status quo and hope some technological breakthrough saves us before it's too late, oh yeah, and invest in biofuel".
I dont remember anyone (except maybe for CAD or scientific simulation work) using NT on the desktop until the NT 5 beta (which then became windows 2000)
There were a lot of us. What you have to remember is that NT 3.51 was solid as a rock, and NT 4.0 was too, minus the occasional disastrous service pack. Given the options available at the time, I _never_ knew anyone who was a professional developer that chose the Windows 95 route. Windows 2000 and XP were logical growths out of the NT line, and were both quite decent, not losing stability even if gaining a lot of bloat. Some improvements always came too: Explorer in particular was really horrible up through 2000, but with XP it became merely awful. I was amused to see it was still pretty awful in Vista, too.
For home use, I finally caved and bought Windows 95 because there was too much 32-bit software I couldn't run, but that didn't last long. Within a months I switched to NT 3.51 and stayed on the Windows NT course (through XP) until I finally switched last machine to Linux earlier this year.
Um, YMBNH. Besides, it's mostly in good fun. We're guys... and nerds... a little friendly belittling is tobe expected. You should see my friends... they're brutal compared to this.:-)
You assume I care. The only reason I tried to install Silverlight was because Microsoft suggested it in order to take advantage of their new download features. I tried it and it failed miserably. I don't even run Windows any more. I'll care if some online app I want to use requires it, _and_ I can get it running with a minimum of trouble. I'm through fighting and clawing and groveling to get Microsoft crap to work. They get one chance, and if it fails as utterly as Silverlight did for me, then I quit. Sorry, this is 2008, not 1983. Software made by a company with billions of dollars and tens of thousands of employees should occasionally work and if, after all the hundreds if not thousands of dollars Microsoft has extorted from me over the past 20 years being a customer of theirs I have to put up with hassle on top of it, then I have no patience.
'I disagree with you therefore you're biased.' - every Microsoft Fanboi
That should be attributed to a large percentage of people on every discussion forum on the Internet. Frankly I think it's much worse when it comes to politics than with technical subjects.
Another one which is even worse and almost as ubiquitous:
"You disagree with me, which is a personal attack. You are evil. I hate you."
I have never been more viciously attacked than by people by people who cannot make this distinction.
Saying Microsoft is trying to kill Adobe is "pro-" or "anti-" anything. It's an observation. It's what Microsoft always tries to do.
I think you're being just a little too sensitive here when talking about a company for which nothing is too low when it comes to smothering the competition.
Aside from that, if Silverlight is good, people will use it. Frankly, all I could ever get it to do is ask to be installed, even when it supposedly was. I guess it doesn't support Firefox. Flash is closed-source, a performance hog, and Adobe can't seem to port it to 64-bits even though they've been allegedly "trying" for years. If that doesn't tell you volumes about the quality of the code, then nothing will.
Silverlight is from Microsoft, therefore it will _not_ come without some huge club beating you in the face to lock you into Microsoft regardless of whether it's good or bad. This is an important consideration. Just when software is more cross-platform friendly than ever, Microsoft comes along and tries to set the clock back 10 years. No Linux support? Is this 1998 again?
These are important considerations above and beyond whether Silverlight is easy to work with and performs well. All Microsoft technology comes with a big ball-and-chain attached, backed by an obscenely powerful company who is not afraid to extort, intimidate and lie to maintain their advantage. For many people, that's not a problem and may even be seen as an advantage. For other people, it could be a deal-breaker.
If Microsoft wants to be treated based solely on the merits of their technology, then perhaps it's time, after 30 years, that they attempt to compete based solely on the merits of their technology.
Maybe they should have called it a public alpha release. Till the meaning of that is lost too.
That was called Windows Vista.
The term "beta" was ruined long before Google started abusing it. What used to be called "beta" is now called a "release candidate", which is what "beta" originally meant: "release candidate". Nowadays, any dot oh version is considered beta at best (or in the case of KDE 4.0, a late alpha, with a retroactive claim of "We meant to do that!"). In Microsoft's case, SP1 might, just might be worthy of a "dot oh" label. In Google's case "beta" means anything between 0.0.1 and 3.0, look just use it OK? We're Google so you know it's cool. And they're usually right.
