I wouldn't call myself an audiophile by the definitions put forth in this post, but I do love to listen to music, and I do pay more money for a decent system. I would never pay $6000 for a pair of analog cables, but I have spent $30 to upgrade from the crappy cables that come with ANY receiver. As the ladies say, never mind the length, feel the WIDTH:)
First, let me just say that there is definitely a difference between a $100 receiver and a $1000 receiver. I have never heard a $10,000 receiver, so I have no idea what it would sound like. So what is different between the $100 receiver and the $1000 receiver? Lots of things. Any modern receiver is made up of hundreds of components, from resisters and transistors to specialized chips like D/A converters and video scaling. For an audiophile, the real money is in the D/A converter. Many people think that the recording on a CD is perfect. It isn't. It's just like the squeeze theorem in Calculus. If you take a sine wave, and you want to approximate the volume underneath, you can draw rectangles that start from the y axis at 0 and go up or down until they touch the sine wave. They you pick an arbitrary width and draw the rectangle underneath the curve. There is a little triangular gap between the rectangle and the curve, but as you make the width of the rectangles smaller, you have less and less of a gap. That's what an A/D converter does: it maps a true sound wave to an approximate equivalent using little slices. For CD that would be around 22000 slices per second, which is very close to the limit of the human ear's capability to resolve. So we have a nearly perfect recording on CD, how about turning those bits back into a wave that can be passed through analog equipment, like speakers? For that we need a digital to analog (D/A) converter. A D/A converter is usually measured by things like noise and dynamics. So if the CD recorded a dynamic peak that was +12db, the analog version should be +12db. Some of the converters used in cheaper stereo equipment uses D/A converters that produce enough noise, and not enough dynamics, that the music starts to sound like AM radio. But mostly they do a good job. Some equipment uses really nice D/A converters that make the music sound more like a vinyl record, not from the noise perspective, but from the "hey that actually sounds like a woman's voice" perspective. For those who don't think their is a difference, head out to a Tweeter and listen to the different products. If you can't tell a difference between them, I would be surprised. Make sure to use a decent pair of speakers that can actually handle some power, and turn it way up. Listen to the distortion that some products produce on the upper end, and whether the bass is muddy or crisp. Turn on a subwoofer and then turn it off. It all makes a difference. The real question is, how much is that difference worth to you? To me, there is no point in listening to music through a crappy system, because the music loses some of its beauty. It's like the difference between watching a movie on your flip phone and watching it in an iMax theater.
I find it really amusing that Slashdot readers, many of whom obsess over the smallest difference in their computer components, and who will spend $100 on fans and $300 on a fancy case, feel the need to make fun of the exact equivalent in the audio category. Perhaps we all don't spend $6000 on USB cables, but I have definitely seen people spent $400 on a whacked-out power supply. We all have our little quirks, so who cares if someone obsesses over the sound of their music collection? Let's get rid of the snake oil salesmen like the Anjou stuff, but remember that for a lot of people sound quality is a reality, and they can spend their money however they feel fit. I tend to spend a lot of money on BOTH;)
When i was an stats undergrad at the University of Illinois I was working with a Flight School Instructor who was trying to come up with a statistical model to predict who would make good pilots (I have no idea what he thought a good pilot is anymore). We modeled over 125 variables, from high school GPA, ACT, SAT and other intelligence indicators, to video game skills, 0-roll handling and the color of their eyes.
Not one good predictor among them. It turns out that good pilots are born that way.
"When the PHBs see reports from Microsoft, who THEY see as a trusted name in the industry..."
You must be kidding me. PHB's do not trust their venders further than they can throw them. They are suspicious by nature.
Having said that, they may not trust Microsoft, but they may use this information to avert a switch to Linux-based systems when confronted by their technical staff.
Numerous articles in the NYT over the past few months actually document the decline in trust that Microsoft is experiencing, mainly due to its security problems and licensing programs. Linux is cited as the major benefactor of this mistrust, specifically because of its open nature and track record.
"Maybe one day we can have international power lines where all the countries with lots of sunshine provide power to the rest of the world? How cool would that be?"
You mean Saudi Arabia and Iraq? Damn, they have all the energy!
Smaller screen? Based on inches maybe. But the VAIO has 1280x768 resolution, whereas the PowerBook has 1028x768. I just dropped by CompUSA tonight to look at them, and the VAIO is a smart little machine. The pre-installed Windows-XP blows, but the resolution is wild. It has the same resolution (per inch) as the Clie line. First notebook with usable 5 point fonts:)
It is way smaller and lighter than the PowerBook as well. If this thing ran OS X it would be a no-brainer. It's good to hear that people have had positive experiences loading Linux onto these things, because the VAIO includes XP Home addition. So even if you like XP it's a downer.
All things equal, I can't decide between the two.
Note: the Apple guy at CompUSA and the regular notebook guy were practically in fisticuffs about this thing. I had the Apple guy hovering around me, iBook in hand, while I was checking out the VAIO. I think he smells competition;)
Last night my wife and I started watching 10 hours of recordings of "Taken" from our PVR". After watching 3 straight shows, which took 4.5 hours, not 6, she mentioned that the PVR is her favorite piece of equipment ever made.
