Why the hell for? These are real people. Not actors reading from a script. They are expressing their own experiences with Windows, from varying points of views.
Are you insinuating that Windows has a more intuitive UI? Why, pray tell, are there video professors that can be purchased that teach you how to use Windows, Office, etc? I see the ads every evening for these products. Yet at no point do I see them teaching someone how to use a Mac.
What point do you want to have proven?!? Windows *is* in fact hard to use. XP has candied the interface up a bit, but to do anything besides open IE and go web browsing, you still have a steep learning curve. In OS X (and all Mac OS systems, for that matter), the UI isn't skin-deep. A great deal of research and design goes into every aspect of the system (which is why Apple subsequently publishes guidelines for application developers so that they, too, can benefit from this research and keep the Mac OS experience a cohesive one).
Precisely. The number of folks out there, particularly home users, still using systems *other* than WinXP (or even Win2K, for that matter) is quite high. My brother (sysadmin) recently completed a roll-out of Win2K to his corporate network, replacing NT. Considering this took place in the last 2-3 weeks, I'd say the timing of Apple's commercials is still quite appropriate.
XP may be stable, but even it suffers severely from problems at times. My father, a rather strange home-user who is always interested in upgrading to the latest and greatest, recently purchased a new computer w/ XP preinstalled. Many, many system crashes and a few frustrated weeks later, he found that the system was *too fast* for XP (don't know if it was a speed thing or a processor heat/motherboard thing), but slowing down his processor allowed XP to function normally. While this may have been a hardware problem, it underscores the fact that on systems running Windows, there are no guarantees.
On (new) systems running OS X, you're guaranteed that everything will work A-O-K. For the most part, its a guarantee on all systems that Apple lists as being "supported", though after-factory modifications abound and may not be supported *as well*. In my father's case, however, no modifications were made to the hardware (unless he's started overclocking, doubt it though;)).
Exactly. Not a bad position to be in, really. Apple's in a better position than they've been in for over 15-20 yrs, I'd venture to say. A large part of the reason being that MS has handled its success poorly... they've taken advantage of their monopoly, much to the disgust of consumers. This has left users frustrated by systems that don't work (contrary to the XP add campaign slogan "it just works") the way users think they should. Apple's historically great success on the UI front, coupled with the stability & reliability of OS X has set them up to truly make a mark in the industry.
Interesting how here on/., when discussing an alternative to MS, the first (and usually only) alternative to be discussed is Linux. As far as a desktop OS is concerned, Apple's Mac OS X may be far better suited to the task. Since the subsystem is very closely based on Open/FreeBSD and hence supports all the "information wants to be free" technologies that Linux does, the real comparison is the user interface.
Now, I have a whole lot of respect for the GNOME and KDE efforts (I have Ximian on my laptop and KDE on one of my desktops), but they've got a ways to go to reach OS X's level of ease-of-use. I believe OS X is also localized in Norwegian, but I could be wrong on this count (if I am wrong, then that's a good reason to discount OS X:)).
Apple's no longer *just* for creatives, designers, writers, etc. It is (at its core) a highly productive and functional operating system built on a highly stable and powerful subsystem. With OS X, you can *get things done*. For the novice computer user, OS X can be a good deal more intuitive than either Windows OR any of the Linux UIs.
*sigh*... this isn't a flame or a troll, just a commentary.
Cheers.
Re:What are these people's problems?
on
Piers Anthony Unbound
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· Score: 2, Insightful
It amazes me how many Americans seem to think that teens still wait until they're 18 to have sex. Very strange... most people I knew in HS either had had sex or were claiming that they had had sex (usually in order to attract more girls in order to have sex). That was a few years ago and attitudes are getting more relaxed, not less so. Once a teen hits college, the liklihood they'll have sex rises dramatically and the question I have is: why shouldn't they (they being teens developing into sexual maturity, not only college-age teens)? The puritanical ideals that are woven through much of our society seem to be inappropriate, though the christian coalition (and by extension, Bush's administration) would have us believe otherwise.
Developing into sexual maturity is a big deal for teens and to be told to "ignore" these temptations or to repress them is a recipe for disaster. Most of the world's conflicts are caused by sexual frustration in some shape or form, practically as far back as the history books go. Maybe my exposure to European society & culture while growing up changed my point of view and what I'm writing here is foreign to others, but really, what's the big deal? If maturing teens learn to express their sexuality safely (with consent and with proper protection against unintentional pregnancy/disease transmission), I imagine they'll continue to mature into more productive adults. Doesn't that stand to reason?