Microsoft is largely to blame, but the whole idea of huge, monolithic releases practiced by almost all software companies until recently (and still practiced by many) meant that everyone was constantly under the gun to release software before it was ready. Betas originally served the purpose of being a release that was essentially feature-complete, and mature enough that a larger segment of testers than just the in-house testers was needed to try to shake out bugs in as many permutations of platforms as possible. For something as large as Windows, which runs on an obscene variety of hardware and has almost no modularity to it, this is critical to the product's success.
The problem is that "beta" releases became (like version numbers) almost became more a vehicle of marketing than actually serving its original purpose. By the time Google came around, "beta" was almost meaningless, and thanks to Google, it now is meaningless, especially since these are now the days of "release early/release often". When something or yours is in "beta" for years, you are either an idiot or abusing the term. If nothing else, it has probably become a de facto statement of "You know how all of our software has clauses in the EULA indemnifying us in case something really bad happens? Well, we are making even less promises than usual about what this may or may not do."
With Microsoft, the distinction between "alpha", "beta", and "release" or "gold" or "dot oh" has been almost eliminated from products constantly being released prematurely. In Google's case, it's pure laziness or, at worst, cynicism. They simply don't want to define what their product is, and therefore can't claim it's finished. Now part of that is the fluidity of software development these days. Throw all kinds of ideas and see what works. But it's also disingenuous because most of Google's audience probably don't know what "beta" is supposed to mean. It's like Google saying, "Here, if this is any good, give us credit. If it loses all of your data, wrecks your credit score and steals your girlfriend, hey, don't blame us, it's BETA!"*
* As opposed to Microsoft which says (cleaned up for public consumption), "If it loses all of your data, wrecks your credit score and steals your girlfriend, you can just go to hell. Watcha gonna do, buy a Mac?!? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!"
Fine. I have a 7800 exabyte database stored on clay tablets and accessed by five hundred Hittite slaves (average seek time, approximately 7 weeks) and edited using small chisels and patching compound.
From my experience those kinds of decisions are made by people who are too powerful or influential to ignore and too ignorant to be convinced by reason, and unless you're at a small startup, those kinds of people exist in every company. They may be irredeemably stupid, but they are everywhere, even in good companies.
Word has convinced me that not only is _it_ an utter failure as a product, but that WYSIWYG word processing is a complete and utter mistake for almost everything it's used for. WSYIWYG is fine for desktop publishing, but for 99% of what Word is used for, simple markup like reStructured Text, is an order of magnitude easier to learn and use, and saves an incredible amount of time.
Microsoft has literally nothing constructive to contribute in the word processing world. At this point, they cause more damage than anything constructive they might have ever accomplished (which pretty much ended in the mid 90's). If anyone asks me for a Word document, I would comply using OOo. If someone gives me a Word document, I make it very clear (in a polite way) that Word documents are a huge convenience problem (especially from Word 2007, which breaks compatibility AGAIN) for people who do not have it.
Fine! I have a 3PB database stored on paper tape in EBCDIC accessed over a 9600 baud modem and transferred using Z-Modem. Seek time is in hours, but file transfer isn't so bad.
They don't check small devices, now do they? I mean your laptop is subject to search, but what about your MP3 player? What's to stop you from imaging your laptop, stuffing the image onto to your iPod (or Neuros II if you like your portable electronics big, black, ugly and not grotesquely overpriced like I do), and replacing it with a vanilla Windows installation. Let's face it, merely running Linux could be looked upon as suspicious by some people. It looks different. A loyal, patriotic American would run Windows.
Anyhow, once you get past security, you spend a half-hour restoring your lappy and you're good to go. A 2.5" USB hard drive is about the same size as a (largish) MP3 player... are they likely to inspect, or even notice that? I doubt it.