I had to agree, as the night before I watched "Full Metal Jacket" on BBC America, in live mode. The same tacky commercials every 20 minutes. Maybe if the commercials weren't so insulting to my intelligence I might watch them. But as it is, nothing I care about is advertised, and the advertisements I don't care about are so unbearable (seen the BowFlex commercial lately?) that I end up hating whatever show I am watching.
I am sure that Hollywood and the Cable companies will figure out a way to make a PVR a pain in the arse, but until then I am happy to own my PVR.
The article says that the statistics are generated using HitBox technology, which is cookie-based. If you are blocking cookies, then perhaps you do not appear on the register. Since the mozilla cookie-blocking feature began about the same time as the fall of market share from > 10% to 3.4%, perhaps this can be explained by people using mozilla's blocking features.
I graduated from the University of Illinois in May of 1992, at the tail end of the last recession. I graduated from a class of 3 undergraduates (most Statistics people are in the Masters program). I decided on Statistics because it turned out that I had an aptitude for math, and not much else of use (I originally wanted to be an engineer, but I found out quickly that I was not suited for such a regimented approach to learning; math accommodates eccentrics).
So there I was with my expensive college degree and a stack of resumes proudly proclaiming to the world that I had met the challenge that is the United States collegiate system, and prevailed with a glowing B average. Who could turn down such genius? Well, strictly speaking, nobody. Truth be told, however, I didn't get a single response to my resume, despite how many I flooded the market with. Nobody was hiring at all, and most government agencies wouldn't even do me the honor of telling me that they received my letter of application.
The summer and fall came and went with no more successes. I did get some letters admitting to hiring freezes, and would I like my resume to be put on file for when they begin hiring again? So I laid low at my university job (statistician for an entomologist).
In November I saw an advertisement on the campus bulletins for Anderson Consulting (NOT Arthur Anderson!). They were to be interviewing the following week. I called the placement office to set up an interview, and they told me that only CS and Engineering students were being allowed to interview. Not content with that answer, I decided to show up at the interview site with suit on and resume in hand. When I got to the interview site, I walked up to the first Anderson Employee I saw and told him that I would like an interview, but was not allowed to ask for one because I did not hold the proper degree. He took my resume and said he would fit me in at the end of the day, about 3pm. I waited for six hours, and was finally interviewed. Being my first real interview, I was nervous as hell and thought I did a terrible job. But a month later, Anderson called from Chicago and asked me to come up for a second interview. That interview went well and I got the job. I asked the recruiter that interviewed my why they chose me, and they said that they liked the aggressive nature that I showed by showing up and demanding an interview. That's a consultancy for you!
The first thing I noticed in the training sessions was that nearly everybody else was NOT a CS or Engineering graduate. I worked with people with Philosophy degrees, Communications degrees, and even a PhD in Slavic languages. Best COBOL programmer we had back then (Hi Lee, if you're reading this!). I picked up COBOL quickly, already knowing C/C++ because of my Statistical Computing class, and was a top programmer within a year. I later moved to Price Waterhouse (an excellent employer, by the way), and then on to smaller and larger software houses. I never regret my choice of Statistics as a major.
I guess the moral of this tale, if there is one, is that you can choose whatever career you want, but be ready to go the extra mile if you decide to change career paths later. Software development is a forgiving career path, unlike Law or Medicine. That is the one saving grace of the field: anybody can play if they are willing to work hard and learn.
My company (Omron) makes RFID tags, and IIR, they are about a US$1 each. Ouch.
Anyway, RFID works based on induction coils. They pick up radio waves (the RF part of RFID), which creates power through the coils, which then enables reading and writing of the memory on the chip.
Now before you get excited, realize that most inexpensive chips have memory sizes measured in bytes, not kilobytes. So tracking the entire history of a note would not really be feasible. Maybe the last 100 transactions, tops.
Let's see, if one man-year is 2000 hours, then we need 7,750,000 man-years of work. Assuming that 50,000 people worked on the project, it would take them 155 years to complete. Wait a minute, it couldn't possibly have taken more than 20 years to do the Apollo project, since NASA had only been around for a little while. So how many people would that be...387,500 people. Which was most of Houston back then. Can these numbers be for real? Or perhaps this is like AT&T saying that a publicly available 911 document is worth a couple million...
If the planet is increasing its CO2 to the point where plants can thrive (which they can't yet, they need water for that), then you could seed plants on Mars, and then wait a couple hundred years for the plants to take over. Once the plants take over, there will be sufficient O2 in the air (plant waste byproduct) for humans.
I don't know if Mars's gravity is strong enough to actually keep the atmosphere from leaking, but hey, it's a start. Since oxygen is a heavier molecule than carbon, it might increase the surface pressure as well.
I am not an environmental scientist, so take all that with a grain of salt. I do, however, read a lot of science fiction, which as we all know is an acceptable substitute for actual learning.
That goes double for my wife. She uses her computer a lot more than I do, and I'm a programmer. She's an elementary school teacher with not enough time and too many students. Oh yeah, she's also a perfectionist.
For her 12 classes (3yrs old to 8th grade), she needs to make lesson plans, test, quizzes, worksheets, handouts, study sheets, notes to parents, attendance rosters, gradebooks, etc.
These documents are all done in Star Office with a lot of help from image manipulation tools.
Linux supports all of her needs, has never crashed during any of her all-nighters, and networks well with all of the other machines in our SOHO.
