Not that silly. I bought my car for the color. Three lots had five cars with the exact same loadoat i was looking for, but they were all too uptight and WASPy in color. I found a bright blue one and shelled out more money because of it (also v. low mileage and perfect interior).
Of course, the big difference here is that people actually see my car. Most companies bury their mainframe where noone will ever find it, like that alone makes it unhackable.
When I run a Fortune 500 company, we're going to have a huge bulletproof glass floor in the lobby, which will show the datacenter below. The mainframe will be a giant art deco brown and white unit with a large glowing red dome, a la HARDAC. If that doesn't impress the shareholders, I don't know what will.
It is not a myth: Most digital cameras have a very slow reaction time, including fairly higher end cameras.
Maybe. But that won't be true in five years. I bought a fuji cam two years ago with a hideous wait. My new fuji cam has a wait that's a hair better than my 35 mm's wind. In five years, every cam on the market will have the features of my current cam.
Most digital cameras spend a hefty amount of time writing each image to memory.
My new fuji does 5 fps, and their top end does a lot more than that. Furthermore, it has a massive cache, so you can take pictures while it's saving to the card. And the save isn't that long.
Image fidelity is far more than simply "number of pixels": Even amongst the best digital cameras there are some concerns about their colour reproduction. With a roll of Kodak film a cheapo 35mm has damn close to perfect colour and linearity.
Uh, no. Film still has a lot of issues with color. Take three rolls of different makes of film, take pictures on three of the same camera in the same light of the same object, you'll get vastly different shots. That's not perfect colour. Most of your old cheap digitals still have a ways to go in any but the best light, this is due to their effective sensitivity. Many top end and middle end have a sensitivity that's pretty decent, with Canon's being around 800 and Fuji offering a 1600 with decreased res. Check out images.dasmegabyte.org; many of those shots have great colour and those were taken with a 2 year old cam (everything past the 20020920 folder is with the new one). The Maine photos especially are awesome...with great focus and prescision. Beat my wife's 35 mm ten times over.
Most digitals aren't SLR. This absolutely kills them for anything but play.
Actually, most digitals ARE SLR -- use the lcd! My fuji has a sperate, hooded LCD instead of a standard eyepiece; this increases battery life and allows for a lot of features most film cams can't provide, such as a special zoom window for checking focus and easy to use menus in a "heads up" situation. Light meter gauge allows you to sync exposure perfectly with the histogram of the current image, etc.
Most digitals have fixed lenses. This absolutely kills them for anything but play.
True. But they're some great effing lenses, mate. The 10X lens Sony's putting on their high end is amazing, and with telefoto and wide angle attachments (which do fit it) it's really all the camera you need. And if you've already got a bunch of lenses, buy a "commerical" unit. There are a dozen that have removable lenses, some for under $1000.
So you've got no argument, really. Get a Fuji S602, $600 at buydig.com, and stop strutting your 35mm. For all but the most purity minded artists, it's a dying medium.
It's all more videophone sillyness. Very low res, no focus, bad optics, no imaging options, 14kbit on most lines outside of huge cities, what's the point? I can take and email much nicer photos just fine with iPhoto and a real camera. This video cell phone thing is yet another attempt to catch star eyed gadgeteers in a trap of mediocrity for the sake of modularity. "The essence of a thing in its purest and most concentrated form?" Concentrated, maybe. Pure? Not half.
This is almost as dumb as "wireless web." WML sucks, guys. It's even more confusing that the regular web's interface, and 40% of people don't understand that. Combine it with the size limit on WML pages (1400 bytes is the max through tmobile's gateway, and the goddamn XML headers take up 100. Hell, this post wouldn't sneak in under 1300 characters!) and you've got a confusing, bland interface with no real data. Hardly the killer app that's going to change the world.
Give me a cell phone with no dumb games, a nice address book, sizable buttons, a clean look with no precarious plastic, plug & play USB interface that works with mac/linux/palm/pocketpc, and a phone plan that doesn't try to put its tongue in my ear every time I do something interesting and you'll have solved the cell phone puzzle. I'll gladly give you my $40 per month.
Sounds like a lot of work and heartache. I don't know about you, but I'm a busy man and that guy is a stupid asshole. Where I come from, we call meaningless lawsuits provoked by stupid assholes who have no chance of winning "barratry," and we usually recoup a few grand whenever it happens.
Oh, and I'm a CEO too. I'm just CEO of webslum, though, so I get to wear Carharrt jackets with the long underwear sewn in, and not a polyester sportcoat. Plus I can do my taxes without a team of husky CPAs.
