How many times have I been around when an electronic device has failed catastrophically (loud noise and smoke?) That is, when the failure has occurred for some reason other than something I was doing? Twenty? Fifty?
In none of these events did anything nearby catch fire. Fire extinguisher not needed, nothing required of me but the mourning of the dead device.
That creates the illusion that these are riskless non-events. But that's always the with risks. One of the reason why accidents happen: we start to ignore the near misses because experience seems to show that they are harmless.
Ever see what happens when the mechanism that turns off a toaster oven jams or fails? After a few minutes the continuous heating action of the elements causes the toast to outright catch fire. In another fraction of a minute, the flames from the burning toaster ignite the plastic components inside the toaster oven. At this point you have serious flames and clouds of black, evil-smelling smoke (that is probably not the healthiest stuff in the world to inhale). Now, suppose that toaster is on a kitchen counter underneath the edge of a wooden counter...
Chording keyboards hae been since the invention of the stenotype machine in the late 1800s, enabling those willing to master what the Ars Technica article calls a "steep learning curve" to attain speeds of 225 wpm or about three times the speed of a comparably skilled typist.
They were an integral part of Engelbart's conception--the mouse was intended for use with a five-key chording keyboard.
There is nothing about them that is very difficult or expensive to manufacture. (In fact, common sense says that all things being equal a device with a dozen or so buttons ought to cost less than one with a hundred).
This one must be about the tenth that's made it to the point of being manufactured and sold to the general PC-using public, several marketed at the height of concern about RSI with reasonable evidence that they would be less stressful to use than conventional keyboards.
None of 'em have ever come close to catching on.
Chalk up chording keyboards with leap-week calendars or decimal time or the Single Tax. Ain't gonna happen.
See this description. Amazon is just offering a raw service with an API for developers to use. Amazon does not provide a WebDAV or similar interface. So it's not ready for home users, just yet... which, at that price, is a pity.
So for now, don't dump your.Mac iDisk.
Undoubtedly we will see independent developers offering home and SOHO backup tools that use A3... and undoubtedly they'll mark up the price.
I don't think it's practical to give everyone a corner office, but everyone _could_ have a window.
In Peopleware, Tom DeMarco & Timothy Lister observe that work better in offices with windows. When this is pointed out, management usually says "sure, but it's impossible to give everyone a room with a window."
DeMarco and Lister's reply is that in fact every hotel in the world manages to do this.
I hate upgrades. They are never clearly described. In particularly, you can sometimes go from N to N+1 to N+2 with no problems whatsoever, only to discover whereas all of these ran fine in the system you have, N+3 may, without warning, suddenly up the ante on system requirements and may run glacially slow or require a RAM upgrade for decent performance.
What I hate worse--is that many vendors make it difficult or impossible to run old and new versions in parallel. It's not even unusual for a new software installation literally to search all of the mounted hard drives and remove all existing copies of the old version.
I tend to blame Microsoft for this, although it has spread to the point of becoming an industry custom (and has infected Apple). I believe it once had a technical origin of sorts in the inadequacies of MS-DOS, which led to the custom of software requiring patches and changes to the OS code itself, which in turn led to the rise of software distributions in which you couldn't simply copy an application... or an application and its directory tree... but had, instead, to run an "installer" program that went around merrily and selfishly making any changes to the OS that it thought it needed in order to give itself an environment in which it could run.
...because at the rate Microsoft keeps coming up with new and incompatible versions of VB, it seems a foregone conclusion that by the time you absorb the book and have Made Your Move Now from VB 6 to VB 2005, it will be time to buy VB Jumpstart 2006: Make Your Move Now from VB 2005 to 2006, and then VB Jumpstart 2007, VB Jumpstart 2008, etc.
For the lucky author, it gives a new meaning to the phrase.NET profit.
Now, Wikipedia doesn't make money, and it's far from worthless, but to a large extent it is the perfect example of the kind of reprocessed content Lee Gomes is describing. Being edited by dedicated volunteers, Wikipedia can "afford" to do this on a large scale.
Wikipedia articles tend to rank quite high in search results... and, being GFDL'ed, Wikipedia's articles are copied by dozens of other mirror sites.
