Very good logic. A little company cranks out one really addictive (and freakin huge) game per year, which keeps a profitable core audience busy until the next one is ready. These addicts will be both exhausted from the game and at the same time hungry for more. Plus the cost of the game is so little when compared with the hours of entertainment provided that your customers won't whine that the game costs $50-$60.
I should have added that it was 4-6 hours a night on work days, over 8 hours on a weekend. No matter how good the game was I have never played a game like this for so long without getting bored.
I have been playing Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind since December 31, 2002 and I still can't put it down. It is really neat to have this gigantc scenario to explore and there's always many things around to do that have nothing to do with the main quest. I am positive that after a whole month playing that game I have yet to uncover 25% of the map.
If these people could expand on this concept and come up with a Morrowind model that spans across a few continents instead of one, and with maybe 3-5 main quests that are dynamically generated then it would take months to finish it. The problem is that if it takes so long to finish one game, people will buy less games. Same thing as building a car that runs like new for 10 years. The car company wants you to buy a new car every 5.
The only thing that stops Microsoft from using Linux as the baseline is the GPL. MS would love the public relations coup of jumping into a unix-like platform, but they are scared to death of GPL. The BSD family, on the other hand, is more aligned with the way Microsoft wants to run their business.
I am a US Army vet, but my only exposure to field food was MREs, I never got to see the next generation MREs used now or the older C-rations. When I was in the service the MREs came in diverse enough configurations that there was something for everyone, plus of course the little black market we had running using the M&Ms as a bargain tool.
Still, MREs had a small problem, it took time to eat them. The MRE not only gave us a certain caloric load per bag, but it also kept us busy for up to 30 minutes (some of us looked forward to getting MREs instead of a chow truck because you would be literally guaranteed 30 minutes of peace from the cadre as long as you looked busy tearing open packets of food). If you are really in a hurry and you don't eat your MREs whole then over time in a long deployment you could start suffering vitamin deficiencies, which is where a patch like that would rock.
Of course, we know the first three patches that are going to be issued will be:
1. Caffeine 2. Tylenol/Motrin 3. Go pills
The concept sounds great, but it is just too obvious that they are looking for a clean way to deliver chemicals without needles or pills (plus the patch allows a time release).
If any of you has never tasted an MRE and has a chance to, go ahead and try it. I have always been picky about food but I never thought I would be so damn well pleased with cold food (the warming jackets were not widely distributed to non-deployed units). Chicken-a-la-King, Beef Stew and "Ham and Omelette" where the best:-)
Yes, that is what I am. I have been doing asp on both SQL Server and Oracle for a few years and managed to ship one asp.net product while Visual Studio was still in beta. Then things changed.
It is easy to support Microsoft-based initiatives when you work for a company large enough to qualify for Microsoft partner discounts on development software. A $2500/year subscription/blackmail fee pretty much gives you access to any and all commercial software sold by Microsoft. You get used to have all the cool stuff arrive on CD or DVD every month or so and nothing stops you from building one more development box just to test Whatever.net. Who cares if you got a room with 20+ development servers on a 100+ employee company anyway?
Things change once you move to the small business field. Suddenly you don't have a shitload of cash to burn, and the $2500/year can probably pay one or two PCs for coworkers. You barely manage to afford one lousy development server, and your production schedule is so hectic that you cannot afford to drop development on asp (dirt cheap, you can pick asp programmers literally everywhere) to make the jump to asp.net, which means you will need Visual Studio and eventually more expensive windows.net server licenses.
I was put in that position when I switched jobs and joined an 11-employee firm to be their techno geek (I got so tired of explaining to people my job that I just tell them my job is to isolate the CEO and President from technical stuff). Then the soul searching started?
1. Do I commit my company to a $2500/year MSDN subscription? We are not a software shop, all our development is internal.
2. Do I make the jump to.net? I love c#, it is a hell of a technology but even if the asp.net sdk is free the only decent tool to build asp.net solutions quickly costs thousands. I would rather use that money to buy more PCs for the 2-3 new employees we hire every quarter.