Seriously, if you're going to go with a free, open source, slow p2p network with nobody on it, try freenet. At least if you get caught they can't prove anything.
Also, we need to remove mute buttons. They enable people to steal TV without viewing the commercials as per the contract.
And friends who hum new songs. They're breaking the encoding of the cd using a psychoacoustic matric, which violates the DMCA.
Oh, and bad reviews! They're stealing money by giving away how dumb so many things are nowadays. Need to put them in prison with the rapists, murderers, bank robbers, jewlery theives and anybody who doesn't like Ashcroft's haircut.
Don't! DON'T. Don't run winipcfg! I will hate you for the rest of your life!
Well, hopefully the office of the future won't be running windows 98, but considering MS' track record for security with new versions, it may be better off to simply release retro operating systems...
And ironically, I just got my new 3.1 MP Fuji S602 yesterday. *sigh, you really can't be top of the line very long, can you?
Anyway, I'm convinced that CCD cameras are dead. Nail in the coffin. Dead. Increaseing the pel count isn't going to fix what's wrong with digicam resolution: moire effects, off color pixels thrown everywhere in low light, low sensitivity (usually around ISO 400 or less; my camera has ISO 1600 capability but only at 1 MP -- 1280x800), fuzzy edges in precision shots due to the particulars of the CCD itself (red and blue sensors are necesarily half a pixel away from each other, meaning to get a truly sharp sample you have to divide the res by 4 (2x sampling)).
Which is why my next $2000 camera is going to have a Foveon sensor. See http://www.dpreview.com/news/0202/02021102foveonx3 tech.asp for a technology overview slideshow. See some of the best digital pictures in the world for the proof that's inside that pudding. Of course, I'm still damn satisfied with my Fuji and its 3.1 MP ccd, 6MP output,.76 effective accurate resolution camera.
Besides the FUD (both MS and IBM are sellers of massively overpowered SQL servers), there's good reason to warn customers about MySQL. It's still a toy -- it can't scale for shit, has trouble optimizing queries and setting up multiple indexes and transactions are a huge performance hit. This is the point at which someone mentions a good DBA is already optimizing the queries. I would like to point out that a company trying to avoid paying $2-$20,000 on a SQL server license don't have the $60k+ to pay a good DBA.
Some consultants are no doubt going to tout to companies the impressiveness of MySQL and hook them on it for its value without telling them that it's not as scalable. Which would mean costly conversion in the future to one of the other database systems, which could have been avoided by just using them in the first place.
I am not a fan of MS, but SQL Server is an impressive piece of software. I've dealt with it my entire career, while running mysql and postgres at home. I would never deliver a product based on MySQL to an F500, or any company that's going to do more with their database than manage a small ebusiness server.
Postgres, on the other hand, is very full featured and a joy to work with.
This isn't to say that MySQL doesn't work for your web log, your cd database, your employee info database or your company wide contact system with SOAP front end. It's to say that I wouldn't trust it with any data I needed 100% responsive and 100% reliable.
I'm studying secondary ed for english and have an MA in linguistics and I have no problem with kids using whatever form of language they like, from vapid mall talk to gruff hiphop dialects and abbreviated chat room speech, as long as they understand the reason for different forms of speech.
Speech forms are a function of society, and should by no means ever be considered set in stone or appropriate. If you bring your patent office speech out to the skate park, you're going to get beat, because in this group the accepted form of speech is "lazy." As a more simplified example, try speaking without appreviations for a day...use CAN NOT and AM NOT and WILL NOT. Watch the strange looks you get.
I think the problem here is that kids aren't necessarily realizing the difference, and this is going to get them into trouble in the business/real world. There are some simple adjustments one can make in ones' speech which make it more neutral, and once made it's amazing how one can fit in and avoid a lot of unfortunate situations.
It's the role of the schools to teach students this neutral speech (they'll pick up street languages on their own). It is not the school's job to "break habits" a person picks up to help them exist. If abbreviating "Your" to "Ur" makes a person enjoy writing more, establish a voice and express themselves well, I have no problem with letting them do so -- as long as they can use a neutral form when required to do so (say, in a formal writing assignment).
NDAs generally prevent you from talking to people OUTSIDE a beta group about the product. Little prevents you from talking to others in the group about it.