Ah well, maybe my views will change when I have children of my own... I'm certain I'll be concerned with *whom* my progeny has sexual relations with as well as *how* the sexual relations are carried out... I can't quite convince myself that I'll be particularly concerned with *if* the sexual relations take place... but, that'll have to wait a good while. Who knows what psychological changes will take place in that time?!? Either way, though, my own "parental" views will only be applied to my progeny (and those that would sexually interact with my progeny), not to society/culture/world in general. Guess that's where I draw the line (and wish other's would as well).
I didn't know that Best Buys or Circuit Citys existed with "Mac" sections... I've only seen "Mac" sections at CompUSA... could just be the local selection, though!
Microsoft announced that it plans to use public-key cryptography and special cryptographic microprocessors to make the Windows operating system more secure
And thought to myself... "say what? That's not what Palladium is about... shouldn't they be saying something about DRM, content control, etc.?" I kept reading and found even more instances where the article seems to incorrectly portray to the (uninformed) reader what Palladium is about... e.g. Palladium will make computers "safer" for the user. I understand that later in the article, other points might be raised, but a casual observer, reading the first few paragraphs wouldn't get any of that... as a matter of fact, after reading the first few paragraphs, I myself felt that the article was already getting overly technical for the casual user.
This certainly isn't an article that expresses the dangers of Palladium to the casual public.
Killing of all mail from yahoo/hotmail is pretty severe. Many, many people (who might have other legit addresses) maintain yahoo/hotmail addresses for when they're on the road. Many other people who want to keep the same address, regardless of what ISP they're using at the moment also use Yahoo/Hotmail. I recently did a search through a client's newsletter subscription database (to compile a list to send the newsletter out to) and over 50% of the addresses were either yahoo or hotmail domains.
I don't see why (with SpamAssassin) you would need to be so draconian. SpamAssassin catches all my spam, regardless of where it originated. If your installation isn't catching what you consider spam, adjust the rules a bit. There's a lot of good documentation on how to do this and it isn't real hard (mine seems to be working fine, out-of-the-box). Now, its very possible that a person would get legit email from yahoo/hotmail addresses that they simply don't *want* to get... fine, but that's not SPAM.
To some extent, that's true. But, if the Internet should be "useful" then a person should be able to type in common "brands" and get the proper site. Its not a perfect philosophy, I'll grant you that. But, why should the person w/ surname McDonald (of which there are many) have an equal right to mcdonalds.com than the commercial entity McDonald's? Especially now that we have these bogus additional domain names such as.name? Even previously, someone with the surname "McDonald" could take the site mcdonald.org OR even mcdonald.com - the company "McDonald's" would want mcdonalds.com, not the non-possesive form of the surname, right? (of course this is all hypothetical, no related to McDonald's specifically and if they actually own or would want to own any other particular domain name).
Entirely - so much for corporate sponsorship of charities and such. Guess its open season now.
There should be a very, very simple way to decide on cybersquatting: if the page you get when going to the URL is "This domain is taken, contact us if you'd like to purchase it", then its cybersquatting. If its anything else (e.g. someone's actually *using* it for something already) then first-come, first-serve should rule.
I recently purchased a domain for a client (Gourmet Pantry) of my company with a ".net" extension, even though the client was just a company that we were setting up an e-commerce site for. However, they couldn't get their company's name with.com, because it was being squatted upon and the site you get when you go to it says that at a MINIMUM, getting the domain will cost $600!! That's ridiculous. There's no need for that kind of crap on the 'Net.
I could see a few exceptions to "first-come, first serve" - at least at the inception of the Internet. e.g. McDonald's Corp. should get mcdonalds.com, regardless of who's using it - their brand is internationally recognized (and this can be measured). At this point in the 'Net's life, however, first-come, first-serve should be fine since no company will come up with a "new" name that is magically nationally or internationally recognized. Even if an existing multi-national company creates a new product, most product marketing specialists know to look for a URL as soon as a list of potential product names is proposed, so that the microsite can launch under an appropriate URL.
Don't count on it. Until you've been in the industry and lived in it to tell how serious they are about these things, you can't assume that things will change there as they do in other industries. The FAA is very, very, very strict. So is the FDA - yet the various pharmaceutical companies and medical equipment companies STILL haven't made the FDA regulations any less draconian. MS, as a newbie in the industry (if they go into it at all) would certainly not have any more sway than say Lockheed Martin, Rockwell Collins, Honeywell, Boeing, etc. Not to mention that anything that will be approved for INTERNATIONAL air travel would need to be approved by the EU equivalent of the FAA, otherwise its worthless.