3. Do I keep the current solution as asp and wait for the end-of-life of asp before I try to move up to.net? Will this ever happen? What if they suddenly drop asp?
4. What about php? I have run a phpnuke website successfully for a long time and I am sure I can rewrite my company's solution to php.
5. What about SQL Server? I absolutely love SQL Server 2000, but how much will I have to relearn when the new one comes out? And will I have odbc connectivity to php in case I want to jump out?
6. What about mySQL? A couple years ago mySQL was nowhere close to ACID, but right now it is almost there. And my mySQL install runs as stable as my SQL Server. When can I trust mySQL with corporate data?
The list of questions goes forever. I finally decided to do nothing. The current toolset in asp runs itself and does not make me waste a lot of time in code maintenance. Performance is acceptable for our usage. I am not going to move us up to asp.net just so I can say it runs on.net. I am happy that Ximian decided to build their own.net solution, but I am hoping this does not harm the php movement.
I would like to be able to buy a $1500 Compaq 1U rack drawer and know I only have to put freeBSD, Apache, mySQL and php and I am set, instead of having to go thru the stupid requisitioning process to get Windows server licenses and CALs every time I deploy a windows server.
When people ask me why I am on a mac (switched in September 2002) but I still use Microsoft products (IE, Ms Office v.X and the xbox) I tell them my beef with Microsoft is not about monopoly this or predatory that. I have valid business concerns and complaints, and.net has the potential to bring me, my company and my colleagues a lot of heartburn.
I have the same problem, I want to use a unix-type environment but I am stuck programming for Windows-only platforms. The solution was provided by Microsoft itself: a terminal services client for OS X.
Now I use my iBook for all MS Office tasks, web programming is done in BBEdit and HTML layouts in Dreamweaver MX. Whenever I need to do something on a SQL Server or configuration of IIS I can use the Remote Desktop Client and use terminal services to do whatever I need to do.
I also tried XP on Virtual PC 6 but found it horribly slow on the iBook. Terminal server will do for now until we phase out IIS and SQL Server and bring up php and MySQL.
This is a smart move. Find a niche market and stick to it. Nintendo has been around since forever, and not even Microsoft and Sony combined can crush it because they are not interested in a marketing grab-all frenzy.
I love my xbox to death, but I would definitely buy a game cube just to play pikmini (sp?) and Metroid Prime. The one thing I won't get is a ps/2/3/whatever.
Yup, you are correct. If a VCR or DVD player used by the kid (now 4, but he learned how to pop movies into the VCR before he was 1) lasts more than 3 months then we pretty much break even.
I was arguing with the wife the other day about this same subject. The only thing we could agree on was that the only electronic device we have purchased that has survived the test of time is my Sony DSC-S70 digital camera, which is almost 3 years old and I still use daily (and yeah, its kept away from the child). Even better, as old as it is I have no intention whatsoever to replace it with a new camera, 3 megapix work for me today as well as back when I bought it, and the camera pretty much rocks.
The "good" stuff is still good. We just got more "cheap" stuff that does the basic stuff only the "good" stuff used to do.
The best example is the stand-alone $49 DVD player. To somebody that is not a total video freak, the $49 does the same job as a $200 unit. My first DVD player cost me $300, a Toshiba that worked for over 2 yrs without any problem. My second DVD player was for my PC and cost me $80. My third one was a stand alone that came as part of a Teac receiver combo and cost $150 with 5.1 speakers plus FM radio (no, they don't sound like Bose, but dammit, that's $150 for a 5.1 home theater). I bought another combo like that one for $130. My wife buys $49 DVD players for my little kid so if they break out of warranty we are out of just $50 (a cheap VCR costs more).
Each and every DVD player I have bought looks exactly the same on my piece of crap TV. Every one. The original Toshiba was the only one with a decent remote, that is the only thing I have to say on its defense. Each of the $49 DVD players we have bought can read VCD and MP3 CDRs and CDRWs. The last one she got is smaller than our digital cable box, and weights maybe 1/3rd of what my xbox does.
