I have used PostgreSQL, Sybase and MS SQL Server extensively.
Sybase is faster at properly indexed select statements than PostgreSQL (both are slower than MS SQL...sorry). Sybase offers two types of stored procedures languages (WATCOM and Transact) and the T-SQL is very nearly identical to MS SQL Server in terms of syntax and features (just watch your niladic functions and your join orders, Sybase can be sensitive about these, also it expects YYYY-MM-DD string date formats by default). It is much more robust than anything PostgreSQL has in this area. T-SQL is a more robust language than PostgreSQL, you don't have to use sequences (which could be good or bad) and you have a lot more options for triggers, views and cascading operations. Finally Sybase has incredible version compatibility...if you write a database for Sybase 7, you can relatively sure it'll work in 8 and 9. Postgres has a poor track record in this arena, at least on my server...we lost a customer because a minor version update broke our config for two days. That's a no-no.
I like PostgreSQL; I like it a lot. But it's no Sybase. And Sybase is no MS SQL Server. They are all better (in terms of stored procedures, complex queries, stability and tuned performance) than MySQL. Any of them are more than enough for what you need, but for my money, Sybase is the easiest to support. The command line tools are better than any of these, Sybase Central is crap compared to Enterprise Manager but it's still better as managing a SQL server than PGAdmin or some dumbass web client like PHPMyAdmin. They've maintained version compatibility so long that they're actually quite good at it; in fact, my only major gripe with Sybase is their Ole Driver, which last time I used it was more beta than beta. Also the resource governor, but you can work around that and it's a nice way to prevent older queries wasting your ram.
Oh, and the best thing about Sybase? It puts all the information about your database (tables, indexes, stored procedures, views, user functions, logins) into one file. Meaning that migrating the database to another server, even one on a different operating platform, is as easy as copying the file. I did this just last week...guy called asking if our system supported Linux servers. I installed Sybase on my Linux box, took a few seconds, copied my trusty db file and it worked. Slowly (P2 233), but it was identical to the same file running on Windows Server 2003.
Some of us don't feel the need to check our email whilst walking, or listen to mp3s on a phone. Some of us believe in that tireless old adage "The right tool for the right job." Still others of us don't have a lot of devices to carry...for me it's keys, ipod, wallet, phone stays in the car or on the desk or in my jacket pocket. I don't carry a palmtop because the input methods are invariably shite, don't carry a camera unless I intend to take pictures of things (and let's face it, camera phones take shitty pictures anyway, why waste the money) and I don't need retarded games or ringtones.
Am I anti-convergence? Fuck no, it's good to see people creating shitty devices that do too much, because it makes them appreciate the simple things in life. Like a phone that's just a phone, or a notebook that doesn't erase everything you're doing if your brother text messages you. Convergent devices are good things, they're just nothing I would ever want to own. I like to be able to USE the things I own.
I'm not going to read the article. I don't care about cell phones...I was reading the slashdot comments to see real users' perceptions of the thumboard input system (being an HID nerd) and discovered this lovely post talking about how cheap the thing is.
Call me old fashioned, but for a device that does everything the Blackberry purports to do, $400 is not all that much. $200 is embarrassingly cheap...meaning that there has to be a catch somewhere. This thing has a very set demand, so if they're able to sell it for so little, they must have skimped in the design process somewhere. Maybe the $199 is with a nine year contract, maybe they just reused a lot of code to reduce the cost...or maybe they skimped in a lot of areas. Either way, I'm sticking with my $75 for 4 phones Verizon deal -- because even though Verizon sucks, they're still better than everybody else in my area and at least I'm not paying a lot for the shitty service.
Sure. And at $13,000 I'd buy a BMW M3 in a second. But that's not what they cost.
Am I the only one who's sick of the "I'd buy it if it were half the price / a quarter of the price / a penny per megabyte" posts? God, shit's not cheap, man -- development, design and promotion cost money, and this attitude of not-paying-a-lot-for-that-muffler is why so many companies outsource all their development and manufacturing overseas.
Get it through your thick skulls, people. Shit isn't cheap to design or to produce. It shouldn't be cheap to buy. You do not need every new gadget that comes out. This attitude is only resulting in shoddy merchandise and people like me being unable to pay $300 for a sturdy, American made cell phone with a sensitive antenna and no useless features like email or cameras or ringtones that sound like Kiss songs. If people would stop griping about price and start saving up for what they really want, we'd all have better tech and maybe even better jobs.
Reminds me of that old Streisand line..."Nobody I know voted for Reagan."