Don't you think folks have been trying to get languages other than Ada83 flight-level A certified? Do you think people enjoy only being able to use ONE certified, validated compiler for Ada, that happens to ONLY run on ancient VAX systems such that compiling an embedded application that is about 700K in size (finished binary) takes in excess of 24hrs! The avionics world is very, very different from any other industry... even other embedded industries. There are very few other technology applications that hold the lives of hundreds of people in the balance. Nuclear energy might be such an industry... not even military applications have as stringent of guidelines as the commercial avionics industry does.
Btw, the info about the Ada compiler is specific to my work at one of the leaders in the avionics industry (no names, sorry).
Don't count on it. C/C++ isn't flight-level A certified (it might be level B certified, but probably not, likely, its level C which is restricted to non-critical systems and systems that do NOT interact in ANY way with critical systems). C# is certainly not going to be certified for critical systems... so far, only Ada83 is (far as I know, Ada95 is NOT).
This is absolutely wrong. If you build your own PCs, that's one thing - by going to the Apple store, you're buying a complete system, same as if you went to Dell or Gateway or IBM. Now, don't compare apples to oranges - every Mac is GUARANTEED to work with the system software. No ifs, ands, or buts. If it doesn't work, the hardware is flawed - take it back and get it replaced. Furthermore, every Mac comes with a warranty - something you don't get if you build a system yourself, but you do get (and pay for) it when buying a Dell, Gateway or IBM.
With base systems starting at $799 (and even less if you get 'em refurbished), this argument about getting PCs for cheap is ridiculous. Never mind the quality of the components - get a commodity motherboard and compare it to a Tyan board, big difference in price and quality. Build your PC using quality parts and you'll find it getting expensive much more quickly.
Every time I've built a PC from scratch, I've ordered the components from different retailers. Each component has its own shipping+handling costs (costs that aren't refunded if the part is bad, which happens at times, that's what commodity is all about). If a part doesn't work with the rest of your system, you better hit the 'Net and figure out how to fix it or send it back and get different parts. All this takes time and if you value your time, this is a big deal.
I have three PCs at home, a dual PIII 450MHz, an Athlon 700MHz rackmount and a P75 for my firewall. All run Linux, I'm happy with all of 'em, but the time I spent ordering the parts, building the system and debugging problems with 'em are far more than it took me to unpack my two iMacs. Furthermore, both iMacs, running at 400MHz and 450MHz respectively, are quite a bit snappier under OS X than any of the other systems (running Mandrake 8 on the dual-proc and RedHat 7.1 on the Athlon). Those iMacs are each about 2 yrs old and they still retain much of their original value. They were purchased for $1K and $1.2K and I could get around $600 on eBay for each of 'em... the dual-proc system *might* go for $3-400, if I'm lucky (and cost in excess of $1.5K originally).
Don't confuse "commodity" hardware with "quality" hardware. You get quality hardware with a Mac and guarantee that everything works. Put a price on that.
Entirely. Having worked extensively on the flight deck systems for the Boeing 767-400ER, I can tell you first hand that the redundancy is rather amazing. There are two major computer systems that drive the displays in the cockpit, the DPCs which do a lot of digital signal manipulation and the DCCs which do a lot of the analog to digital signal manipulation and control. Two DCC boxes drive three DPC boxes and the two DCC boxes are cross-connected to each of the DPC boxes. The three DPC boxes each talk to each other (I'm not sure if the DCC boxes talked to each other - that was further down the chain than I was working on) and actually vote on the data points that are being sent to the displays to determine if one of the DPCs is malfunctioning or processing bad data. The way this all works together is amazingly complicated, especially when you consider that it all runs on embedded boards where the "executable" is typically less than 1-2MBs in size.
My particular area of development was the actual display software which was provided data from the DPC systems. Each of the six displays (2-pilot, 2-copilot, 2-EICAS in the console) received multi-cast data from each of the DPCs and then fed data back to the DPCs on the display's status. The DPCs would then automagically evaluate if the displays were functioning properly and switch primary functions away from a malfunctioning display to a functioning display if error conditions were detected.
The PFD (primary flight display) is the pilots most important display as it displays airspeed, artificial horizon, TCAS warnings, altitude and a few other things. The ND (navigation display) is the inner screen on both the pilot/co-pilot sides and if the PFD experiences error conditions, the DPCs switch the PFD to the ND and the ND to one of the EICAS (engine indicators, etc.) displays.
All very interesting stuff... especially the way its actually implemented in the embedded system. Debugging all this, of course, was non-trivial. For that matter, coding it is non-trivial as its all in Ada83.