Notice I said this only applies if you are not a video freak. To us normal Joes, a DVD plays the same regardless, and the only thing you can do to make it better is to get a better TV.
There are many more examples like this, but to me the most obvious is the cheapo DVD players.
Desus, I am also very pleased with JohnCompanies. My current uptime is 80 days and going strong, and my support replies are also in the 5-minute range.
I had hosted for free in my last two jobs, but my new company is so small that they won't let me plug my bsd box into the network (I am employee #12 and they did not want it to look like it was favoritism). So time to go and actually pay for hosting, ouch.
I was ready to bite the bullet and pick a cheapo unix shop, but I was so addicted to having full control of my free bsd server that I kept looking around and found JohnCompanies. $65 for a virtual colo, so the physical server is running multiple virtual partitions that to the user look like a full system. I said screw it, if it does not work I lose $65 and I can look elsewhere.
So far everything they have promised has been right on the money. The support is AWESOME. Email them at the weirdest hours and a real person replies within minutes. They don't charge for backups (my company has a colo that wants $200/month extra to do backups for us). The server runs pretty damn fast, and it is triple-homed.
When you receive the server it is freeBSD4.6 and stripped to the bone. The only thing running is sendmail and ssh, plus a fresh ports tree. Anything else you want, you install yourself exactly how you want it. Don't know how to do something? Email support and they will walk you thru it.
I am hosting 5 websites and running mail feeds for 2 and so far no outages and no complaints.
By the way, if you are an open source developer they will give you a price break, and they also have deals for Linux instead of freeBSD and also for actual rack space if you want to provide your hardware.
They have too much traffic to think about doing something so stupid. I have kept cnn as my home page for as long as I have been online but I will not pay AOL to access it, since I already pay a hell of a lot of money for cable TV. I guess I will have to switch to Google News and Washingtonpost.com until THEY decide to do something as retarded.
I am going to save this article for when the annual wave of new pc buyers hits me this season. I keep telling people that unless they are processing video, doing number crunching, programming or playing 3D games there is no need for a monster pc. Maybe if they read it in the post they will believe me.
I switched from a dual processor PIII-1GHZ Windows XP Pro PC with 1.75GB ram and a 64MB nVidia card to an iBook 600 MHZ with 384 MB ram and OS X 10.2 (for work) and an xbox (for play).
The xbox plays games a hell of a lot better than my dual processor pc ever did. The iBook runs MS Office v.X as good as my dual processor pc ran MS Office XP. The 600 MHZ have been plenty for everything I do with it at work (web programming, remote server management, office tasks, etc). There is only one program that runs like crap: Macromedia Dreamweaver MX. Everything else runs perfect.
Worse, I offered to my wife to give her my dual processor pc and to sell her Celeron 600 Dell with 256MB ram and Windows XP Pro. She told me to go to hell, so I sold the dualie to offset the cost of the xbox and a few games. Her Dell runs rock solid and I don't average one hour per month in maintenance for that pc.
Eventually I am switching her to mac too, but that pc will probably stay in action for at least a couple more years.
This is a non-event. And secret is not a life-or-death classification level, as anything that is considered remotely important will automagically get tagged with TS + keyword.
The original cart as I remember carried enough iBooks for a classroom, plus airport (I don't remember if it had a printer). This is a kickass concept, it kept the iBooks secure and recharged, and it is really easy to move the whole thing to a different classroom.
This could easily work in a small business scenario. My company has 12 employees and everybody is on macs except myself. They issued me a Compaq but within a month I have purchased my own iBook, and the Compaq is used as a server. I am always worried that it is just too easy for somebody to grab one of the LCD iMacs and walk away from the office without anyone noticing. Once I started carrying the iBook to all my meetings the other employees started whining that they wanted iBooks too, but I told the powers-that-be that I am not going to trust these people with remembering to chain their iBooks to their desks whenever they were not at their offices.