At school, however, she uses 98 and NT. NT she doesn't mind too much, except that she doesn't get to use the Gimp and Nautilus (which she adores). But 98 drives her insane.
I have learned a lot about Linux by taking on administration of a busy woman's machine. Over the years I have had to do a lot of little hacks to get things just right. Now, however, I can take a default 7.1 install of RedHat and she is perfectly happy. All of the little workarounds I used to do myself are now part of a standard distrobution. This is immensely important. I used to worry that if I got hit by a truck my wife would not be able to find any of her files and would end up reverting to Windows in my absence. That is no longer true.
She is now trying to find ways to introduce Linux to her students, as she thinks that Linux is a real choice for education. Considering that she works for a school that rations white chalk and pencils, the money to keep upgrading those Windows boxen is just getting too expensive. They have a nice computer lab at her school, but you can bet that the next upgrades of the hardware and software in that lab will coincide with Windows 2009.
Linux has come a long way on the desktop, and that is fantastic. It has become a real server powerhouse, too, and that is fantastic. But for the author of that article to say that Linux should focus on the server is suicidal. We all know that a Sun server will beat the pants off a Windows server. Always has, most likely always will. So would a SCO, BSD, Linux, or any other *nix. But that has not saved their bacon. Why? Because nobody has the money to pay for a decent sys admin (as Microsoft even concedes). Command line tools and config files? Not for the average sys admin. Microsoft learned that it is easier to sell a lousy server machine running a nice desktop than it is to sell a nice server with a lousy/non-existant desktop.
As programs like linuxconf evolve into highly usable administration tools, more people will give Linux the time of day.
I personally look forward to a future with all-open source protocols and programs. Instead of trying to get the next version of SMBS to work with Linux, perhaps the open source community should put its energy into finishing promising alternatives like Coda, with both Linux and Windows clients (but only Linux servers - back at ya, Microsoft).
I think that the war is over, but Microsoft just doesn't know it yet. Whether anybody buys Linux is irrelevant. So long as this mass of programmers continues to build better and better software, the user community can wait. And with all of the BS going on with the RIAA and MPAA getting in bed with Microsoft, it is only a matter of time before users are desperate for an alternative. By then Linux will be as good or better in the desktop realm as Microsoft.
So hackers, keep working on those office suites, USB drivers and eye candy. The war IS over.
I don't agree with this analogy. West did not TRY to break into the site, he simply walked through an open door. A better analogy might be this:
Someone walks up to your door to insert a flier. When attaching the flier to your door (totally legit), the door opens. Curiousity strikes, and the caller walks in to see if anyone is home (questionable, but if the intent is friendly, not generally a big deal). Note that so far the caller has no intent on stealing anything. The caller then sees a set of keys on the floor, and decides to pick them up to see if they are the keys for the door. Upon discovering that they are, he notifies the owner that his door is open and that the keys are sitting right inside, within plain view of anyone who would want to steal something from him.
I still don't see how he did anything wrong. Illegal? Possibly. Ethically wrong? Not really.
I would like to point out that the only thing harder to find than an Oracle DBA/Programmer who really knows what s/he is doing is a person with a high IQ and the ability/inclination to learn new things quickly. Ten years in the industry and I can only say that I am disappointed with the caliber of people in the industry. I can not, however, say that foreign workers fill the high IQ/learn-things-quickly prerequisite any better than native workers. In fact, the language barrier can sometimes get in the way. However, they tend to have more incentive to learn, since they will be deported if they fail at their task and get fired.
Sure it is well-cooled and isolated. But who exactly is going to sys admin a site on the North Slope? How much will you have to pay to have a nerd give up his life to administer that site? Think about it: no women, no electronics superstore, no Borders, no cops, no boss on site, unfettered access to pr0n, nobody watching,... wait a minute, maybe it won't be that hard to find someone after all...
Is two desktops really too much choice? Gnome and KDE are very different when you get down to the development level. And I'm not just talking about the C vs. C++ difference. There are basic design philosophies at work. For example, Gnome decided that the best way to support an object model is to take CORBA, make it as fast as possible, then wrap it up in regular C bindings. KDE, on the other hand, decided to skip CORBA in favor of a more lightweight, if less standard, protocol. I can see good reasons for doing either, but as far as integration goes, there is little hope.
Personally I like having a lot of choices. Some people argue that the Linux community spends too much time reinventing the wheel with all the different window managers and desktop environments. So? Evolutionary designs involve taking *large* samples, then breeding out the inferior designs. Since any given application must follow some guiding paradigm, such as ease-of-use vs. power/features, you will always end up with one application that makes precisely nobody happy. Better to have both emacs and vi than just one.
That was a huge ramble, but then I haven't eaten lunch yet.
"In fact, if my employees came to me and asked if they should pay the $50 fee or waste two minutes of their work day watching ads on The New York Times' website, I would tell them to watch the ads and save the cash (if we were 2,000 people, I would, of course, buy a site license)."
Well, if your employees work 200 days a year and watch 2 minutes worth of commercials a day, assuming that wages are half of total compensation, then unless your employess make less than US$3.75/hour, you are losing big bucks over paying the $50 yearly subscription fee. It would cost my employer upwards of US$500 for me to watch those commercials. Hell, they just paid me US$3 to write this reply.