Frankly, I suspect they are really concerned about physical security, making sure your lappy isn't packed with plastique, than what data you have on there. Demonstrating that it works is probably sufficient, unless you've been pulled aside for "special" screening, meaning they are worried about you, or more likely want to hassle you so people don't get upset when they also want to hassle the people who, for instance look Arabic, dress funny, have one way tickets paid for with cash, no luggage and are muttering to themselves, "Allah Akbar!" and writing out their wills.
That was the first thing that I thought. That quote must be incorrect, or the guy is clearly insane. Given that not so long ago, in evolutionary times, humans hardly made it past their 30s, and now the average age of getting married is in the late 20's or later (and even in the third world, I imagine there are similar trends), there's no way that assertion could be correct.
Yeah, I had to snigger at that. The project I'm responsible for has a database that's gotten up to tens of gigabytes in size. MySQL was chosen before I came along, and knowing what I know now, I'd definitely consider alternatives, but for the most part, it serves our purposes.
That's the problem with MyISAM. It's only useful if you're not worried about losing data. Any breakage, whether it's a server crash, running out of disk space or the wrong phase of the moon will totally lunch your DB. InnoDB on the other hand is storage engine actually meant for real projects. That said, MySQL definitely has its limitations, but within them it's pretty good.
Although I wouldn't put it past anyone's campaign to do these kinds of things, it's quite possible that there are simply a large number of loose cannons in the spam world who want to do Obama a favor by spreading his name around. Let's face it, spammers and their targets are not the sharpest knives in the drawer so the spammers are likely to think they are helping their candidate even if they're not, and as to intended spam targets, well, they're an oblique proof of evolution in that apparently it sometimes doesn't work.
Trust me, I'm no fan of Obama. I think he'll be a disaster for this country worse than the disasters we've had in recent years (i.e., "change" does not mean "improvement"). This will be a victory for the last dregs of the 60's radicals who will finally achieve their goal of gaining enough political power to ruin this country once and for all. Just as it was with Clinton and Carter, it's not the President I fear as much as the people he'll appoint. Clinton wasn't an awful President and with the Republican Congress, achieved some really good things. On the other hand, his Cabinet members had a pretty awful track record (including plenty of indictments and resignations under less than ideal circumstances). Can you imagine William Ayers as the Secretary of HUD or Education?
Anyhow, to get back on topic, I would not _assume_, however, that Obama or his campaign is behind any spam campaigns. I wouldn't put it past the campaigners, many of whom are likely to do things the candidate would not support. And Obama has a history of playing hardball (not always clean), but this is probably the work of well-meaning idiots.
Well, there's a problem. Assuming for a minute that you'd actually want your child to do this, on the Washington Beltway and the Dulles Toll-road here in the D.C. 'burbs if you are only going 65, you're creating a hazard.
My first thought was that I'd have no interest in that because, although my kids are years away from driving, I am already instructing them on various aspects of driving, both while in the car and just in general discussion. I believe that we are being pretty successful in instilling a sense of responsibility and establishing a pattern of trust with our kids, and making a real impression on them about the seriousness that driving involves.
Beyond that, although a couple of my kids are becoming really interested in music, _none_ of them likes the stereo as loud as I do.
That said, however, if using these keys gave me a break on insurance, I'd go for it. I'd simply say, "Look, it's not a matter of trust. It a matter of money." They would definitely understand and appreciate that.
Finally, the key still wouldn't stop you from barrelling through the neighborhood at 80, so even crazy rebellious teens shouldn't be too concerned. I'm not sure this technology would really help.
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I was wondering... Obama's energy policy (and yes, I read it) seems to be "maintain the status quo and hope some technological breakthrough saves us before it's too late, oh yeah, and invest in biofuel".
Wow. More sense than a lot of liberals, that young lady. I'd vote for her.