The one big thing that the consumer needs to realize, though, is the thing that my fiancee (a designer, artist, audio engineer and song writer) has been pounding into my skull since our first conversation (argument?) about copyright, MP3s, etc: if the artist decides to provide MP3s at a cost or for free, that's the artist's decision. If a consumer takes it upon themselves to rip MP3s and share them on Napster, Audiogalaxy, Limewire, Morpheus, Kazaa, etc. then its stealing. If in doing so you increase sales for that particular artist is irrelevant if you've stolen to do so. The artist has certain rights, amongst those is to decide if he/she wants to release things for free (these rights may in many instances be ristricted by the artist's contract with their label). Nevertheless, sharing music files without the artists/label's permission is stealing. It is up to the artist to work on the labels and get them to realize that sharing some (or all) of their music in MP3 format will improve their sales. In some circumstances, a particular artist may feel that this would not be the case. Moby comes to mind as such an example. Consumers may not take it upon themselves to decide that all artists would share their music if they could. Some artists don't prescribe to that philosophy, that's their business (or problem).
Big point: sharing music files without permission is stealing. If you're cool with that, so be it. But, don't try to hide behind a veil of "I'm really increasing sales for the artists whose music I'm sharing." Bullshit. You're stealing. Plain and simple.
Read the Audiogalaxy story, many of the items being shared were not illegal (at least, that's what I got from reading that story;)). Obviously, many things were which is why they had to filter, but the point here is that this story outlines a benefit to P2P sharing that is far greater than simply illegally getting copyrighted material for free.
The book recently review on Slashdot, Translucent Databases does a good job of explaining how databases can be designed to provide these types of services (credit card authorization, central storage of information, etc.) in such a way that compromising the database does not provide the cracker with any information. Furthermore, an administrator or executive can glean no more information from the database than can a cracker, yet the database serves its purpose, while protecting the information it contains.
I went an ordered the book after reading the review here on slashdot and I must say that the methods discussed are quite interesting and I'm very likely to start incorporating them into my database designs as I go forward. In some respects, the book isn't laid out/designed very well for "flow", but it does contain very good information and it challenges the reader to think about the material in new ways.
If you're worried about securing data against everyone except for the people/applications that need to access it, check out this book.
I use Perl all the time to do OO programming, but I wouldn't call Perl's OO techniques wonderful, not by a long shot. Perl has its place. I don't believe that Perl is the best contender out there for web-based things, PHP is far better in many of those areas, but Perl can do many, many things in the console world that PHP can't hope to do (even thru the PHP executable).
In the OO world, Perl's implementation is a hack at best. The fact that there are only about a bazillion different ways to define a package ("class" in OO-speak) and to get subroutines and parameters of that package viewable/executable by including scripts makes my point for me. Its great that these different ways exist - they each serve their own purpose, but they don't come close to converging under a wonderful OO techniques umbrella!
What I would really like to see is a good book written for Perl, not that talks about the language features and such, as the Camel book does, but rather about how to effectively use all the modules in CPAN. The number of contributed modules is just enormous and I'm sure I could make use of more of 'em if I had a decent reference book for 'em (I know a few sites exist out there, but I'd really like to see more thoughtful coverage). Maybe identify a few different "major" areas and then get a few Perl gurus together to write a few different volumes... something, anything:)
True, but there aren't enough Opera users out there to really introduce much error into the mix. Also, I believe that even when "acting" as MSIE, Opera does indicate that it is Opera and Analog (the tool I used to collect the stats) can differentiate. I could be wrong, though... its happened on occasion;)
Precisely. I couldn't agree more. When I open DW and create a table, it creates one table in the HTML... if I want to center align it, it sets the align property of the table. I could go on, but really, people who think that DW is like every other WYSIWYG editor out there are kidding themselves. Both Imageready and Dreamweaver (and by extension, Fireworks, I imagine) create very intelligent HTML. The thing is, they create HTML for a particular look. From my experience, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to create *exactly* a certain look with a different (more intelligent) set of HTML than what Imageready/Dreamweaver create in the hands of a skilled developer.
I hand-edit my code in DW frequently, don't get me wrong, but that's to do things that the interface isn't optimized for or to fix rendering bugs in NS4 (which always requires hand-editing the code, often times, removing certain white-space between tags fixes NS4 rendering problems).
On a site launched a few weeks ago (that I can run stats on rather quickly since the logfile isn't gigantic yet), the IE crowd seems to be about 93.3%, the Netscape + Netscape (compatible) crowd seem to make up most of the rest (a small fractional percentage is always search-bots). Last I checked, the site has received approx. 1400 page loads since launch (6/15/02) from approx. 308 distinct hosts (somewhat skewed number since the client's main Internet connection is dial-up, so each time she dials-up, she'll represent a different host (most likely) when she looks at her site).