The GPL guarantees copyleft to the "community" and availability of source to customers. As long as the beta members can get the source are free to share their changes to the source with other members of the beta group, they've maintained these rights, NDA or no. And UL doesn't have to worry about supporting a thousand different takes on a hundred different betas -- or about unfair reviews based on "stolen," partially working prereleases of their distro.
I've read the GPL a couple times, and have never gotten the perception that it prevented a company from preserving its right to sell a product and not offer Joe Q. Hacker full rights to recompile the source. As long as actual customers have rights to source, and a forum for sharing updates, I think there can be "closed" projects that maintain the GPL.
Dude, the HuCard games for my TurboGraphix were on cards. Tiny little things...they liked to pick up legs when my other Turbo friends would come over. And they worked great...never had to blow on them or put them in new carts like genesis and Nintendo games.
What's amazing is that the technology is so CHEAP you can do this with a trading card set.
That's because fatties could prevent their plight. Cigarette smokers, addicts and drunks are parodied for the same reason.
Please don't feed me an "oh its really hard" line. I know it is. It's also essential. I'd love to balloon above my normally 30 lbs overweight stature...i love to eat...but I don't love dying early.
Because it means they want to make us obsolete to increase the margins of rich idiots. And it won't save that much money, in the long run, from well run companies.
When I first came to this company, we had something like 20 IT employees. Through "attrition" (read: fire X, Y quits) we're down to 4. Every time somebody left, the remaining folks would write a script to automate what the other guy spent most of the day doing...watching servers for spikes and resetting them, etc.
Did it save us from hiring new people? Our HR department will tell you it did, but it's untrue. The fact is the turnaround time for IT requests has become abyssmal. Adding new segments to our network takes much much longer -- to the point that a new code base for email took 2 people six months to analyze deployment options and deploy, and only took me three weeks to write.
Customers are leaving, siting huge turn arounds for new features and fixes, and we're blaming it on our support dept. Support is fine -- they get requests to us fast. Deployment...well, it could take weeks even to get cosmetic changes through.
Can you imagine the additional testing you'd have to perform before changing a truly autonomous server? And how can you be sure that the self healing server is really healthy, or just not noticing the problem?
As self centered as expecting everybody to agree with your own moral standing against omivorous evolution?
Sorry, not to be rude, but I feel vegetarianism with a cause is a worse pain than religious fundamentalism. I mean, you only die once (Hindus excepted) but you eat three to seven times a day. I used to get a lecture every time I'd eat when I lived with a PETA vegan, which is why I evolved the ability to enjoy meatless meals -- they were delivered without nagging.
At the same time, saying you won't come to an event because of the menu is pretty damn antisocial. A few of my friends teased they'd toss off early for a steak, and I accepted this when we made the meal plan. I even refused my wife's relent to allow shrimp cocktail. I sort of wish I hadn't -- the menu is my only regret. Well, the menu and the hotel we stayed in the first night. Paper thin walls, mate.
You know, this is an interesting point. A lot of the plots we find refreshing and original in all fiction are, at their heart, boring rehashes. There just aren't that many effective actions anymore; if there's no rape, murder or suicide, it will take a lot more skill to get us callous viewers to care. However, the motivations of the characters are what makes everything seem refreshing. A man killing another man in rage is hackneyed, as is a man killing another for money. But a man killing another man for money, but who must pretend it was rage when caught to protect his employer, is a different plot entirely. And the difference of motivation need not be so complex...a simple juxtaposition of expected roles can make a plot seem refreshing as well -- I'm thinking of the surprise turn in Sixth Sense, which was refreshing even if it was predictable.
Villains who are out for something besides pride, money or power are difficult to craft but make a plot so much more interesting. I like me a villain who doesn't consider himself one (and who, from a point of view, might not be...i'm talking Castro here, not Hitler), or a hero who wonders if he's working for the right cause.
The trick of course is making all the characters act in ways that aren't typical to their typecast. Han Solo was original when he was written, when it became apparent he was truly in love with Leia and not merely a womanizer. Twenty years later I can't believe Hayden Christiansen, because his affair is almost a crystaline structure of love and war. There is no believable resistance to his affair with Padme. But of course, that may just be my own callousness and lack of disbelief through seven years of literary study.
I wonder how these films look to my brother, who at 13 has yet to be inundated with cliche Sci-Fi?
Oh, and if you're a vegetarian inviting your non-vegetarian friends to a potluck/buffet, make sure to cook up something with meat in it for us.
