Hi, my name's Brent, I'm a developer, and I'm migrating from Windows to Linux. ("Hi, Brent.") About a month and a half ago, I got fed up with the intricacies of Active Directory and Exchange 2003's wacko registry keys, and decided to ditch it all.
I'd tried Linux every year or so, but the installation process kept turning me away. I couldn't find a distro that worked out of the box with my IBM Thinkpad T21 (strange video card running 1400x1050, and integrated 3com Hurricane ethernet card that isn't supported anymore.) This time, I decided I was going to make the switch no matter what.
Over the course of two weekends, I tried every distro I could find and had nothing but problems. My video card setup was particularly problematic: I just wanted dual head video with one video card, two flat panels. Most distributions just stubbornly refused to work out of the box. I contacted a lot of Linux users in my area via IRC, and nobody had the time (even though I was offering great money) to come set it up for me.
Out of desperation, I shelled out $90 for the downloadable version of Xandros, figuring that since it came with Crossover Office, it'd probably be worth the money.
Wow. It was. Among other things, Xandros detected the ATI video card out of the box, eventually got dual head video working, and the user interface is pretty straightforward. It still couldn't handle the onboard Ethernet on the Thinkpad, but I've given up on that laptop by now.
Here's the punch line: users leaving Windows don't care about the window manager. They don't care whether it's Gnome or KDE. We want an easy transition, and we're willing to pay good money for it. We don't want a *BETTER* user interface - if we did, we'd buy Macs. We just want to do the same things we're doing more, but more reliably and more securely. People who argue about whether Xandros is copying Windows are missing the point. They got my $90. If I could do it all over again, the only thing I would have done is bought Xandros earlier in the process.
Y! News doesn't use asp. Keen observers will notice this.
Yeah, but keen observers will notice the url spoofing anyway.
A more obvious bit is that Y! says "Welcome, Guest" instead of "Welcome, Anonymous" when a user is not logged in.
I actually copied the entire page from 'em back in September 2003, and that was what it had at the time. I should redo another version of it with a few different news service skins to make it really convincing, but bah.
And as long as we're nit-picking, you really won't like the Google ads I just slapped into there, hahaha. Figured if I'm getting this many hits I should probably bait a hook.
What a great business model. You cant sell CD's because there nothing good coming out these days, and they are drastically over priced. So to stay economically viable you sue everyone. This way you dont havet to pay the artist and keep the money for yourself.
Well, I'm definitely not one to defend the RIAA, but if your argument was really true (that nothing good is coming out these days and the current stuff is overpriced), then I should be allowed to steal Corvettes, right? After all, the new ones are ugly, and they don't make the old ones anymore, so hey, I should be able to steal new ones and old ones alike.
Ah, right you are. Fixed that by saving the remote visitor's IP address and grabbing their most recent submission. Never had to deal with 10-15 visitors a second before. Hooah!
Heh heh heh - time to dust off my fake RIAA lawsuit press release to scare your friends with. It's a press release ripped off Yahoo, but you can fill in your friend's name and occupation to generate an official-looking link. Tell them you saw their name in the press release, and watch 'em drop their coffee. The link to turn themselves down at the end of the article clues them in that they've been had. Generate a personalized link at http://www.brentozar.com/breakingnews/.
Last time I published this on Slashdot, a few people got fooled so badly they sent me threatening emails. Hee hee... Of course, last time, I didn't get near the top of the postings, so my server didn't get much of a load. I can almost hear the DSL line screaming in protest as I click Submit.
Oddly, I only had to change the date and a couple of numbers. The other headlines on the page still ring true as current: rebuilding Iraq, SCO's salvation, and the flash mob craze.
It's like suing a library because I went to look for say McDonalds and found that Burger King also sells hamburgers.
A better analogy is that you opened the phone book's white pages to look up McDonald's, and saw a Burger King ad right next to the McDonald's listing.