I hate it when people call users stupid when they don't or can't install Windows or Linux. Users just don't *want* to do those things. Users want to *use* the computer, not pull it apart and put it together again. Most computer users have a job to do with the computer, and every minute spent trying to figure out how to do something is a minute lost. Microsoft went a long way to simplifying tasks on the computer. Now they made lots of mistakes along the way (the paper clip comes to mind), but that doesn't make end users lazy or stupid.
Would you want "upgrade" your car? How many computer geeks get their oil changed at Jiffy Lube? More than you'll ever know. It's not that they can't or don't know how to change the oil, it's just that they don't *want* to do it. Same thing with Windows users.
You'll notice that most of the work under Linux right now has to do with "spiffying up" the user interface, and making installation of Linux/apps easier. I love it. I hate having to edit a config file to get an application to run the way I want it to. I'll never get my dad using Linux until it is easier to user.
The real beauty of Linux comes from the fact that Linux rarely crashes, so I get fewer tech support calls from relatives. Right now most of my questions are hardware related (hey, how do I hook up this printer/set up a DSL modem/get the mouse wheel working/whatever). That's true under Windows, too. But under Windows there is a pretty good chance that the guy at Best Buy knows the answer. Under Linux you have to check the web. Odds are the guy down the street doesn't use Linux. Yet:)
RMS does not portend that Linux is part of the GNU project: it is not. That is why he calls it GNU/Linux and not GNU Linux. Note the "/". That indicates a combination, not ownership.
You will also find that you will be PAID according to your age, not your ability. One of the great things about Open Source is that it is a meritocracy: the more you do, the more you are respected, and the more you are consulted. But in the workplace, salary is directly related to your age. You can produce 10 times the work as another senior programmer, but you'll find that you aren't paid as well. Same goes for vacation, by the way.
I'm sure that there are companies where this is not true, but I'm also sure that they are the exception, not the rule.
The article also mentions that Kylix will integrate with bonobo. Perhaps this means that they support QT *and* GTK. The VCL/CLX libraries can be bound to any underlying widget system. Another month of programming and, voila, new widget bindings. And if they change CLX to support GTK, then since the Kylix IDE is written using CLX, Kylix itself will be a GNOME app!
Here is a section from Borland's Kylix faq:
"Is Kylix an Open Source project?
While the Kylix project itself is not being developed in a community Open Source model, it is a top requirement that developers be able to use Kylix to develop both GPL Open Source, and proprietary applications. The details of the Kylix open source project are currently under development and will be announced at a later date. The Kylix development team believes strongly in the value of open source and free software (in the FSF sense) and aims to support GPL application development as a clear option in Kylix."
Notice the clause that specifies "in the FSF sense". Well, since the FSF doesn't recognize Qt as free software, then it could be argued that Kylix no longer depends on Qt.
Either way, we should know by Christmas. I'll take a copy of Kylix in my stocking anytime.
Too late. Microsoft bought and paid for the chief architect of Delphi, Anders Helsberg, a couple of years ago. I'm sure he signed a couple of agreements that keep his mouth/mind shut for a few years, but that time is almost up.
What I find more interesting is that Kylix will integrate with gnome. I saw a demo of Kylix months ago, before they even had the IDE up and running. I watched the guy demoing the software write a test program, which linked with libqt. That indicated to me that they would be integrating with KDE, not GNOME. Of course, much has changed since then, with GNOME gaining much more support from industry.
Using the phone as an analogy, is it legal for AT&T to charge merchants for customers delivered to them simply by using their phone lines? I simply can't imagine how this could fly. If it does work, many online retailers will close due to non-existent profits. As the article points out, online retailers are losing money on sales in hopes of creating a customer base. Amazon has been following this policy for years, and has yet to turn a profit. If Amazon has to pay AT&T a cut, and the States start passing Internet Tax laws, say good-bye to the e-commerce industry.
It simply kills me that AT&T has to resort to this type of behavior to turn a profit. You can almost see the board room at AT&T corporate:
CEO: We're losing our shirts in the long distance market! What can we do to create a new revenue engine?
SUIT: Well, making a real product could take time and money, and that would hurt our share price. Why don't we just charge people money for the hell of it? Let the lawyers work out the details.
CEO: What would you suggest? We can't just start charging people's credit cards. I don't think that's legal.
SUIT #2: Well, let's cash in on this e-thing. We'll charge merchants, since they have more money than customers. Besides, most companies just roll over when you sick a few lawyers on them. Take Rambus and 1-click shopping for example.
CEO: Beautiful. Why don't we just charge retailers for providing customer "leads". After all, we own most of the networks. That could be worth billions! We create a massing team of lawyers to handle the strongarming and politician-buying, the lawyers take half, and we still get billions. And we don't even have to produce anything! We just sit on our butts and let the pot 'o gold roll in! Excellent. Gentlemen, I think we all deserve a big bonus for such innovation.
While I think that the addition of 16bit color is fantastic, the announcement actually talked about the release of a module for cellular communications. Until now you had to have a separate cell phone to make calls. Now you can use the Visor to place calls all by itself. The 3oz module contains a rechargeable battery and an earpiece, and uses the built-in microphone on the Visor. It will cost about US$300. What the article didn't mention was whether you could cruise the web using the module. That would be ideal, and would make the Visor a good competitor to the Palm VII.
