...it pretty much doesn't matter what the stoopid window dressing is. I learned long ago the universal technique for shutting off any computer (yank the power cable). Since then, I have only needed my editor and my scripting language. Everything else is pretty much fluff. I do like to have firefox on the system, though.
I believe the game is all about the apps, not the OS.
Has any analyst considered that there can be no winner to the "browser war?" Good gravy, war is certainly an easy metaphor to understand but its applicability to emerging and evolving technologies is tenuous. Better to call the competition by browser makers for the hearts of consumers a Red Queen's race. Do species stop competing for resources? Only the "stable" ones (i.e. thost that have become extinct) do.
As for bracing for the horrors of a two-platform web world, that call is many years too late. Apple's Safari is likely to be the dark horse that IT folks will have to adapt to. I think Steve Jobs means to make a big play for the PC pie. The Mac mini is as reasonable desktop as any from Dell, Gateway or Newegg (at least for corporate use).
In a perfect world, it wouldn't matter one jot what web client software is used. Browsers ought to be a whole lot stupider than they are. Just follow the meticulously defined W3C specs and lets all stop caring about "owning the platform." It's the applications that are far more interesting and carefully contrieved browser inoperabilities only stall the inevitable demotion of the underlying operating system to something akin to a really bloated BIOS.
The death of the American Programmer has been heralded many times before. Back before spreading terror about the eminent collapse of our non-Y2K compliant world, Ed Yourdon wrote a little book of doom called The Rise and Fall of the American Programer, in which a dim future was projected for our overpaid and underworked behinds.
He wrote this is 1993.
Some of you will remember that the booming economy of the mid to late 90s in which being able to say "internet" landed you a tech job.
It will take more years to evaluate the real impact of offshoring on the American Programmer. If programming is what you enjoy doing, you will always have work (although you will have to be flexible in what you program).
Shatner is a fine actor. He always brings something to the part. I love the orginal series. However, Kirk is f*cking dead. Ditto Spock. Ditto Scotty. I wish Berman would stop masturbating about action-figure sales and put PLOT first. Tell interesting stories. Have the characters make interesting choices. KILL a few of them.
I was recently leafing though some of my Dragon Magazines from the mid-80's and this game is often mentioned. Paranoia seemed like a fantastically humorous game. It will be nice to see what this iteration will bring.
Seth Able, creator of the BBS game Legend of the Red Dragon, continues to produce wonderfully quirky games. For instance, Funeral Quest is online game that has players via for the wallets of grieving families. Capitalism at its finest. DungeonScroll is word game/RPG. It's like boogle but with spells and hit points.
Are you insane? Hammers, saws and screwdrivers
aren't provided to carpenters, but materials that will stay with the customer, like 2x4 planks, I-beams, nails, are. Why on Earth would a programmer, that's not with a VAR, bring a computer to the job? A programmer's tools are nearly all insubstantial (the notable exception being books, but even those are going electronic). Programming is a skill, not a piece of hardware. You don't need a programmer to run a computer. You need the programmer to make the computer do something useful.
The constant equating of programming to an industrial process is without merit and has been debunked before by Fred Brooks, Steve McConnell and others. The construction techniques for software aren't as well understood or as systematized as those known to physical engineers and fabricators. This makes every software project mostly unique, although certainly experiences from previous projects will help the next one. McConnell identifies four legs of software development that must come together to get a successful production. These are people, process, product and technology. In reverse order, the technology piece is simply the OS, the hardware and programming language chosen for the job. The product leg deals with scope of the project, such as listing the required features, inputs, outputs and whatnot. The process bit relates to how the project is (or isn't) managed, risk management and customer feedback. The people aspect comprises the quality of the programmers doing the work. This can have a huge impact on the shipping product.
Outsourcing addresses only one leg of software developement: people. By reducing the cost of this one leg, the cost of the process aspect will go up. It remains to be seen whether paying for more management and process will produce more profitable results than simply working with the native talent pool of programmers. I suspect it won't for most cases. However, there will surely be some outsourcing success stories.
It's grossly unfair to expect the art of programming, which is hardly sixty years old, to be as well understood as construction, which has been a human endeavor for thousands of years. Those managers and market analysts that labor under this delusion are in for a rude surprise.
If you are interested in obtaining a license, please contact our Intellectual Property and Licensing Group at fatspec@microsoft.com for more information.
