Years ago I used to work at a big biotech company mostly-owned by a big European pharmaceutical company.
Back in California we had a pretty relaxed work atmosphere, it was even fun sometimes, and we often worked ridiculous hours to meet deadlines and get things done and just generally feel like we were working as hard as we should.
I went over to the European company for a week to do some database stuff in the equivalent department to the one I worked for back home.
Interestingly enough, their office was quite boring by comparison. Nobody "did lunch," just everyone went and ate together in the cafeteria, which was only open at lunch and paid for with company-provided meal tickets (we had various cafeterias around the campus open most of the day, cheap but you did pay). People took a couple coffee breaks a day, usually half the office together in the coffee room, where they paid for their coffee with tokens provided by the company (we had free espresso). That's where the smokers could smoke, so there was no "going out for a smoke" and associated socializing. There was almost zero banter. Though there wasn't a dress code, nobody was below "business casual."
It wasn't very exciting at all. Pleasant, friendly, but not exciting.
HOWEVER, they basically never worked more than 8 hours a day. Everyone was in by 8 or 9, everyone was out by 5 or 6, and nobody even for a moment pretended that the job was more important than any other part of their lives.
All in all I got the impression they were more productive than we were, even if less innovative.
Last November a friend had me bring him a fully loaded 17" Powerbook from the States to Hungary.
After about a month he didn't like it anymore - he discovered that it's a giant heat sink, that the monitor hinge is a case study in bad industrial design, that the trackpad is badly positioned... in short, that the sucker is not a laptop at all but rather a "desktop replacement" meant for people who need a big pretty computer they can move easily from desk to desk. (Yes, I did warn him about all this ahead of time).
After he talked to Apple and got an agreement that he would get his money back minus shipping, we checked out local prices......and found that, in dollars at least, the local price for the same config was more than double what he paid (>US$6K vs US$3K).
Being a nice guy, he found someone in under three days to buy it at his cost.
So my advice is to get a top-of-the-line powerbook, resell it back home for a decent profit but well below market, and use the extra cash to take either buy your real laptop at home or to take a fun-filled short trip to NYC,USA and buy what you want there.
Actually about a year ago I ran into this at Rackspace while shopping for hosting.
The salesperson was definitely real, and helpful as well. It was a bit annoying to get the popup; I would much rather have had a little box within the page. But in the end he answered my questions directly, gave me a quote on a fairly complex configuration, and off I went to a lower-priced competitor....
As I understand it the requirement about the media player is that they offer two versions of 'doze, one with the player and one without the player. They don't have to include someone else's player, they just have to offer (to OEMs too) a version of their OS with no media player installed.
Now, say you're the OEM. Hmmmm.... same price, one is the "normal" windows and the other is the "no media player" version. Of course you're going to pick the "normal" version.
AFAIK there is no requirement that they charge less for the one without the player.
If you're a big outfit with your own interest in controlling media access, you might want to sell the "RealMedia PC" - but I doubt there will be much difference in the HPaqs and Dells and whatnot.
The other requirement, about publishing the APIs so anyone can make server software compatible with MS clients, is I think a much bigger deal.
Actually it's trivially easy to do that, assuming you only need to divide people into "slow, fast, superfast" connections.
You just feed them a very large yet invisible background image on their first visit, and have a program feeding the image. Program knows how long it took to feed the image, therefore which category the user is *probably* in, and puts the IP address in a database and a cookie on the machine.
If the cookie is there you put that speed value in the DB (again with the IP address).
Over time you get a nice database full of IP addresses and the speeds at which their users surf.
You can also do the same inside Flash and simply branch in your preloading process based on connection speed. I've actually done that before in Flash5, it would be easier with MX.
I would be surprised if the full-motion ad types don't do something similar as the ads become more widespread. You obviously don't want to feed a dialup user 2MB, they will probably click away. But you *would* want to feed them a 50K version of the ad.
Of course, it would be so much nicer for everyone if browsers sent a Connection-Speed header.
I'm curious, anyone want to chime in about Encyclopedia culture elsewhere? That is, outside the English-speaking world?
I fondly remember encyclopedias from when I was a kid, but I didn't really use them so much. I don't know if I'd buy a set now if I were a parent.
Now a good Dictionary, on the other hand, is something I find indispensible. And while I use the net for that a lot (thank you mycroft for the dictionary and wikipedia search options!) I still plan to buy the next edition of the full OED... hopefully I will be able to afford it about the same time they get around to publishing the 3rd edition.
Also I have some reference works from the late 1800s and early 1900s, and I must say, they may not be up to date but they are somehow Very Cool.
...which by itself would be a good sign, except that those German colleagues in Iraq are likely to remain very hypothetical for the foreseeable future.
Esperanto was really popular in Hungary. Well, let's say "popular" by Esperanto-popularity standards...