I dont remember anyone (except maybe for CAD or scientific simulation work) using NT on the desktop until the NT 5 beta (which then became windows 2000)
There were a lot of us. What you have to remember is that NT 3.51 was solid as a rock, and NT 4.0 was too, minus the occasional disastrous service pack. Given the options available at the time, I _never_ knew anyone who was a professional developer that chose the Windows 95 route. Windows 2000 and XP were logical growths out of the NT line, and were both quite decent, not losing stability even if gaining a lot of bloat. Some improvements always came too: Explorer in particular was really horrible up through 2000, but with XP it became merely awful. I was amused to see it was still pretty awful in Vista, too.
For home use, I finally caved and bought Windows 95 because there was too much 32-bit software I couldn't run, but that didn't last long. Within a months I switched to NT 3.51 and stayed on the Windows NT course (through XP) until I finally switched last machine to Linux earlier this year.
Um, YMBNH. Besides, it's mostly in good fun. We're guys... and nerds... a little friendly belittling is tobe expected. You should see my friends... they're brutal compared to this. :-)
Wow! He was much calmer and more coherent back then.
I remember Windows 2.1. Man, was it ugly. Even uglier than the default theme in XP, although not by much.
I think the word you're looking for is 'drivel'.
You assume I care. The only reason I tried to install Silverlight was because Microsoft suggested it in order to take advantage of their new download features. I tried it and it failed miserably. I don't even run Windows any more. I'll care if some online app I want to use requires it, _and_ I can get it running with a minimum of trouble. I'm through fighting and clawing and groveling to get Microsoft crap to work. They get one chance, and if it fails as utterly as Silverlight did for me, then I quit. Sorry, this is 2008, not 1983. Software made by a company with billions of dollars and tens of thousands of employees should occasionally work and if, after all the hundreds if not thousands of dollars Microsoft has extorted from me over the past 20 years being a customer of theirs I have to put up with hassle on top of it, then I have no patience.
No, I didn't know that. Frankly, I don't care about what Microsoft does.
'I disagree with you therefore you're biased.' - every Microsoft Fanboi
That should be attributed to a large percentage of people on every discussion forum on the Internet. Frankly I think it's much worse when it comes to politics than with technical subjects.
Another one which is even worse and almost as ubiquitous:
"You disagree with me, which is a personal attack. You are evil. I hate you."
I have never been more viciously attacked than by people by people who cannot make this distinction.
Saying Microsoft is trying to kill Adobe is "pro-" or "anti-" anything. It's an observation. It's what Microsoft always tries to do.
I think you're being just a little too sensitive here when talking about a company for which nothing is too low when it comes to smothering the competition.
Aside from that, if Silverlight is good, people will use it. Frankly, all I could ever get it to do is ask to be installed, even when it supposedly was. I guess it doesn't support Firefox. Flash is closed-source, a performance hog, and Adobe can't seem to port it to 64-bits even though they've been allegedly "trying" for years. If that doesn't tell you volumes about the quality of the code, then nothing will.
Silverlight is from Microsoft, therefore it will _not_ come without some huge club beating you in the face to lock you into Microsoft regardless of whether it's good or bad. This is an important consideration. Just when software is more cross-platform friendly than ever, Microsoft comes along and tries to set the clock back 10 years. No Linux support? Is this 1998 again?
These are important considerations above and beyond whether Silverlight is easy to work with and performs well. All Microsoft technology comes with a big ball-and-chain attached, backed by an obscenely powerful company who is not afraid to extort, intimidate and lie to maintain their advantage. For many people, that's not a problem and may even be seen as an advantage. For other people, it could be a deal-breaker.
If Microsoft wants to be treated based solely on the merits of their technology, then perhaps it's time, after 30 years, that they attempt to compete based solely on the merits of their technology.
Maybe they should have called it a public alpha release. Till the meaning of that is lost too.
That was called Windows Vista.
The term "beta" was ruined long before Google started abusing it. What used to be called "beta" is now called a "release candidate", which is what "beta" originally meant: "release candidate". Nowadays, any dot oh version is considered beta at best (or in the case of KDE 4.0, a late alpha, with a retroactive claim of "We meant to do that!"). In Microsoft's case, SP1 might, just might be worthy of a "dot oh" label. In Google's case "beta" means anything between 0.0.1 and 3.0, look just use it OK? We're Google so you know it's cool. And they're usually right.