"Gross," you say? Not I. My wedding was meatless to appease my poseur vegetarian wife (a poseur vegetarian being someone who looks down a menu past all the delicious meat dishes and orders a boring vegetarian entree, despite not being a vegetarian. Or one who says "Ew, bacon!" and then eats it anyway. Or any "vegetarian" who eats chicken wings / fried catfish / filet mignon because they "miss it sometimes"). I invited four other vegetarians, all of whom really enjoyed themselves on some fantastic cusisine the caterers pulled out (frankly, I think they were excited to to have something to cook besides bland swedish meatballs and little wieners in shells). I thought the food was fantastic, but hardly anybody ate any of it. Of some 100 portions, nearly 60 were left at the end. My dad & some of my friends snuck out to a burger place midway through the reception.
Talk about embarrassing! Furthermore, people ate a lot more cake than they usually do -- meaning that there was only one slice left to save for the aniversary.
Meat satisfies, people, as much as I hate to admit it. If you can't stand cooking it, get somebody else to do it.
Those question marks? Each represents a subtle Unicode punctuation character that slashcode decided would be better served as itallicized query.
God, proper guestimation of unrepresentable characters is the first thing I learned when I started doing data transformation. Em spaces become regular spaces, not question marks. Same with "smart" quotes and long dashes.
Branding doesn't even work on companies that make money, advertise and have an image. But certification might work, with certain provisos.
Consider: the biggest asset to Open Source is that anybody can fix a bug. The biggest liability is that nobody is under any influence to fix it...especially if it's something minor affecting only one customer.
If OSS certification means you know enough about the codebase to be able to go in, find the problem, repair it, and get props for the company by uploading the fix, it'll be more than worth it. Consultants could charge more because there would be a valid benchmark to their resume's assertion that they "know the code inside and out." Companies would have the peace of mind much needed in OSS. And everybody keeps their freedom.
An OSS Certification program -- with $5000 for a skill audit by core developers -- could be a very valuable thing. The JBoss brand, however, is kind of worthless. Just ask all those people who stare at the cute little Postgres Elephant logo on my server and then ask for MySQL anyway. Gay dolphin...
You know, this is actually pretty cheap. I had no idea how inexpensive this was...I thought Fraunhaufer & Co were taking a percentage of your company's profits a la Unisys, or a per song cost. $.75 per player is nothing...I have a dozen players, hardware & software alike, and they all amount to under $10. Not bad, considering how great the technology behind MP3 is.
Sure, they're profiteering, but they're profiteering off of a format they helped produce and thought to patent. MP3 encoding isn't exactly no duh stuff like hyperlinks or LZW compression (which is essentially a really fast look up table). And sure, there's Ogg, but I don't like the sound as much and my consumer devices don't support it.
You can bitch and moan about how this will kill mp3, but I think it's obvious nothing will kill MP3 -- the technology is too widely supported. What it means, though, is that GPL'd and other free decoders are going to have to ammend the license to be sure Fraunhoffer gets its money. This is a perfect time to test whether or not the GPL can play nice in the IP pool.
$200 per hour consultants -- guys on standards committees driving Excursions whose weblogs are actually _READ_ -- are perceived as writing better code than us $20 per hour pissants.
End result? Well, both applications look the same and feature set, but the latter should have fewer bugs, be more reliable, and a cleaner interface. The two are nowhere near the same end product.
Think of the this like a car sale. The Audi S4 quattro is an all wheel drive car burning 240 hp. The Subaru WRX is a lighter all wheel drive car burning 227 hp, gets about.4 better in the quarter mile, and costs thousands less. But the Audi is perceived by most car buffs, myself included, as the better car. Why? There's less plastic on the inside. The leather is nicer. The engine is quieter while idling and louder at full boost. The doors shut with a delightful muted crunch, rather than the slam effect of the Subaru. And the controls are much more intuitive...
I run into the same thing all the time where I work. I'm the $20 jr, working with some "past their prime" fellas. When I do something, there's a good chance it'll be fast and great, and an equal chance it'll be buggy and not work. I jump for the brass ring and have been known to bit off more than I can chew. My expensive peers always aim low, take their time, overestimate, take lunch rather than caffeine it: and the result is, their stuff passes QA while mine languishes.
Not all the high bidding is "perception of value." Some of it is insurance of value.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh no! Anonymous Coward has been revealed as our mild manner Network Ops guy!
Please don't do this to the SNAP servers!
Not that silly. I bought my car for the color. Three lots had five cars with the exact same loadoat i was looking for, but they were all too uptight and WASPy in color. I found a bright blue one and shelled out more money because of it (also v. low mileage and perfect interior).