A cart like this would rock, since at the end of the day I could pick each iBook as I leave the office and lock it in the cart. Next morning I know all the iBooks will be safe and charged, so no distractions with people chasing for open power plugs 5 minutes into a meeting just because they forgot to recharge their iBooks.
Using PDF on a Windows platform is a royal pain in the ass! I never thought about it because I was always thinking I was just unlucky that whenever I needed to open a PDF, the PC would not have Acrobat reader installed. This went on for many years.
Then I started using SuSe 8, and pretty much everywhere you go there is PDF this and PDF that. And with no dramatics. It just works.
Now I am switched to Mac, and PDF on OS X 10.2 works perfectly. It's one less thing I need to think of because I can count on it working every time. Print to PDF (Linux has it too) pretty much rocks.
How many times have you thought before downloading a PDF because you did not think it would be worth the hassle to try to open it?
75% of the Windows laptops I have been assigned over the last 5 years have had that "feature."
Yes, feature. In each case the builder added little stickers and tray icons saying how it had a "power saving feature" that slows down the CPU to save battery power. The tray icon points to an applet that controls what triggers the speed drop.
The biggest offenders in my case where IBM and Toshiba. Neither could play a full DVD. I remember one specific instance that the battery died right at the intermission for 2001: A Space Odyssey!
My 600 MHz iBook on OS X 10.2 has this kind of feature in the system preferences, but as far as I can tell it defaults to full power. You would have to specifically set it to cut performance to save power. And I can watch a whole DVD without sweating it out.
You sir are completely correct. It takes an idiot to recommend dynamic sql over a stored procedure on a SQL Server 2000. Portability my ass, after you buy a license for SQL Server 2000 on a server farm you are not going to scrape it off and move on to Oracle, so all that crap about portability is an old scare tactic by Oracle.
I spent a long miserable year building asp apps and being forced to use dynamic sql because my company was an Oracle shop and they were counting on charging the customer more a few months down the road to move up to Oracle. Once one of our high profile products started to choke under load so they let us switch to stored procedures. We had pages that used to load in 50+ seconds that as once switched to stored procedures started loading in 5. That's a 1000% improvement. The day I walked away from that job I promised myself that any and all future work I do on a SQL server environment is going to exploit stored procedures and user functions, portability be damned.
Read the PDF, the Java folks had plenty of chances to rewrite their stuff. Had the second version of the.net app kept the stored procedures the results would have been much more embarrassing.
Don't just blame draconian ops, it is more of an act of desperation. In undernet we take so much crap from kiddies that 99% of the time happen to be coming from.ro, simpatico.ca (its so bad we call them simpaticrap, go figure),.no and.mx . I have personally banned.mx and.ro temporarily a few times from #asp on undernet because once a kiddie puts his/her mind into making you miserable it will take minutes to max out the ban list. Only reason we cannot ban.no and.ca is that too many innocent people will get hit.
I got mine while it was still @home. The technician told me not to install any of the software that @home sent me. I had their service until their demise and I am now on Comcast. Comcast does not force me to install anything but they force you to install an activex control if you want to use their support website.
It could save a lot of time to asp programmers. Instead of taking an html template and adding asp code to pull the recordset and loop thru it, you can do this:
1. Put your query in an xml file and drop it into the xml gateway folder at the iis server. This xml file is tiny, since it only holds the query and a link to the xsl.
It drives me crazy that with the incredible talent behind Debian the install process is such a pain. Installing Suse, Mandrake and RH are not harder to install than installing Windows XP or OS X. Installing freeBSD is confusing until you find a few hours after you think you mastered sysinstall a kind soul at a bsd chatroom tells you to use the ports instead.
Installing Debian (or Gentoo) is just too damn confusing. I admire what Debian and Gentoo are aiming for, but they need to come up with a no-hassle installer.
