I was wondering why this thing was even getting mentioned, then I checked out the list of member companies and if anyone can get this in wide use it's these companies.
Not to dismiss this study out of hand, but this prediction has been made in the past many times, most famously by the economist Thomas Malthus in 1798 entitled An Essay on the Principle of Population. Malthus predicted man would outgrow it's resources within ~50 years if strict population checks were not enforced. However, he did not take into account the pace of technological change and food production far exceeded his estimates for the time frame.
It is very difficult to predict the future, especially almost 50 years out. As stock brokers are supposed to say "Past performance is no guarantee of future performance." Or something like that.
I was actually reading the NY Times website and tried to click through to see what this Alice was all about and was confused when the link didn't work. Weird. Then I realized that like all NY Times tech stories this one was now resting comfortably on the front page of Slashdot, allowing it's readers to do their dirty work and deprive the world of another interesting site for a few days.
It's becoming less and less useful to read slashdot - "News for Herds. Stuff that is by now being served from a flaming web server."
... but I don't think there is a definitive list of prefixes that are for cell phones only. For example, in the NYC area the prefix 646 is for land lines and for cell phones.
For the time being immediately ask for them to place you on your do not call list and at least they won't call you back.
This is clearly retarded. Why do computer dudes always throw down insane ultimatums? It gives us a bad name and it's the reason people in companies don't trust us.
"DOS 6.3 is the last operating system this company will every use, PERIOD." "Get out." "Ok."
This comment doesn't make any sense. Compare PHP to JSP if you must, as both are front end languages that can do everything, but you'd be foolish to use them to do so.
Writing a larger scale web application in PHP would be a very bad idea, and until you've done one I doubt you'd see why.
Re:Thats MORE True With Development Environments
on
Version Fatigue
·
· Score: 2
This is such a perfect example of the moving technology target that MS presents it's programmers, and ultimately is the reason I stopped working with MS technologies and switched completely to Java.
The most important thing I found with Java (and in this case data access methods therein) is that there's a framework that effectively hides the details of the access from you and allows for future updates to that layer without busting your old code. Microsoft has no concept of this and replaces their technologies so often that you are constantly reworking code for little to no benefit.
Aside from C++, this seems to be a problem with all MS supported languages, and is one reason I'm not taking the.NET platform too seriously.
We've been seeing more stories about Governments either being petitioned to change their software buying policies, or mandate certain buying policies for their various departments.
The problem is that the mandates seem somewhat disconnected by technical reality and what software works best in a situation. My suggestion is that perhaps what should be mandated is a minimum standard of interoperability between systems, and a minimum level of openness about the mechanics through which the software achieves the interoperability.
So for example, the US gov't could specify that any productivity suite purchased by it's departments must support completely an open standard file format of their choosing or design. If MS Office chooses to support that file format properly, that there is no cap on how many units of MS Office could be purchased. If they choose not to, then it cannot be considered.
If that policy were applied to many different software application areas then it would quickly matter less where the software came from, and would start to matter more how good the software was.
I'm not sure, but I think the use of the word "funky" was banned internationally in 1984. Unless you're into crafts with beads and rope, I'd suggest avoiding the word.
Also, prefixing it with "Tres" is seriously fucked.
You're probably going to have to offer some form of compatibility layer with the other networks. That's how Limewire got it's improved Gnutella protocol out there.
That is assuming that your protocol really does offer tangible benefits and people will want to continue using it when the other networks are available to them as well.
...but it'll increasingly be all of our problems in the future. A lot of really smart people are worried about the computer industry's quick pace and are worried that it's unsustainable. If I have a computer that I bought 15 years ago that's running a critical function in my workplace, it quickly becomes more expensive (in hardware costs) to support that piece of equipment than it does to buy a whole new machine. That's fine except that we then need to convert all the data over to new formats and operating systems, interface all our surrounding systems with the new system and generally spend a bunch of time and money replicating the functions of the old machine.
Sure, it's rarely ever that simple a scenario, but the computer industry should spend a bit more time thinking about sustainable growth rather than the next 300 Mhz of CPU performance.
The worst part about all this legislation is that the people that write it think it's going to be effective, then they go back to sleep and think they've done something about violence in schools.
How many kids 16 and under actually buy the video games they play themselves? I bet they don't buy more than 1 in 4, and so this legislation would just force kids to pirate that one title they would buy.
Why don't we try to control the source of the real violence, real guns, instead of going after these false demons like video games that don't have a powerful lobby to protect them.
Actually, J Allard the head of MS' digital entertainment division (in charge of xBox) stated in a wired interview prior to the unit's release that he wanted to move prices down fairly rapidly, "to get the retail price to $100 as quickly as possible."
This may be a little faster than they had hoped to lower the price, but MS knows it's gonna take heavy losses to get the market penetration required to start making serious money on the software.
Remember when they did the American version of La Femme Nikita with Bridget Fonda or something? They managed to achieve heir vision by removing all elements of style and character, and replacing them with larger explosions.
I'm always seeing companies targetting the embedded systems and webpad markets with new products, but where are the webpads?