I absolutely agree. I've launched a fair number of sites in the few years that I've been in charge of production for WebProjkt and on the occasions that I've received an email, either directly from an end-user or indirectly from the client, the highest priority has been given to getting that problem or issue resolved as quickly as possible.
The main area our sites are somewhat lacking is that they are not very Lynx friendly... but, then again, on some sites, I redirect Lynx browsers to a page indicating that our sites are in fact difficult to browse using that browser, so I hope I give the impression that WebProjkt is aware of the console browser crowd, but that we simply don't have the necessary resources to make sure everything looks right for that...
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Why the hell for? These are real people. Not actors reading from a script. They are expressing their own experiences with Windows, from varying points of views.
Are you insinuating that Windows has a more intuitive UI? Why, pray tell, are there video professors that can be purchased that teach you how to use Windows, Office, etc? I see the ads every evening for these products. Yet at no point do I see them teaching someone how to use a Mac.
What point do you want to have proven?!? Windows *is* in fact hard to use. XP has candied the interface up a bit, but to do anything besides open IE and go web browsing, you still have a steep learning curve. In OS X (and all Mac OS systems, for that matter), the UI isn't skin-deep. A great deal of research and design goes into every aspect of the system (which is why Apple subsequently publishes guidelines for application developers so that they, too, can benefit from this research and keep the Mac OS experience a cohesive one).
Precisely. The number of folks out there, particularly home users, still using systems *other* than WinXP (or even Win2K, for that matter) is quite high. My brother (sysadmin) recently completed a roll-out of Win2K to his corporate network, replacing NT. Considering this took place in the last 2-3 weeks, I'd say the timing of Apple's commercials is still quite appropriate.
;)).
XP may be stable, but even it suffers severely from problems at times. My father, a rather strange home-user who is always interested in upgrading to the latest and greatest, recently purchased a new computer w/ XP preinstalled. Many, many system crashes and a few frustrated weeks later, he found that the system was *too fast* for XP (don't know if it was a speed thing or a processor heat/motherboard thing), but slowing down his processor allowed XP to function normally. While this may have been a hardware problem, it underscores the fact that on systems running Windows, there are no guarantees.
On (new) systems running OS X, you're guaranteed that everything will work A-O-K. For the most part, its a guarantee on all systems that Apple lists as being "supported", though after-factory modifications abound and may not be supported *as well*. In my father's case, however, no modifications were made to the hardware (unless he's started overclocking, doubt it though
Cheers.
Exactly. Not a bad position to be in, really. Apple's in a better position than they've been in for over 15-20 yrs, I'd venture to say. A large part of the reason being that MS has handled its success poorly ... they've taken advantage of their monopoly, much to the disgust of consumers. This has left users frustrated by systems that don't work (contrary to the XP add campaign slogan "it just works") the way users think they should. Apple's historically great success on the UI front, coupled with the stability & reliability of OS X has set them up to truly make a mark in the industry.
Interesting how here on /., when discussing an alternative to MS, the first (and usually only) alternative to be discussed is Linux. As far as a desktop OS is concerned, Apple's Mac OS X may be far better suited to the task. Since the subsystem is very closely based on Open/FreeBSD and hence supports all the "information wants to be free" technologies that Linux does, the real comparison is the user interface.
:)).
... this isn't a flame or a troll, just a commentary.
Now, I have a whole lot of respect for the GNOME and KDE efforts (I have Ximian on my laptop and KDE on one of my desktops), but they've got a ways to go to reach OS X's level of ease-of-use. I believe OS X is also localized in Norwegian, but I could be wrong on this count (if I am wrong, then that's a good reason to discount OS X
Apple's no longer *just* for creatives, designers, writers, etc. It is (at its core) a highly productive and functional operating system built on a highly stable and powerful subsystem. With OS X, you can *get things done*. For the novice computer user, OS X can be a good deal more intuitive than either Windows OR any of the Linux UIs.
*sigh*
Cheers.
It amazes me how many Americans seem to think that teens still wait until they're 18 to have sex. Very strange ... most people I knew in HS either had had sex or were claiming that they had had sex (usually in order to attract more girls in order to have sex). That was a few years ago and attitudes are getting more relaxed, not less so. Once a teen hits college, the liklihood they'll have sex rises dramatically and the question I have is: why shouldn't they (they being teens developing into sexual maturity, not only college-age teens)? The puritanical ideals that are woven through much of our society seem to be inappropriate, though the christian coalition (and by extension, Bush's administration) would have us believe otherwise.