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't call myself an audiophile by the definitions put forth in this post, but I do love to listen to music, and I do pay more money for a decent system. I would never pay $6000 for a pair of analog cables, but I have spent $30 to upgrade from the crappy cables that come with ANY receiver. As the ladies say, never mind the length, feel the WIDTH :)
;)
First, let me just say that there is definitely a difference between a $100 receiver and a $1000 receiver. I have never heard a $10,000 receiver, so I have no idea what it would sound like. So what is different between the $100 receiver and the $1000 receiver? Lots of things. Any modern receiver is made up of hundreds of components, from resisters and transistors to specialized chips like D/A converters and video scaling. For an audiophile, the real money is in the D/A converter. Many people think that the recording on a CD is perfect. It isn't. It's just like the squeeze theorem in Calculus. If you take a sine wave, and you want to approximate the volume underneath, you can draw rectangles that start from the y axis at 0 and go up or down until they touch the sine wave. They you pick an arbitrary width and draw the rectangle underneath the curve. There is a little triangular gap between the rectangle and the curve, but as you make the width of the rectangles smaller, you have less and less of a gap. That's what an A/D converter does: it maps a true sound wave to an approximate equivalent using little slices. For CD that would be around 22000 slices per second, which is very close to the limit of the human ear's capability to resolve. So we have a nearly perfect recording on CD, how about turning those bits back into a wave that can be passed through analog equipment, like speakers? For that we need a digital to analog (D/A) converter. A D/A converter is usually measured by things like noise and dynamics. So if the CD recorded a dynamic peak that was +12db, the analog version should be +12db. Some of the converters used in cheaper stereo equipment uses D/A converters that produce enough noise, and not enough dynamics, that the music starts to sound like AM radio. But mostly they do a good job. Some equipment uses really nice D/A converters that make the music sound more like a vinyl record, not from the noise perspective, but from the "hey that actually sounds like a woman's voice" perspective. For those who don't think their is a difference, head out to a Tweeter and listen to the different products. If you can't tell a difference between them, I would be surprised. Make sure to use a decent pair of speakers that can actually handle some power, and turn it way up. Listen to the distortion that some products produce on the upper end, and whether the bass is muddy or crisp. Turn on a subwoofer and then turn it off. It all makes a difference. The real question is, how much is that difference worth to you? To me, there is no point in listening to music through a crappy system, because the music loses some of its beauty. It's like the difference between watching a movie on your flip phone and watching it in an iMax theater.
I find it really amusing that Slashdot readers, many of whom obsess over the smallest difference in their computer components, and who will spend $100 on fans and $300 on a fancy case, feel the need to make fun of the exact equivalent in the audio category. Perhaps we all don't spend $6000 on USB cables, but I have definitely seen people spent $400 on a whacked-out power supply. We all have our little quirks, so who cares if someone obsesses over the sound of their music collection? Let's get rid of the snake oil salesmen like the Anjou stuff, but remember that for a lot of people sound quality is a reality, and they can spend their money however they feel fit. I tend to spend a lot of money on BOTH
When i was an stats undergrad at the University of Illinois I was working with a Flight School Instructor who was trying to come up with a statistical model to predict who would make good pilots (I have no idea what he thought a good pilot is anymore). We modeled over 125 variables, from high school GPA, ACT, SAT and other intelligence indicators, to video game skills, 0-roll handling and the color of their eyes.
Not one good predictor among them. It turns out that good pilots are born that way.
"When the PHBs see reports from Microsoft, who THEY see as a trusted name in the industry..."
You must be kidding me. PHB's do not trust their venders further than they can throw them. They are suspicious by nature.
Having said that, they may not trust Microsoft, but they may use this information to avert a switch to Linux-based systems when confronted by their technical staff.
Numerous articles in the NYT over the past few months actually document the decline in trust that Microsoft is experiencing, mainly due to its security problems and licensing programs. Linux is cited as the major benefactor of this mistrust, specifically because of its open nature and track record.
"Maybe one day we can have international power lines where all the countries with lots of sunshine provide power to the rest of the world? How cool would that be?"
You mean Saudi Arabia and Iraq? Damn, they have all the energy!
Smaller screen? Based on inches maybe. But the VAIO has 1280x768 resolution, whereas the PowerBook has 1028x768. I just dropped by CompUSA tonight to look at them, and the VAIO is a smart little machine. The pre-installed Windows-XP blows, but the resolution is wild. It has the same resolution (per inch) as the Clie line. First notebook with usable 5 point fonts :)
;)
It is way smaller and lighter than the PowerBook as well. If this thing ran OS X it would be a no-brainer. It's good to hear that people have had positive experiences loading Linux onto these things, because the VAIO includes XP Home addition. So even if you like XP it's a downer.
All things equal, I can't decide between the two.
Note: the Apple guy at CompUSA and the regular notebook guy were practically in fisticuffs about this thing. I had the Apple guy hovering around me, iBook in hand, while I was checking out the VAIO. I think he smells competition
Last night my wife and I started watching 10 hours of recordings of "Taken" from our PVR". After watching 3 straight shows, which took 4.5 hours, not 6, she mentioned that the PVR is her favorite piece of equipment ever made.
I had to agree, as the night before I watched "Full Metal Jacket" on BBC America, in live mode. The same tacky commercials every 20 minutes. Maybe if the commercials weren't so insulting to my intelligence I might watch them. But as it is, nothing I care about is advertised, and the advertisements I don't care about are so unbearable (seen the BowFlex commercial lately?) that I end up hating whatever show I am watching.