Face it cats...a lot of people vote on integrity, not on issues. Republican supporters (I don't say "Bush" because I doubt he had anything to do with the Swift boat shit, that was purely the product of independent connizers) have called Kerry's integrity into question and painted Bush as a strong, moral everyman.
Unless Kerry gets his shit correct and starts acting like a leader, until he and his campaign stop calling fowl at every moronic attack on their candidate, until they find a message that rings true with people who just want to feel safe from the terrorist menace the Republican political machine has invented...he's in danger of losing.
He cried like a baby about the swift boat ads because they were full of lies, presented as the truth. Wouldn't you be pretty pissed off if somebody paid to slander you in a commercial?
I agree, though, that he should have railed the moveon.org shit, especially the comparison with Hitler. But to be honest, his campaign isn't very good at anything other than side remarks dissing Bush. He was doing much better in the primaries, I don't know what the fuck happened but if he doesn't tighten up, drop the apologetic rhetoric and ditch the losers, he's gonna lose this thing bigtime. Bush is turning this thing into a battle on Strength and Morality...two things Kerry has. Why he's letting Mary Beth Cahill paint him as a victim, I don't know. He's a soldier. Let him fight.
Hey, I don't even like electronic voting. I think it's a terrible idea, so no way in hell am I gonna work my ass off to promote it.
My point is that all of these "tsk they shoulda gone Open Source" posts are really short sighted. There was no option to go Open Source, because Open Source does not drive product development. Product development CAN drive Open Source, but there was no motivation among voting districts, tasked with the hassle of finding and replacing their currently useful equipment with "more secure" e-voting equipment, to wait four years and lose their budget just to get Open Source code -- something that these folks probably don't understand or even know exists.
I agree with you -- If somebody out there cares enough about Open Source and electronic voting software, they absolutely should get off their asses and do something about it. They did not. As a result, we get Diebold.
Maybe you're right. Personally, I think what government needs is a little less defense spending and a little more local programs...but how are you gonna spin THAT on the campaign trail? "Yeah, that whole War on Terror thing? It's not worth close to a trillian dollars (300 million per person who died in 9/11) for an initiative with unmeasurable success that seems to be decreasing the international opion of out nation. Let's take some of that cash and give it to the local guys, who might be able to use it for, you know, local cops, schools and programs to improve your conditions."
It's a lot easier to create a War on X. And maybe I shouldn't post this after six Coors.
I agree. Selling your boss on a cheaper solution with no commercial support is the hard way to job security. It will be cheaper for everybody in the long run to have a phone number you can call if and when something blows up. After all, most support contracts are a FRACTION of the development cost of one staff member per year, and pay for themselves the first time you don't know how to fix something.
I mean, going with cheaper paperclips is one thing. But cutting out the guys who know how to fix things is a good way to drive your plane into the ground.
(You're right...as a minor karma whore, I've noticed that what I consider to be a really insightful, interesting post is worthless if made too far down on a discussion or too late in the posting day. The secret? Reply to early +3 funny posts with completely unrelated insights. I'm not ashamed of my whoring; it's for the ancients)
If you want to change things for the better, get on Congress to come up with a better means of accounting for all of those tax dollars and managing their use. There is so much waste inherent in the system that has nothing to do with Democrats and Republicans, but with bean counters and spreadsheets.
This is a terrible idea. If we did this, my company couldn't sell software and consulting services to towns that have money allocated and no other use for it. We love these little windfalls...what's that Simpsons quote about a mule with a spinning wheel?
(J/k of course...my company is actually really good about only selling towns what they need and what we can offer. Government NEEDS software these days...hiring freezes and tiny budgets combined with increased regulations means the need for efficiency and the elimination of redundancy is huge. Joke about the inefficiency of government if you like...but when you have one full time guy managing all of the development regulations for a town of 15,000+ people, it's hard to be anything BUT inefficient.)
Then you're used to tweaking software before even considering that it might work. No wonder you're defending Debian.
(J/k...I use Gentoo at work and was surprised that Sybase 9 installed on it without a fuss and worked perfectly the first time. Unfortunately, said machine is a p2 233 and is like a secretary with an armful of papers when it comes to serving a database)
Problem was, at the time people were looking to pay for voting machines, there was not one mass produced machine with open source code.
Not one.
Do you even understand how government, especially local government, works?? You get the money once. It's a set sum, with an additional budget for maintenance and support. If you don't spend the money, it's gone. So you have to buy when you have it. You can't wait. You can't hope or wish. You have to pick a vendor and pay them and hope they do a good job, because the money won't be coming back if you wait too long.