The scary result of all this is that I want to check a fact or find independent confirmation of an item in a Wikipedia article, if the item has been there for more than a few months, I frequently find that when I do plausible searches on it, most or even all of the hits are the Wikipedia article itself and its mirrors. It is sometimes quite hard to find any independent sources for the information.
...I get so tired of big companies sponsoring genuinely interesting research, but never actually using the results. The research departments seem to be window-dressing or public relations or vanity.
This is unbelievable. If the plaintiff even comes close to succeeding, the public is so screwed.
It doesn't matter whether Brown lifted his ideas from an earlier book. Pope said, "True wit is nature to advantage dress'd/What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed."
It may be unfair to Baigent and Leigh that they did all the hard work--"invested a 'massive amount of their lives'researching the Holy Blood book between 1976 and 1981'"--and that Brown made all the money, by recasting their ideas into a more entertaining package. But writers have been doing that ever since Shakespeare cribbed Hakluyt.
Copyright protects the expression of ideas, not the idea themselves. And in the U.S., Feist v. Rural Service Telephone Co. established, in so many words, that in the U.S. copyright exists to reward "creative expression, not hard not hard work." I doubt that British law is all that different. I certainly hope not, because if stealing ideas is actionable, it will mean the end of literature as we know it. Nobody can write a novel without borrowing from the work of the past.
Seven's the magic number. Lucky Seven. Marketers usually have either three price points or seven. They must have planned for seven and then been forced to drop one. I wonder what the missing one was?
Let's see if I've got this right. First, they use a technology that isn't designed for voice to carry voice, knowing that it is a kludge that can only work properly when the network is unusually lightly loaded. Then, they complain that the use of the network in its intended purpose is interfering with their use of it for an unintended purpose.
Reminds me of people who buy houses near working farms and then expect the farmers to stop farming so they won't be offended by the smell associated with normal farm operations...
Circa 1985 and 1986, I used two lovely applications, Cricket Graph and DeltaGraph to create graphs and charts. Then Microsoft Excel came out. In my next three jobs, whenever I attempted to purchase graphing or charting software, my manager turned me down on the grounds that "Excel can do graphs and charts."
If they think practical applications in medical imaging and airport scanning are in the foreseeable, commercial future... well, if you can produce enough power to do that, you certainly can produce enough power to injure people.
...it was associated with sleazy dives in New Orleans. It didn't become mainstream and get taken seriously until they started calling it "Polyrhythmic improvisational music."
"Chess" was never taken seriously until they stopped calling it a game. It didn't take off until they started to call them "Combinatorial placement challenges."
"The movies" never caught the attention of serious critics. That's why, today, everybody calls them "Photoplays."
Yes, absolutely, what's important is not what it is, but what you call it.
The machine I built myself in high school out of approximately forty DPDT relays didn't count, because it didn't have any memory or any way to execute a program automatically. It was a five-bit binary adder and multiplier. But in order to make it multiply, I had to press about six buttons repeatedly in a predetermined sequence. I always figured eventually I would add some kind of clock and sequencer, but I never got around to it. By the time I got more than about a dozen relays, the train transformer I'd been using to power them no longer had enough power; my allowance didn't enable me to buy enough #6 Ignition dry cells; and my parents flatly refused to let me have a car battery.
GENIAC certainly didn't count, and neither the the "analog computer" with three potentiometers and a voltmeter that I got as a science kit.
The PDP-1 truly feels to me like it was "my" first computer, even though I had to share it with about a hundred other MIT undergraduates, and come in at 2 a.m. in the morning to get time. I used it mostly for programming, but also for what would now be called word processing (formatting with a program called TJ-2, and outputting in Flexowriters which had IBM electric-typewriter mechanism and produced what would later be called "letter-quality" output. No spreadsheets, but Expensive Desk Calculator was a lot more capable than most real desk calculators. No MIDI, but using Pete Samson's harmony compiler I coded up a few pieces of music and had the PDP-1 play them in four-part harmony.
Games? Spacewar, of course. And "flight simulator simulator." That was a byproduct of a real research project, which coupled the PDP-1 for human input (joysticks etc.) and display to an analog computer that did the real simulation heavy lifting. That was the "flight simulator." The guy who did it, Ray Tomlinson, knew that people enjoyed "flying" it so he made a "flight simulator simulator" in which the analog computer was replaced by a much simpler and less-realistic set of calculations made by the PDP-1 itself.