In the Yellow Pages, a commercial directory, you clearly expect to find businesses advertised by category. In the White Pages, customers are listed by name instead. AXA is trying to say that Google should limit itself to being a white pages index of the web, which is rubbish.
Developing tons of web sites for a web design company under customer deadlines while trying to produce a profit is stressful.
Developing and maintaining a single large web site for a large non-profit or non-IT organization is markedly less stressful.
No matter what you're doing, the stress goes up when you're dealing with external customer deadlines, pointy-headed-bosses that constantly change project scope, and the urgency to sell stuff fast or perish. Conversely, if you have the luxury of being an internal developer for a stable company whose main focus isn't actually IT, things get more predictable and stable. I'm not saying there's no stress at non-IT companies, I'm just saying it's a lot worse when you're the guy whose work pays the checks for the rest of the staff.
If you're working for an IT company, consider your next job at a non-IT company, like non-profit organizations, city government, services companies, etc. The money's usually lower, but the pace is slower, the demands are more lax, and you don't have the stress of trying to put bread on other people's plates by the merits of your own coding.
...according to their specs sheet (PDF warning), this stuff has a boiling point of 49.2C (120.6F). Processors burn hotter than that, how useful would it still be for cooling purposes if it were a gas?
If they're using it to put out fires, it's a safe bet that it can handle your Athlon.
That kind of culture explains why Toyota was first to market with a profitable hybrid car, and why they're so far ahead that Ford's licensing hybrid technology from them.
Here's the missing link that doesn't get publicized: automakers are ahead of the curve on robots because they use robotics extensively in assembly. The more accurately their robots move, the more accurately they assemble cars. Next time you wonder why Japanese cars have a reputation for being so well-built, think of projects like these.
Don't call it a comeback, I've been here for years.
Well, and as long as you're quoting that particular song, you should quote the line that applies to the many fun times I had trying to get Mandrake to properly recognize my Thinkpad's wireless network card and video adapter:
For the price of one software engineer for a year (call it 50k to 100k burdened labor rate), I can buy between 20 to 100 new PCs (at $1000 to $3000 each).
Sure, but who's going to install 20 to 100 new PC's? Remember, you'll also need another piece of wetware (a network engineer) to move everyone's data from the old PC's to the new PC's, so your argument is less powerful.
Everybody's going the wrong way with this. Hide them in plain sight.
Get a cheap 2-way radio and run a cable into the headphone jack. Make it look like the earpiece going into your ear is going into the radio. Bonus points for busting open the radio and hiding the iRiver inside it, thereby also hiding the iRiver. Nobody will ask why you've got a 2-way radio clipped to your belt - even Gap workers have them these days, for crying out loud.
The editorial points mostly at Microsoft's failed offerings like MSN and Xbox, saying that the 80% profit numbers for Windows and Office can only sustain the failed products as long as Windows and Office remain profitable. It suggests that Linux and GPL'ed office products will erode that 80% profit number.
The "failed" products aren't a problem: that's exactly what big business is supposed to do. When you've got a product or two that bring in tons of money, you throw lots of money around trying to invent other moneymakers. You know that your main product or two will eventually run dry: that's no surprise, and that's why you continue to throw money at other ideas trying to come up with the next big moneymaker.
Most of these other sideline products (MSN, Xbox, smart phones) will fail. But that's not unexpected: most small businesses and startups fail. This is what big businesses do: fund R&D trying to come up with the Next Big Thing to replace their current revenue stream.
It's the same thing Microsoft did with Office: initially, they were an OS-only company. They got into Office because they needed to diversify, just like every big business did. Office started as a pretty crummy product that got routinely spanked by both WordPerfect and Lotus. But given enough time and enough money, Office became a profit machine. Microsoft is actually pretty lucky to have two dynamo products in the market at once.
Think of MS like 3M: could 3M survive simply by producing Post-It Notes? No, they have a huge amount of diversity and R&D running to find the Next Big Thing. The more products you throw at the market, the more chances you have of staying power.
