I think we should call programs that play DVD's but don't copy them 'crippleware' or 'defective' -- the MPAA calls them 'secure' -- I call them 'defective.' Even better, let's call anything related to copy restriction 'defective.'
Defective implies an accident. CDs that can't be copied because of their extra data track were intentionally manufactured to be non-standard. I think a better word is "impaired". It shows intention.
Someone once sent an email to my yahoo account that looked just like the yahoo login message. I would have fell for it, but IE didn't auto-fill my login into their fake text field.
"...if upper management doesn't care, you shouldn't either."
Until I took my current job, I had know idea there were so many educated adults in this world who care so little about their the jobs they worked so hard to get into. Its disgusting that so many people take the attitude that any task not specifically written in their job description should be ignored and blamed on others.
I admire the poster for trying to fix things, even if the administration doesn't care. Some people like what they do, and they want to do it right. For those of you who don't, please feel free to step out of the way.
Wouldn't it be nice to be able to just pay for the features you need? The division between XP Home/Pro/Server/etc/etc isn't flexable enough. XP Pro only has one feature that I would ever need on my home laptop (sync-ing network drives at work). It would be nice to pay $50 for a strip down version of XP home and an extra $15 for the network sync feature.
I was just like you. Downloaded piles of mp3s off the internet when I was in school. Of course, this was pre-napster, we had to use FTP and IRC. I had a fast connection and I used it. Before P2P, you needed to have music as trading material. I downloaded music I didn't even like. I was 20, and I had a lot of time on my hands. I didn't buy CDs... I was in college. If I had $15, I would have bought beer.
Since then, I got a job, a house and picked up a few hobbies. I have a high speed connection, but I only download a song every once and a while. I buy CDs on a weekly basis. Once I get them home, I pop them right into my computer and rip them to my hard drive. I listen to them on my laptop at work, or my audiotron at home. I don't have time to download them from the internet, and quite frankly I don't care for the hassle. I'd rather just pay for the disc and know my rip was good quality.
There are a lot of us out here who don't mind buying music. We would rather just buy the songs we like, and we would rather pay a more fair price, but we don't mind paying. I agree that the music industry will be changed forever, but I don't think it will collapse.
I don't have mod points today, so I'll just reply:
I don't think you could be more correct. You simply can't have a book about Java tools for XP without talking about IDEA and some of the other great refactoring tools out there.
IDEA has completely changed the way I write code. I never really took the idea of refactoring seriously until I found it. Until then, it seemed like the refactoring book was just a guide to the obvious, but to see the refactorings automated with names I immediately recognize made me rethink things. All those idealistic phrases I once laughed at started flooding back to mind.
With the exception of JUnit (and even that's a close call), I don't think any other tool supports XP as well as IDEA.
Naked Objects are not a tool for XP. They are simply a tool for presenting the business objects directly to the user. Although using Naked Objects might be easier if you were to use an agile process, they don't fulfill any of the needs of XP.
Your post seems to hint that XP was presented to you as the be-all-end-all of programming methodologies. I don't think anyone well educated in the subject would recommend it for all projects.
I don't pretend to be an expert (just regurgitating some information from a guest speaker from Object Mentor at a JUG meeting), but from what I understood there are several reasons not to pick XP for a given project. Some that I remember include lack of management buy in (XP can't be forced on a company), extremely large projects that can't(won't) be broken up, or too many dead-beat programmers to fail (although he only conceded to the most extreme example... one guy worked in a programmers union).
Take a look at JavaGaming.org. They have some screen shots there that might change your mind. Keep in mind, this stuff is pretty new. It's only getting better.
As a professional Java developer, I've learned not to give up on Sun. Java's potential has jumped leaps and bounds in the last few years.
This would create a huge barrier to entry for the entire software industry. Joe Blow could no longer write software 'just cause the world needed it'. If you aren't hiding behind a corporate shield, you simply couldn't write software.