I wish I had fatspect@microsoft.com as an email address. That would be awesome...
While SCO may possibly win in court--I doubt it, but it's possible--I don't think their claims have any moral standing whatsoever. They are exploiting the legal system in the name of pure greed, not in the name of justice.
This is exactly the point. While there has already been far too much debate here on Ye Olde Slashdot about whether SCO's claim of copyright infringement has technical merit, the management of SCO surely couldn't care one wit about the truth of their claims. I'd be surprised if the people at SCO responsible for launching this legal attack could distinguish between Linux box and a SCO Unix box. This action isn't based on technical merit. Here's what it is based on:
What SCO is doing is a management hack and it's working. It's a way of creating temporary value in the company so that one of these scenarios can happen:
the top SCO brass can depart with some dough
IBM is forced to buy SCO to stop the lawsuit
Someone like Microsoft buys the company to continue the lawsuit/protection racket
There is no way that SCO's actions represent a long-term business plan. Instead, this looks like the last gasp of a dying company. I don't believe SCO will be an independent entity three years from now.
The most damaging effect of this lawsuit is the chilling effect it has on businesses adopting Open Source projects. It's infuriating that the half truths, lies and innuendo told by SCO in its last days are scaring other companies away from Linux. This could not have worked out better for Microsoft.
Count by 18. Ready? Go!
on
Making Change
·
· Score: 2, Funny
<voice style="school house rock">
18...36...54...72...90....108
STOP
Multiply by 18 is like multiplying by 20 but subtracting multiples of 2. So 18*3 is really like 20*3 - 2*3. That's just 60 - 6, or 54! Let's do it again!
Jason McIntosh has done many Cool Things (tm), including co-authoring Perl and XML and defining ComicsXML. He worked at O'Reilly for awhile in the now defunct Tools group, helping to build programs to convert author manuscripts into a formats amenable to the Production workflow. When not hacking code, jmac finds and plays obscure games from impolitely named companies. Buy his book and encourage him to write a second edition about Panther.
Hey Slashdot! Interview Ben "Crighton" Browder or
(exec producer) David Kemper! Both have done numerous irc chats. I'm sure they wouldn't might a little slashdotting.;-)
Last year, I started playing with this IBM tech. I thought it would be cool to have RSS feeds read to you in middle of stream music. It's kind of do-it-yourself radio. Although I don't anything to show for that idea, I did make a few songs with it, like Make the Pie Higher, Plug Nickle and Progress.
mmm. I hope the server can take a slashdotting...
The TTS interface is C++, but it comes with a program that will compile text into AU files. I wrote the following script to change those AU files into mp3s:
#!/bin/bash # Make a text file a spoken MP3
if [ -z "$1" ]; then echo "usage: $0 <input.txt>"; exit; fi
speakfile is a slightly hacked version of the demo program IBM ships. Unfortunately,/.'s lameness filter doesn't like C++ code.:-(
It's petty messy C++ hacking on my part, anyway.
The Perl program is based on the CPAN module Audio::SoundFile. It's also hacked from a demo script that shipped with the module.
#!/usr/bin/perl use Audio::SoundFile; use Audio::SoundFile::Header;
my $BUFFSIZE = 16384; my $ifile = shift || usage(); my $ofile = shift || usage(); my $buffer; my $header;
my $reader = new Audio::SoundFile::Reader($ifile, \$header); $header->{format} = SF_FORMAT_WAV | SF_FORMAT_PCM; my $writer = new Audio::SoundFile::Writer($ofile, $header);
while (my $length = $reader->bread_pdl(\$buffer, $BUFFSIZE)) { $writer->bwrite_pdl($buffer); }
Is to go into the services panel, and turn off Windows Messenging Service.
For the record on WinXP, go Control Panel > Adminstrative Tools > Services. Find and highlight the service call 'Messenger'. Right click and select the menu option 'Stop'. This will stop the service until you reboot. To prevent the service from starting on boot, on the menu that has 'Stop', instead select 'Properties'. On the window the appears, find the section (with a dropdown menu) called 'Startup type:' and change this setting from 'Automatic' to 'Manual' (or 'Disable' if you're certain you never ever want this Windows for Workgroups feature).
Or we could just bitch about it on/.
Why choose? We can do both. I'm a multitasking fool.
