Scott Kurtz (creator of PVP comics) made a very funny comic in 2000 as a rebuttal to JTC's comic. His writeup is worth reading, but if you're in a hurry or just not in the mood just scroll down for the comic.
I have a neat jabber setup running at my office. All the windows clients using Exodus, but of the many jabber clients for OS X Adium is my favorite for being such a strong project with nice aesthetics.
Exodus is slightly buggy, but it has a useful interface and works well for my environment. I tried out gaim briefly, but the roster items were too big and I didn't find a quick way to fix that. What else are people using for jabber clients?
From my own experience, I can attest to two separate windows driver nightmare situations.
The first is more of an annoyance than a nightmare. The place where I work has been buying new dell machines of various models. A fresh installation from the Windows SP2 cd it comes with does not have any drivers for the intel based network, video, and a couple other misc devices. I think the sound chipset is something else, and it doesn't support that either.
Fortunately, dell packs a separate cd with drivers on it, and it refuses to run on non dell machines if you have the same hardware and are stuck in that situation. Plus, if you dig hard enough you can probably find drivers on the internet.
I'd like to point out that in this situation, the mega trio of Dell, Intel, and Microsoft cannot provide a system that installs an OS off the cd and has working video/sound/network. Pretty lame.
The second situation involves a coworker's recent purchase of a sony vaio that is rife with severe annoyances. For instance, if you uninstall norton internet security before it expires and nags you to death, your entire network subsystem eats shit and refuses to do anything. That was fun.
But more relevant to this topic, windows has practically no builtin driver support for it, and it doesn't even come with any drivers on cd! They expect you to make a 10 cd backup (or 2 dvd's and one cd) so that you can restore your system if necessary. If you ask sony support for drivers, they direct you to purchase a cd (set?) that may solve the issue for $12. Absolutely no option to download drivers.
I'm not entirely sure, but I think the sound won't even work properly unless you have some magic sony-blessed drm drivers.
In both of these cases, knoppix and gentoo boot fine and support all of the devices (except maybe the vaio's wireless.. I didn't try).
ps. don't buy sony laptops, they are crippled with drm services and shitware.
That does sound funny to read:) In the name of diplomacy, I've been working to find euphamisms for "micromanagement is no substitute for understanding the situation" and "quit wasting my time with dangerously ignorant planning"
The growing influx of technological culture is already demanding more technical competency from society as a whole than the majority of its individuals can provide.
I think the unemployment issue arises from insufficient management with technical competency. The IT workforce lacks a familiar liason to traditional business (think PHB types) that would enable effective utilization of IT in the scale that would provide for a more rigorous application of IT as a profession.
To summarize, I'm saying there's no shortage of demand for skilled IT workers, just that the field is immature in such a way that the industry is still highly specialized and that not everyone has "caught up" enough to apply existing IT workers effectively to the variety of daily work that needs to be done in every business.
It has been my experience that the ladies are extremely unrepresented in IT. The sausage fest has gone on too long!
As for the unexmployment issue, perhaps there should be more focus on developing specially trained IT management to put all these "unemployed" IT folk to work.
Skype's success can be attributed to its ease of use and the "it just works" factor. Part of that is the proprietary protocol that makes it work nicely through nat's and firewalls, something the SIP doesn't do so well.
However, there is an open VoIP protocol developed by the asterisk project call IAX that works great through nat's and firewalls as well.
The trip planner is a wonderful companion to Portland's (tri-metropolitan) transportation system of busses and light rail. http://tri-met.org/. There are also lots of bike paths that are neatly mapped somewhere, but I don't have a link.
I only watched one show all the way through and while I appreciate the entertainment value, I was appalled at hearing something so wrong as "Terminal velocity is 9.8 meters per second squared"
Maybe those kinds of mistakes aren't common with the show, but it gave me a very bad first impression.
You do not need to do "due diligence" unless you are basing your design on someone else's patented product.
That's kinda the point. With all the ridiculous software patents, it's a minefield in which you could unwittingly step on an existing patent unless you do some research beforehand.
Unless I have items of value in my car, I leave it unlocked with a small (not especially visible) key in the ignition. It hasn't been stolen yet, but that doesn't prevent anyone from taking advantage of the situation.