IMHO, even as buggy as Microsoft's software is, they are the best suited to defend themselves. In a liable industry, they might stand the best chance of surviving.
I wasn't saying you had a hardware problem. I was suggesting you should figure out what software issue you are having and resolve it. Many times, you just need to upgrade a single DLL or tweak a registry setting.
Re:Here's the article
on
Penguin2Apple
·
· Score: 3, Informative
My work machine crashes at least once a day
Why don't all you people look into geting your computers fixed? Everyone here seems perfectly content to edit 4 tab delimted files to get their sound cards working in Linux, but they won't spend five minutes to look under the hood when windows crashes.
If windows crashes more than once in the same month, chances are you have a problem that you should be able to fix. Rather than pointing the finger at the evil empire, you should fix it.
The things you talk about doing with this, has the software already been written for these tasks? I already have cat5 behind my tv for an MP3 player, and eventualy my XBox, so I really wouldn't need to wait for the 802.11b solution. Is there somewhere I can go to read up on this stuff (other than digging through that message board for weeks)?
If anyone is interested in reading about consistancy (other than/. personal opinions), try this article: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/ dnhfact/ht ml/hfactor8_5.asp
In this interview, Jef Raskin comes off as rather arrogant. He seems absolutely convinced that there is an objective, scientific, Best Way for everything about interfaces.
Did anyone really think that an interface expert would really get a fair shake on/.?
Maybe everyone should post a personal experience showing how Raskin is proved wrong because "my situation is different". Did you really think you would become convinced of the science behind interface design in a two-page article? Do you think that because of a couple of poorly chosen phrases, the entire industry should be dismissed as a fraud?
If you really want to be convinced, then pick up a book. After you finish reading Raskin, try Cooper, Neilson or Tog. If you read these with an open mind, you should find that Interface Design is a real science. You should also find that it is a very young subject (which is why even some experts disagree with each other). UI design is even closer it its infancy than computer programming; but it is real.
What's karma good for, if not to defend your ideas? If you mod this down, make sure it's not just because you disagree.
All of these take some getting used to when getting into a new car, but it's part of the "charm". It's also one of the big factors when someone is buying a new car. Different people are comfortable with different things.
Your assuming people use cars for the experience of driving a car. Raskin might assume that your in the car to get from point A to point B safely and efficiently.
Really, that's been the argument all along. That's why Raskin says Linux has failed on the desktop. Geeks use computers for the pure sake of using computers... getting something done is just an excuse to use them in many cases. Raskin assumes (I believe correctly) that most people using computers are using them because they must. Although most people will customize things, and do love the bells and whistles, they don't realize what their loosing in usability by doing so.
Because the linux desktop was built from the computer up, rather than the user down, it will never be as usable as other operating systems. For most of us, that is just fine. Geeks value our choices, and love being able to play under the hood. As soon as we wrap it all up and put it in a vanilla wrapper, it's lost its appeal to most of us.
Its not that there is some technical reason it could never happen... its just our culture.
One of the disadvantages of an open source project is that many (not all) of them aren't run with the degree of close teamwork and tight deadlines that are the staple of commercial software development.
I'd like to stress this point further. Being a hacker isn't all you need in most programming jobs, but it is the most admired trait in open source developers. It's fairly rare to find an open source project that will teach an individual when it's appropriate to make compromises in the workplace. Open source projects rarely have the individual pressures or conflicting goals found in commercial projects. Because many (especially small) open source projects start as academic exercises and many are designed for use by other hackers, the programmers can more often choose the elegant solution. On top of these compromises are the social ones you eluded to... programmers in the workplace need to work closely with others. Many times, with people who aren't qualified for their jobs (Dilbert is real).
Although open source projects teach a lot, they won't replace real experience. There is still a lot to be said for the guy who's already had the ambition beat out of him.