Diebold had machines. People bought them because Diebold made big promises and nobody else had a decent machine for a fair price. Meanwhile, Open Source lost yet another battle due to a complete lack of understanding of how things work. If an OSS solution had been ready when the evoting money came in, and that solution was cheaper and backed by a solid company with a reputation and support staff, it would have won.
That didn't happen. Not because local government is stupid and doesn't understand open source, but because open source is nearsighted and reactionary and was not ready.
Why not flash? Well, considering how vulnerable flash memory of all types is to filesystem corruption if its read/write operations are interrupted, I'd much rather have the reliability of a hard drive. Should writes be interrupted, even for a second, you have the possibility of losing all of your data. This has happened to me dozens of times with various complact flash formats, operating systems and cameras, to the point that I wait a few seconds even after the read light has gone off before even considering removing a device.
My iPod and microdrive have NEVER given me this problem. And though yes, it is a user support issue, saving a single format cycle or support call makes it much cheaper in the long run to go with the small hard drive.
Who cares if the original programmers aren't getting a dime, man? Copyright isn't about that. Copyright is about ownership. The programmers sold their ownership rights in exchange for a paycheck. Some sold their ownership rights for a pittance. Some got a lot more than they probably should have. Point is, you can't base an argument against copyright on the fact that creators are "no longer" paid. If copyright law were intended only to pay creators on a per-work basis, copyright wouldn't be transferrable and artists (who are not by and large advertisers or salespeople) would be a lot worse off.
Yes, emulator users are only stealing from "corporations." But it's those corporations that pay for the games in the first damned place. Steal from them, remove the incentive for them to make money where they can, and they're less likely to finance the games you actually want to buy. Shit, we've already seen the death of Interplay and Acclaim this year...
That's mostly untrue. I've had comments modded up, or down, a week after I wrote them. And once the story's archived, your post is essentially carbonized for the ages...many times I search on google and find posts I wrote on Slashdot stories from 2001 and earlier. Spooky and worthless, but kind of neat...especially since my own blog articles at the time were destroyed in the Coming of the Curious Chinese Search Engine back in Aught One.
I disagree. Nostalgia would certainly exist in a vacuum, in fact nostalgia is fueled by a vacuum in the same way absence makes the heart grow fonder. Since it is nostalgia, not any inherent timeless nature, that sells these old games when many superior clones have done poorly, emulation and abandonware don't really have much of a leg to stand on. They are, indeed, reducing the commercial viability of these works. Honestly, who's gonna buy 50 Atari classics for $20 when you can download Every Atari Game Ever on a torrent for free?
Non geeks, is who. People like my dad who haven't played a game in twenty years, but used to rule the school at Pole Position.
Oh, I am in support of abandonware in cases where the company that originated the title is long since out of business and the ownership is questionable or non-existant. Who owns the rights to Coleco stuff these days (I know the rights to Intellivision went back to the Blue Sky Rangers), or Hudson Soft? Languishing in a corporate basement is one thing, somebody might dredge that up someday. Languishing nowhere in particular is another.
Eh, my local station (102.7 WEQX out of Vermont) is very, very good, they play new music before the ClearChannel stations, old favorites the CC wouldn't dare play because they weren't big enough hits and local and regional music you can't hear elsewhere. They even have long commercial free blocks, like 5 to 11 pm -- though I suspect it's because they were having trouble selling ads and that scares the shit out of me.
It would be a shame to see such a great station (a lot of people I know say it's the only station they will listen to) disappear because of crap like this MSN deal. Of course, I'm not too worried about it...MSN's clone stations, by nature, can only copy. Stations like WEQX get their following by doing new things, like Sunday's Download show (playing great music off new CDs you may never hear again because they have no budget for promotions). I would never take MSN over EQX...but I'd certainly take it over dumbass reactive pay-for-play ClearChannel stations.
I've often wondered if it would be possible to run a modern rock station on the same model as NPR/PRI affiliates, as an alternative to corporate rock that sucks or college rock that has no market and no antenna worth a damn. You know...commercial free rock picked by real DJs with good taste and skills on the mic, supported by bi-monthly fund drives...
What you mean to say, is that you've found an easy way to prove my point by disagreeing with me.
Thank you, AC.
Stream of consciousness writing is hardly evidence of poor debating skills -- Michael Herr's "Dispatches" is a good example of disjointed writing that illustrates important points. But mechanisms like the moderation system and the number of good writers willing to explain points in a different way serve to make disjointed viewpoints more accessible. Accessibility adds coherence to a good idea, because many people just aren't willing to read posts like yours. They take too much effort to parse, mentally, and so many readers rely on moderation and replies to show them what, subjectively, is worth reading. It would, indeed, be a good world where everybody would read everything regardless of style or content...but that's not going to happen.