If you like Farscape, it is easy to show your support for the show by going to Save Farscape. You can help by doing something as
simple as logging on to irc.scifi.com and lurking in #farscape. It's not too late for Farscape. We are having an impact. This is a populist movement and you can be a part of it.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe the game is all about the apps, not the OS.
Has any analyst considered that there can be no winner to the "browser war?" Good gravy, war is certainly an easy metaphor to understand but its applicability to emerging and evolving technologies is tenuous. Better to call the competition by browser makers for the hearts of consumers a Red Queen's race. Do species stop competing for resources? Only the "stable" ones (i.e. thost that have become extinct) do.
As for bracing for the horrors of a two-platform web world, that call is many years too late. Apple's Safari is likely to be the dark horse that IT folks will have to adapt to. I think Steve Jobs means to make a big play for the PC pie. The Mac mini is as reasonable desktop as any from Dell, Gateway or Newegg (at least for corporate use).
In a perfect world, it wouldn't matter one jot what web client software is used. Browsers ought to be a whole lot stupider than they are. Just follow the meticulously defined W3C specs and lets all stop caring about "owning the platform." It's the applications that are far more interesting and carefully contrieved browser inoperabilities only stall the inevitable demotion of the underlying operating system to something akin to a really bloated BIOS.
Two browser world? Lunacy...
The death of the American Programmer has been heralded many times before. Back before spreading terror about the eminent collapse of our non-Y2K compliant world, Ed Yourdon wrote a little book of doom called The Rise and Fall of the American Programer, in which a dim future was projected for our overpaid and underworked behinds.
He wrote this is 1993.
Some of you will remember that the booming economy of the mid to late 90s in which being able to say "internet" landed you a tech job.
It will take more years to evaluate the real impact of offshoring on the American Programmer. If programming is what you enjoy doing, you will always have work (although you will have to be flexible in what you program).
As always, don't panic.
Events happen.
I didn't want all that spam that had accumulated in my hotmail account anyway.
Shatner is a fine actor. He always brings something to the part. I love the orginal series. However, Kirk is f*cking dead. Ditto Spock. Ditto Scotty. I wish Berman would stop masturbating about action-figure sales and put PLOT first. Tell interesting stories. Have the characters make interesting choices. KILL a few of them.
That's a spicy meatball!
I was recently leafing though some of my Dragon Magazines from the mid-80's and this game is often mentioned. Paranoia seemed like a fantastically humorous game. It will be nice to see what this iteration will bring.
Seth Able, creator of the BBS game Legend of the Red Dragon, continues to produce wonderfully quirky games. For instance, Funeral Quest is online game that has players via for the wallets of grieving families. Capitalism at its finest. DungeonScroll is word game/RPG. It's like boogle but with spells and hit points.
Keep up the great work, Seth. :-)
Are you insane? Hammers, saws and screwdrivers aren't provided to carpenters, but materials that will stay with the customer, like 2x4 planks, I-beams, nails, are. Why on Earth would a programmer, that's not with a VAR, bring a computer to the job? A programmer's tools are nearly all insubstantial (the notable exception being books, but even those are going electronic). Programming is a skill, not a piece of hardware. You don't need a programmer to run a computer. You need the programmer to make the computer do something useful.
The constant equating of programming to an industrial process is without merit and has been debunked before by Fred Brooks, Steve McConnell and others. The construction techniques for software aren't as well understood or as systematized as those known to physical engineers and fabricators. This makes every software project mostly unique, although certainly experiences from previous projects will help the next one. McConnell identifies four legs of software development that must come together to get a successful production. These are people, process, product and technology. In reverse order, the technology piece is simply the OS, the hardware and programming language chosen for the job. The product leg deals with scope of the project, such as listing the required features, inputs, outputs and whatnot. The process bit relates to how the project is (or isn't) managed, risk management and customer feedback. The people aspect comprises the quality of the programmers doing the work. This can have a huge impact on the shipping product.
Outsourcing addresses only one leg of software developement: people. By reducing the cost of this one leg, the cost of the process aspect will go up. It remains to be seen whether paying for more management and process will produce more profitable results than simply working with the native talent pool of programmers. I suspect it won't for most cases. However, there will surely be some outsourcing success stories.
It's grossly unfair to expect the art of programming, which is hardly sixty years old, to be as well understood as construction, which has been a human endeavor for thousands of years. Those managers and market analysts that labor under this delusion are in for a rude surprise.
No entirely true. Last year's OpenSource Conference was in Portland and will be there again in 2004. Check out O'Reilly Conferences.