Folks, this is security by obscurity at its finest. If cars came default with this behaviour (analogous to windows), I'd take more care in going through the hassle of securing my car. That is to say, if automotive hooligans could rely on a significant population of cars to be that easy to access, I'd be more worried about my car being targeted.
Once I get my gps-enabled stealth computer with gprs going, I'll be able to see where thieves take my car when they steal it!
Re:No, A Dual Joystick Controller Really Is Better
on
Halo 2 Released
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Okay, this is too much to ignore. I have many times enjoyed the FPS console experience, especially with goldeneye back in the day. I think the [PS2] controls for GTA are among the best I've ever experienced, and I have a great deal of experience in PC FPS with my peak of performance during the Q3A and CS heydays.
But the parent comment is just simply incorrect on all numbered points:
1. If you run out of mousepad, try increasing sensitivity and learn the skill of picking up your mouse during play. It's not that hard and it comes naturally.
2. Generally I only absolutely need my middle finger for forward/back movement at all times. My pinky is always available to any of the 3 keys I use with it. My ring finger can reach 4 extra buttons I use in addition to strafing. I use my index finger for 3 additional keys, though I can reach more. I also have a free thumb for spacebar action. And that's only my left hand. Compared to a DJ controller, I only have the trigger available to me while I keep my thumb on the joystick for movement. I can use the dpad, but not while moving. As for the right hand on a DJC, try pushing more than two buttons at the same time with your thumb, or two buttons opposite each other.
3. If your mouse is crappy, that's more of a personal problem.
4. This is just ignorant. Keyboards send a message for keyup and keydown. Text editors don't handle keyboard input the same way games do.
The art of manually targeted headshot is completely abesnt with a DJ controller. And unless the gameplay compensates for it, the slow movement speed (where you'd use a mouse) with a DJ controller is just painful.
I've been thinking frequently that what would help spread linux like wildfire is network delivered applications that make the platform irrelevant.
Simple web based apps are nice, but there are many limitations such as not having a framework for interface, making developers write their own widgets or integrate other software after researching available solutions.
I've just started using XUL (pronounced 'zool') for an application that will load simply by visiting a url with mozilla/firefox. You can install local apps that have priveleged access to resources, but for my needs all data interaction will be handled by a central system.
If anyone could have a fully working computer that just worked reliably all the time with most software you could ever want available to you for the cost of internet access, I think *that* is the kind of appeal that would help cause accelerated growth in open souce adoption in the consumer market.
This is shamelessly ripped from http://xulplanet.com/tutorials/whyxul.html I think it presents a concise overview of firefox as a development platform.
XUL and Gecko make an excellent choice for building sophisticated Web applications. It provides a rich user interface toolkit, an HTML and CSS renderer with excellent standards-compliance and support for web services, all completely cross platform.
Work is ongoing with the Gecko Runtime Environment (GRE), which aims to make Gecko a snap to drop into a standalone application, complete with your own executable, if you desire. The idea is to allow the right version of the GRE to be installed automatically with the application if necessary. If the GRE is already installed, there is no need to install it again, or even download it. For those that are interested, the GRE is about 5 to 10 MB, depending on your platform, which is quite small compared to other application platforms. It's also possible to have Gecko run directly from a network drive or CD.
Since XUL may be used on Web sites, it can be used with server-side architectures such as PHP and JSP to build dynamic content. This allows Gecko to be both a two-tier or a three-tier application model depending on your needs. There are projects in development now which aim to integrate Java, Python and other languages into Gecko directly.
Re:did they fix the problems?
on
DSPAM v3.2 Released
·
· Score: 2, Informative
the database did grow huge......performance was terrible.
Did you try TOE mode? Instead of analyzing everything, it just uses the errors. That means significantly less utilization of your data backend. From the FAQ:
Switch to TOE Mode. DSPAM v2.10 supports TOE (Train-On-Error) mode, which only performs writes to the database in the event that a misclassification has occured (or if a user has fewer than 4000 innocent messages in corpus). Train-on-error mode should make a significant reduction in the number of writes (and therefore locks) being performed on your database, and may actually improve accuracy as TOE has been known to do so. The default mode of learning is TEFT (Train Everything). This performs a much more detailed training of incoming messages and can more easily adapt to new types of email behavior for users, but does use up a significant number of resources. This is a definite thing to try if you're bottlenecked!