Slashdot Mirror
Very good logic. A little company cranks out one really addictive (and freakin huge) game per year, which keeps a profitable core audience busy until the next one is ready. These addicts will be both exhausted from the game and at the same time hungry for more. Plus the cost of the game is so little when compared with the hours of entertainment provided that your customers won't whine that the game costs $50-$60.
I should have added that it was 4-6 hours a night on work days, over 8 hours on a weekend. No matter how good the game was I have never played a game like this for so long without getting bored.
I have been playing Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind since December 31, 2002 and I still can't put it down. It is really neat to have this gigantc scenario to explore and there's always many things around to do that have nothing to do with the main quest. I am positive that after a whole month playing that game I have yet to uncover 25% of the map.
If these people could expand on this concept and come up with a Morrowind model that spans across a few continents instead of one, and with maybe 3-5 main quests that are dynamically generated then it would take months to finish it. The problem is that if it takes so long to finish one game, people will buy less games. Same thing as building a car that runs like new for 10 years. The car company wants you to buy a new car every 5.
The only thing that stops Microsoft from using Linux as the baseline is the GPL. MS would love the public relations coup of jumping into a unix-like platform, but they are scared to death of GPL. The BSD family, on the other hand, is more aligned with the way Microsoft wants to run their business.
I am a US Army vet, but my only exposure to field food was MREs, I never got to see the next generation MREs used now or the older C-rations. When I was in the service the MREs came in diverse enough configurations that there was something for everyone, plus of course the little black market we had running using the M&Ms as a bargain tool.
:-)
Still, MREs had a small problem, it took time to eat them. The MRE not only gave us a certain caloric load per bag, but it also kept us busy for up to 30 minutes (some of us looked forward to getting MREs instead of a chow truck because you would be literally guaranteed 30 minutes of peace from the cadre as long as you looked busy tearing open packets of food). If you are really in a hurry and you don't eat your MREs whole then over time in a long deployment you could start suffering vitamin deficiencies, which is where a patch like that would rock.
Of course, we know the first three patches that are going to be issued will be:
1. Caffeine
2. Tylenol/Motrin
3. Go pills
The concept sounds great, but it is just too obvious that they are looking for a clean way to deliver chemicals without needles or pills (plus the patch allows a time release).
If any of you has never tasted an MRE and has a chance to, go ahead and try it. I have always been picky about food but I never thought I would be so damn well pleased with cold food (the warming jackets were not widely distributed to non-deployed units). Chicken-a-la-King, Beef Stew and "Ham and Omelette" where the best
Is it really that hard to read an article before writing a small blurb and posting it?
Microsoft is about to unveil Internet Explorer 7 for Mac OS X, which will be based on the Apple-enhanced KHTML engine.
Yes, that is what I am. I have been doing asp on both SQL Server and Oracle for a few years and managed to ship one asp.net product while Visual Studio was still in beta. Then things changed.
.net? I love c#, it is a hell of a technology but even if the asp.net sdk is free the only decent tool to build asp.net solutions quickly costs thousands. I would rather use that money to buy more PCs for the 2-3 new employees we hire every quarter.
.net? Will this ever happen? What if they suddenly drop asp?
.net. I am happy that Ximian decided to build their own .net solution, but I am hoping this does not harm the php movement.
.net has the potential to bring me, my company and my colleagues a lot of heartburn.
It is easy to support Microsoft-based initiatives when you work for a company large enough to qualify for Microsoft partner discounts on development software. A $2500/year subscription/blackmail fee pretty much gives you access to any and all commercial software sold by Microsoft. You get used to have all the cool stuff arrive on CD or DVD every month or so and nothing stops you from building one more development box just to test Whatever.net. Who cares if you got a room with 20+ development servers on a 100+ employee company anyway?
Things change once you move to the small business field. Suddenly you don't have a shitload of cash to burn, and the $2500/year can probably pay one or two PCs for coworkers. You barely manage to afford one lousy development server, and your production schedule is so hectic that you cannot afford to drop development on asp (dirt cheap, you can pick asp programmers literally everywhere) to make the jump to asp.net, which means you will need Visual Studio and eventually more expensive windows.net server licenses.