Of course, the big difference here is that people actually see my car. Most companies bury their mainframe where noone will ever find it, like that alone makes it unhackable.
When I run a Fortune 500 company, we're going to have a huge bulletproof glass floor in the lobby, which will show the datacenter below. The mainframe will be a giant art deco brown and white unit with a large glowing red dome, a la HARDAC. If that doesn't impress the shareholders, I don't know what will.
It is not a myth: Most digital cameras have a very slow reaction time, including fairly higher end cameras.
Maybe. But that won't be true in five years. I bought a fuji cam two years ago with a hideous wait. My new fuji cam has a wait that's a hair better than my 35 mm's wind. In five years, every cam on the market will have the features of my current cam.
Most digital cameras spend a hefty amount of time writing each image to memory.
My new fuji does 5 fps, and their top end does a lot more than that. Furthermore, it has a massive cache, so you can take pictures while it's saving to the card. And the save isn't that long.
Image fidelity is far more than simply "number of pixels": Even amongst the best digital cameras there are some concerns about their colour reproduction. With a roll of Kodak film a cheapo 35mm has damn close to perfect colour and linearity.
Uh, no. Film still has a lot of issues with color. Take three rolls of different makes of film, take pictures on three of the same camera in the same light of the same object, you'll get vastly different shots. That's not perfect colour. Most of your old cheap digitals still have a ways to go in any but the best light, this is due to their effective sensitivity. Many top end and middle end have a sensitivity that's pretty decent, with Canon's being around 800 and Fuji offering a 1600 with decreased res. Check out images.dasmegabyte.org; many of those shots have great colour and those were taken with a 2 year old cam (everything past the 20020920 folder is with the new one). The Maine photos especially are awesome...with great focus and prescision. Beat my wife's 35 mm ten times over.
Most digitals aren't SLR. This absolutely kills them for anything but play.
Actually, most digitals ARE SLR -- use the lcd! My fuji has a sperate, hooded LCD instead of a standard eyepiece; this increases battery life and allows for a lot of features most film cams can't provide, such as a special zoom window for checking focus and easy to use menus in a "heads up" situation. Light meter gauge allows you to sync exposure perfectly with the histogram of the current image, etc.
Most digitals have fixed lenses. This absolutely kills them for anything but play.
True. But they're some great effing lenses, mate. The 10X lens Sony's putting on their high end is amazing, and with telefoto and wide angle attachments (which do fit it) it's really all the camera you need. And if you've already got a bunch of lenses, buy a "commerical" unit. There are a dozen that have removable lenses, some for under $1000.
So you've got no argument, really. Get a Fuji S602, $600 at buydig.com, and stop strutting your 35mm. For all but the most purity minded artists, it's a dying medium.
It's all more videophone sillyness. Very low res, no focus, bad optics, no imaging options, 14kbit on most lines outside of huge cities, what's the point? I can take and email much nicer photos just fine with iPhoto and a real camera. This video cell phone thing is yet another attempt to catch star eyed gadgeteers in a trap of mediocrity for the sake of modularity. "The essence of a thing in its purest and most concentrated form?" Concentrated, maybe. Pure? Not half.
This is almost as dumb as "wireless web." WML sucks, guys. It's even more confusing that the regular web's interface, and 40% of people don't understand that. Combine it with the size limit on WML pages (1400 bytes is the max through tmobile's gateway, and the goddamn XML headers take up 100. Hell, this post wouldn't sneak in under 1300 characters!) and you've got a confusing, bland interface with no real data. Hardly the killer app that's going to change the world.
Give me a cell phone with no dumb games, a nice address book, sizable buttons, a clean look with no precarious plastic, plug & play USB interface that works with mac/linux/palm/pocketpc, and a phone plan that doesn't try to put its tongue in my ear every time I do something interesting and you'll have solved the cell phone puzzle. I'll gladly give you my $40 per month.
Sounds like a lot of work and heartache. I don't know about you, but I'm a busy man and that guy is a stupid asshole. Where I come from, we call meaningless lawsuits provoked by stupid assholes who have no chance of winning "barratry," and we usually recoup a few grand whenever it happens.
Oh, and I'm a CEO too. I'm just CEO of webslum, though, so I get to wear Carharrt jackets with the long underwear sewn in, and not a polyester sportcoat. Plus I can do my taxes without a team of husky CPAs.
And used by nearly 7 people.
Seriously, if you're going to go with a free, open source, slow p2p network with nobody on it, try freenet. At least if you get caught they can't prove anything.