The first computer I personally owned and had in my home was a VIC-20. I don't have anything like the same depth of feeling for it that I have for the PDP-1, however. At about the time I bought the VIC-20, there was a gentleman who lived about a block away from me who was in Digital's AI group and they let him keep a real computer--I think it was might have been one of the original Microvaxes--in his house. I was green with envy.
It's par for the course in any controversial article. It's standard operating procedure. People on both sides try to apply "spin."
For any particular article, one hopes that there are a reasonable number of members of the Wikipedian community that have the article on their watchlist, and that genuinely agree with WIkipedia's policies on verifiability, source citation, and neutrality to keep things under control. One also hopes that the spinners have enough respect for Wikipedia's policy to understand that they need to cite sources instead of edit warring. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, and for any controversial article there's a significantly nonzero probability that at the moment you look at it, it has something in it that was inserted by a "point-of-view pusher."
Actually, I've contacted public relations offices of corporations, etc. with questions for articles I'm working on. As a matter of courtesy I always give the URL of the article I'm working on, and I always mention that they can edit the article themselves. I've always been a little surprised that they haven't attempted to take advantage of that, whether fairly or unfairly.
I don't really know whether WIkipedia "works." I do know if it can't tolerate (and neutralize) a little "spin" by congressional staffers, it can't work at all.
As Wikipedia becomes more and more useful to the public, I do worry about what I see as a discrepancy between what Wikipedia is and what the public thinks it is.
They'll conduct the exercise, discover that there are serious problems--just as every other evaluation of our cybersecurity has discovered. They'll make a report, the report will note that to fix things it would be necessary to spend money. And involve uncomfortable decisions like reducing our dependence on a monoculture of Microsoft Windows.
The decision-makers will decide (as they have so far about everything involving actual defensive measures involving the homeland that they would prefer to spend the money in some other way. They'll appoint yet another cyber defense "czar" as evidence of action, he will start with the clear understanding that the one thing he can't do is get the funding to implement the measures recommended in the report.
And when the actual attack happens and is devastating, they'll say nobody could have anticipated it.
If what you're interested in is just getting the job done, you can't beat VB... or RealBasic, which I'm partial to, since I do more of this kind of thing on the Mac, but it's not mainstream.
There are a lot of knocks on VB, but most of them are snobbery, pure and simple.
If you're interested in earning status with your developer peers, boosting your career, making your resume marketable... stay away from VB.
But if what you're interested in is just getting the job done, it's a good choice.
Postscript: do not let Microsoft's marketers fool you into thinking there's any similarity between Visual Basic and Visual C++. Visual C++ is not just Visual Basic with a different programming language component. I wish it were, or I wish they had a product like that.
VC++'s "visual" features are shallow, fragile, and paper-thin.
I don't understand why there should be hardware standby and sleep functions. The hardware should be provided with a means of reading and writing its entire state. When you power down, the contents of RAM and all the hardware state should get written to the hard drive. When you power up normally, instead of going through a lengthy boot process, it should read and restore the state the contents of RAM and the hardware state, and pick up where it left off.
Of course, that would require hardware to be designed... you know, like to a standard. But isn't that what WINHEC is supposed to be about.
All these sleep and standby functions are only there because it's easier to just keep the power on than to save and restore the state. Except... it apparently isn't that easy, because failure to wake from sleep is not uncommon.
How about the 20 gig disk drive that I removed when I bought the 120 gig, that was in perfect wording condition when it was removed?
Can a bag of old laundry that's not quite in good enough condition to donate to Goodwill be a useful satellite?
How about a Roto-tiller that works perfectly except for the deadman's switch and is therefore too dangerous to give away but too expensive to repair? A useful satellite?
How about a chocolate fondue fountain that someone gave me for Christmas? Useful? As a satellite?
NASA, just let me know which of them you'd like to test. I'll have them on their way via Fedex Ground tomorrow.
I didn't mean that their web page is well designed. I mean that their service is well designed. For example, the page has links to about twenty services that are all described in one word ("Weather," "Travel," "Maps") that are all things anyone might want and are all what you'd expect. (Except for "360", of course.) And they've got 'em all in the top left corner, where you'll see them even if your screen is 640x480.