Well, there are two problems addressed by an English class. The first is "How do I write?" The second is "What do I write about?"
Your assertion that merely teaching the first is a disservice is completely valid. However, it is far better to have students writing boring, but cogent works rather than an exciting mess. For one thing, many students are already good at writing interesting crud. For another, it's extremely difficult to teach creativity. Creativity is learned almost through osmosis...it is a function of how we process our experiences and other peoples' descriptions of them. As such, it's, well, complicated. The dumb rules of Hypotheses -- Three Strong Points -- Conclusion are pretty easy. Creativity, at least at the secondary level, is best suited to image poems, narratives and fiction, where the elements of style are more easily laid out.
Incidentally, people most definitely do teach creative essay writing, but generally at a college level. It takes years of practice in reading to understand what makes a good essay, and without this knowledge it's extremely difficult to write a good essay. Plus, if you're not into essays, even interesting ones like A Modest Proposal or The Rights of Man will seem dreadfully boring. Best to keep them out of the hands of the unskilled, lest they swear off literature for good.
Re:The problem I have with essays....
on
The Age of the Essay
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· Score: 4, Insightful
You're partially right. A bad essay is a point padded to fill a word limit.
A good essay is a point illustrated through insights, pruned to fill a word limit.
If you ever take a journalism or discourse class (and, if you ever plan to do any writing in any respect, you should), you will learn that a piece of writing is not done until you can take nothing else away without losing meaning.
Unfortunately, this is the opposite of what we learn in school up to this point -- assignments like "write an X page paper on beekeeping" train young writers that what matters is not the content but the length that's important. This perception tends to stick with people -- my wife, who writes reports as part of her work, starts writing by setting up her page limit, and then tries to fill that. Doesn't matter what form her language takes or how many leading sentences she uses, she has to fill her limit or she doesn't feel like she's done. And when she goes over the limit, she stresses out as well.
In a good discourse class, you learn to overwrite first. Plan for two or more pages to fill one page. Take out flimsy arguments, avoid needless soft language and remove obvious conclusions that don't prove your hypothesis. Of course, none of these would help you in a high school where the state board is looking for students to write a minimum of 40 pages per class per year -- only the most prolific fledgling authors could manage 80 pages and intense editing along with a normal courseload. I sure couldn't.
Academia aside, good language isn't about length. It's about coherence. Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was only 3 paragraphs long. It also doesn't address any single problem by name nor does it offer any solutions. If he had added those in there...he might have wound up with something like Castro's infamous marathon speeches...and still never left the point at hand.
The thing is, the people who are poor spellers, have poor grammar and who use poor organizational skills don't matter so much on the internet. Just like in the real world, people on the Internet detect the difference between a well thought out point and a bunch of mindless rambling based on the coherence of the argument. If your argument is well spelled out, understandable and flows organically from point to point, you'll get more links, more mod points, etc.
What the internet allows that the real world does not is a chance for people who aren't naturally good at organizing ideas to make themselves heard regardless. Many people who visit open forums like Slashdot et. al. are much better at explaining opinions than they are at making them...which is why so many highly moderated posts begin with "What I think you mean is," and so on. This means that poorly written posts that have valid points are not necessarily ignored...they are quite often embellished so that the validity of points raised by good thinker is strengthened by those who are good writers.
Incidentally, this bolstering of good ideas with good language is in my opinion the first step towards making an important viewpoint into a political lynchpin: finding a way to explain the viewpoint and the urgency of it in an understandable (if not completely accurate) way. Bush Jr has (some would say unfortunately) had great success in his political career due to the bolstering he receives from his speech writers -- lord knows he couldn't survive in an oratorical vacuum. Bush's camp almost seems to have take cues from the internet -- they've realized that not speaking perfect English is an easy way to get the common man to associate himself with you, even if you're a multi-millionaire oil baron and career politician who's a former coke fiend.
The point is: people who can't spell and can't write aren't a problem on the internet, because it's the internet and it offers a system of checks and balances that will quite often bury their points. You want to promote better English? Use it yourself and don't make it a point of elitism -- all that does is create a feeling of separatism that's not getting us a less abbreviated internet.
Slashdot Mirror
I have used PostgreSQL, Sybase and MS SQL Server extensively.