I've downloaded 3 different versions of OO.o as new versions come out, and those get distributed to the 30 or so computers at my office.
Also, last x-mas I gave out copies of the open cd to family and friends, each containing a copy of OO.o.
Perhaps I'm not alone, and that others who do this balance out the figures for downloads that don't result in market share.
There must be some margin of error, but in lieu of a comprehensive survey, download quantity gives a good representation of how widely used a software product is.
Here Here! As much as I like advocating open source, I have a hard time setting people up with GIMP because it's not very friendly to average users. I'm much more inclined to suggest something like Google's picasa even though it lacks features such as text overlay and specific image resizing (sizes are preset, non-editable).
I'm accustomed to photoshop and always find myself frustrated with trying to perform simple tasks in GIMP. Not to mention all the dialogs dogpiling on each other. Windows (the OS interface) is cluttered enough without all those damn subwindows!
I've just barely started playing with it, but it's pretty easy to use once you get the hang of it. It even comes with prerecorded messages such as "all members of our household are currently dealing with telemarketers", "somethings *terribly* wrong", and one that's just angry monkeys screaming for 20 seconds.
Slashdot Mirror
Blue is higher frequency, which means *shorter* wavelength.
This illustrates it nicely.
Scott Kurtz (creator of PVP comics) made a very funny comic in 2000 as a rebuttal to JTC's comic. His writeup is worth reading, but if you're in a hurry or just not in the mood just scroll down for the comic.
http://www.pvponline.com/rants_jesus.php3
I have a neat jabber setup running at my office.
All the windows clients using Exodus, but of the many jabber clients for OS X Adium is my favorite for being such a strong project with nice aesthetics.
Exodus is slightly buggy, but it has a useful interface and works well for my environment. I tried out gaim briefly, but the roster items were too big and I didn't find a quick way to fix that. What else are people using for jabber clients?
From my own experience, I can attest to two separate windows driver nightmare situations.
The first is more of an annoyance than a nightmare. The place where I work has been buying new dell machines of various models. A fresh installation from the Windows SP2 cd it comes with does not have any drivers for the intel based network, video, and a couple other misc devices. I think the sound chipset is something else, and it doesn't support that either.
Fortunately, dell packs a separate cd with drivers on it, and it refuses to run on non dell machines if you have the same hardware and are stuck in that situation. Plus, if you dig hard enough you can probably find drivers on the internet.
I'd like to point out that in this situation, the mega trio of Dell, Intel, and Microsoft cannot provide a system that installs an OS off the cd and has working video/sound/network. Pretty lame.
The second situation involves a coworker's recent purchase of a sony vaio that is rife with severe annoyances. For instance, if you uninstall norton internet security before it expires and nags you to death, your entire network subsystem eats shit and refuses to do anything. That was fun.
But more relevant to this topic, windows has practically no builtin driver support for it, and it doesn't even come with any drivers on cd! They expect you to make a 10 cd backup (or 2 dvd's and one cd) so that you can restore your system if necessary. If you ask sony support for drivers, they direct you to purchase a cd (set?) that may solve the issue for $12. Absolutely no option to download drivers.
I'm not entirely sure, but I think the sound won't even work properly unless you have some magic sony-blessed drm drivers.
In both of these cases, knoppix and gentoo boot fine and support all of the devices (except maybe the vaio's wireless.. I didn't try).
ps. don't buy sony laptops, they are crippled with drm services and shitware.
That does sound funny to read :) In the name of diplomacy, I've been working to find euphamisms for "micromanagement is no substitute for understanding the situation" and "quit wasting my time with dangerously ignorant planning"
For employment, you just need D-cups, full of JUSTICE!
Allow me to present this as an opinion:
The growing influx of technological culture is already demanding more technical competency from society as a whole than the majority of its individuals can provide.