I am sure that Hollywood and the Cable companies will figure out a way to make a PVR a pain in the arse, but until then I am happy to own my PVR.
The article says that the statistics are generated using HitBox technology, which is cookie-based. If you are blocking cookies, then perhaps you do not appear on the register. Since the mozilla cookie-blocking feature began about the same time as the fall of market share from > 10% to 3.4%, perhaps this can be explained by people using mozilla's blocking features.
I graduated from the University of Illinois in May of 1992, at the tail end of the last recession. I graduated from a class of 3 undergraduates (most Statistics people are in the Masters program). I decided on Statistics because it turned out that I had an aptitude for math, and not much else of use (I originally wanted to be an engineer, but I found out quickly that I was not suited for such a regimented approach to learning; math accommodates eccentrics).
So there I was with my expensive college degree and a stack of resumes proudly proclaiming to the world that I had met the challenge that is the United States collegiate system, and prevailed with a glowing B average. Who could turn down such genius? Well, strictly speaking, nobody. Truth be told, however, I didn't get a single response to my resume, despite how many I flooded the market with. Nobody was hiring at all, and most government agencies wouldn't even do me the honor of telling me that they received my letter of application.
The summer and fall came and went with no more successes. I did get some letters admitting to hiring freezes, and would I like my resume to be put on file for when they begin hiring again? So I laid low at my university job (statistician for an entomologist).
In November I saw an advertisement on the campus bulletins for Anderson Consulting (NOT Arthur Anderson!). They were to be interviewing the following week. I called the placement office to set up an interview, and they told me that only CS and Engineering students were being allowed to interview. Not content with that answer, I decided to show up at the interview site with suit on and resume in hand. When I got to the interview site, I walked up to the first Anderson Employee I saw and told him that I would like an interview, but was not allowed to ask for one because I did not hold the proper degree. He took my resume and said he would fit me in at the end of the day, about 3pm. I waited for six hours, and was finally interviewed. Being my first real interview, I was nervous as hell and thought I did a terrible job. But a month later, Anderson called from Chicago and asked me to come up for a second interview. That interview went well and I got the job. I asked the recruiter that interviewed my why they chose me, and they said that they liked the aggressive nature that I showed by showing up and demanding an interview. That's a consultancy for you!
The first thing I noticed in the training sessions was that nearly everybody else was NOT a CS or Engineering graduate. I worked with people with Philosophy degrees, Communications degrees, and even a PhD in Slavic languages. Best COBOL programmer we had back then (Hi Lee, if you're reading this!). I picked up COBOL quickly, already knowing C/C++ because of my Statistical Computing class, and was a top programmer within a year. I later moved to Price Waterhouse (an excellent employer, by the way), and then on to smaller and larger software houses. I never regret my choice of Statistics as a major.
I guess the moral of this tale, if there is one, is that you can choose whatever career you want, but be ready to go the extra mile if you decide to change career paths later. Software development is a forgiving career path, unlike Law or Medicine. That is the one saving grace of the field: anybody can play if they are willing to work hard and learn.
My company (Omron) makes RFID tags, and IIR, they are about a US$1 each. Ouch.
Anyway, RFID works based on induction coils. They pick up radio waves (the RF part of RFID), which creates power through the coils, which then enables reading and writing of the memory on the chip.
Now before you get excited, realize that most inexpensive chips have memory sizes measured in bytes, not kilobytes. So tracking the entire history of a note would not really be feasible. Maybe the last 100 transactions, tops.
j
15.5 billion man-hours for the Apollo project?
Let's see, if one man-year is 2000 hours, then we need 7,750,000 man-years of work. Assuming that 50,000 people worked on the project, it would take them 155 years to complete. Wait a minute, it couldn't possibly have taken more than 20 years to do the Apollo project, since NASA had only been around for a little while. So how many people would that be...387,500 people. Which was most of Houston back then. Can these numbers be for real? Or perhaps this is like AT&T saying that a publicly available 911 document is worth a couple million...
If the planet is increasing its CO2 to the point where plants can thrive (which they can't yet, they need water for that), then you could seed plants on Mars, and then wait a couple hundred years for the plants to take over. Once the plants take over, there will be sufficient O2 in the air (plant waste byproduct) for humans.
I don't know if Mars's gravity is strong enough to actually keep the atmosphere from leaking, but hey, it's a start. Since oxygen is a heavier molecule than carbon, it might increase the surface pressure as well.
I am not an environmental scientist, so take all that with a grain of salt. I do, however, read a lot of science fiction, which as we all know is an acceptable substitute for actual learning.
That goes double for my wife. She uses her computer a lot more than I do, and I'm a programmer. She's an elementary school teacher with not enough time and too many students. Oh yeah, she's also a perfectionist.
For her 12 classes (3yrs old to 8th grade), she needs to make lesson plans, test, quizzes, worksheets, handouts, study sheets, notes to parents, attendance rosters, gradebooks, etc.
These documents are all done in Star Office with a lot of help from image manipulation tools.
Linux supports all of her needs, has never crashed during any of her all-nighters, and networks well with all of the other machines in our SOHO.