In fact, HDTV owners are often some of the biggest movie fans, trying to get the best quality possible for their movie viewing. And the movie industry says "screw you"!
The movie industry is screwing their biggest supporters because supporters are demanding more than ever before. I was perfectly content watching commercials before I got my Tivo. I only bought it so I could watch tv shows at my leisure. I had no idea I would become addicted to the control I now have over my tv.
If DIVX (Circut's City's format) was introduced before videotape... it might have take off. We would have never known the power of ownership.
Once you've left the matrix, there's no going back. The movie, tv and music industries are all fighting loosing battles. I don't think anyone knows for sure how this will end, but one thing's for sure... most of us are not going back.
I don't understand the spell check. Do people do wordprossesing in PS?
I never really understood this attitude. Every computer program should have access to spell checking. Why should I have to open word and copy/paste text into it every time I want to post on/.?
I suggested adding spellchecking to my favorite Java IDE recently, and everyone thought I was joking. I just want it to check spelling in my Javadoc comments... how hard is that?
Its funny, how even (especially) the die-hard geeks, still don't understand that no human should have to do extra work that the computer is capable of doing on its own.
If I was born on one of these ships, I'd dedicate my whole life to inventing a warp drive so I could get the hell out of that tin can.
Ironic that we don't have the same attitude about getting off this rock.
it can't be removed? There just ones and zeros. No, they can't just remove a couple dll files and call it a day, but they integrated ie and windows in less than a year. If they really believed it was important, they could have taken them back apart sometime in the last 4 years.
Maybe I'm just old-fashioned, but I like to understand decisions which I make.
That was fine when we were only effected by decisions we make on our own. But now, with these Microsoft bugs, we are constantly effected by the decisions made by others. I may not open email attachments, but if two people in my entire company do, I get 300 emails and I have to restore the backups from my shared drive.
Slashdot Mirror
I think we should call programs that play DVD's but don't copy them 'crippleware' or 'defective' -- the MPAA calls them 'secure' -- I call them 'defective.' Even better, let's call anything related to copy restriction 'defective.' Defective implies an accident. CDs that can't be copied because of their extra data track were intentionally manufactured to be non-standard. I think a better word is "impaired". It shows intention.
Someone once sent an email to my yahoo account that looked just like the yahoo login message. I would have fell for it, but IE didn't auto-fill my login into their fake text field.
Or download Matrix Service Pack 1, which not only fixes 51 bugs, but adds 3 new scenes.
I think this quote says it all:
"...if upper management doesn't care, you shouldn't either."
Until I took my current job, I had know idea there were so many educated adults in this world who care so little about their the jobs they worked so hard to get into. Its disgusting that so many people take the attitude that any task not specifically written in their job description should be ignored and blamed on others.
I admire the poster for trying to fix things, even if the administration doesn't care. Some people like what they do, and they want to do it right. For those of you who don't, please feel free to step out of the way.
Wouldn't it be nice to be able to just pay for the features you need? The division between XP Home/Pro/Server/etc/etc isn't flexable enough. XP Pro only has one feature that I would ever need on my home laptop (sync-ing network drives at work). It would be nice to pay $50 for a strip down version of XP home and an extra $15 for the network sync feature.
I was just like you. Downloaded piles of mp3s off the internet when I was in school. Of course, this was pre-napster, we had to use FTP and IRC. I had a fast connection and I used it. Before P2P, you needed to have music as trading material. I downloaded music I didn't even like. I was 20, and I had a lot of time on my hands. I didn't buy CDs... I was in college. If I had $15, I would have bought beer.
Since then, I got a job, a house and picked up a few hobbies. I have a high speed connection, but I only download a song every once and a while. I buy CDs on a weekly basis. Once I get them home, I pop them right into my computer and rip them to my hard drive. I listen to them on my laptop at work, or my audiotron at home. I don't have time to download them from the internet, and quite frankly I don't care for the hassle. I'd rather just pay for the disc and know my rip was good quality.