5.0 isn't out yet - it's a development tree. That's like saying MS SQL Server has C#-based stored procedures - it will, in the next version, but the current public version does not.
I used Java stored procedures a lot back when I was...
Just FYI - MySQL still doesn't support stored procedures, let alone Java inside stored procedures. Seems like MySQL is trying to run before it's gotten the walking thing down yet.
The reason for getting excited is that you can get these for $10 each. Walgreens expects that you'll return them to get your pictures "processed", and then they'll turn around and sell the cameras again to somebody else.
$10 for a camera that shoots 1280x1024 plus has a flash certainly isn't bad - but then you're going to rack up the expense of a SmartMedia socket, soldering, the memory card, and optionally, your own soldered USB connection. Even if you figure $40-$50 worth of materials, it's not a bad deal, if you can settle for its washed-out colors.
you should be using XML for all the data and then XSLT + CSS for the style.
The suggested redesign isn't for buzzword compliance or increased functionality - it's to reduce bandwidth. XML + XSLT + CSS would produce the opposite effect, despite its arguable cool factor.
Slashdot Mirror
Hi, my name's Brent, I'm a developer, and I'm migrating from Windows to Linux. ("Hi, Brent.") About a month and a half ago, I got fed up with the intricacies of Active Directory and Exchange 2003's wacko registry keys, and decided to ditch it all.
I'd tried Linux every year or so, but the installation process kept turning me away. I couldn't find a distro that worked out of the box with my IBM Thinkpad T21 (strange video card running 1400x1050, and integrated 3com Hurricane ethernet card that isn't supported anymore.) This time, I decided I was going to make the switch no matter what.
Over the course of two weekends, I tried every distro I could find and had nothing but problems. My video card setup was particularly problematic: I just wanted dual head video with one video card, two flat panels. Most distributions just stubbornly refused to work out of the box. I contacted a lot of Linux users in my area via IRC, and nobody had the time (even though I was offering great money) to come set it up for me.
Out of desperation, I shelled out $90 for the downloadable version of Xandros, figuring that since it came with Crossover Office, it'd probably be worth the money.
Wow. It was. Among other things, Xandros detected the ATI video card out of the box, eventually got dual head video working, and the user interface is pretty straightforward. It still couldn't handle the onboard Ethernet on the Thinkpad, but I've given up on that laptop by now.
Here's the punch line: users leaving Windows don't care about the window manager. They don't care whether it's Gnome or KDE. We want an easy transition, and we're willing to pay good money for it. We don't want a *BETTER* user interface - if we did, we'd buy Macs. We just want to do the same things we're doing more, but more reliably and more securely. People who argue about whether Xandros is copying Windows are missing the point. They got my $90. If I could do it all over again, the only thing I would have done is bought Xandros earlier in the process.
Ever see people driving down the street with their radio so loud their car buzzes. They're pretty cool right?
It also explains why I yell at those morons to "Chill out!", they just turn the volume up even louder.
Y! News doesn't use asp. Keen observers will notice this.
Yeah, but keen observers will notice the url spoofing anyway.
A more obvious bit is that Y! says "Welcome, Guest" instead of "Welcome, Anonymous" when a user is not logged in.
I actually copied the entire page from 'em back in September 2003, and that was what it had at the time. I should redo another version of it with a few different news service skins to make it really convincing, but bah.
And as long as we're nit-picking, you really won't like the Google ads I just slapped into there, hahaha. Figured if I'm getting this many hits I should probably bait a hook.
What a great business model. You cant sell CD's because there nothing good coming out these days, and they are drastically over priced. So to stay economically viable you sue everyone. This way you dont havet to pay the artist and keep the money for yourself.
Well, I'm definitely not one to defend the RIAA, but if your argument was really true (that nothing good is coming out these days and the current stuff is overpriced), then I should be allowed to steal Corvettes, right? After all, the new ones are ugly, and they don't make the old ones anymore, so hey, I should be able to steal new ones and old ones alike.