At school, however, she uses 98 and NT. NT she doesn't mind too much, except that she doesn't get to use the Gimp and Nautilus (which she adores). But 98 drives her insane.
I have learned a lot about Linux by taking on administration of a busy woman's machine. Over the years I have had to do a lot of little hacks to get things just right. Now, however, I can take a default 7.1 install of RedHat and she is perfectly happy. All of the little workarounds I used to do myself are now part of a standard distrobution. This is immensely important. I used to worry that if I got hit by a truck my wife would not be able to find any of her files and would end up reverting to Windows in my absence. That is no longer true.
She is now trying to find ways to introduce Linux to her students, as she thinks that Linux is a real choice for education. Considering that she works for a school that rations white chalk and pencils, the money to keep upgrading those Windows boxen is just getting too expensive. They have a nice computer lab at her school, but you can bet that the next upgrades of the hardware and software in that lab will coincide with Windows 2009.
Linux has come a long way on the desktop, and that is fantastic. It has become a real server powerhouse, too, and that is fantastic. But for the author of that article to say that Linux should focus on the server is suicidal. We all know that a Sun server will beat the pants off a Windows server. Always has, most likely always will. So would a SCO, BSD, Linux, or any other *nix. But that has not saved their bacon. Why? Because nobody has the money to pay for a decent sys admin (as Microsoft even concedes). Command line tools and config files? Not for the average sys admin. Microsoft learned that it is easier to sell a lousy server machine running a nice desktop than it is to sell a nice server with a lousy/non-existant desktop.
As programs like linuxconf evolve into highly usable administration tools, more people will give Linux the time of day.
I personally look forward to a future with all-open source protocols and programs. Instead of trying to get the next version of SMBS to work with Linux, perhaps the open source community should put its energy into finishing promising alternatives like Coda, with both Linux and Windows clients (but only Linux servers - back at ya, Microsoft).
I think that the war is over, but Microsoft just doesn't know it yet. Whether anybody buys Linux is irrelevant. So long as this mass of programmers continues to build better and better software, the user community can wait. And with all of the BS going on with the RIAA and MPAA getting in bed with Microsoft, it is only a matter of time before users are desperate for an alternative. By then Linux will be as good or better in the desktop realm as Microsoft.
So hackers, keep working on those office suites, USB drivers and eye candy. The war IS over.
I don't agree with this analogy. West did not TRY to break into the site, he simply walked through an open door. A better analogy might be this:
Someone walks up to your door to insert a flier. When attaching the flier to your door (totally legit), the door opens. Curiousity strikes, and the caller walks in to see if anyone is home (questionable, but if the intent is friendly, not generally a big deal). Note that so far the caller has no intent on stealing anything. The caller then sees a set of keys on the floor, and decides to pick them up to see if they are the keys for the door. Upon discovering that they are, he notifies the owner that his door is open and that the keys are sitting right inside, within plain view of anyone who would want to steal something from him.
I still don't see how he did anything wrong. Illegal? Possibly. Ethically wrong? Not really.
I would like to point out that the only thing harder to find than an Oracle DBA/Programmer who really knows what s/he is doing is a person with a high IQ and the ability/inclination to learn new things quickly. Ten years in the industry and I can only say that I am disappointed with the caliber of people in the industry. I can not, however, say that foreign workers fill the high IQ/learn-things-quickly prerequisite any better than native workers. In fact, the language barrier can sometimes get in the way. However, they tend to have more incentive to learn, since they will be deported if they fail at their task and get fired.
Sure it is well-cooled and isolated. But who exactly is going to sys admin a site on the North Slope? How much will you have to pay to have a nerd give up his life to administer that site? Think about it: no women, no electronics superstore, no Borders, no cops, no boss on site, unfettered access to pr0n, nobody watching,... wait a minute, maybe it won't be that hard to find someone after all...
j
Is two desktops really too much choice? Gnome and KDE are very different when you get down to the development level. And I'm not just talking about the C vs. C++ difference. There are basic design philosophies at work. For example, Gnome decided that the best way to support an object model is to take CORBA, make it as fast as possible, then wrap it up in regular C bindings. KDE, on the other hand, decided to skip CORBA in favor of a more lightweight, if less standard, protocol. I can see good reasons for doing either, but as far as integration goes, there is little hope.
Personally I like having a lot of choices. Some people argue that the Linux community spends too much time reinventing the wheel with all the different window managers and desktop environments. So? Evolutionary designs involve taking *large* samples, then breeding out the inferior designs. Since any given application must follow some guiding paradigm, such as ease-of-use vs. power/features, you will always end up with one application that makes precisely nobody happy. Better to have both emacs and vi than just one.
That was a huge ramble, but then I haven't eaten lunch yet.
"In fact, if my employees came to me and asked if they should pay the $50 fee or waste two minutes of their work day watching ads on The New York Times' website, I would tell them to watch the ads and save the cash (if we were 2,000 people, I would, of course, buy a site license)."
Well, if your employees work 200 days a year and watch 2 minutes worth of commercials a day, assuming that wages are half of total compensation, then unless your employess make less than US$3.75/hour, you are losing big bucks over paying the $50 yearly subscription fee. It would cost my employer upwards of US$500 for me to watch those commercials. Hell, they just paid me US$3 to write this reply.