Nowadays the local Esperantosok are about as.. erm.. as independent-minded as just about anywhere, but I've heard lots of stories about Mom's or Dad's Esperanto obsession from people who grew up in otherwise perfectly normal families under Communism.
There's an Esperanto Hill not too far from where I live, and I've long thought I should take up a phrasebook and some wood and post some absurdist signage in Esperanto. Because, yes, it is that silly.
of course i'm too tired to RTFA (it's 8am where i am) but i have to say, there have been many times when i had some great idea for a perl-based doodad to summarize a buncha info for print, but i was always too lazy to grok word-wrapping variable-width fonts... i sure hope this comes to pass.
Actually, more to the point, other people will fall into one of those traps. Lots of them.
A lot of the headline-grabbers were bright young people with new ideas, but I'd bet most of the people who made solid, below the radar, don't-have-to-work-anymore-thank-you money had been adults during the 80's.
I think the next time a boom or bubble comes along, a whole lot of the people who worked throught he dot-com-dot-bomb cycle without making a killing will focus on making a killing.
I know many people who did interesting work in dot-com land and were paid well enough but were always a bit sore about those folks getting away with murder at boo.com or pets.com or their ilk.
My guess is most of these folks won't flinch the next time around, and will make some fat dough. Arguably this will be on the backs of the next generation of hard-working modest non-suit-wearing people, or at the expense of clueless investors, but it'll happen just the same.
In San Francisco, a wealthy tech-savvy city, my Sprint PCS phone drops network randomly as I walk through the financial district. In Noe Valley I have four antennas on one side of the $tarbucks and zero on the other side of it.
In Budapest, an up-and-coming (and much larger) yet by no means wealthy Central European city, the only time I ever lose connectivity above ground is for 20 minutes after midnight on New Year's.
Face it, the US cellphone infrastructure is many, many years behind Europe's in terms of reliability and signal quality (and IMHO revenue concept).
As for the reliability of the handsets themselves, you may have a point - or you may not, since your point contradicts US behavior in other tech markets (PDAs spring to mind).
Actually, as someone who has several manual typewriters, I must point out:
There are some of us (I'm 33) who genuinely appreciate the aesthetics of typing on a good, smooth, Manual typewriter.
It's a bit like Super8 film versus video. You don't end up writing nearly as much but often what you write is better.
That's not for everyone of course, but I like to think that there will "always" (ie, for a very long time) be a small niche of people who love good typewriters and use them from time to time.
Unlike Super8, you can always re-ink your ribbons or make new ones or whatever.
I suppose it's possible that nobody will care once nobody first learns to type on real typewriters, but on the other hand most of the people doing Super8 these days did video first.
(And yes, I have several Super8 cameras as well, though I rarely use them anymore. I would use them a lot if it weren't for the very high film price, but hey, we're a very small market.)
Parent post is rightly modded Funny, but in case anyone doesn't get the joke:
Yes, in the US at least most college campuses are either "Pepsi" or "Coke" campuses, in that either the university or some other company has a monopoly on soda pop sales on university property, and both Pepsi and Coke require exclusivity if you want any of the goodies they give out.
And those goodies can be pretty nice. Sometimes just plain old cash. Sometimes they pay for advertising for your business as long as it has a Pepsi|Coke logo on it. Lots of other stuff.
Imagine one (a bit larger, a bit higher-res) that plugs into your mobile phone.
You subscribe to a service that gives you headlines, stock quotes, whatever. You use your phone to pick what you want, plug in the display, transfer the image, and bingo, you've got a page of potentially useful information you can read now or later, without tying up your phone.
Maybe the display has an itsybitsy memory thingy and paging buttons so you can store more than one page at a time, as you suggested. Or maybe it's just one page but the data transfer is entirely powered by your phone.
You could also use it to "print" your MMS's - muuuch nicer than passing the stupid phone around to all your friends at a party. (Plus you want to use your phone at the same time.)
Slashdot Mirror
Anecdotal evidence in support of your point:
Years ago I used to work at a big biotech company mostly-owned by a big European pharmaceutical company.
Back in California we had a pretty relaxed work atmosphere, it was even fun sometimes, and we often worked ridiculous hours to meet deadlines and get things done and just generally feel like we were working as hard as we should.
I went over to the European company for a week to do some database stuff in the equivalent department to the one I worked for back home.
Interestingly enough, their office was quite boring by comparison. Nobody "did lunch," just everyone went and ate together in the cafeteria, which was only open at lunch and paid for with company-provided meal tickets (we had various cafeterias around the campus open most of the day, cheap but you did pay). People took a couple coffee breaks a day, usually half the office together in the coffee room, where they paid for their coffee with tokens provided by the company (we had free espresso). That's where the smokers could smoke, so there was no "going out for a smoke" and associated socializing. There was almost zero banter. Though there wasn't a dress code, nobody was below "business casual."