Apparently that recent patch that blocked URL spoofing disallows all addresses with username:password@domain.
Doh! I've added new verbage on the link page explaining that, and threw in a new link that's not as official-looking, but will work with IE6 users.
Ah, right you are. Fixed that by saving the remote visitor's IP address and grabbing their most recent submission. Never had to deal with 10-15 visitors a second before. Hooah!
Heh heh heh - time to dust off my fake RIAA lawsuit press release to scare your friends with. It's a press release ripped off Yahoo, but you can fill in your friend's name and occupation to generate an official-looking link. Tell them you saw their name in the press release, and watch 'em drop their coffee. The link to turn themselves down at the end of the article clues them in that they've been had. Generate a personalized link at http://www.brentozar.com/breakingnews/.
Last time I published this on Slashdot, a few people got fooled so badly they sent me threatening emails. Hee hee... Of course, last time, I didn't get near the top of the postings, so my server didn't get much of a load. I can almost hear the DSL line screaming in protest as I click Submit.
Oddly, I only had to change the date and a couple of numbers. The other headlines on the page still ring true as current: rebuilding Iraq, SCO's salvation, and the flash mob craze.
It's like suing a library because I went to look for say McDonalds and found that Burger King also sells hamburgers.
A better analogy is that you opened the phone book's white pages to look up McDonald's, and saw a Burger King ad right next to the McDonald's listing.
In the Yellow Pages, a commercial directory, you clearly expect to find businesses advertised by category. In the White Pages, customers are listed by name instead. AXA is trying to say that Google should limit itself to being a white pages index of the web, which is rubbish.
Developing tons of web sites for a web design company under customer deadlines while trying to produce a profit is stressful.
Developing and maintaining a single large web site for a large non-profit or non-IT organization is markedly less stressful.
No matter what you're doing, the stress goes up when you're dealing with external customer deadlines, pointy-headed-bosses that constantly change project scope, and the urgency to sell stuff fast or perish. Conversely, if you have the luxury of being an internal developer for a stable company whose main focus isn't actually IT, things get more predictable and stable. I'm not saying there's no stress at non-IT companies, I'm just saying it's a lot worse when you're the guy whose work pays the checks for the rest of the staff.
If you're working for an IT company, consider your next job at a non-IT company, like non-profit organizations, city government, services companies, etc. The money's usually lower, but the pace is slower, the demands are more lax, and you don't have the stress of trying to put bread on other people's plates by the merits of your own coding.
The moral to me is to distrust Baystar as a potential investment partner.
You needed more reasons than their investment in SCO?
If it supports SIP, it's not obvious from their downloads. Their ISOs haven't been updated since 2002...
...according to their specs sheet (PDF warning), this stuff has a boiling point of 49.2C (120.6F). Processors burn hotter than that, how useful would it still be for cooling purposes if it were a gas?
If they're using it to put out fires, it's a safe bet that it can handle your Athlon.
If they're targeting it for fire prevention applications, not industrial cooling, then you can bet it's pretty pricey.
After all, 3M's not stupid: they price things correctly. These are the guys behind the Post-It Note.
This opens up a bunch of things now.
No, actually, it closes a bunch of them.
Does this mean I can't let people share my wireless connection, for instance,
If you're talking about your cordless phone, then yes.
The decision means total support for the local monopoly, which is sad indeed.
No, it means total support for the national monopoly. It means a lack of support for anything local, period.
That kind of culture explains why Toyota was first to market with a profitable hybrid car, and why they're so far ahead that Ford's licensing hybrid technology from them.
Here's the missing link that doesn't get publicized: automakers are ahead of the curve on robots because they use robotics extensively in assembly. The more accurately their robots move, the more accurately they assemble cars. Next time you wonder why Japanese cars have a reputation for being so well-built, think of projects like these.
