99% of blogs don't give you any new facts, they simply pass on facts that they have picked up elsewhere.
So this differentiates said blogs from the so-called "real journalists" because they pick the facts from elsewhere(s) with names like Reuters, AP, etc? And just because these "elsewheres" sell their facts to anyone willing to pay for it, make up the news then? I don't think so. They pick up their facts from elsewhere as well - only difference, they pay for the fact-gathering while many bloggers do their research on their own expense.
To cut a long story short: A (well-written and -researched) Blog does not differ from a traditional news-outlet, the latter usually pays better, though.
You forgot Entertainment-Business 103 [Imagine an angry kid jumping, screaming, pounding the walls]: "I don't want you to play / watch imported games and DVDs, even if we are to stupid to sell them here or the domestic version is of inferior quality! I don't! I don't! I don't! I'll hold my breath until this has made it into legislation!"
A valid point, but that is not what I'm talking about. Let me rephrase, I meant: There is no simple / legal way for Jane and John Doe to make the product work in the not too distant future. Messing around with an "encrypted" output is/will be illegal by then.
It's not about being cheaper in Japan, it's about getting as much DRM as possible into the Japanese households. Just imagine a lot of PS3s without (gasp) copy-protection. The movie industry would be forced to, either sell Blue-Ray disks willing to output HD-signals to TV-sets without checking for an active DRM, or deal with thousands of angry customers feeling cheated. OK, now they have been cheated into buying PS3s with DRM, which will - in the not to distant future - not allow them to use the product they bought with their first- or second-gen HD-TV.
A good point and also a moot point. It completely depends on how much can I do with the hardware as a programmer? and will I be able to give my creations to other people without jumping through too many hoops? The former is still to be seen / heard from Sony, so, for the time being a moot point, sorry. The latter has the same status quo, nobody knows for sure. If both questions will be answered - for developers not working for a big publisher / game studio - in a satisfactory way, then, and only then, the point you made could be a good reason to put time and effort into programming Linux on the PS3. BTW: I'm still dreaming about a grid of affordable Cells in my apartment, but that's just me, you know.;-)
Your are straight on the mark. A couple of years ago, a customer told me: "I switched everything to HP, because if a company is able to produce medical equipment in such a superb quality, then they should be able to create top-notch workstations and servers as well."
To bad I lost contact to the guy, I'd be very interested how he sees HP nowadays.
Maybe, but most of the industry already hopped on the bandwagon with the "almost barebones" -> "somewhat extended" -> "more or less ultimate" -> "ultimate edition" release-cycle anyway. So there wouldn't be a big change, in theory, at least. In retrospect (I'm talking the last year here), I went to the cinema about five or six times, the rest of the movies came from my video rental-store because I wasn't sure if they were worth the money I'd have to spent to see them in the theater. I got really picky about DVDs that go into my permanent collection, the minimum requirement is a good directors commentary, the other requirement is a good price. I'm usually able to rent a DVD a couple of times and wait for an edition that fulfills these requirements and save some money compared to what I have to pay if I'd rush out and buy a DVD on the release-date.
Spot on, I don't listen to the radio too often these days (podcasts are so much better), but I do from time to time. The latest to-be-hyped songs are played about three times an hour (my unscientific guess), means I really don't want to hear them again after a couple of days. I do not dare to imagine, what this scheme does to regular listeners of commercial radio.
Sony is just too scared about loosing the grip on the contents, but by holding on to that, they have lost the grip on hardware. Sony is it's own worst enemy! This remark is right on the spot. The different divisions at SONY are trying to protect their interests - their own interests without regard how much this might hurt another division or the company as a whole. It's not that the walkman-division didn't know that the customers wanted to be able to play MP3-files, they just could not convince the "content-holding" divisions that this is a good thing. Said "content-holding" divisions actually undermined the success of SONY's new portable players under the guise of "copyright protection"; my guess is that they thought that bad MP3-thing will go away if they just looked hard enough in another direction.
...that's all. While working in the Game-Industry as a programming-lead, I found out that there a two mindsets prevalent:
abstract
on the metal
Type 1 thinks in "i_unknown" theoretical concepts, tries to create a framework to rely on and then starts looking what the metal is capable of. Type 2 looks at the metal, plays around with it, reads the manuals, plays around a little longer to make sure everything needed is understood, and then evaluates the possibility to use either a supplied framework (customized if needed) or to create a new framework. I had my fair share of type 1s, I had my fair share of type 2s. Type 1 had problems with the console-programming more than often, the perfectly crafted framework had to be duct-taped to the metal because it implied functionality that simply wasn't there, thus delaying delivery dates. Type 2 sometimes got lost in the possibilities of the metal, but delivered results. Before you start to flame me now: the type 1 approach is valid if the feature-set of the hardware is known and tested, but, if dealing with metal of not-so-tested capabilities, type 2 is needed to make sure there are no surprises later. To make my point: I had to fight with a type 1 at one time because the framework he invented didn't match the features of Nintendos GC. For him, this was no problem, "let's create another thousand classes and it will work." He did not understand that programming on metal, read consoles, is different from programming on a PC with an OS. Maybe its time for the studios/programmers complaining about difficulties to evaluate the number of type 1s vs. the number of type 2s in the team. It won't work without a good mix of both and clear cut responsibilities/planning before.