... I'm certain I'll be concerned with *whom* my progeny has sexual relations with as well as *how* the sexual relations are carried out ... I can't quite convince myself that I'll be particularly concerned with *if* the sexual relations take place ... but, that'll have to wait a good while. Who knows what psychological changes will take place in that time?!? Either way, though, my own "parental" views will only be applied to my progeny (and those that would sexually interact with my progeny), not to society/culture/world in general. Guess that's where I draw the line (and wish other's would as well).
Developing into sexual maturity is a big deal for teens and to be told to "ignore" these temptations or to repress them is a recipe for disaster. Most of the world's conflicts are caused by sexual frustration in some shape or form, practically as far back as the history books go. Maybe my exposure to European society & culture while growing up changed my point of view and what I'm writing here is foreign to others, but really, what's the big deal? If maturing teens learn to express their sexuality safely (with consent and with proper protection against unintentional pregnancy/disease transmission), I imagine they'll continue to mature into more productive adults. Doesn't that stand to reason?
Ah well, maybe my views will change when I have children of my own
What kind of processor speed does your DV have? I have a 400MHz G3 and my bro has been bugging me to get in on Q3A.
Be my guest ... though the email address is obfuscated by /. for a reason ... posting it in an unobfuscated fashion circumvents that pretty effectively :(
I didn't know that Best Buys or Circuit Citys existed with "Mac" sections ... I've only seen "Mac" sections at CompUSA ... could just be the local selection, though!
Cheers.
I read the following:
And thought to myself ... "say what? That's not what Palladium is about ... shouldn't they be saying something about DRM, content control, etc.?" I kept reading and found even more instances where the article seems to incorrectly portray to the (uninformed) reader what Palladium is about ... e.g. Palladium will make computers "safer" for the user. I understand that later in the article, other points might be raised, but a casual observer, reading the first few paragraphs wouldn't get any of that ... as a matter of fact, after reading the first few paragraphs, I myself felt that the article was already getting overly technical for the casual user.
This certainly isn't an article that expresses the dangers of Palladium to the casual public.
Killing of all mail from yahoo/hotmail is pretty severe. Many, many people (who might have other legit addresses) maintain yahoo/hotmail addresses for when they're on the road. Many other people who want to keep the same address, regardless of what ISP they're using at the moment also use Yahoo/Hotmail. I recently did a search through a client's newsletter subscription database (to compile a list to send the newsletter out to) and over 50% of the addresses were either yahoo or hotmail domains.
... fine, but that's not SPAM.
I don't see why (with SpamAssassin) you would need to be so draconian. SpamAssassin catches all my spam, regardless of where it originated. If your installation isn't catching what you consider spam, adjust the rules a bit. There's a lot of good documentation on how to do this and it isn't real hard (mine seems to be working fine, out-of-the-box). Now, its very possible that a person would get legit email from yahoo/hotmail addresses that they simply don't *want* to get
Did anyone else almost fall asleep whilst reading that? Not a ton of enthusiasm apparent ... guess he's tired of interviews :)
To some extent, that's true. But, if the Internet should be "useful" then a person should be able to type in common "brands" and get the proper site. Its not a perfect philosophy, I'll grant you that. But, why should the person w/ surname McDonald (of which there are many) have an equal right to mcdonalds.com than the commercial entity McDonald's? Especially now that we have these bogus additional domain names such as .name? Even previously, someone with the surname "McDonald" could take the site mcdonald.org OR even mcdonald.com - the company "McDonald's" would want mcdonalds.com, not the non-possesive form of the surname, right? (of course this is all hypothetical, no related to McDonald's specifically and if they actually own or would want to own any other particular domain name).
Entirely - so much for corporate sponsorship of charities and such. Guess its open season now.
There should be a very, very simple way to decide on cybersquatting: if the page you get when going to the URL is "This domain is taken, contact us if you'd like to purchase it", then its cybersquatting. If its anything else (e.g. someone's actually *using* it for something already) then first-come, first-serve should rule.
I recently purchased a domain for a client (Gourmet Pantry) of my company with a ".net" extension, even though the client was just a company that we were setting up an e-commerce site for. However, they couldn't get their company's name with .com, because it was being squatted upon and the site you get when you go to it says that at a MINIMUM, getting the domain will cost $600!! That's ridiculous. There's no need for that kind of crap on the 'Net.
I could see a few exceptions to "first-come, first serve" - at least at the inception of the Internet. e.g. McDonald's Corp. should get mcdonalds.com, regardless of who's using it - their brand is internationally recognized (and this can be measured). At this point in the 'Net's life, however, first-come, first-serve should be fine since no company will come up with a "new" name that is magically nationally or internationally recognized. Even if an existing multi-national company creates a new product, most product marketing specialists know to look for a URL as soon as a list of potential product names is proposed, so that the microsite can launch under an appropriate URL.