I think the unemployment issue arises from insufficient management with technical competency. The IT workforce lacks a familiar liason to traditional business (think PHB types) that would enable effective utilization of IT in the scale that would provide for a more rigorous application of IT as a profession.
To summarize, I'm saying there's no shortage of demand for skilled IT workers, just that the field is immature in such a way that the industry is still highly specialized and that not everyone has "caught up" enough to apply existing IT workers effectively to the variety of daily work that needs to be done in every business.
It has been my experience that the ladies are extremely unrepresented in IT. The sausage fest has gone on too long!
As for the unexmployment issue, perhaps there should be more focus on developing specially trained IT management to put all these "unemployed" IT folk to work.
Look at what Dvorak says in his latest column
I know it's probably not what you meant, but that should read Cringely's latest column.
Skype's success can be attributed to its ease of use and the "it just works" factor. Part of that is the proprietary protocol that makes it work nicely through nat's and firewalls, something the SIP doesn't do so well.
However, there is an open VoIP protocol developed by the asterisk project call IAX that works great through nat's and firewalls as well.
http://www.voip-info.org/wiki-IAX
According to the Gantt Chart, the server and client implementations should be complete and the 'done' milestone is set tentatively for Sep 1 2004.
Must be vapor.
Nice word. I just learned the meaning of "invective":
invective
n : abusive or venomous language used to express blame or censure or bitter deep-seated ill will [syn: {vituperation}, {vitriol}]
The trip planner is a wonderful companion to Portland's (tri-metropolitan) transportation system of busses and light rail.
http://tri-met.org/.
There are also lots of bike paths that are neatly mapped somewhere, but I don't have a link.
I only watched one show all the way through and while I appreciate the entertainment value, I was appalled at hearing something so wrong as "Terminal velocity is 9.8 meters per second squared"
Maybe those kinds of mistakes aren't common with the show, but it gave me a very bad first impression.
You do not need to do "due diligence" unless you are basing your design on someone else's patented product.
That's kinda the point. With all the ridiculous software patents, it's a minefield in which you could unwittingly step on an existing patent unless you do some research beforehand.
Unless I have items of value in my car, I leave it unlocked with a small (not especially visible) key in the ignition. It hasn't been stolen yet, but that doesn't prevent anyone from taking advantage of the situation.
Folks, this is security by obscurity at its finest. If cars came default with this behaviour (analogous to windows), I'd take more care in going through the hassle of securing my car. That is to say, if automotive hooligans could rely on a significant population of cars to be that easy to access, I'd be more worried about my car being targeted.
Once I get my gps-enabled stealth computer with gprs going, I'll be able to see where thieves take my car when they steal it!
Okay, this is too much to ignore. I have many times enjoyed the FPS console experience, especially with goldeneye back in the day. I think the [PS2] controls for GTA are among the best I've ever experienced, and I have a great deal of experience in PC FPS with my peak of performance during the Q3A and CS heydays.
But the parent comment is just simply incorrect on all numbered points:
1. If you run out of mousepad, try increasing sensitivity and learn the skill of picking up your mouse during play. It's not that hard and it comes naturally.
2. Generally I only absolutely need my middle finger for forward/back movement at all times. My pinky is always available to any of the 3 keys I use with it. My ring finger can reach 4 extra buttons I use in addition to strafing. I use my index finger for 3 additional keys, though I can reach more. I also have a free thumb for spacebar action. And that's only my left hand. Compared to a DJ controller, I only have the trigger available to me while I keep my thumb on the joystick for movement. I can use the dpad, but not while moving. As for the right hand on a DJC, try pushing more than two buttons at the same time with your thumb, or two buttons opposite each other.
3. If your mouse is crappy, that's more of a personal problem.
4. This is just ignorant. Keyboards send a message for keyup and keydown. Text editors don't handle keyboard input the same way games do.
The art of manually targeted headshot is completely abesnt with a DJ controller. And unless the gameplay compensates for it, the slow movement speed (where you'd use a mouse) with a DJ controller is just painful.
I've been thinking frequently that what would help spread linux like wildfire is network delivered applications that make the platform irrelevant.