I would have thought in '98 with the amount of press and press releasing surrounding the webpad idea we'd be swimming in low cost options by now and I'd happily be reading slashdot on the couch, but I've been sorely disappointed.
Does anybody have any idea when a mid cost wireless webpad will show up that actually makes this market worth targetting?
You usually pay for a number of impressions for an ad, similar to the way you would pay more for an ad in a magazine with greater distribution.
Clickthroughs can pay more or will be the source of payment for certain types of ads, but I doubt for example that Salon.com only gets paid when someone clicks through and I know that the OSDN network sells based on impressions not clickthroughs.
Anyone who's using Sourceforge to host their project, as I am, should be realistic about what they're getting and for how long they'll get it.
First of all, I love sourceforge. It gives me all of the things I want right out of the box and for free. User forums, bug tracking, SSH CVS, and so on.
However, it is free and I think we all know has a pretty slim chance of making money. With that in mind, no matter what their polcies state there seems to be a pretty good chance of them just exploding one fine morning and taking a whole bunch of source down with them. Make backups, I should too.
Other than that, we can be a demanding lot so try to go easy on these guys, let's give them a chance to survive.
I've been struggling with CVS for a while now, and while it does the job I've always been thinking "There's got to be something out there with recursive add built in."
Now here comes slashdot with an actual useful story about source control and some of the options and development outside of CVS.
The only thing to find out now is if the discussion will be of any use, obviously I'm not helping...
Hey, thanks for the compliment, that's all we're hoping for with this thing - people who don't want to bother setting up insane mod_mp3 modules or shoutcast and who want a web interface.
Thanks for the tip on versiontracker too, we just got listed on Download.com and our downloads are through the roof, so maybe a versiontracker listing will really put us over the top.
... they're not really levelling the playing field because DDR memory is a mature option for AMD whereas it's brand new on the Intel boards, and apparently has some problems.
If you're going to compare just CPU power then use synthetic benchmarks that test just that, otherwise if it's system performance you're going after why not compare AMD DDR to Pentium 4 RDRAM, at least those are two mature configurations.
And in a related story...
on
VeriSign Buys .tv
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
...verisign loses $44.8 million dollars on the.tv registry.
I can't believe people are still dealing out big cash for lame TLDs, what is this, '98?
Depends what the potential savings are to your constituents. If you can present open source software in concrete terms as in "Ditching Microsoft will pay for one more school per year in our city" then perhaps people will listen.
Otherwise you'll have exactly one extra vote, from RMS.
Slashdot Mirror
I was wondering why this thing was even getting mentioned, then I checked out the list of member companies and if anyone can get this in wide use it's these companies.
Maybe it has a chance.
Not to dismiss this study out of hand, but this prediction has been made in the past many times, most famously by the economist Thomas Malthus in 1798 entitled An Essay on the Principle of Population. Malthus predicted man would outgrow it's resources within ~50 years if strict population checks were not enforced. However, he did not take into account the pace of technological change and food production far exceeded his estimates for the time frame.
It is very difficult to predict the future, especially almost 50 years out. As stock brokers are supposed to say "Past performance is no guarantee of future performance." Or something like that.
I was actually reading the NY Times website and tried to click through to see what this Alice was all about and was confused when the link didn't work. Weird. Then I realized that like all NY Times tech stories this one was now resting comfortably on the front page of Slashdot, allowing it's readers to do their dirty work and deprive the world of another interesting site for a few days.
It's becoming less and less useful to read slashdot - "News for Herds. Stuff that is by now being served from a flaming web server."
For the time being immediately ask for them to place you on your do not call list and at least they won't call you back.
I got one of these from Asus. It's pretty good, graphics performance isn't the best and it runs a little hot, but other than that cheap and fast.
"I will always only install Mandrake."
This is clearly retarded. Why do computer dudes always throw down insane ultimatums? It gives us a bad name and it's the reason people in companies don't trust us.
"DOS 6.3 is the last operating system this company will every use, PERIOD."
"Get out."
"Ok."
This comment doesn't make any sense. Compare PHP to JSP if you must, as both are front end languages that can do everything, but you'd be foolish to use them to do so.
Writing a larger scale web application in PHP would be a very bad idea, and until you've done one I doubt you'd see why.
This is such a perfect example of the moving technology target that MS presents it's programmers, and ultimately is the reason I stopped working with MS technologies and switched completely to Java.
The most important thing I found with Java (and in this case data access methods therein) is that there's a framework that effectively hides the details of the access from you and allows for future updates to that layer without busting your old code. Microsoft has no concept of this and replaces their technologies so often that you are constantly reworking code for little to no benefit.
Aside from C++, this seems to be a problem with all MS supported languages, and is one reason I'm not taking the
How much chepaer is AMD once you "drop over $100 on a heatsink/fan?"
We've been seeing more stories about Governments either being petitioned to change their software buying policies, or mandate certain buying policies for their various departments.
The problem is that the mandates seem somewhat disconnected by technical reality and what software works best in a situation. My suggestion is that perhaps what should be mandated is a minimum standard of interoperability between systems, and a minimum level of openness about the mechanics through which the software achieves the interoperability.