Don't you think folks have been trying to get languages other than Ada83 flight-level A certified? Do you think people enjoy only being able to use ONE certified, validated compiler for Ada, that happens to ONLY run on ancient VAX systems such that compiling an embedded application that is about 700K in size (finished binary) takes in excess of 24hrs! The avionics world is very, very different from any other industry ... even other embedded industries. There are very few other technology applications that hold the lives of hundreds of people in the balance. Nuclear energy might be such an industry ... not even military applications have as stringent of guidelines as the commercial avionics industry does.
Btw, the info about the Ada compiler is specific to my work at one of the leaders in the avionics industry (no names, sorry).
Don't count on it. C/C++ isn't flight-level A certified (it might be level B certified, but probably not, likely, its level C which is restricted to non-critical systems and systems that do NOT interact in ANY way with critical systems). C# is certainly not going to be certified for critical systems ... so far, only Ada83 is (far as I know, Ada95 is NOT).
This is absolutely wrong. If you build your own PCs, that's one thing - by going to the Apple store, you're buying a complete system, same as if you went to Dell or Gateway or IBM. Now, don't compare apples to oranges - every Mac is GUARANTEED to work with the system software. No ifs, ands, or buts. If it doesn't work, the hardware is flawed - take it back and get it replaced. Furthermore, every Mac comes with a warranty - something you don't get if you build a system yourself, but you do get (and pay for) it when buying a Dell, Gateway or IBM.
... the dual-proc system *might* go for $3-400, if I'm lucky (and cost in excess of $1.5K originally).
With base systems starting at $799 (and even less if you get 'em refurbished), this argument about getting PCs for cheap is ridiculous. Never mind the quality of the components - get a commodity motherboard and compare it to a Tyan board, big difference in price and quality. Build your PC using quality parts and you'll find it getting expensive much more quickly.
Every time I've built a PC from scratch, I've ordered the components from different retailers. Each component has its own shipping+handling costs (costs that aren't refunded if the part is bad, which happens at times, that's what commodity is all about). If a part doesn't work with the rest of your system, you better hit the 'Net and figure out how to fix it or send it back and get different parts. All this takes time and if you value your time, this is a big deal.
I have three PCs at home, a dual PIII 450MHz, an Athlon 700MHz rackmount and a P75 for my firewall. All run Linux, I'm happy with all of 'em, but the time I spent ordering the parts, building the system and debugging problems with 'em are far more than it took me to unpack my two iMacs. Furthermore, both iMacs, running at 400MHz and 450MHz respectively, are quite a bit snappier under OS X than any of the other systems (running Mandrake 8 on the dual-proc and RedHat 7.1 on the Athlon). Those iMacs are each about 2 yrs old and they still retain much of their original value. They were purchased for $1K and $1.2K and I could get around $600 on eBay for each of 'em
Don't confuse "commodity" hardware with "quality" hardware. You get quality hardware with a Mac and guarantee that everything works. Put a price on that.
Entirely. Having worked extensively on the flight deck systems for the Boeing 767-400ER, I can tell you first hand that the redundancy is rather amazing. There are two major computer systems that drive the displays in the cockpit, the DPCs which do a lot of digital signal manipulation and the DCCs which do a lot of the analog to digital signal manipulation and control. Two DCC boxes drive three DPC boxes and the two DCC boxes are cross-connected to each of the DPC boxes. The three DPC boxes each talk to each other (I'm not sure if the DCC boxes talked to each other - that was further down the chain than I was working on) and actually vote on the data points that are being sent to the displays to determine if one of the DPCs is malfunctioning or processing bad data. The way this all works together is amazingly complicated, especially when you consider that it all runs on embedded boards where the "executable" is typically less than 1-2MBs in size.
... especially the way its actually implemented in the embedded system. Debugging all this, of course, was non-trivial. For that matter, coding it is non-trivial as its all in Ada83.
... those were the days :)
My particular area of development was the actual display software which was provided data from the DPC systems. Each of the six displays (2-pilot, 2-copilot, 2-EICAS in the console) received multi-cast data from each of the DPCs and then fed data back to the DPCs on the display's status. The DPCs would then automagically evaluate if the displays were functioning properly and switch primary functions away from a malfunctioning display to a functioning display if error conditions were detected.
The PFD (primary flight display) is the pilots most important display as it displays airspeed, artificial horizon, TCAS warnings, altitude and a few other things. The ND (navigation display) is the inner screen on both the pilot/co-pilot sides and if the PFD experiences error conditions, the DPCs switch the PFD to the ND and the ND to one of the EICAS (engine indicators, etc.) displays.