Microsoft is largely to blame, but the whole idea of huge, monolithic releases practiced by almost all software companies until recently (and still practiced by many) meant that everyone was constantly under the gun to release software before it was ready. Betas originally served the purpose of being a release that was essentially feature-complete, and mature enough that a larger segment of testers than just the in-house testers was needed to try to shake out bugs in as many permutations of platforms as possible. For something as large as Windows, which runs on an obscene variety of hardware and has almost no modularity to it, this is critical to the product's success.
The problem is that "beta" releases became (like version numbers) almost became more a vehicle of marketing than actually serving its original purpose. By the time Google came around, "beta" was almost meaningless, and thanks to Google, it now is meaningless, especially since these are now the days of "release early/release often". When something or yours is in "beta" for years, you are either an idiot or abusing the term. If nothing else, it has probably become a de facto statement of "You know how all of our software has clauses in the EULA indemnifying us in case something really bad happens? Well, we are making even less promises than usual about what this may or may not do."
With Microsoft, the distinction between "alpha", "beta", and "release" or "gold" or "dot oh" has been almost eliminated from products constantly being released prematurely. In Google's case, it's pure laziness or, at worst, cynicism. They simply don't want to define what their product is, and therefore can't claim it's finished. Now part of that is the fluidity of software development these days. Throw all kinds of ideas and see what works. But it's also disingenuous because most of Google's audience probably don't know what "beta" is supposed to mean. It's like Google saying, "Here, if this is any good, give us credit. If it loses all of your data, wrecks your credit score and steals your girlfriend, hey, don't blame us, it's BETA!"*
* As opposed to Microsoft which says (cleaned up for public consumption), "If it loses all of your data, wrecks your credit score and steals your girlfriend, you can just go to hell. Watcha gonna do, buy a Mac?!? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!"
Fine. I have a 7800 exabyte database stored on clay tablets and accessed by five hundred Hittite slaves (average seek time, approximately 7 weeks) and edited using small chisels and patching compound.
From my experience those kinds of decisions are made by people who are too powerful or influential to ignore and too ignorant to be convinced by reason, and unless you're at a small startup, those kinds of people exist in every company. They may be irredeemably stupid, but they are everywhere, even in good companies.
Word has convinced me that not only is _it_ an utter failure as a product, but that WYSIWYG word processing is a complete and utter mistake for almost everything it's used for. WSYIWYG is fine for desktop publishing, but for 99% of what Word is used for, simple markup like reStructured Text, is an order of magnitude easier to learn and use, and saves an incredible amount of time.
Microsoft has literally nothing constructive to contribute in the word processing world. At this point, they cause more damage than anything constructive they might have ever accomplished (which pretty much ended in the mid 90's). If anyone asks me for a Word document, I would comply using OOo. If someone gives me a Word document, I make it very clear (in a polite way) that Word documents are a huge convenience problem (especially from Word 2007, which breaks compatibility AGAIN) for people who do not have it.
Fine! I have a 3PB database stored on paper tape in EBCDIC accessed over a 9600 baud modem and transferred using Z-Modem. Seek time is in hours, but file transfer isn't so bad.
They don't check small devices, now do they? I mean your laptop is subject to search, but what about your MP3 player? What's to stop you from imaging your laptop, stuffing the image onto to your iPod (or Neuros II if you like your portable electronics big, black, ugly and not grotesquely overpriced like I do), and replacing it with a vanilla Windows installation. Let's face it, merely running Linux could be looked upon as suspicious by some people. It looks different. A loyal, patriotic American would run Windows.
Anyhow, once you get past security, you spend a half-hour restoring your lappy and you're good to go. A 2.5" USB hard drive is about the same size as a (largish) MP3 player... are they likely to inspect, or even notice that? I doubt it.