There are a lot of us out here who don't mind buying music. We would rather just buy the songs we like, and we would rather pay a more fair price, but we don't mind paying. I agree that the music industry will be changed forever, but I don't think it will collapse.
I don't have mod points today, so I'll just reply:
I don't think you could be more correct. You simply can't have a book about Java tools for XP without talking about IDEA and some of the other great refactoring tools out there.
IDEA has completely changed the way I write code. I never really took the idea of refactoring seriously until I found it. Until then, it seemed like the refactoring book was just a guide to the obvious, but to see the refactorings automated with names I immediately recognize made me rethink things. All those idealistic phrases I once laughed at started flooding back to mind.
With the exception of JUnit (and even that's a close call), I don't think any other tool supports XP as well as IDEA.
Naked Objects are not a tool for XP. They are simply a tool for presenting the business objects directly to the user. Although using Naked Objects might be easier if you were to use an agile process, they don't fulfill any of the needs of XP.
Your post seems to hint that XP was presented to you as the be-all-end-all of programming methodologies. I don't think anyone well educated in the subject would recommend it for all projects.
I don't pretend to be an expert (just regurgitating some information from a guest speaker from Object Mentor at a JUG meeting), but from what I understood there are several reasons not to pick XP for a given project. Some that I remember include lack of management buy in (XP can't be forced on a company), extremely large projects that can't(won't) be broken up, or too many dead-beat programmers to fail (although he only conceded to the most extreme example... one guy worked in a programmers union).
XP isn't for every project.
We hate them Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday They release DVDs on Tuesdays. I think you need to move Tuesday to the other list.
Take a look at JavaGaming.org. They have some screen shots there that might change your mind. Keep in mind, this stuff is pretty new. It's only getting better.
As a professional Java developer, I've learned not to give up on Sun. Java's potential has jumped leaps and bounds in the last few years.
This would create a huge barrier to entry for the entire software industry. Joe Blow could no longer write software 'just cause the world needed it'. If you aren't hiding behind a corporate shield, you simply couldn't write software.
IMHO, even as buggy as Microsoft's software is, they are the best suited to defend themselves. In a liable industry, they might stand the best chance of surviving.
I wasn't saying you had a hardware problem. I was suggesting you should figure out what software issue you are having and resolve it. Many times, you just need to upgrade a single DLL or tweak a registry setting.
My work machine crashes at least once a day Why don't all you people look into geting your computers fixed? Everyone here seems perfectly content to edit 4 tab delimted files to get their sound cards working in Linux, but they won't spend five minutes to look under the hood when windows crashes. If windows crashes more than once in the same month, chances are you have a problem that you should be able to fix. Rather than pointing the finger at the evil empire, you should fix it.
I have more stupid questions:
The things you talk about doing with this, has the software already been written for these tasks? I already have cat5 behind my tv for an MP3 player, and eventualy my XBox, so I really wouldn't need to wait for the 802.11b solution. Is there somewhere I can go to read up on this stuff (other than digging through that message board for weeks)?
If anyone is interested in reading about consistancy (other than /. personal opinions), try this article:/ dnhfact/ht ml/hfactor8_5.asp
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us
In this interview, Jef Raskin comes off as rather arrogant. He seems absolutely convinced that there is an objective, scientific, Best Way for everything about interfaces. Did anyone really think that an interface expert would really get a fair shake on /.?
Maybe everyone should post a personal experience showing how Raskin is proved wrong because "my situation is different". Did you really think you would become convinced of the science behind interface design in a two-page article? Do you think that because of a couple of poorly chosen phrases, the entire industry should be dismissed as a fraud?
If you really want to be convinced, then pick up a book. After you finish reading Raskin, try Cooper, Neilson or Tog. If you read these with an open mind, you should find that Interface Design is a real science. You should also find that it is a very young subject (which is why even some experts disagree with each other). UI design is even closer it its infancy than computer programming; but it is real.