Don't call it a comeback, I've been here for years.
Well, and as long as you're quoting that particular song, you should quote the line that applies to the many fun times I had trying to get Mandrake to properly recognize my Thinkpad's wireless network card and video adapter:
Makin the tears rain down like a monsoon
- SetSlower is a procedure that reduces the speed
- SetsLower is a function that gets a lower bound in a set of sets
Ah! That explains why Java is so slow - everybody keeps using the wrong one, eh? I've always wondered what the deal is.
Why not get some very small solid rocket engines and put them facing in all directions on this thing.....They are also pretty cheap.
Great idea! Duct tape $5 bottle rockets all over the rover! That'll definitely decrease its chances of failure. Brilliant!
You wouldn't happen to work in the European Space Agency, would you?
For the price of one software engineer for a year (call it 50k to 100k burdened labor rate), I can buy between 20 to 100 new PCs (at $1000 to $3000 each).
Sure, but who's going to install 20 to 100 new PC's? Remember, you'll also need another piece of wetware (a network engineer) to move everyone's data from the old PC's to the new PC's, so your argument is less powerful.
Everybody's going the wrong way with this. Hide them in plain sight. Get a cheap 2-way radio and run a cable into the headphone jack. Make it look like the earpiece going into your ear is going into the radio. Bonus points for busting open the radio and hiding the iRiver inside it, thereby also hiding the iRiver. Nobody will ask why you've got a 2-way radio clipped to your belt - even Gap workers have them these days, for crying out loud.
The editorial points mostly at Microsoft's failed offerings like MSN and Xbox, saying that the 80% profit numbers for Windows and Office can only sustain the failed products as long as Windows and Office remain profitable. It suggests that Linux and GPL'ed office products will erode that 80% profit number.
The "failed" products aren't a problem: that's exactly what big business is supposed to do. When you've got a product or two that bring in tons of money, you throw lots of money around trying to invent other moneymakers. You know that your main product or two will eventually run dry: that's no surprise, and that's why you continue to throw money at other ideas trying to come up with the next big moneymaker.
Most of these other sideline products (MSN, Xbox, smart phones) will fail. But that's not unexpected: most small businesses and startups fail. This is what big businesses do: fund R&D trying to come up with the Next Big Thing to replace their current revenue stream.
It's the same thing Microsoft did with Office: initially, they were an OS-only company. They got into Office because they needed to diversify, just like every big business did. Office started as a pretty crummy product that got routinely spanked by both WordPerfect and Lotus. But given enough time and enough money, Office became a profit machine. Microsoft is actually pretty lucky to have two dynamo products in the market at once.
Think of MS like 3M: could 3M survive simply by producing Post-It Notes? No, they have a huge amount of diversity and R&D running to find the Next Big Thing. The more products you throw at the market, the more chances you have of staying power.
Stored Procedures are in 5.0.
5.0 isn't out yet - it's a development tree. That's like saying MS SQL Server has C#-based stored procedures - it will, in the next version, but the current public version does not.
I used Java stored procedures a lot back when I was...
Just FYI - MySQL still doesn't support stored procedures, let alone Java inside stored procedures. Seems like MySQL is trying to run before it's gotten the walking thing down yet.
The reason for getting excited is that you can get these for $10 each. Walgreens expects that you'll return them to get your pictures "processed", and then they'll turn around and sell the cameras again to somebody else.
$10 for a camera that shoots 1280x1024 plus has a flash certainly isn't bad - but then you're going to rack up the expense of a SmartMedia socket, soldering, the memory card, and optionally, your own soldered USB connection. Even if you figure $40-$50 worth of materials, it's not a bad deal, if you can settle for its washed-out colors.
you should be using XML for all the data and then XSLT + CSS for the style.
The suggested redesign isn't for buzzword compliance or increased functionality - it's to reduce bandwidth. XML + XSLT + CSS would produce the opposite effect, despite its arguable cool factor.