I was put in that position when I switched jobs and joined an 11-employee firm to be their techno geek (I got so tired of explaining to people my job that I just tell them my job is to isolate the CEO and President from technical stuff). Then the soul searching started?
1. Do I commit my company to a $2500/year MSDN subscription? We are not a software shop, all our development is internal.
2. Do I make the jump to
3. Do I keep the current solution as asp and wait for the end-of-life of asp before I try to move up to
4. What about php? I have run a phpnuke website successfully for a long time and I am sure I can rewrite my company's solution to php.
5. What about SQL Server? I absolutely love SQL Server 2000, but how much will I have to relearn when the new one comes out? And will I have odbc connectivity to php in case I want to jump out?
6. What about mySQL? A couple years ago mySQL was nowhere close to ACID, but right now it is almost there. And my mySQL install runs as stable as my SQL Server. When can I trust mySQL with corporate data?
The list of questions goes forever. I finally decided to do nothing. The current toolset in asp runs itself and does not make me waste a lot of time in code maintenance. Performance is acceptable for our usage. I am not going to move us up to asp.net just so I can say it runs on
I would like to be able to buy a $1500 Compaq 1U rack drawer and know I only have to put freeBSD, Apache, mySQL and php and I am set, instead of having to go thru the stupid requisitioning process to get Windows server licenses and CALs every time I deploy a windows server.
When people ask me why I am on a mac (switched in September 2002) but I still use Microsoft products (IE, Ms Office v.X and the xbox) I tell them my beef with Microsoft is not about monopoly this or predatory that. I have valid business concerns and complaints, and
I have the same problem, I want to use a unix-type environment but I am stuck programming for Windows-only platforms. The solution was provided by Microsoft itself: a terminal services client for OS X.
Now I use my iBook for all MS Office tasks, web programming is done in BBEdit and HTML layouts in Dreamweaver MX. Whenever I need to do something on a SQL Server or configuration of IIS I can use the Remote Desktop Client and use terminal services to do whatever I need to do.
I also tried XP on Virtual PC 6 but found it horribly slow on the iBook. Terminal server will do for now until we phase out IIS and SQL Server and bring up php and MySQL.
This is a smart move. Find a niche market and stick to it. Nintendo has been around since forever, and not even Microsoft and Sony combined can crush it because they are not interested in a marketing grab-all frenzy.
I love my xbox to death, but I would definitely buy a game cube just to play pikmini (sp?) and Metroid Prime. The one thing I won't get is a ps/2/3/whatever.
Yup, you are correct. If a VCR or DVD player used by the kid (now 4, but he learned how to pop movies into the VCR before he was 1) lasts more than 3 months then we pretty much break even.
I was arguing with the wife the other day about this same subject. The only thing we could agree on was that the only electronic device we have purchased that has survived the test of time is my Sony DSC-S70 digital camera, which is almost 3 years old and I still use daily (and yeah, its kept away from the child). Even better, as old as it is I have no intention whatsoever to replace it with a new camera, 3 megapix work for me today as well as back when I bought it, and the camera pretty much rocks.
The "good" stuff is still good. We just got more "cheap" stuff that does the basic stuff only the "good" stuff used to do.
The best example is the stand-alone $49 DVD player. To somebody that is not a total video freak, the $49 does the same job as a $200 unit. My first DVD player cost me $300, a Toshiba that worked for over 2 yrs without any problem. My second DVD player was for my PC and cost me $80. My third one was a stand alone that came as part of a Teac receiver combo and cost $150 with 5.1 speakers plus FM radio (no, they don't sound like Bose, but dammit, that's $150 for a 5.1 home theater). I bought another combo like that one for $130. My wife buys $49 DVD players for my little kid so if they break out of warranty we are out of just $50 (a cheap VCR costs more).