Sybase is faster at properly indexed select statements than PostgreSQL (both are slower than MS SQL...sorry). Sybase offers two types of stored procedures languages (WATCOM and Transact) and the T-SQL is very nearly identical to MS SQL Server in terms of syntax and features (just watch your niladic functions and your join orders, Sybase can be sensitive about these, also it expects YYYY-MM-DD string date formats by default). It is much more robust than anything PostgreSQL has in this area. T-SQL is a more robust language than PostgreSQL, you don't have to use sequences (which could be good or bad) and you have a lot more options for triggers, views and cascading operations. Finally Sybase has incredible version compatibility...if you write a database for Sybase 7, you can relatively sure it'll work in 8 and 9. Postgres has a poor track record in this arena, at least on my server...we lost a customer because a minor version update broke our config for two days. That's a no-no.
I like PostgreSQL; I like it a lot. But it's no Sybase. And Sybase is no MS SQL Server. They are all better (in terms of stored procedures, complex queries, stability and tuned performance) than MySQL. Any of them are more than enough for what you need, but for my money, Sybase is the easiest to support. The command line tools are better than any of these, Sybase Central is crap compared to Enterprise Manager but it's still better as managing a SQL server than PGAdmin or some dumbass web client like PHPMyAdmin. They've maintained version compatibility so long that they're actually quite good at it; in fact, my only major gripe with Sybase is their Ole Driver, which last time I used it was more beta than beta. Also the resource governor, but you can work around that and it's a nice way to prevent older queries wasting your ram.
Oh, and the best thing about Sybase? It puts all the information about your database (tables, indexes, stored procedures, views, user functions, logins) into one file. Meaning that migrating the database to another server, even one on a different operating platform, is as easy as copying the file. I did this just last week...guy called asking if our system supported Linux servers. I installed Sybase on my Linux box, took a few seconds, copied my trusty db file and it worked. Slowly (P2 233), but it was identical to the same file running on Windows Server 2003.
Some of us don't feel the need to check our email whilst walking, or listen to mp3s on a phone. Some of us believe in that tireless old adage "The right tool for the right job." Still others of us don't have a lot of devices to carry...for me it's keys, ipod, wallet, phone stays in the car or on the desk or in my jacket pocket. I don't carry a palmtop because the input methods are invariably shite, don't carry a camera unless I intend to take pictures of things (and let's face it, camera phones take shitty pictures anyway, why waste the money) and I don't need retarded games or ringtones.
Am I anti-convergence? Fuck no, it's good to see people creating shitty devices that do too much, because it makes them appreciate the simple things in life. Like a phone that's just a phone, or a notebook that doesn't erase everything you're doing if your brother text messages you. Convergent devices are good things, they're just nothing I would ever want to own. I like to be able to USE the things I own.
I'm not going to read the article. I don't care about cell phones...I was reading the slashdot comments to see real users' perceptions of the thumboard input system (being an HID nerd) and discovered this lovely post talking about how cheap the thing is.
Call me old fashioned, but for a device that does everything the Blackberry purports to do, $400 is not all that much. $200 is embarrassingly cheap...meaning that there has to be a catch somewhere. This thing has a very set demand, so if they're able to sell it for so little, they must have skimped in the design process somewhere. Maybe the $199 is with a nine year contract, maybe they just reused a lot of code to reduce the cost...or maybe they skimped in a lot of areas. Either way, I'm sticking with my $75 for 4 phones Verizon deal -- because even though Verizon sucks, they're still better than everybody else in my area and at least I'm not paying a lot for the shitty service.
Sure. And at $13,000 I'd buy a BMW M3 in a second. But that's not what they cost.
Am I the only one who's sick of the "I'd buy it if it were half the price / a quarter of the price / a penny per megabyte" posts? God, shit's not cheap, man -- development, design and promotion cost money, and this attitude of not-paying-a-lot-for-that-muffler is why so many companies outsource all their development and manufacturing overseas.
Get it through your thick skulls, people. Shit isn't cheap to design or to produce. It shouldn't be cheap to buy. You do not need every new gadget that comes out. This attitude is only resulting in shoddy merchandise and people like me being unable to pay $300 for a sturdy, American made cell phone with a sensitive antenna and no useless features like email or cameras or ringtones that sound like Kiss songs. If people would stop griping about price and start saving up for what they really want, we'd all have better tech and maybe even better jobs.
Well, Genesis has come crashing down. Note to NASA: this is not the time to resurrect the Saturn series of booster rockets.
I say Steve Jobs, without whom there would be no interfaces worth cloning...
Wow, I didn't know that. Meaning he probably should have been more vocal, but good for him anyway.