What's karma good for, if not to defend your ideas? If you mod this down, make sure it's not just because you disagree.
All of these take some getting used to when getting into a new car, but it's part of the "charm". It's also one of the big factors when someone is buying a new car. Different people are comfortable with different things. Your assuming people use cars for the experience of driving a car. Raskin might assume that your in the car to get from point A to point B safely and efficiently. Really, that's been the argument all along. That's why Raskin says Linux has failed on the desktop. Geeks use computers for the pure sake of using computers... getting something done is just an excuse to use them in many cases. Raskin assumes (I believe correctly) that most people using computers are using them because they must. Although most people will customize things, and do love the bells and whistles, they don't realize what their loosing in usability by doing so. Because the linux desktop was built from the computer up, rather than the user down, it will never be as usable as other operating systems. For most of us, that is just fine. Geeks value our choices, and love being able to play under the hood. As soon as we wrap it all up and put it in a vanilla wrapper, it's lost its appeal to most of us. Its not that there is some technical reason it could never happen... its just our culture.
One of the disadvantages of an open source project is that many (not all) of them aren't run with the degree of close teamwork and tight deadlines that are the staple of commercial software development. I'd like to stress this point further. Being a hacker isn't all you need in most programming jobs, but it is the most admired trait in open source developers. It's fairly rare to find an open source project that will teach an individual when it's appropriate to make compromises in the workplace. Open source projects rarely have the individual pressures or conflicting goals found in commercial projects. Because many (especially small) open source projects start as academic exercises and many are designed for use by other hackers, the programmers can more often choose the elegant solution. On top of these compromises are the social ones you eluded to... programmers in the workplace need to work closely with others. Many times, with people who aren't qualified for their jobs (Dilbert is real). Although open source projects teach a lot, they won't replace real experience. There is still a lot to be said for the guy who's already had the ambition beat out of him.
In fact, HDTV owners are often some of the biggest movie fans, trying to get the best quality possible for their movie viewing. And the movie industry says "screw you"! The movie industry is screwing their biggest supporters because supporters are demanding more than ever before. I was perfectly content watching commercials before I got my Tivo. I only bought it so I could watch tv shows at my leisure. I had no idea I would become addicted to the control I now have over my tv. If DIVX (Circut's City's format) was introduced before videotape... it might have take off. We would have never known the power of ownership. Once you've left the matrix, there's no going back. The movie, tv and music industries are all fighting loosing battles. I don't think anyone knows for sure how this will end, but one thing's for sure... most of us are not going back.
I don't understand the spell check. Do people do wordprossesing in PS? I never really understood this attitude. Every computer program should have access to spell checking. Why should I have to open word and copy/paste text into it every time I want to post on /.?
I suggested adding spellchecking to my favorite Java IDE recently, and everyone thought I was joking. I just want it to check spelling in my Javadoc comments... how hard is that?
Its funny, how even (especially) the die-hard geeks, still don't understand that no human should have to do extra work that the computer is capable of doing on its own.
If I was born on one of these ships, I'd dedicate my whole life to inventing a warp drive so I could get the hell out of that tin can. Ironic that we don't have the same attitude about getting off this rock.
it can't be removed? There just ones and zeros. No, they can't just remove a couple dll files and call it a day, but they integrated ie and windows in less than a year. If they really believed it was important, they could have taken them back apart sometime in the last 4 years.
Yes it would be alot of work. But it can be done.
"...those words would be explicitly confrontational, and I did not have any wish to do that."
;)
right... rms has never been known to be confrontational.
Maybe I'm just old-fashioned, but I like to understand decisions which I make. That was fine when we were only effected by decisions we make on our own. But now, with these Microsoft bugs, we are constantly effected by the decisions made by others. I may not open email attachments, but if two people in my entire company do, I get 300 emails and I have to restore the backups from my shared drive.