Right on. This lone example that the system sometimes works (by accident) proofs that the system in itself is not totally flawed. Score!!!!!!!!!! Besides, coming up with an idea like this and getting a patent for it? The system must have worked. Who would come up with an idea like, say, a transistor radio, maybe portable? And since the program usually sucks, lets add some way to listen to what the owner wants, let's say cassettes? Every person carrying a portable radio since the '50s might have thought about that, but still, there is the patent for the obvious. My point in the parent post was, that one has to have very deep pockets to mount a defense against the ones with deeper pockets. If you think every small company or inventor has the funds to survive a legal battle dragging on for that period of time: Welcome to the real world, Neo!
If you are not protected by MEGACORP(TM) with lots of money to burn in legal battles, forget standing up to your rights. It really does not matter if you got there (and tried to patent) first, all your ideas belong to the ones with the deepest pockets. Isn't this a wonderful word?
my 2 cents (if this should be trademarked by now, consider this sentence non-existant)
...this time, is the fact that the BSA is distributing this BS (coincidence?) worldwide at the same time. The usual suspects (politicians, etc.) try to fall for it in a believable manner (you have to agree with statements of people who are actually paying you money to do so), and will try to enact the more severe punishments their real employers are demanding (to put it bluntly: politicians living on taxes are so 90s, getting paid for "consulting" in the industry is hip). What's new?
Amen, brother. No one is forcing any user to use a certain desktop-GUI. I still use WindowMaker on slower desktops since both, Gnome and KDE, are sometimes a little too much for older machines.
...I use the "ad-punishment system". In a nutshell:
I understand that websites have to make money to stay afloat; I do understand that this is achieved via ads; I just do not like certain types of ads (pretty much like turning the volume down while watching TV when the ads "shout" at me).
The "ad-punishement system" is simple, annoy me once, get blocked in/etc/hosts. My reasoning in greater detail at Slow browsing. just my 2 cents
I read TFA and read it again, no test system was mentioned. My SAP days are over, but I distinctly remember that having a test system was a requirement, means there should be a comparable system to test patches and customizations to SAP and the OS first. If everything runs OK on the test system, then you are allowed to apply the modification to the production system. It seems that that didn't happen and that the SE(s) in question had no clue how to handle the installation in the first place. Two weeks, give me a break, none of them did an install for a production system before, I guess. Repeat with me: It is not a good idea to learn on a customer's system! A little hint for the poor soul who did the install: a well-groomed/etc/syslog.conf tells you a lot about your running system. You have to understand how to do it, though.
This would be like if the *AA immediately started suing all ISPs as if they were knowingly involved in large-scale copyright infringement. Based on your comparison: they simply try to do the same thing as the *AAs. Both parties will keep trying until they find someone in power, lacking the knowledge about the linking system in the Internet, who pushes this behavior into law.
There seems to be a real test on real computers for the advanced exams, from what I found in the roadmap. If this is really the case, then the exam could be worth something. Most of the other exams simply prove that the person to be tested was able to click on the right spot while taking said exam. The multiple choice exams tell nothing about the problem-solving skills of the tested person, IMHO. I got into a discussion with the trainer while taking a training for a certain test, that very trainer told us all questions that might come up and require a "wrong" answer to pass the test. In that discussion said trainer told me: "I know this is wrong, but you want to pass, don't you?" In short: I don't see any value in the "click-through" tests.
I think RSS is a great and efficient way to relay information, the protocol should be in the toolbox of every SysAdmin, IMHO. If a SysAdmin needs to keep the users of certain services posted about the latest developments, he/she could simply set up an RSS-Feed to allow the users to subscribe to the information they are interested in, e.g. the availability of a cluster-system, or a generated feed showing the current load on a render-farm, etc. The beauty of RSS is choice, if you are not interested in the information, do not subscribe to the channel.
RSS started mainly as a way to syndicate information like a wire-service, but the protocol allows to quickly generate a feed with some lines of Perl or sh, so why not use it.