Reminds me of that old Streisand line..."Nobody I know voted for Reagan."
Face it cats...a lot of people vote on integrity, not on issues. Republican supporters (I don't say "Bush" because I doubt he had anything to do with the Swift boat shit, that was purely the product of independent connizers) have called Kerry's integrity into question and painted Bush as a strong, moral everyman.
Unless Kerry gets his shit correct and starts acting like a leader, until he and his campaign stop calling fowl at every moronic attack on their candidate, until they find a message that rings true with people who just want to feel safe from the terrorist menace the Republican political machine has invented...he's in danger of losing.
Even though Bush is a shitty president.
He cried like a baby about the swift boat ads because they were full of lies, presented as the truth. Wouldn't you be pretty pissed off if somebody paid to slander you in a commercial?
I agree, though, that he should have railed the moveon.org shit, especially the comparison with Hitler. But to be honest, his campaign isn't very good at anything other than side remarks dissing Bush. He was doing much better in the primaries, I don't know what the fuck happened but if he doesn't tighten up, drop the apologetic rhetoric and ditch the losers, he's gonna lose this thing bigtime. Bush is turning this thing into a battle on Strength and Morality...two things Kerry has. Why he's letting Mary Beth Cahill paint him as a victim, I don't know. He's a soldier. Let him fight.
Hey, I don't even like electronic voting. I think it's a terrible idea, so no way in hell am I gonna work my ass off to promote it.
My point is that all of these "tsk they shoulda gone Open Source" posts are really short sighted. There was no option to go Open Source, because Open Source does not drive product development. Product development CAN drive Open Source, but there was no motivation among voting districts, tasked with the hassle of finding and replacing their currently useful equipment with "more secure" e-voting equipment, to wait four years and lose their budget just to get Open Source code -- something that these folks probably don't understand or even know exists.
I agree with you -- If somebody out there cares enough about Open Source and electronic voting software, they absolutely should get off their asses and do something about it. They did not. As a result, we get Diebold.
Maybe you're right. Personally, I think what government needs is a little less defense spending and a little more local programs...but how are you gonna spin THAT on the campaign trail? "Yeah, that whole War on Terror thing? It's not worth close to a trillian dollars (300 million per person who died in 9/11) for an initiative with unmeasurable success that seems to be decreasing the international opion of out nation. Let's take some of that cash and give it to the local guys, who might be able to use it for, you know, local cops, schools and programs to improve your conditions."
It's a lot easier to create a War on X. And maybe I shouldn't post this after six Coors.
I agree. Selling your boss on a cheaper solution with no commercial support is the hard way to job security. It will be cheaper for everybody in the long run to have a phone number you can call if and when something blows up. After all, most support contracts are a FRACTION of the development cost of one staff member per year, and pay for themselves the first time you don't know how to fix something.
I mean, going with cheaper paperclips is one thing. But cutting out the guys who know how to fix things is a good way to drive your plane into the ground.
yes, i didn't capitalize properly - oh well.
If you had, you would have been modded up.
(You're right...as a minor karma whore, I've noticed that what I consider to be a really insightful, interesting post is worthless if made too far down on a discussion or too late in the posting day. The secret? Reply to early +3 funny posts with completely unrelated insights. I'm not ashamed of my whoring; it's for the ancients)
If you want to change things for the better, get on Congress to come up with a better means of accounting for all of those tax dollars and managing their use. There is so much waste inherent in the system that has nothing to do with Democrats and Republicans, but with bean counters and spreadsheets.
This is a terrible idea. If we did this, my company couldn't sell software and consulting services to towns that have money allocated and no other use for it. We love these little windfalls...what's that Simpsons quote about a mule with a spinning wheel?
(J/k of course...my company is actually really good about only selling towns what they need and what we can offer. Government NEEDS software these days...hiring freezes and tiny budgets combined with increased regulations means the need for efficiency and the elimination of redundancy is huge. Joke about the inefficiency of government if you like...but when you have one full time guy managing all of the development regulations for a town of 15,000+ people, it's hard to be anything BUT inefficient.)
PS: Personally, I use Gentoo.
Then you're used to tweaking software before even considering that it might work. No wonder you're defending Debian.
(J/k...I use Gentoo at work and was surprised that Sybase 9 installed on it without a fuss and worked perfectly the first time. Unfortunately, said machine is a p2 233 and is like a secretary with an armful of papers when it comes to serving a database)
Problem was, at the time people were looking to pay for voting machines, there was not one mass produced machine with open source code.
Not one.