All very interesting stuff
Ahh
Good luck applying Six Sigma to processes that aren't directly related to manufacturing something ... ;)
:)
I really mean that - Good Luck.
Big point: sharing music files without permission is stealing. If you're cool with that, so be it. But, don't try to hide behind a veil of "I'm really increasing sales for the artists whose music I'm sharing." Bullshit. You're stealing. Plain and simple.
Read the Audiogalaxy story, many of the items being shared were not illegal (at least, that's what I got from reading that story ;)). Obviously, many things were which is why they had to filter, but the point here is that this story outlines a benefit to P2P sharing that is far greater than simply illegally getting copyrighted material for free.
The book recently review on Slashdot, Translucent Databases does a good job of explaining how databases can be designed to provide these types of services (credit card authorization, central storage of information, etc.) in such a way that compromising the database does not provide the cracker with any information. Furthermore, an administrator or executive can glean no more information from the database than can a cracker, yet the database serves its purpose, while protecting the information it contains.
I went an ordered the book after reading the review here on slashdot and I must say that the methods discussed are quite interesting and I'm very likely to start incorporating them into my database designs as I go forward. In some respects, the book isn't laid out/designed very well for "flow", but it does contain very good information and it challenges the reader to think about the material in new ways.
If you're worried about securing data against everyone except for the people/applications that need to access it, check out this book.
Cheers.
I use Perl all the time to do OO programming, but I wouldn't call Perl's OO techniques wonderful, not by a long shot. Perl has its place. I don't believe that Perl is the best contender out there for web-based things, PHP is far better in many of those areas, but Perl can do many, many things in the console world that PHP can't hope to do (even thru the PHP executable).
... something, anything :)
In the OO world, Perl's implementation is a hack at best. The fact that there are only about a bazillion different ways to define a package ("class" in OO-speak) and to get subroutines and parameters of that package viewable/executable by including scripts makes my point for me. Its great that these different ways exist - they each serve their own purpose, but they don't come close to converging under a wonderful OO techniques umbrella!
What I would really like to see is a good book written for Perl, not that talks about the language features and such, as the Camel book does, but rather about how to effectively use all the modules in CPAN. The number of contributed modules is just enormous and I'm sure I could make use of more of 'em if I had a decent reference book for 'em (I know a few sites exist out there, but I'd really like to see more thoughtful coverage). Maybe identify a few different "major" areas and then get a few Perl gurus together to write a few different volumes
True, but there aren't enough Opera users out there to really introduce much error into the mix. Also, I believe that even when "acting" as MSIE, Opera does indicate that it is Opera and Analog (the tool I used to collect the stats) can differentiate. I could be wrong, though ... its happened on occasion ;)
Cheers.
Precisely. I couldn't agree more. When I open DW and create a table, it creates one table in the HTML ... if I want to center align it, it sets the align property of the table. I could go on, but really, people who think that DW is like every other WYSIWYG editor out there are kidding themselves. Both Imageready and Dreamweaver (and by extension, Fireworks, I imagine) create very intelligent HTML. The thing is, they create HTML for a particular look. From my experience, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to create *exactly* a certain look with a different (more intelligent) set of HTML than what Imageready/Dreamweaver create in the hands of a skilled developer.
I hand-edit my code in DW frequently, don't get me wrong, but that's to do things that the interface isn't optimized for or to fix rendering bugs in NS4 (which always requires hand-editing the code, often times, removing certain white-space between tags fixes NS4 rendering problems).
On a site launched a few weeks ago (that I can run stats on rather quickly since the logfile isn't gigantic yet), the IE crowd seems to be about 93.3% , the Netscape + Netscape (compatible) crowd seem to make up most of the rest (a small fractional percentage is always search-bots). Last I checked, the site has received approx. 1400 page loads since launch (6/15/02) from approx. 308 distinct hosts (somewhat skewed number since the client's main Internet connection is dial-up, so each time she dials-up, she'll represent a different host (most likely) when she looks at her site).
I absolutely agree. I've launched a fair number of sites in the few years that I've been in charge of production for WebProjkt and on the occasions that I've received an email, either directly from an end-user or indirectly from the client, the highest priority has been given to getting that problem or issue resolved as quickly as possible.
... but, then again, on some sites, I redirect Lynx browsers to a page indicating that our sites are in fact difficult to browse using that browser, so I hope I give the impression that WebProjkt is aware of the console browser crowd, but that we simply don't have the necessary resources to make sure everything looks right for that ...
The main area our sites are somewhat lacking is that they are not very Lynx friendly