I wish I had fatspect@microsoft.com as an email address. That would be awesome...
Karmic rewards are your ANONYMOUS READER for using comprise correctly. Truly, you are a shining light to the rest of us. I salute you!
I live in Boston and hardly anybody recognizes my face.
While SCO may possibly win in court--I doubt it, but it's possible--I don't think their claims have any moral standing whatsoever. They are exploiting the legal system in the name of pure greed, not in the name of justice.
This is exactly the point. While there has already been far too much debate here on Ye Olde Slashdot about whether SCO's claim of copyright infringement has technical merit, the management of SCO surely couldn't care one wit about the truth of their claims. I'd be surprised if the people at SCO responsible for launching this legal attack could distinguish between Linux box and a SCO Unix box. This action isn't based on technical merit. Here's what it is based on:
Inflating their stock price.
What SCO is doing is a management hack and it's working. It's a way of creating temporary value in the company so that one of these scenarios can happen:
There is no way that SCO's actions represent a long-term business plan. Instead, this looks like the last gasp of a dying company. I don't believe SCO will be an independent entity three years from now.
The most damaging effect of this lawsuit is the chilling effect it has on businesses adopting Open Source projects. It's infuriating that the half truths, lies and innuendo told by SCO in its last days are scaring other companies away from Linux. This could not have worked out better for Microsoft.
"freedom fries"
<voice style="school house rock">
18...36...54...72...90....108
STOP
Multiply by 18 is like multiplying by 20 but subtracting multiples of 2. So 18*3 is really like 20*3 - 2*3. That's just 60 - 6, or 54! Let's do it again!
18...36...54...72...90...108...126...144...162.. .180!
Ready or not, here I come!
</voice>
no, I didn't use a calculator. I sure hope the math is right.
Jason McIntosh has done many Cool Things (tm), including co-authoring Perl and XML and defining ComicsXML. He worked at O'Reilly for awhile in the now defunct Tools group, helping to build programs to convert author manuscripts into a formats amenable to the Production workflow. When not hacking code, jmac finds and plays obscure games from impolitely named companies. Buy his book and encourage him to write a second edition about Panther.
$ cat <<EOT | perl -lpe 'tr/A-Za-z/N-ZA-Mn-za-m/;'
# Cut'n'paste away.
Hey Slashdot! Interview Ben "Crighton" Browder or (exec producer) David Kemper! Both have done numerous irc chats. I'm sure they wouldn't might a little slashdotting. ;-)
mmm. I hope the server can take a slashdotting...
The TTS interface is C++, but it comes with a program that will compile text into AU files. I wrote the following script to change those AU files into mp3s:
speakfile is a slightly hacked version of the demo program IBM ships. Unfortunately, /.'s lameness filter doesn't like C++ code. :-(
It's petty messy C++ hacking on my part, anyway. The Perl program is based on the CPAN module Audio::SoundFile. It's also hacked from a demo script that shipped with the module.
mmm. There was indenting in code at one point. Sigh...
The real things are pretty much 2D. I guess someone needed to publish or perish.
I'm sure that when I'm copying my mortal soul to the hard drive, that's exactly when the Windows box will blue screen. :-/
I wonder how tech support is going to field that problem?
Is to go into the services panel, and turn off Windows Messenging Service.
For the record on WinXP, go Control Panel > Adminstrative Tools > Services. Find and highlight the service call 'Messenger'. Right click and select the menu option 'Stop'. This will stop the service until you reboot. To prevent the service from starting on boot, on the menu that has 'Stop', instead select 'Properties'. On the window the appears, find the section (with a dropdown menu) called 'Startup type:' and change this setting from 'Automatic' to 'Manual' (or 'Disable' if you're certain you never ever want this Windows for Workgroups feature).
Or we could just bitch about it on /.
Why choose? We can do both. I'm a multitasking fool.
Thanks for the challenge. I haven't done long multiplication in years. BTW, KCalc displays the answer as: 1.99242e+09.
If you like Farscape, it is easy to show your support for the show by going to Save Farscape. You can help by doing something as simple as logging on to irc.scifi.com and lurking in #farscape. It's not too late for Farscape. We are having an impact. This is a populist movement and you can be a part of it.
Peace out.
Seems like /. has been responsible for many a 'netquake. Now /. will crash your web servers FOR SCIENCE!