Now, Geocities. I have a story about that. Years ago I ran out of space on the free webspace my ISP provided, so I unloaded some of it into Geocities. A couple of years later my ISP offered more space at a decent price, so I moved it back, and sort of forgot about my Geocities site. The other day I decided I really should clean it up... and I can't! Why? Because somewhere along the line, they discontinued FTP access to the free service! The free service still exists, and you can set up and edit a free site via a Web-based interface... but there is no provision whatsoever for getting to anything but the top-level directory! And, of course, my old Geocities site was a multilevel directory structure set up via FTP.
No, I'm not going to pay them for the privilege of deleting the content on my site.
Nonsense. In the late 1980s, Prodigy was using ads that were banner ads in every sense of the word. For all you young whippersnappers, this was before the days of the Internet and HTML. Prodigy used a protocol called, um, NAPHTHA? NABPLANALP? NAMBLA? NAFTA? Anyway, it used a highly compressed format to deliver graphics that looked like Tangrams over the blazing-fast 1200 bps modems that had recently become available.
It was a joint venture of IBM and Sears, and was marketed as being a highly family-friendly service. All content was rigidly controlled. Every posting was inspected and approved by a moderator, and off-topic posts were brutally deleted. Anything criticizing Prodigy, or the moderators (soon referred to as "Cato," as in Cato the Censor), was considered off-topic, of course. You could sometimes get off-color content past them, but only if you were a cunning linguist.
It was heavily commercial. The whole premise was getting people to buy stuff. Their attitude was sometimes characterized as "shut up and shop."
Anyway.
At the bottom of almost every Prodigy screen, there was a rectangular area. It was about an inch high and extended the width of the screen. It was brightly colored (garishly colored, many machines of the time being limited to 16 colors or so) to contrast with the rest of the screen, and decorated with eye-catching blocky NAPLPS (I knew I could remember it) graphics. All of them offered to take you somewhere where you could buy something if you clicked a button.
Slashdot Mirror
How many times have I been around when an electronic device has failed catastrophically (loud noise and smoke?) That is, when the failure has occurred for some reason other than something I was doing? Twenty? Fifty?
In none of these events did anything nearby catch fire. Fire extinguisher not needed, nothing required of me but the mourning of the dead device.
That creates the illusion that these are riskless non-events. But that's always the with risks. One of the reason why accidents happen: we start to ignore the near misses because experience seems to show that they are harmless.
Ever see what happens when the mechanism that turns off a toaster oven jams or fails? After a few minutes the continuous heating action of the elements causes the toast to outright catch fire. In another fraction of a minute, the flames from the burning toaster ignite the plastic components inside the toaster oven. At this point you have serious flames and clouds of black, evil-smelling smoke (that is probably not the healthiest stuff in the world to inhale). Now, suppose that toaster is on a kitchen counter underneath the edge of a wooden counter...
That's as far as I've seen things go....
Chording keyboards hae been since the invention of the stenotype machine in the late 1800s, enabling those willing to master what the Ars Technica article calls a "steep learning curve" to attain speeds of 225 wpm or about three times the speed of a comparably skilled typist.
They were an integral part of Engelbart's conception--the mouse was intended for use with a five-key chording keyboard.
There is nothing about them that is very difficult or expensive to manufacture. (In fact, common sense says that all things being equal a device with a dozen or so buttons ought to cost less than one with a hundred).
This one must be about the tenth that's made it to the point of being manufactured and sold to the general PC-using public, several marketed at the height of concern about RSI with reasonable evidence that they would be less stressful to use than conventional keyboards.
None of 'em have ever come close to catching on.
Chalk up chording keyboards with leap-week calendars or decimal time or the Single Tax. Ain't gonna happen.
See this description. Amazon is just offering a raw service with an API for developers to use. Amazon does not provide a WebDAV or similar interface. So it's not ready for home users, just yet... which, at that price, is a pity.
.Mac iDisk.
So for now, don't dump your
Undoubtedly we will see independent developers offering home and SOHO backup tools that use A3... and undoubtedly they'll mark up the price.
I don't think it's practical to give everyone a corner office, but everyone _could_ have a window.
In Peopleware, Tom DeMarco & Timothy Lister observe that work better in offices with windows. When this is pointed out, management usually says "sure, but it's impossible to give everyone a room with a window."