I hate it when people call users stupid when they don't or can't install Windows or Linux. Users just don't *want* to do those things. Users want to *use* the computer, not pull it apart and put it together again. Most computer users have a job to do with the computer, and every minute spent trying to figure out how to do something is a minute lost. Microsoft went a long way to simplifying tasks on the computer. Now they made lots of mistakes along the way (the paper clip comes to mind), but that doesn't make end users lazy or stupid.
:)
Would you want "upgrade" your car? How many computer geeks get their oil changed at Jiffy Lube? More than you'll ever know. It's not that they can't or don't know how to change the oil, it's just that they don't *want* to do it. Same thing with Windows users.
You'll notice that most of the work under Linux right now has to do with "spiffying up" the user interface, and making installation of Linux/apps easier. I love it. I hate having to edit a config file to get an application to run the way I want it to. I'll never get my dad using Linux until it is easier to user.
The real beauty of Linux comes from the fact that Linux rarely crashes, so I get fewer tech support calls from relatives. Right now most of my questions are hardware related (hey, how do I hook up this printer/set up a DSL modem/get the mouse wheel working/whatever). That's true under Windows, too. But under Windows there is a pretty good chance that the guy at Best Buy knows the answer. Under Linux you have to check the web. Odds are the guy down the street doesn't use Linux. Yet
RMS does not portend that Linux is part of the GNU project: it is not. That is why he calls it GNU/Linux and not GNU Linux. Note the "/". That indicates a combination, not ownership.
You will also find that you will be PAID according to your age, not your ability. One of the great things about Open Source is that it is a meritocracy: the more you do, the more you are respected, and the more you are consulted. But in the workplace, salary is directly related to your age. You can produce 10 times the work as another senior programmer, but you'll find that you aren't paid as well. Same goes for vacation, by the way.
I'm sure that there are companies where this is not true, but I'm also sure that they are the exception, not the rule.
Can't wait for the mozilla team to finish those performance enhancements...
The article also mentions that Kylix will integrate with bonobo. Perhaps this means that they support QT *and* GTK. The VCL/CLX libraries can be bound to any underlying widget system. Another month of programming and, voila, new widget bindings. And if they change CLX to support GTK, then since the Kylix IDE is written using CLX, Kylix itself will be a GNOME app! Here is a section from Borland's Kylix faq: "Is Kylix an Open Source project? While the Kylix project itself is not being developed in a community Open Source model, it is a top requirement that developers be able to use Kylix to develop both GPL Open Source, and proprietary applications. The details of the Kylix open source project are currently under development and will be announced at a later date. The Kylix development team believes strongly in the value of open source and free software (in the FSF sense) and aims to support GPL application development as a clear option in Kylix." Notice the clause that specifies "in the FSF sense". Well, since the FSF doesn't recognize Qt as free software, then it could be argued that Kylix no longer depends on Qt. Either way, we should know by Christmas. I'll take a copy of Kylix in my stocking anytime.
Too late. Microsoft bought and paid for the chief architect of Delphi, Anders Helsberg, a couple of years ago. I'm sure he signed a couple of agreements that keep his mouth/mind shut for a few years, but that time is almost up. What I find more interesting is that Kylix will integrate with gnome. I saw a demo of Kylix months ago, before they even had the IDE up and running. I watched the guy demoing the software write a test program, which linked with libqt. That indicated to me that they would be integrating with KDE, not GNOME. Of course, much has changed since then, with GNOME gaining much more support from industry.
Using the phone as an analogy, is it legal for AT&T to charge merchants for customers delivered to them simply by using their phone lines? I simply can't imagine how this could fly. If it does work, many online retailers will close due to non-existent profits. As the article points out, online retailers are losing money on sales in hopes of creating a customer base. Amazon has been following this policy for years, and has yet to turn a profit. If Amazon has to pay AT&T a cut, and the States start passing Internet Tax laws, say good-bye to the e-commerce industry.
It simply kills me that AT&T has to resort to this type of behavior to turn a profit. You can almost see the board room at AT&T corporate:
CEO: We're losing our shirts in the long distance market! What can we do to create a new revenue engine?
SUIT: Well, making a real product could take time and money, and that would hurt our share price. Why don't we just charge people money for the hell of it? Let the lawyers work out the details.
CEO: What would you suggest? We can't just start charging people's credit cards. I don't think that's legal.
SUIT #2: Well, let's cash in on this e-thing. We'll charge merchants, since they have more money than customers. Besides, most companies just roll over when you sick a few lawyers on them. Take Rambus and 1-click shopping for example.
CEO: Beautiful. Why don't we just charge retailers for providing customer "leads". After all, we own most of the networks. That could be worth billions! We create a massing team of lawyers to handle the strongarming and politician-buying, the lawyers take half, and we still get billions. And we don't even have to produce anything! We just sit on our butts and let the pot 'o gold roll in! Excellent. Gentlemen, I think we all deserve a big bonus for such innovation.
SUITS: .
Corporate America makes me puke.
While I think that the addition of 16bit color is fantastic, the announcement actually talked about the release of a module for cellular communications. Until now you had to have a separate cell phone to make calls. Now you can use the Visor to place calls all by itself. The 3oz module contains a rechargeable battery and an earpiece, and uses the built-in microphone on the Visor. It will cost about US$300. What the article didn't mention was whether you could cruise the web using the module. That would be ideal, and would make the Visor a good competitor to the Palm VII.