Each and every DVD player I have bought looks exactly the same on my piece of crap TV. Every one. The original Toshiba was the only one with a decent remote, that is the only thing I have to say on its defense. Each of the $49 DVD players we have bought can read VCD and MP3 CDRs and CDRWs. The last one she got is smaller than our digital cable box, and weights maybe 1/3rd of what my xbox does.
Notice I said this only applies if you are not a video freak. To us normal Joes, a DVD plays the same regardless, and the only thing you can do to make it better is to get a better TV.
There are many more examples like this, but to me the most obvious is the cheapo DVD players.
Desus, I am also very pleased with JohnCompanies. My current uptime is 80 days and going strong, and my support replies are also in the 5-minute range.
http://www.johncompanies.com/collocation/
I had hosted for free in my last two jobs, but my new company is so small that they won't let me plug my bsd box into the network (I am employee #12 and they did not want it to look like it was favoritism). So time to go and actually pay for hosting, ouch.
I was ready to bite the bullet and pick a cheapo unix shop, but I was so addicted to having full control of my free bsd server that I kept looking around and found JohnCompanies. $65 for a virtual colo, so the physical server is running multiple virtual partitions that to the user look like a full system. I said screw it, if it does not work I lose $65 and I can look elsewhere.
So far everything they have promised has been right on the money. The support is AWESOME. Email them at the weirdest hours and a real person replies within minutes. They don't charge for backups (my company has a colo that wants $200/month extra to do backups for us). The server runs pretty damn fast, and it is triple-homed.
When you receive the server it is freeBSD4.6 and stripped to the bone. The only thing running is sendmail and ssh, plus a fresh ports tree. Anything else you want, you install yourself exactly how you want it. Don't know how to do something? Email support and they will walk you thru it.
I am hosting 5 websites and running mail feeds for 2 and so far no outages and no complaints.
By the way, if you are an open source developer they will give you a price break, and they also have deals for Linux instead of freeBSD and also for actual rack space if you want to provide your hardware.
They have too much traffic to think about doing something so stupid. I have kept cnn as my home page for as long as I have been online but I will not pay AOL to access it, since I already pay a hell of a lot of money for cable TV. I guess I will have to switch to Google News and Washingtonpost.com until THEY decide to do something as retarded.
I am going to save this article for when the annual wave of new pc buyers hits me this season. I keep telling people that unless they are processing video, doing number crunching, programming or playing 3D games there is no need for a monster pc. Maybe if they read it in the post they will believe me.
I switched from a dual processor PIII-1GHZ Windows XP Pro PC with 1.75GB ram and a 64MB nVidia card to an iBook 600 MHZ with 384 MB ram and OS X 10.2 (for work) and an xbox (for play).
The xbox plays games a hell of a lot better than my dual processor pc ever did. The iBook runs MS Office v.X as good as my dual processor pc ran MS Office XP. The 600 MHZ have been plenty for everything I do with it at work (web programming, remote server management, office tasks, etc). There is only one program that runs like crap: Macromedia Dreamweaver MX. Everything else runs perfect.
Worse, I offered to my wife to give her my dual processor pc and to sell her Celeron 600 Dell with 256MB ram and Windows XP Pro. She told me to go to hell, so I sold the dualie to offset the cost of the xbox and a few games. Her Dell runs rock solid and I don't average one hour per month in maintenance for that pc.
Eventually I am switching her to mac too, but that pc will probably stay in action for at least a couple more years.
This is a non-event. And secret is not a life-or-death classification level, as anything that is considered remotely important will automagically get tagged with TS + keyword.
The original cart as I remember carried enough iBooks for a classroom, plus airport (I don't remember if it had a printer). This is a kickass concept, it kept the iBooks secure and recharged, and it is really easy to move the whole thing to a different classroom.
This could easily work in a small business scenario. My company has 12 employees and everybody is on macs except myself. They issued me a Compaq but within a month I have purchased my own iBook, and the Compaq is used as a server. I am always worried that it is just too easy for somebody to grab one of the LCD iMacs and walk away from the office without anyone noticing. Once I started carrying the iBook to all my meetings the other employees started whining that they wanted iBooks too, but I told the powers-that-be that I am not going to trust these people with remembering to chain their iBooks to their desks whenever they were not at their offices.