<shameless plug> My upcoming book contains a short sh-script to generate a feed to keep users informed regarding developments in the data-center, it is called "Unix/Linux Survival Guide". </shameless plug>
Maybe some of you remember the "old days" when there was actually an option which OS to choose for the workplace, e.g. OS/2, NetWare, *NIX, *BSD, etc. ? M$ figured how to talk to the suits and convince them that "our product is not ready, yet. But it will be much better than the competition, you'll just have to wait a little longer." And lo and behold the PHBs fell for it! No big surprise here, but maybe M$ simply tries to get back to these wonderful times when telling a PHB that "Windows 95 will increase your productivity for sure! I would not use OS/2, I heard it is unstable." simply closed the deal and was deemed a believable statement in certain circles (hint PHBs, again). The whole scheme worked until the late 90's, they convinced my, then, boss that replacing Sybase running a 1 TB database 24/7 with SQLServer was indeed possible and that even the released Beta [of SQLServer] was fit for production -- the poor guy never understood why I was laughing so hard. The application in question was Scopus, which would have simply ceased to work with the weird locking-scheme SQLServer used in these days (they came up with record-locking one or two releases down the road, though).
My big beef with PPC such as the G5 is that they're expensive and generate a shit load of heat. Even my G4 Laptop gets very hot sometimes:-( My bone to pick with AMD was a really strange behavior in a Game I wrote (time-pressed as always) regarding animations in a not-to-be-named commercial Game-FrameWork. I tried to hunt the bug down until the representative of the publisher arrived, to no avail. We demoed on an Intel-based box that did not make the animations look like a nervous breakdown of the GPU. I guess it was the manufacturers fault, they simply got the timing wrong on AMD, but experiences like that are hard to forget. The game was supposed to run on the GameCube BTW, so I was actually looking forward to do it right on RISC:-)
I see your point, but, call me old-fashioned (I've been on RISC for most of my programming life), this: http://www.go-ecs.com/ppc/ppctek1.htm just makes me feel more comfortable. I'll take a much closer look at the technical details you wrote about later, though. Thanks for the answer.
I have no clue at all why you are getting so upset. The simple fact that I prefer to have 32 64-Bit GPRs should not influence your blood-pressure, or should it?
If Steve isn't willing to give me registers by switching to x86, then this CPU could be sitting on my desktop in the future instead of my Macs. All arguments about OS and usability aside, the next evolutionary step in computing needs the functionality in the Cell and not growing stacks due to the lack of CPU registers.
Slashdot Mirror
So this differentiates said blogs from the so-called "real journalists" because they pick the facts from elsewhere(s) with names like Reuters, AP, etc? And just because these "elsewheres" sell their facts to anyone willing to pay for it, make up the news then? I don't think so. They pick up their facts from elsewhere as well - only difference, they pay for the fact-gathering while many bloggers do their research on their own expense.
To cut a long story short: A (well-written and -researched) Blog does not differ from a traditional news-outlet, the latter usually pays better, though.
just my 2 cents
You forgot Entertainment-Business 103 [Imagine an angry kid jumping, screaming, pounding the walls]: "I don't want you to play / watch imported games and DVDs, even if we are to stupid to sell them here or the domestic version is of inferior quality! I don't! I don't! I don't! I'll hold my breath until this has made it into legislation!"
A valid point, but that is not what I'm talking about. Let me rephrase, I meant: There is no simple / legal way for Jane and John Doe to make the product work in the not too distant future. Messing around with an "encrypted" output is /will be illegal by then.
It's not about being cheaper in Japan, it's about getting as much DRM as possible into the Japanese households. Just imagine a lot of PS3s without (gasp) copy-protection. The movie industry would be forced to, either sell Blue-Ray disks willing to output HD-signals to TV-sets without checking for an active DRM, or deal with thousands of angry customers feeling cheated. OK, now they have been cheated into buying PS3s with DRM, which will - in the not to distant future - not allow them to use the product they bought with their first- or second-gen HD-TV.
A good point and also a moot point. It completely depends on how much can I do with the hardware as a programmer? and will I be able to give my creations to other people without jumping through too many hoops? ;-)
The former is still to be seen / heard from Sony, so, for the time being a moot point, sorry. The latter has the same status quo, nobody knows for sure.
If both questions will be answered - for developers not working for a big publisher / game studio - in a satisfactory way, then, and only then, the point you made could be a good reason to put time and effort into programming Linux on the PS3.
BTW: I'm still dreaming about a grid of affordable Cells in my apartment, but that's just me, you know.
my 2 cents
Your are straight on the mark. A couple of years ago, a customer told me: "I switched everything to HP, because if a company is able to produce medical equipment in such a superb quality, then they should be able to create top-notch workstations and servers as well."
To bad I lost contact to the guy, I'd be very interested how he sees HP nowadays.
just my 2 cents
Maybe, but most of the industry already hopped on the bandwagon with the "almost barebones" -> "somewhat extended" -> "more or less ultimate" -> "ultimate edition" release-cycle anyway. So there wouldn't be a big change, in theory, at least.