So for example, the US gov't could specify that any productivity suite purchased by it's departments must support completely an open standard file format of their choosing or design. If MS Office chooses to support that file format properly, that there is no cap on how many units of MS Office could be purchased. If they choose not to, then it cannot be considered.
If that policy were applied to many different software application areas then it would quickly matter less where the software came from, and would start to matter more how good the software was.
I'm not sure, but I think the use of the word "funky" was banned internationally in 1984. Unless you're into crafts with beads and rope, I'd suggest avoiding the word.
Also, prefixing it with "Tres" is seriously fucked.
You're probably going to have to offer some form of compatibility layer with the other networks. That's how Limewire got it's improved Gnutella protocol out there.
That is assuming that your protocol really does offer tangible benefits and people will want to continue using it when the other networks are available to them as well.
...but it'll increasingly be all of our problems in the future. A lot of really smart people are worried about the computer industry's quick pace and are worried that it's unsustainable. If I have a computer that I bought 15 years ago that's running a critical function in my workplace, it quickly becomes more expensive (in hardware costs) to support that piece of equipment than it does to buy a whole new machine. That's fine except that we then need to convert all the data over to new formats and operating systems, interface all our surrounding systems with the new system and generally spend a bunch of time and money replicating the functions of the old machine.
Sure, it's rarely ever that simple a scenario, but the computer industry should spend a bit more time thinking about sustainable growth rather than the next 300 Mhz of CPU performance.
The worst part about all this legislation is that the people that write it think it's going to be effective, then they go back to sleep and think they've done something about violence in schools.
How many kids 16 and under actually buy the video games they play themselves? I bet they don't buy more than 1 in 4, and so this legislation would just force kids to pirate that one title they would buy.
Why don't we try to control the source of the real violence, real guns, instead of going after these false demons like video games that don't have a powerful lobby to protect them.
Actually, J Allard the head of MS' digital entertainment division (in charge of xBox) stated in a wired interview prior to the unit's release that he wanted to move prices down fairly rapidly, "to get the retail price to $100 as quickly as possible."
This may be a little faster than they had hoped to lower the price, but MS knows it's gonna take heavy losses to get the market penetration required to start making serious money on the software.
Remember when they did the American version of La Femme Nikita with Bridget Fonda or something? They managed to achieve heir vision by removing all elements of style and character, and replacing them with larger explosions.
Great work America.
I'm always seeing companies targetting the embedded systems and webpad markets with new products, but where are the webpads?
I would have thought in '98 with the amount of press and press releasing surrounding the webpad idea we'd be swimming in low cost options by now and I'd happily be reading slashdot on the couch, but I've been sorely disappointed.
Does anybody have any idea when a mid cost wireless webpad will show up that actually makes this market worth targetting?
This sounds like the perfect thing to use to listen to your streamsicle server, check out the link in the sig.
You usually pay for a number of impressions for an ad, similar to the way you would pay more for an ad in a magazine with greater distribution.
Clickthroughs can pay more or will be the source of payment for certain types of ads, but I doubt for example that Salon.com only gets paid when someone clicks through and I know that the OSDN network sells based on impressions not clickthroughs.
Anyone who's using Sourceforge to host their project, as I am, should be realistic about what they're getting and for how long they'll get it.
First of all, I love sourceforge. It gives me all of the things I want right out of the box and for free. User forums, bug tracking, SSH CVS, and so on.
However, it is free and I think we all know has a pretty slim chance of making money. With that in mind, no matter what their polcies state there seems to be a pretty good chance of them just exploding one fine morning and taking a whole bunch of source down with them. Make backups, I should too.
Other than that, we can be a demanding lot so try to go easy on these guys, let's give them a chance to survive.
I've been struggling with CVS for a while now, and while it does the job I've always been thinking "There's got to be something out there with recursive add built in."
Now here comes slashdot with an actual useful story about source control and some of the options and development outside of CVS.
The only thing to find out now is if the discussion will be of any use, obviously I'm not helping...
Hey, thanks for the compliment, that's all we're hoping for with this thing - people who don't want to bother setting up insane mod_mp3 modules or shoutcast and who want a web interface.
Thanks for the tip on versiontracker too, we just got listed on Download.com and our downloads are through the roof, so maybe a versiontracker listing will really put us over the top.
... they're not really levelling the playing field because DDR memory is a mature option for AMD whereas it's brand new on the Intel boards, and apparently has some problems.
If you're going to compare just CPU power then use synthetic benchmarks that test just that, otherwise if it's system performance you're going after why not compare AMD DDR to Pentium 4 RDRAM, at least those are two mature configurations.
...verisign loses $44.8 million dollars on the
I can't believe people are still dealing out big cash for lame TLDs, what is this, '98?
Depends what the potential savings are to your constituents. If you can present open source software in concrete terms as in "Ditching Microsoft will pay for one more school per year in our city" then perhaps people will listen.
Otherwise you'll have exactly one extra vote, from RMS.