Simple web based apps are nice, but there are many limitations such as not having a framework for interface, making developers write their own widgets or integrate other software after researching available solutions.
I've just started using XUL (pronounced 'zool') for an application that will load simply by visiting a url with mozilla/firefox. You can install local apps that have priveleged access to resources, but for my needs all data interaction will be handled by a central system.
If anyone could have a fully working computer that just worked reliably all the time with most software you could ever want available to you for the cost of internet access, I think *that* is the kind of appeal that would help cause accelerated growth in open souce adoption in the consumer market.
Check out XUL: http://xulplanet.com
I would ask for an original Nintendo system.
Complete with the little robot guy to handle the gyroscopes! That thing was awesome!
MB means MegaByte. Mb is megaBit. Quite a difference, but you can generally count on connection speed being measured in the latter.
/. subscription if the stories could be edited for technical and grammatical correctness. That would really be nice.
I'd seriously consider buying a
This is shamelessly ripped from http://xulplanet.com/tutorials/whyxul.html
I think it presents a concise overview of firefox as a development platform.
XUL and Gecko make an excellent choice for building sophisticated Web applications. It provides a rich user interface toolkit, an HTML and CSS renderer with excellent standards-compliance and support for web services, all completely cross platform.
Work is ongoing with the Gecko Runtime Environment (GRE), which aims to make Gecko a snap to drop into a standalone application, complete with your own executable, if you desire. The idea is to allow the right version of the GRE to be installed automatically with the application if necessary. If the GRE is already installed, there is no need to install it again, or even download it. For those that are interested, the GRE is about 5 to 10 MB, depending on your platform, which is quite small compared to other application platforms. It's also possible to have Gecko run directly from a network drive or CD.
Since XUL may be used on Web sites, it can be used with server-side architectures such as PHP and JSP to build dynamic content. This allows Gecko to be both a two-tier or a three-tier application model depending on your needs. There are projects in development now which aim to integrate Java, Python and other languages into Gecko directly.
Peace Brigades International
the database did grow huge... ...performance was terrible.
Did you try TOE mode? Instead of analyzing everything, it just uses the errors. That means significantly less utilization of your data backend. From the FAQ:
Switch to TOE Mode. DSPAM v2.10 supports TOE (Train-On-Error) mode, which only performs writes to the database in the event that a misclassification has occured (or if a user has fewer than 4000 innocent messages in corpus). Train-on-error mode should make a significant reduction in the number of writes (and therefore locks) being performed on your database, and may actually improve accuracy as TOE has been known to do so. The default mode of learning is TEFT (Train Everything). This performs a much more detailed training of incoming messages and can more easily adapt to new types of email behavior for users, but does use up a significant number of resources. This is a definite thing to try if you're bottlenecked!
I've downloaded 3 different versions of OO.o as new versions come out, and those get distributed to the 30 or so computers at my office.
Also, last x-mas I gave out copies of the open cd to family and friends, each containing a copy of OO.o.
Perhaps I'm not alone, and that others who do this balance out the figures for downloads that don't result in market share.
There must be some margin of error, but in lieu of a comprehensive survey, download quantity gives a good representation of how widely used a software product is.
I found this in a link from the "consequences" link in the story.
A shuttle windsield impacted by a paint chip at 3 to 6km/sec
http://www.aero.org/cords/debrisks.html
Here Here! As much as I like advocating open source, I have a hard time setting people up with GIMP because it's not very friendly to average users. I'm much more inclined to suggest something like Google's picasa even though it lacks features such as text overlay and specific image resizing (sizes are preset, non-editable).
I'm accustomed to photoshop and always find myself frustrated with trying to perform simple tasks in GIMP. Not to mention all the dialogs dogpiling on each other. Windows (the OS interface) is cluttered enough without all those damn subwindows!
I've just barely started playing with it, but it's pretty easy to use once you get the hang of it. It even comes with prerecorded messages such as "all members of our household are currently dealing with telemarketers", "somethings *terribly* wrong", and one that's just angry monkeys screaming for 20 seconds.
Here are some great resources for getting started:
http://www.digium.com/handbook-draft.pdf
and a good soft phone (x-lite) at http://www.xten.com/