DeMarco and Lister's reply is that in fact every hotel in the world manages to do this.
I hate upgrades. They are never clearly described. In particularly, you can sometimes go from N to N+1 to N+2 with no problems whatsoever, only to discover whereas all of these ran fine in the system you have, N+3 may, without warning, suddenly up the ante on system requirements and may run glacially slow or require a RAM upgrade for decent performance.
What I hate worse--is that many vendors make it difficult or impossible to run old and new versions in parallel. It's not even unusual for a new software installation literally to search all of the mounted hard drives and remove all existing copies of the old version.
I tend to blame Microsoft for this, although it has spread to the point of becoming an industry custom (and has infected Apple). I believe it once had a technical origin of sorts in the inadequacies of MS-DOS, which led to the custom of software requiring patches and changes to the OS code itself, which in turn led to the rise of software distributions in which you couldn't simply copy an application... or an application and its directory tree... but had, instead, to run an "installer" program that went around merrily and selfishly making any changes to the OS that it thought it needed in order to give itself an environment in which it could run.
...because at the rate Microsoft keeps coming up with new and incompatible versions of VB, it seems a foregone conclusion that by the time you absorb the book and have Made Your Move Now from VB 6 to VB 2005, it will be time to buy VB Jumpstart 2006: Make Your Move Now from VB 2005 to 2006, and then VB Jumpstart 2007, VB Jumpstart 2008, etc.
.NET profit.
For the lucky author, it gives a new meaning to the phrase
I didn't see the green glowing radioactive chunk land on Bart's skateboard. Did I miss something? Or did Homer miss?
Now, Wikipedia doesn't make money, and it's far from worthless, but to a large extent it is the perfect example of the kind of reprocessed content Lee Gomes is describing. Being edited by dedicated volunteers, Wikipedia can "afford" to do this on a large scale.
Wikipedia articles tend to rank quite high in search results... and, being GFDL'ed, Wikipedia's articles are copied by dozens of other mirror sites.
The scary result of all this is that I want to check a fact or find independent confirmation of an item in a Wikipedia article, if the item has been there for more than a few months, I frequently find that when I do plausible searches on it, most or even all of the hits are the Wikipedia article itself and its mirrors. It is sometimes quite hard to find any independent sources for the information.
...I get so tired of big companies sponsoring genuinely interesting research, but never actually using the results. The research departments seem to be window-dressing or public relations or vanity.
Remember Xerox PARC?
This is unbelievable. If the plaintiff even comes close to succeeding, the public is so screwed.
It doesn't matter whether Brown lifted his ideas from an earlier book. Pope said, "True wit is nature to advantage dress'd/What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed."
It may be unfair to Baigent and Leigh that they did all the hard work--"invested a 'massive amount of their lives'researching the Holy Blood book between 1976 and 1981'"--and that Brown made all the money, by recasting their ideas into a more entertaining package. But writers have been doing that ever since Shakespeare cribbed Hakluyt.
Copyright protects the expression of ideas, not the idea themselves. And in the U.S., Feist v. Rural Service Telephone Co. established, in so many words, that in the U.S. copyright exists to reward "creative expression, not hard not hard work." I doubt that British law is all that different. I certainly hope not, because if stealing ideas is actionable, it will mean the end of literature as we know it. Nobody can write a novel without borrowing from the work of the past.
Seven's the magic number. Lucky Seven. Marketers usually have either three price points or seven. They must have planned for seven and then been forced to drop one. I wonder what the missing one was?
Any suggestions?
Doesn't the FCC have anything say in this? Aren't they supposed to be in charge of standards?
Wasn't it supposed to be a national priority to encourage people to adopt HDTV?
Let's see if I've got this right. First, they use a technology that isn't designed for voice to carry voice, knowing that it is a kludge that can only work properly when the network is unusually lightly loaded. Then, they complain that the use of the network in its intended purpose is interfering with their use of it for an unintended purpose.
Reminds me of people who buy houses near working farms and then expect the farmers to stop farming so they won't be offended by the smell associated with normal farm operations...
Circa 1985 and 1986, I used two lovely applications, Cricket Graph and DeltaGraph to create graphs and charts. Then Microsoft Excel came out. In my next three jobs, whenever I attempted to purchase graphing or charting software, my manager turned me down on the grounds that "Excel can do graphs and charts."