A cart like this would rock, since at the end of the day I could pick each iBook as I leave the office and lock it in the cart. Next morning I know all the iBooks will be safe and charged, so no distractions with people chasing for open power plugs 5 minutes into a meeting just because they forgot to recharge their iBooks.
Using PDF on a Windows platform is a royal pain in the ass! I never thought about it because I was always thinking I was just unlucky that whenever I needed to open a PDF, the PC would not have Acrobat reader installed. This went on for many years.
Then I started using SuSe 8, and pretty much everywhere you go there is PDF this and PDF that. And with no dramatics. It just works.
Now I am switched to Mac, and PDF on OS X 10.2 works perfectly. It's one less thing I need to think of because I can count on it working every time. Print to PDF (Linux has it too) pretty much rocks.
How many times have you thought before downloading a PDF because you did not think it would be worth the hassle to try to open it?
75% of the Windows laptops I have been assigned over the last 5 years have had that "feature."
Yes, feature. In each case the builder added little stickers and tray icons saying how it had a "power saving feature" that slows down the CPU to save battery power. The tray icon points to an applet that controls what triggers the speed drop.
The biggest offenders in my case where IBM and Toshiba. Neither could play a full DVD. I remember one specific instance that the battery died right at the intermission for 2001: A Space Odyssey!
My 600 MHz iBook on OS X 10.2 has this kind of feature in the system preferences, but as far as I can tell it defaults to full power. You would have to specifically set it to cut performance to save power. And I can watch a whole DVD without sweating it out.
You sir are completely correct. It takes an idiot to recommend dynamic sql over a stored procedure on a SQL Server 2000. Portability my ass, after you buy a license for SQL Server 2000 on a server farm you are not going to scrape it off and move on to Oracle, so all that crap about portability is an old scare tactic by Oracle.
.net app kept the stored procedures the results would have been much more embarrassing.
I spent a long miserable year building asp apps and being forced to use dynamic sql because my company was an Oracle shop and they were counting on charging the customer more a few months down the road to move up to Oracle. Once one of our high profile products started to choke under load so they let us switch to stored procedures. We had pages that used to load in 50+ seconds that as once switched to stored procedures started loading in 5. That's a 1000% improvement. The day I walked away from that job I promised myself that any and all future work I do on a SQL server environment is going to exploit stored procedures and user functions, portability be damned.
Read the PDF, the Java folks had plenty of chances to rewrite their stuff. Had the second version of the
Don't just blame draconian ops, it is more of an act of desperation. In undernet we take so much crap from kiddies that 99% of the time happen to be coming from .ro, simpatico.ca (its so bad we call them simpaticrap, go figure), .no and .mx . I have personally banned .mx and .ro temporarily a few times from #asp on undernet because once a kiddie puts his/her mind into making you miserable it will take minutes to max out the ban list. Only reason we cannot ban .no and .ca is that too many innocent people will get hit.
I got mine while it was still @home. The technician told me not to install any of the software that @home sent me. I had their service until their demise and I am now on Comcast. Comcast does not force me to install anything but they force you to install an activex control if you want to use their support website.
It could save a lot of time to asp programmers. Instead of taking an html template and adding asp code to pull the recordset and loop thru it, you can do this:
1. Put your query in an xml file and drop it into the xml gateway folder at the iis server. This xml file is tiny, since it only holds the query and a link to the xsl.
2. Use XSL to make your template.
3. Done!
It drives me crazy that with the incredible talent behind Debian the install process is such a pain. Installing Suse, Mandrake and RH are not harder to install than installing Windows XP or OS X. Installing freeBSD is confusing until you find a few hours after you think you mastered sysinstall a kind soul at a bsd chatroom tells you to use the ports instead.
Installing Debian (or Gentoo) is just too damn confusing. I admire what Debian and Gentoo are aiming for, but they need to come up with a no-hassle installer.