Do you even understand how government, especially local government, works?? You get the money once. It's a set sum, with an additional budget for maintenance and support. If you don't spend the money, it's gone. So you have to buy when you have it. You can't wait. You can't hope or wish. You have to pick a vendor and pay them and hope they do a good job, because the money won't be coming back if you wait too long.
Diebold had machines. People bought them because Diebold made big promises and nobody else had a decent machine for a fair price. Meanwhile, Open Source lost yet another battle due to a complete lack of understanding of how things work. If an OSS solution had been ready when the evoting money came in, and that solution was cheaper and backed by a solid company with a reputation and support staff, it would have won.
That didn't happen. Not because local government is stupid and doesn't understand open source, but because open source is nearsighted and reactionary and was not ready.
Why not flash? Well, considering how vulnerable flash memory of all types is to filesystem corruption if its read/write operations are interrupted, I'd much rather have the reliability of a hard drive. Should writes be interrupted, even for a second, you have the possibility of losing all of your data. This has happened to me dozens of times with various complact flash formats, operating systems and cameras, to the point that I wait a few seconds even after the read light has gone off before even considering removing a device.
My iPod and microdrive have NEVER given me this problem. And though yes, it is a user support issue, saving a single format cycle or support call makes it much cheaper in the long run to go with the small hard drive.
Who cares if the original programmers aren't getting a dime, man? Copyright isn't about that. Copyright is about ownership. The programmers sold their ownership rights in exchange for a paycheck. Some sold their ownership rights for a pittance. Some got a lot more than they probably should have. Point is, you can't base an argument against copyright on the fact that creators are "no longer" paid. If copyright law were intended only to pay creators on a per-work basis, copyright wouldn't be transferrable and artists (who are not by and large advertisers or salespeople) would be a lot worse off.
Yes, emulator users are only stealing from "corporations." But it's those corporations that pay for the games in the first damned place. Steal from them, remove the incentive for them to make money where they can, and they're less likely to finance the games you actually want to buy. Shit, we've already seen the death of Interplay and Acclaim this year...
That's mostly untrue. I've had comments modded up, or down, a week after I wrote them. And once the story's archived, your post is essentially carbonized for the ages...many times I search on google and find posts I wrote on Slashdot stories from 2001 and earlier. Spooky and worthless, but kind of neat...especially since my own blog articles at the time were destroyed in the Coming of the Curious Chinese Search Engine back in Aught One.
I disagree. Nostalgia would certainly exist in a vacuum, in fact nostalgia is fueled by a vacuum in the same way absence makes the heart grow fonder. Since it is nostalgia, not any inherent timeless nature, that sells these old games when many superior clones have done poorly, emulation and abandonware don't really have much of a leg to stand on. They are, indeed, reducing the commercial viability of these works. Honestly, who's gonna buy 50 Atari classics for $20 when you can download Every Atari Game Ever on a torrent for free?
Non geeks, is who. People like my dad who haven't played a game in twenty years, but used to rule the school at Pole Position.
Oh, I am in support of abandonware in cases where the company that originated the title is long since out of business and the ownership is questionable or non-existant. Who owns the rights to Coleco stuff these days (I know the rights to Intellivision went back to the Blue Sky Rangers), or Hudson Soft? Languishing in a corporate basement is one thing, somebody might dredge that up someday. Languishing nowhere in particular is another.
Eh, my local station (102.7 WEQX out of Vermont) is very, very good, they play new music before the ClearChannel stations, old favorites the CC wouldn't dare play because they weren't big enough hits and local and regional music you can't hear elsewhere. They even have long commercial free blocks, like 5 to 11 pm -- though I suspect it's because they were having trouble selling ads and that scares the shit out of me.
It would be a shame to see such a great station (a lot of people I know say it's the only station they will listen to) disappear because of crap like this MSN deal. Of course, I'm not too worried about it...MSN's clone stations, by nature, can only copy. Stations like WEQX get their following by doing new things, like Sunday's Download show (playing great music off new CDs you may never hear again because they have no budget for promotions). I would never take MSN over EQX...but I'd certainly take it over dumbass reactive pay-for-play ClearChannel stations.
I've often wondered if it would be possible to run a modern rock station on the same model as NPR/PRI affiliates, as an alternative to corporate rock that sucks or college rock that has no market and no antenna worth a damn. You know...commercial free rock picked by real DJs with good taste and skills on the mic, supported by bi-monthly fund drives...
What you mean to say, is that you've found an easy way to prove my point by disagreeing with me.
Thank you, AC.