Also, we need to remove mute buttons. They enable people to steal TV without viewing the commercials as per the contract.
And friends who hum new songs. They're breaking the encoding of the cd using a psychoacoustic matric, which violates the DMCA.
Oh, and bad reviews! They're stealing money by giving away how dumb so many things are nowadays. Need to put them in prison with the rapists, murderers, bank robbers, jewlery theives and anybody who doesn't like Ashcroft's haircut.
Don't! DON'T. Don't run winipcfg! I will hate you for the rest of your life!
Well, hopefully the office of the future won't be running windows 98, but considering MS' track record for security with new versions, it may be better off to simply release retro operating systems...
And ironically, I just got my new 3.1 MP Fuji S602 yesterday. *sigh, you really can't be top of the line very long, can you?
3 tech.asp for a technology overview slideshow. See some of the best digital pictures in the world for the proof that's inside that pudding. Of course, I'm still damn satisfied with my Fuji and its 3.1 MP ccd, 6MP output, .76 effective accurate resolution camera.
Anyway, I'm convinced that CCD cameras are dead. Nail in the coffin. Dead. Increaseing the pel count isn't going to fix what's wrong with digicam resolution: moire effects, off color pixels thrown everywhere in low light, low sensitivity (usually around ISO 400 or less; my camera has ISO 1600 capability but only at 1 MP -- 1280x800), fuzzy edges in precision shots due to the particulars of the CCD itself (red and blue sensors are necesarily half a pixel away from each other, meaning to get a truly sharp sample you have to divide the res by 4 (2x sampling)).
Which is why my next $2000 camera is going to have a Foveon sensor. See http://www.dpreview.com/news/0202/02021102foveonx
Besides the FUD (both MS and IBM are sellers of massively overpowered SQL servers), there's good reason to warn customers about MySQL. It's still a toy -- it can't scale for shit, has trouble optimizing queries and setting up multiple indexes and transactions are a huge performance hit. This is the point at which someone mentions a good DBA is already optimizing the queries. I would like to point out that a company trying to avoid paying $2-$20,000 on a SQL server license don't have the $60k+ to pay a good DBA.
Some consultants are no doubt going to tout to companies the impressiveness of MySQL and hook them on it for its value without telling them that it's not as scalable. Which would mean costly conversion in the future to one of the other database systems, which could have been avoided by just using them in the first place.
I am not a fan of MS, but SQL Server is an impressive piece of software. I've dealt with it my entire career, while running mysql and postgres at home. I would never deliver a product based on MySQL to an F500, or any company that's going to do more with their database than manage a small ebusiness server.
Postgres, on the other hand, is very full featured and a joy to work with.
This isn't to say that MySQL doesn't work for your web log, your cd database, your employee info database or your company wide contact system with SOAP front end. It's to say that I wouldn't trust it with any data I needed 100% responsive and 100% reliable.
I'm studying secondary ed for english and have an MA in linguistics and I have no problem with kids using whatever form of language they like, from vapid mall talk to gruff hiphop dialects and abbreviated chat room speech, as long as they understand the reason for different forms of speech.
Speech forms are a function of society, and should by no means ever be considered set in stone or appropriate. If you bring your patent office speech out to the skate park, you're going to get beat, because in this group the accepted form of speech is "lazy." As a more simplified example, try speaking without appreviations for a day...use CAN NOT and AM NOT and WILL NOT. Watch the strange looks you get.
I think the problem here is that kids aren't necessarily realizing the difference, and this is going to get them into trouble in the business/real world. There are some simple adjustments one can make in ones' speech which make it more neutral, and once made it's amazing how one can fit in and avoid a lot of unfortunate situations.
It's the role of the schools to teach students this neutral speech (they'll pick up street languages on their own). It is not the school's job to "break habits" a person picks up to help them exist. If abbreviating "Your" to "Ur" makes a person enjoy writing more, establish a voice and express themselves well, I have no problem with letting them do so -- as long as they can use a neutral form when required to do so (say, in a formal writing assignment).
NDAs generally prevent you from talking to people OUTSIDE a beta group about the product. Little prevents you from talking to others in the group about it.
The GPL guarantees copyleft to the "community" and availability of source to customers. As long as the beta members can get the source are free to share their changes to the source with other members of the beta group, they've maintained these rights, NDA or no. And UL doesn't have to worry about supporting a thousand different takes on a hundred different betas -- or about unfair reviews based on "stolen," partially working prereleases of their distro.