Frankly, I suspect they are really concerned about physical security, making sure your lappy isn't packed with plastique, than what data you have on there. Demonstrating that it works is probably sufficient, unless you've been pulled aside for "special" screening, meaning they are worried about you, or more likely want to hassle you so people don't get upset when they also want to hassle the people who, for instance look Arabic, dress funny, have one way tickets paid for with cash, no luggage and are muttering to themselves, "Allah Akbar!" and writing out their wills.
That was the first thing that I thought. That quote must be incorrect, or the guy is clearly insane. Given that not so long ago, in evolutionary times, humans hardly made it past their 30s, and now the average age of getting married is in the late 20's or later (and even in the third world, I imagine there are similar trends), there's no way that assertion could be correct.
Not to mention all the Tennessee Tuxedo fans, who are not going to be happy about it either.
Don Adams, we miss you!
Yeah, because requirements never change.
Sometimes they don't. B-)
You're right. Sometimes they just get cancelled. :-)
Sounds like somebody got a program working right and, instead of tweaking it some more and breaking it again, quit.
Yeah, because requirements never change.
Yeah, I had to snigger at that. The project I'm responsible for has a database that's gotten up to tens of gigabytes in size. MySQL was chosen before I came along, and knowing what I know now, I'd definitely consider alternatives, but for the most part, it serves our purposes.
That's the problem with MyISAM. It's only useful if you're not worried about losing data. Any breakage, whether it's a server crash, running out of disk space or the wrong phase of the moon will totally lunch your DB. InnoDB on the other hand is storage engine actually meant for real projects. That said, MySQL definitely has its limitations, but within them it's pretty good.
Although I wouldn't put it past anyone's campaign to do these kinds of things, it's quite possible that there are simply a large number of loose cannons in the spam world who want to do Obama a favor by spreading his name around. Let's face it, spammers and their targets are not the sharpest knives in the drawer so the spammers are likely to think they are helping their candidate even if they're not, and as to intended spam targets, well, they're an oblique proof of evolution in that apparently it sometimes doesn't work.
Trust me, I'm no fan of Obama. I think he'll be a disaster for this country worse than the disasters we've had in recent years (i.e., "change" does not mean "improvement"). This will be a victory for the last dregs of the 60's radicals who will finally achieve their goal of gaining enough political power to ruin this country once and for all. Just as it was with Clinton and Carter, it's not the President I fear as much as the people he'll appoint. Clinton wasn't an awful President and with the Republican Congress, achieved some really good things. On the other hand, his Cabinet members had a pretty awful track record (including plenty of indictments and resignations under less than ideal circumstances). Can you imagine William Ayers as the Secretary of HUD or Education?
Anyhow, to get back on topic, I would not _assume_, however, that Obama or his campaign is behind any spam campaigns. I wouldn't put it past the campaigners, many of whom are likely to do things the candidate would not support. And Obama has a history of playing hardball (not always clean), but this is probably the work of well-meaning idiots.
When the median speed is about 75, which it usually is on those roads, especially the toll road, driving significantly slower is a hazard.
Well, there's a problem. Assuming for a minute that you'd actually want your child to do this, on the Washington Beltway and the Dulles Toll-road here in the D.C. 'burbs if you are only going 65, you're creating a hazard.
My first thought was that I'd have no interest in that because, although my kids are years away from driving, I am already instructing them on various aspects of driving, both while in the car and just in general discussion. I believe that we are being pretty successful in instilling a sense of responsibility and establishing a pattern of trust with our kids, and making a real impression on them about the seriousness that driving involves.
Beyond that, although a couple of my kids are becoming really interested in music, _none_ of them likes the stereo as loud as I do.
That said, however, if using these keys gave me a break on insurance, I'd go for it. I'd simply say, "Look, it's not a matter of trust. It a matter of money." They would definitely understand and appreciate that.
Finally, the key still wouldn't stop you from barrelling through the neighborhood at 80, so even crazy rebellious teens shouldn't be too concerned. I'm not sure this technology would really help.