Stream of consciousness writing is hardly evidence of poor debating skills -- Michael Herr's "Dispatches" is a good example of disjointed writing that illustrates important points. But mechanisms like the moderation system and the number of good writers willing to explain points in a different way serve to make disjointed viewpoints more accessible. Accessibility adds coherence to a good idea, because many people just aren't willing to read posts like yours. They take too much effort to parse, mentally, and so many readers rely on moderation and replies to show them what, subjectively, is worth reading. It would, indeed, be a good world where everybody would read everything regardless of style or content...but that's not going to happen.
Well, there are two problems addressed by an English class. The first is "How do I write?" The second is "What do I write about?"
Your assertion that merely teaching the first is a disservice is completely valid. However, it is far better to have students writing boring, but cogent works rather than an exciting mess. For one thing, many students are already good at writing interesting crud. For another, it's extremely difficult to teach creativity. Creativity is learned almost through osmosis...it is a function of how we process our experiences and other peoples' descriptions of them. As such, it's, well, complicated. The dumb rules of Hypotheses -- Three Strong Points -- Conclusion are pretty easy. Creativity, at least at the secondary level, is best suited to image poems, narratives and fiction, where the elements of style are more easily laid out.
Incidentally, people most definitely do teach creative essay writing, but generally at a college level. It takes years of practice in reading to understand what makes a good essay, and without this knowledge it's extremely difficult to write a good essay. Plus, if you're not into essays, even interesting ones like A Modest Proposal or The Rights of Man will seem dreadfully boring. Best to keep them out of the hands of the unskilled, lest they swear off literature for good.
You're partially right. A bad essay is a point padded to fill a word limit.
A good essay is a point illustrated through insights, pruned to fill a word limit.
If you ever take a journalism or discourse class (and, if you ever plan to do any writing in any respect, you should), you will learn that a piece of writing is not done until you can take nothing else away without losing meaning.
Unfortunately, this is the opposite of what we learn in school up to this point -- assignments like "write an X page paper on beekeeping" train young writers that what matters is not the content but the length that's important. This perception tends to stick with people -- my wife, who writes reports as part of her work, starts writing by setting up her page limit, and then tries to fill that. Doesn't matter what form her language takes or how many leading sentences she uses, she has to fill her limit or she doesn't feel like she's done. And when she goes over the limit, she stresses out as well.
In a good discourse class, you learn to overwrite first. Plan for two or more pages to fill one page. Take out flimsy arguments, avoid needless soft language and remove obvious conclusions that don't prove your hypothesis. Of course, none of these would help you in a high school where the state board is looking for students to write a minimum of 40 pages per class per year -- only the most prolific fledgling authors could manage 80 pages and intense editing along with a normal courseload. I sure couldn't.
Academia aside, good language isn't about length. It's about coherence. Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was only 3 paragraphs long. It also doesn't address any single problem by name nor does it offer any solutions. If he had added those in there...he might have wound up with something like Castro's infamous marathon speeches...and still never left the point at hand.
The thing is, the people who are poor spellers, have poor grammar and who use poor organizational skills don't matter so much on the internet. Just like in the real world, people on the Internet detect the difference between a well thought out point and a bunch of mindless rambling based on the coherence of the argument. If your argument is well spelled out, understandable and flows organically from point to point, you'll get more links, more mod points, etc.
What the internet allows that the real world does not is a chance for people who aren't naturally good at organizing ideas to make themselves heard regardless. Many people who visit open forums like Slashdot et. al. are much better at explaining opinions than they are at making them...which is why so many highly moderated posts begin with "What I think you mean is," and so on. This means that poorly written posts that have valid points are not necessarily ignored...they are quite often embellished so that the validity of points raised by good thinker is strengthened by those who are good writers.
Incidentally, this bolstering of good ideas with good language is in my opinion the first step towards making an important viewpoint into a political lynchpin: finding a way to explain the viewpoint and the urgency of it in an understandable (if not completely accurate) way. Bush Jr has (some would say unfortunately) had great success in his political career due to the bolstering he receives from his speech writers -- lord knows he couldn't survive in an oratorical vacuum. Bush's camp almost seems to have take cues from the internet -- they've realized that not speaking perfect English is an easy way to get the common man to associate himself with you, even if you're a multi-millionaire oil baron and career politician who's a former coke fiend.
The point is: people who can't spell and can't write aren't a problem on the internet, because it's the internet and it offers a system of checks and balances that will quite often bury their points. You want to promote better English? Use it yourself and don't make it a point of elitism -- all that does is create a feeling of separatism that's not getting us a less abbreviated internet.