If they think practical applications in medical imaging and airport scanning are in the foreseeable, commercial future... well, if you can produce enough power to do that, you certainly can produce enough power to injure people.
...it was associated with sleazy dives in New Orleans. It didn't become mainstream and get taken seriously until they started calling it "Polyrhythmic improvisational music."
"Chess" was never taken seriously until they stopped calling it a game. It didn't take off until they started to call them "Combinatorial placement challenges."
"The movies" never caught the attention of serious critics. That's why, today, everybody calls them "Photoplays."
Yes, absolutely, what's important is not what it is, but what you call it.
Note: Irony.
The machine I built myself in high school out of approximately forty DPDT relays didn't count, because it didn't have any memory or any way to execute a program automatically. It was a five-bit binary adder and multiplier. But in order to make it multiply, I had to press about six buttons repeatedly in a predetermined sequence. I always figured eventually I would add some kind of clock and sequencer, but I never got around to it. By the time I got more than about a dozen relays, the train transformer I'd been using to power them no longer had enough power; my allowance didn't enable me to buy enough #6 Ignition dry cells; and my parents flatly refused to let me have a car battery.
GENIAC certainly didn't count, and neither the the "analog computer" with three potentiometers and a voltmeter that I got as a science kit.
The PDP-1 truly feels to me like it was "my" first computer, even though I had to share it with about a hundred other MIT undergraduates, and come in at 2 a.m. in the morning to get time. I used it mostly for programming, but also for what would now be called word processing (formatting with a program called TJ-2, and outputting in Flexowriters which had IBM electric-typewriter mechanism and produced what would later be called "letter-quality" output. No spreadsheets, but Expensive Desk Calculator was a lot more capable than most real desk calculators. No MIDI, but using Pete Samson's harmony compiler I coded up a few pieces of music and had the PDP-1 play them in four-part harmony.
Games? Spacewar, of course. And "flight simulator simulator." That was a byproduct of a real research project, which coupled the PDP-1 for human input (joysticks etc.) and display to an analog computer that did the real simulation heavy lifting. That was the "flight simulator." The guy who did it, Ray Tomlinson, knew that people enjoyed "flying" it so he made a "flight simulator simulator" in which the analog computer was replaced by a much simpler and less-realistic set of calculations made by the PDP-1 itself.
The first computer I personally owned and had in my home was a VIC-20. I don't have anything like the same depth of feeling for it that I have for the PDP-1, however. At about the time I bought the VIC-20, there was a gentleman who lived about a block away from me who was in Digital's AI group and they let him keep a real computer--I think it was might have been one of the original Microvaxes--in his house. I was green with envy.
It's par for the course in any controversial article. It's standard operating procedure. People on both sides try to apply "spin."
For any particular article, one hopes that there are a reasonable number of members of the Wikipedian community that have the article on their watchlist, and that genuinely agree with WIkipedia's policies on verifiability, source citation, and neutrality to keep things under control. One also hopes that the spinners have enough respect for Wikipedia's policy to understand that they need to cite sources instead of edit warring. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, and for any controversial article there's a significantly nonzero probability that at the moment you look at it, it has something in it that was inserted by a "point-of-view pusher."
Actually, I've contacted public relations offices of corporations, etc. with questions for articles I'm working on. As a matter of courtesy I always give the URL of the article I'm working on, and I always mention that they can edit the article themselves. I've always been a little surprised that they haven't attempted to take advantage of that, whether fairly or unfairly.
I don't really know whether WIkipedia "works." I do know if it can't tolerate (and neutralize) a little "spin" by congressional staffers, it can't work at all.
As Wikipedia becomes more and more useful to the public, I do worry about what I see as a discrepancy between what Wikipedia is and what the public thinks it is.
They'll conduct the exercise, discover that there are serious problems--just as every other evaluation of our cybersecurity has discovered. They'll make a report, the report will note that to fix things it would be necessary to spend money. And involve uncomfortable decisions like reducing our dependence on a monoculture of Microsoft Windows.
The decision-makers will decide (as they have so far about everything involving actual defensive measures involving the homeland that they would prefer to spend the money in some other way. They'll appoint yet another cyber defense "czar" as evidence of action, he will start with the clear understanding that the one thing he can't do is get the funding to implement the measures recommended in the report.