It wasn't very exciting at all. Pleasant, friendly, but not exciting.
HOWEVER, they basically never worked more than 8 hours a day. Everyone was in by 8 or 9, everyone was out by 5 or 6, and nobody even for a moment pretended that the job was more important than any other part of their lives.
All in all I got the impression they were more productive than we were, even if less innovative.
Funny, I'm currently paying $8.50 for new .com/.net registrations...
...and even if I buy in bulk (100 years) Network Solutions still wants to charge me more.
Last November a friend had me bring him a fully loaded 17" Powerbook from the States to Hungary.
...and found that, in dollars at least, the local price for the same config was more than double what he paid (>US$6K vs US$3K).
After about a month he didn't like it anymore - he discovered that it's a giant heat sink, that the monitor hinge is a case study in bad industrial design, that the trackpad is badly positioned... in short, that the sucker is not a laptop at all but rather a "desktop replacement" meant for people who need a big pretty computer they can move easily from desk to desk. (Yes, I did warn him about all this ahead of time).
After he talked to Apple and got an agreement that he would get his money back minus shipping, we checked out local prices...
Being a nice guy, he found someone in under three days to buy it at his cost.
So my advice is to get a top-of-the-line powerbook, resell it back home for a decent profit but well below market, and use the extra cash to take either buy your real laptop at home or to take a fun-filled short trip to NYC,USA and buy what you want there.
Wash, rinse, repeat.
The Gates of Hell?
That's at Stanford.
Actually about a year ago I ran into this at Rackspace while shopping for hosting.
The salesperson was definitely real, and helpful as well. It was a bit annoying to get the popup; I would much rather have had a little box within the page. But in the end he answered my questions directly, gave me a quote on a fairly complex configuration, and off I went to a lower-priced competitor....
As I understand it the requirement about the media player is that they offer two versions of 'doze, one with the player and one without the player. They don't have to include someone else's player, they just have to offer (to OEMs too) a version of their OS with no media player installed.
Now, say you're the OEM. Hmmmm.... same price, one is the "normal" windows and the other is the "no media player" version. Of course you're going to pick the "normal" version.
AFAIK there is no requirement that they charge less for the one without the player.
If you're a big outfit with your own interest in controlling media access, you might want to sell the "RealMedia PC" - but I doubt there will be much difference in the HPaqs and Dells and whatnot.
The other requirement, about publishing the APIs so anyone can make server software compatible with MS clients, is I think a much bigger deal.
Why not build whatever version you think your distro needs, and call it "Web Browser?"
Actually it's trivially easy to do that, assuming you only need to divide people into "slow, fast, superfast" connections.
You just feed them a very large yet invisible background image on their first visit, and have a program feeding the image. Program knows how long it took to feed the image, therefore which category the user is *probably* in, and puts the IP address in a database and a cookie on the machine.
If the cookie is there you put that speed value in the DB (again with the IP address).
Over time you get a nice database full of IP addresses and the speeds at which their users surf.
You can also do the same inside Flash and simply branch in your preloading process based on connection speed. I've actually done that before in Flash5, it would be easier with MX.
I would be surprised if the full-motion ad types don't do something similar as the ads become more widespread. You obviously don't want to feed a dialup user 2MB, they will probably click away. But you *would* want to feed them a 50K version of the ad.
Of course, it would be so much nicer for everyone if browsers sent a Connection-Speed header.
a rouge government or terrorist organization...
Hmm, North Korea is pretty close to being both...
If you buy into that whole color scheme, anyway.
Actually, I have found that I do set my own hours.
It's just that they are "the waking hours." As long as I set them to that, though, it's my choice.
I don't want to even think about trying to replicate Photoshop with a CLI.
perl -e 'use Image::Magick; etc();'
oh wait, that's GIMP...
/ ducks
I'm curious, anyone want to chime in about Encyclopedia culture elsewhere? That is, outside the English-speaking world?
I fondly remember encyclopedias from when I was a kid, but I didn't really use them so much. I don't know if I'd buy a set now if I were a parent.
Now a good Dictionary, on the other hand, is something I find indispensible. And while I use the net for that a lot (thank you mycroft for the dictionary and wikipedia search options!) I still plan to buy the next edition of the full OED... hopefully I will be able to afford it about the same time they get around to publishing the 3rd edition.
Also I have some reference works from the late 1800s and early 1900s, and I must say, they may not be up to date but they are somehow Very Cool.
English <-> MMS?
...which by itself would be a good sign, except that those German colleagues in Iraq are likely to remain very hypothetical for the foreseeable future.
Funny you should mention Hungarian...
Esperanto was really popular in Hungary. Well, let's say "popular" by Esperanto-popularity standards...