I've read the GPL a couple times, and have never gotten the perception that it prevented a company from preserving its right to sell a product and not offer Joe Q. Hacker full rights to recompile the source. As long as actual customers have rights to source, and a forum for sharing updates, I think there can be "closed" projects that maintain the GPL.
"Technology's progressed."
Dude, the HuCard games for my TurboGraphix were on cards. Tiny little things...they liked to pick up legs when my other Turbo friends would come over. And they worked great...never had to blow on them or put them in new carts like genesis and Nintendo games.
What's amazing is that the technology is so CHEAP you can do this with a trading card set.
That's because fatties could prevent their plight. Cigarette smokers, addicts and drunks are parodied for the same reason.
Please don't feed me an "oh its really hard" line. I know it is. It's also essential. I'd love to balloon above my normally 30 lbs overweight stature...i love to eat...but I don't love dying early.
Because it means they want to make us obsolete to increase the margins of rich idiots. And it won't save that much money, in the long run, from well run companies.
When I first came to this company, we had something like 20 IT employees. Through "attrition" (read: fire X, Y quits) we're down to 4. Every time somebody left, the remaining folks would write a script to automate what the other guy spent most of the day doing...watching servers for spikes and resetting them, etc.
Did it save us from hiring new people? Our HR department will tell you it did, but it's untrue. The fact is the turnaround time for IT requests has become abyssmal. Adding new segments to our network takes much much longer -- to the point that a new code base for email took 2 people six months to analyze deployment options and deploy, and only took me three weeks to write.
Customers are leaving, siting huge turn arounds for new features and fixes, and we're blaming it on our support dept. Support is fine -- they get requests to us fast. Deployment...well, it could take weeks even to get cosmetic changes through.
Can you imagine the additional testing you'd have to perform before changing a truly autonomous server? And how can you be sure that the self healing server is really healthy, or just not noticing the problem?
Das no like-y. Bad medicine.
As self centered as expecting everybody to agree with your own moral standing against omivorous evolution?
Sorry, not to be rude, but I feel vegetarianism with a cause is a worse pain than religious fundamentalism. I mean, you only die once (Hindus excepted) but you eat three to seven times a day. I used to get a lecture every time I'd eat when I lived with a PETA vegan, which is why I evolved the ability to enjoy meatless meals -- they were delivered without nagging.
At the same time, saying you won't come to an event because of the menu is pretty damn antisocial. A few of my friends teased they'd toss off early for a steak, and I accepted this when we made the meal plan. I even refused my wife's relent to allow shrimp cocktail. I sort of wish I hadn't -- the menu is my only regret. Well, the menu and the hotel we stayed in the first night. Paper thin walls, mate.
You know, this is an interesting point. A lot of the plots we find refreshing and original in all fiction are, at their heart, boring rehashes. There just aren't that many effective actions anymore; if there's no rape, murder or suicide, it will take a lot more skill to get us callous viewers to care. However, the motivations of the characters are what makes everything seem refreshing. A man killing another man in rage is hackneyed, as is a man killing another for money. But a man killing another man for money, but who must pretend it was rage when caught to protect his employer, is a different plot entirely. And the difference of motivation need not be so complex...a simple juxtaposition of expected roles can make a plot seem refreshing as well -- I'm thinking of the surprise turn in Sixth Sense, which was refreshing even if it was predictable.
Villains who are out for something besides pride, money or power are difficult to craft but make a plot so much more interesting. I like me a villain who doesn't consider himself one (and who, from a point of view, might not be...i'm talking Castro here, not Hitler), or a hero who wonders if he's working for the right cause.
The trick of course is making all the characters act in ways that aren't typical to their typecast. Han Solo was original when he was written, when it became apparent he was truly in love with Leia and not merely a womanizer. Twenty years later I can't believe Hayden Christiansen, because his affair is almost a crystaline structure of love and war. There is no believable resistance to his affair with Padme. But of course, that may just be my own callousness and lack of disbelief through seven years of literary study.
I wonder how these films look to my brother, who at 13 has yet to be inundated with cliche Sci-Fi?
Oh, and if you're a vegetarian inviting your non-vegetarian friends to a potluck/buffet, make sure to cook up something with meat in it for us.