And when the actual attack happens and is devastating, they'll say nobody could have anticipated it.
See also Hurricane Pam
If what you're interested in is just getting the job done, you can't beat VB... or RealBasic, which I'm partial to, since I do more of this kind of thing on the Mac, but it's not mainstream.
There are a lot of knocks on VB, but most of them are snobbery, pure and simple.
If you're interested in earning status with your developer peers, boosting your career, making your resume marketable... stay away from VB.
But if what you're interested in is just getting the job done, it's a good choice.
Postscript: do not let Microsoft's marketers fool you into thinking there's any similarity between Visual Basic and Visual C++. Visual C++ is not just Visual Basic with a different programming language component. I wish it were, or I wish they had a product like that.
VC++'s "visual" features are shallow, fragile, and paper-thin.
I don't understand why there should be hardware standby and sleep functions. The hardware should be provided with a means of reading and writing its entire state. When you power down, the contents of RAM and all the hardware state should get written to the hard drive. When you power up normally, instead of going through a lengthy boot process, it should read and restore the state the contents of RAM and the hardware state, and pick up where it left off.
Of course, that would require hardware to be designed... you know, like to a standard. But isn't that what WINHEC is supposed to be about.
All these sleep and standby functions are only there because it's easier to just keep the power on than to save and restore the state. Except... it apparently isn't that easy, because failure to wake from sleep is not uncommon.
How about the 20 gig disk drive that I removed when I bought the 120 gig, that was in perfect wording condition when it was removed?
Can a bag of old laundry that's not quite in good enough condition to donate to Goodwill be a useful satellite?
How about a Roto-tiller that works perfectly except for the deadman's switch and is therefore too dangerous to give away but too expensive to repair? A useful satellite?
How about a chocolate fondue fountain that someone gave me for Christmas? Useful? As a satellite?
NASA, just let me know which of them you'd like to test. I'll have them on their way via Fedex Ground tomorrow.
...make books available for distribution, don't they?
I didn't mean that their web page is well designed. I mean that their service is well designed. For example, the page has links to about twenty services that are all described in one word ("Weather," "Travel," "Maps") that are all things anyone might want and are all what you'd expect. (Except for "360", of course.) And they've got 'em all in the top left corner, where you'll see them even if your screen is 640x480.
Now, Geocities. I have a story about that. Years ago I ran out of space on the free webspace my ISP provided, so I unloaded some of it into Geocities. A couple of years later my ISP offered more space at a decent price, so I moved it back, and sort of forgot about my Geocities site. The other day I decided I really should clean it up... and I can't! Why? Because somewhere along the line, they discontinued FTP access to the free service! The free service still exists, and you can set up and edit a free site via a Web-based interface... but there is no provision whatsoever for getting to anything but the top-level directory! And, of course, my old Geocities site was a multilevel directory structure set up via FTP.
No, I'm not going to pay them for the privilege of deleting the content on my site.
Nonsense. In the late 1980s, Prodigy was using ads that were banner ads in every sense of the word. For all you young whippersnappers, this was before the days of the Internet and HTML. Prodigy used a protocol called, um, NAPHTHA? NABPLANALP? NAMBLA? NAFTA? Anyway, it used a highly compressed format to deliver graphics that looked like Tangrams over the blazing-fast 1200 bps modems that had recently become available.
It was a joint venture of IBM and Sears, and was marketed as being a highly family-friendly service. All content was rigidly controlled. Every posting was inspected and approved by a moderator, and off-topic posts were brutally deleted. Anything criticizing Prodigy, or the moderators (soon referred to as "Cato," as in Cato the Censor), was considered off-topic, of course. You could sometimes get off-color content past them, but only if you were a cunning linguist.
It was heavily commercial. The whole premise was getting people to buy stuff. Their attitude was sometimes characterized as "shut up and shop."
Anyway.
At the bottom of almost every Prodigy screen, there was a rectangular area. It was about an inch high and extended the width of the screen. It was brightly colored (garishly colored, many machines of the time being limited to 16 colors or so) to contrast with the rest of the screen, and decorated with eye-catching blocky NAPLPS (I knew I could remember it) graphics. All of them offered to take you somewhere where you could buy something if you clicked a button.
They were exactly like banner ads.
They were banner ads.