Nowadays the local Esperantosok are about as.. erm.. as independent-minded as just about anywhere, but I've heard lots of stories about Mom's or Dad's Esperanto obsession from people who grew up in otherwise perfectly normal families under Communism.
There's an Esperanto Hill not too far from where I live, and I've long thought I should take up a phrasebook and some wood and post some absurdist signage in Esperanto. Because, yes, it is that silly.
formatting text using variable-width fonts
ooooh!
of course i'm too tired to RTFA (it's 8am where i am) but i have to say, there have been many times when i had some great idea for a perl-based doodad to summarize a buncha info for print, but i was always too lazy to grok word-wrapping variable-width fonts... i sure hope this comes to pass.
Actually, more to the point, other people will fall into one of those traps. Lots of them.
A lot of the headline-grabbers were bright young people with new ideas, but I'd bet most of the people who made solid, below the radar, don't-have-to-work-anymore-thank-you money had been adults during the 80's.
I think the next time a boom or bubble comes along, a whole lot of the people who worked throught he dot-com-dot-bomb cycle without making a killing will focus on making a killing.
I know many people who did interesting work in dot-com land and were paid well enough but were always a bit sore about those folks getting away with murder at boo.com or pets.com or their ilk.
My guess is most of these folks won't flinch the next time around, and will make some fat dough. Arguably this will be on the backs of the next generation of hard-working modest non-suit-wearing people, or at the expense of clueless investors, but it'll happen just the same.
Colombo is the capital of Sri Lanka.
Yeah, right.
In San Francisco, a wealthy tech-savvy city, my Sprint PCS phone drops network randomly as I walk through the financial district. In Noe Valley I have four antennas on one side of the $tarbucks and zero on the other side of it.
In Budapest, an up-and-coming (and much larger) yet by no means wealthy Central European city, the only time I ever lose connectivity above ground is for 20 minutes after midnight on New Year's.
Face it, the US cellphone infrastructure is many, many years behind Europe's in terms of reliability and signal quality (and IMHO revenue concept).
As for the reliability of the handsets themselves, you may have a point - or you may not, since your point contradicts US behavior in other tech markets (PDAs spring to mind).
i saw this on a slashdotter's sig, but i can't remember which one:
" Enjoy your job, make lots of money, work within the law. Choose any two. "
Actually, as someone who has several manual typewriters, I must point out:
There are some of us (I'm 33) who genuinely appreciate the aesthetics of typing on a good, smooth, Manual typewriter.
It's a bit like Super8 film versus video. You don't end up writing nearly as much but often what you write is better.
That's not for everyone of course, but I like to think that there will "always" (ie, for a very long time) be a small niche of people who love good typewriters and use them from time to time.
Unlike Super8, you can always re-ink your ribbons or make new ones or whatever.
I suppose it's possible that nobody will care once nobody first learns to type on real typewriters, but on the other hand most of the people doing Super8 these days did video first.
(And yes, I have several Super8 cameras as well, though I rarely use them anymore. I would use them a lot if it weren't for the very high film price, but hey, we're a very small market.)
I'm utterly ignorant of this in programming languages, but it reminds me a bit of NULL in SQL.
For, say, a boolean column you have true, false and NULL as possible "values."
And NULL is never equal to anything, and it is also never not equal to anything.
boolColumn != true
charColumn != 'x'
intColumn != 1
(etc)
will not match a NULL, you have to explicitly say IS NULL or IS NOT NULL.
Obviously not news to anyone who knows SQL, but I just felt like pointing it out...
Parent post is rightly modded Funny, but in case anyone doesn't get the joke:
Yes, in the US at least most college campuses are either "Pepsi" or "Coke" campuses, in that either the university or some other company has a monopoly on soda pop sales on university property, and both Pepsi and Coke require exclusivity if you want any of the goodies they give out.
And those goodies can be pretty nice. Sometimes just plain old cash. Sometimes they pay for advertising for your business as long as it has a Pepsi|Coke logo on it. Lots of other stuff.
Absolutely. Since my phone doesn't have Bluetooth I'm always forgetting about it ;-)
Of course this is assuming the display thingy has a little controller, battery, paging buttons build-in. That's probably a reasonable assumption.
Better yet...
Imagine one (a bit larger, a bit higher-res) that plugs into your mobile phone.
You subscribe to a service that gives you headlines, stock quotes, whatever. You use your phone to pick what you want, plug in the display, transfer the image, and bingo, you've got a page of potentially useful information you can read now or later, without tying up your phone.
Maybe the display has an itsybitsy memory thingy and paging buttons so you can store more than one page at a time, as you suggested. Or maybe it's just one page but the data transfer is entirely powered by your phone.
You could also use it to "print" your MMS's - muuuch nicer than passing the stupid phone around to all your friends at a party. (Plus you want to use your phone at the same time.)