"Gross," you say? Not I. My wedding was meatless to appease my poseur vegetarian wife (a poseur vegetarian being someone who looks down a menu past all the delicious meat dishes and orders a boring vegetarian entree, despite not being a vegetarian. Or one who says "Ew, bacon!" and then eats it anyway. Or any "vegetarian" who eats chicken wings / fried catfish / filet mignon because they "miss it sometimes"). I invited four other vegetarians, all of whom really enjoyed themselves on some fantastic cusisine the caterers pulled out (frankly, I think they were excited to to have something to cook besides bland swedish meatballs and little wieners in shells). I thought the food was fantastic, but hardly anybody ate any of it. Of some 100 portions, nearly 60 were left at the end. My dad & some of my friends snuck out to a burger place midway through the reception.
Talk about embarrassing! Furthermore, people ate a lot more cake than they usually do -- meaning that there was only one slice left to save for the aniversary.
Meat satisfies, people, as much as I hate to admit it. If you can't stand cooking it, get somebody else to do it.
My rules to live by... if you're hungry, drink a glass of water, avoid eating after dinner, and never, ever eat before bed. Are you a mogwai?
For not properly reencoding his answers!
Those question marks? Each represents a subtle Unicode punctuation character that slashcode decided would be better served as itallicized query.
God, proper guestimation of unrepresentable characters is the first thing I learned when I started doing data transformation. Em spaces become regular spaces, not question marks. Same with "smart" quotes and long dashes.
Wow.
That is officially the geekiest post I've ever seen on slashdot. I didn't undestand a thing and it turns me on.
Branding doesn't even work on companies that make money, advertise and have an image. But certification might work, with certain provisos.
Consider: the biggest asset to Open Source is that anybody can fix a bug. The biggest liability is that nobody is under any influence to fix it...especially if it's something minor affecting only one customer.
If OSS certification means you know enough about the codebase to be able to go in, find the problem, repair it, and get props for the company by uploading the fix, it'll be more than worth it. Consultants could charge more because there would be a valid benchmark to their resume's assertion that they "know the code inside and out." Companies would have the peace of mind much needed in OSS. And everybody keeps their freedom.
An OSS Certification program -- with $5000 for a skill audit by core developers -- could be a very valuable thing. The JBoss brand, however, is kind of worthless. Just ask all those people who stare at the cute little Postgres Elephant logo on my server and then ask for MySQL anyway. Gay dolphin...
You know, this is actually pretty cheap. I had no idea how inexpensive this was...I thought Fraunhaufer & Co were taking a percentage of your company's profits a la Unisys, or a per song cost. $.75 per player is nothing...I have a dozen players, hardware & software alike, and they all amount to under $10. Not bad, considering how great the technology behind MP3 is.
Sure, they're profiteering, but they're profiteering off of a format they helped produce and thought to patent. MP3 encoding isn't exactly no duh stuff like hyperlinks or LZW compression (which is essentially a really fast look up table). And sure, there's Ogg, but I don't like the sound as much and my consumer devices don't support it.
You can bitch and moan about how this will kill mp3, but I think it's obvious nothing will kill MP3 -- the technology is too widely supported. What it means, though, is that GPL'd and other free decoders are going to have to ammend the license to be sure Fraunhoffer gets its money. This is a perfect time to test whether or not the GPL can play nice in the IP pool.
To think the entire thing is rendered useless by my wide use of ssl, ssh and Freenet.
But alas, maybe they'll catch a lot of really careless people.
$200 per hour consultants -- guys on standards committees driving Excursions whose weblogs are actually _READ_ -- are perceived as writing better code than us $20 per hour pissants.
.4 better in the quarter mile, and costs thousands less. But the Audi is perceived by most car buffs, myself included, as the better car. Why? There's less plastic on the inside. The leather is nicer. The engine is quieter while idling and louder at full boost. The doors shut with a delightful muted crunch, rather than the slam effect of the Subaru. And the controls are much more intuitive...
End result? Well, both applications look the same and feature set, but the latter should have fewer bugs, be more reliable, and a cleaner interface. The two are nowhere near the same end product.
Think of the this like a car sale. The Audi S4 quattro is an all wheel drive car burning 240 hp. The Subaru WRX is a lighter all wheel drive car burning 227 hp, gets about
I run into the same thing all the time where I work. I'm the $20 jr, working with some "past their prime" fellas. When I do something, there's a good chance it'll be fast and great, and an equal chance it'll be buggy and not work. I jump for the brass ring and have been known to bit off more than I can chew. My expensive peers always aim low, take their time, overestimate, take lunch rather than caffeine it: and the result is, their stuff passes QA while mine languishes.
Not all the high bidding is "perception of value." Some of it is insurance of value.