In retrospect (I'm talking the last year here), I went to the cinema about five or six times, the rest of the movies came from my video rental-store because I wasn't sure if they were worth the money I'd have to spent to see them in the theater. I got really picky about DVDs that go into my permanent collection, the minimum requirement is a good directors commentary, the other requirement is a good price. I'm usually able to rent a DVD a couple of times and wait for an edition that fulfills these requirements and save some money compared to what I have to pay if I'd rush out and buy a DVD on the release-date.
just my 2 cents
Spot on, I don't listen to the radio too often these days (podcasts are so much better), but I do from time to time. The latest to-be-hyped songs are played about three times an hour (my unscientific guess), means I really don't want to hear them again after a couple of days. I do not dare to imagine, what this scheme does to regular listeners of commercial radio.
Sony is just too scared about loosing the grip on the contents, but by holding on to that, they have lost the grip on hardware. Sony is it's own worst enemy!
This remark is right on the spot. The different divisions at SONY are trying to protect their interests - their own interests without regard how much this might hurt another division or the company as a whole. It's not that the walkman-division didn't know that the customers wanted to be able to play MP3-files, they just could not convince the "content-holding" divisions that this is a good thing. Said "content-holding" divisions actually undermined the success of SONY's new portable players under the guise of "copyright protection"; my guess is that they thought that bad MP3-thing will go away if they just looked hard enough in another direction.
my 2 cents
Type 1 thinks in "i_unknown" theoretical concepts, tries to create a framework to rely on and then starts looking what the metal is capable of.
Type 2 looks at the metal, plays around with it, reads the manuals, plays around a little longer to make sure everything needed is understood, and then evaluates the possibility to use either a supplied framework (customized if needed) or to create a new framework.
I had my fair share of type 1s, I had my fair share of type 2s.
Type 1 had problems with the console-programming more than often, the perfectly crafted framework had to be duct-taped to the metal because it implied functionality that simply wasn't there, thus delaying delivery dates.
Type 2 sometimes got lost in the possibilities of the metal, but delivered results.
Before you start to flame me now: the type 1 approach is valid if the feature-set of the hardware is known and tested, but, if dealing with metal of not-so-tested capabilities, type 2 is needed to make sure there are no surprises later. To make my point: I had to fight with a type 1 at one time because the framework he invented didn't match the features of Nintendos GC. For him, this was no problem, "let's create another thousand classes and it will work." He did not understand that programming on metal, read consoles, is different from programming on a PC with an OS.
Maybe its time for the studios/programmers complaining about difficulties to evaluate the number of type 1s vs. the number of type 2s in the team. It won't work without a good mix of both and clear cut responsibilities/planning before.
just my 2 cents
Right on. This lone example that the system sometimes works (by accident) proofs that the system in itself is not totally flawed. Score!!!!!!!!!!
Besides, coming up with an idea like this and getting a patent for it? The system must have worked. Who would come up with an idea like, say, a transistor radio, maybe portable? And since the program usually sucks, lets add some way to listen to what the owner wants, let's say cassettes? Every person carrying a portable radio since the '50s might have thought about that, but still, there is the patent for the obvious.
My point in the parent post was, that one has to have very deep pockets to mount a defense against the ones with deeper pockets. If you think every small company or inventor has the funds to survive a legal battle dragging on for that period of time: Welcome to the real world, Neo!
If you are not protected by MEGACORP(TM) with lots of money to burn in legal battles, forget standing up to your rights. It really does not matter if you got there (and tried to patent) first, all your ideas belong to the ones with the deepest pockets.
Isn't this a wonderful word?
my 2 cents (if this should be trademarked by now, consider this sentence non-existant)
...this time, is the fact that the BSA is distributing this BS (coincidence?) worldwide at the same time. The usual suspects (politicians, etc.) try to fall for it in a believable manner (you have to agree with statements of people who are actually paying you money to do so), and will try to enact the more severe punishments their real employers are demanding (to put it bluntly: politicians living on taxes are so 90s, getting paid for "consulting" in the industry is hip).
What's new?
Are you one hundred percent sure that this was "The Onion" and not the "Times" or any other reliable news-source?
Just checking...
Amen, brother. No one is forcing any user to use a certain desktop-GUI. I still use WindowMaker on slower desktops since both, Gnome and KDE, are sometimes a little too much for older machines.
...I use the "ad-punishment system". In a nutshell:
/etc/hosts. My reasoning in greater detail at Slow browsing.
I understand that websites have to make money to stay afloat; I do understand that this is achieved via ads; I just do not like certain types of ads (pretty much like turning the volume down while watching TV when the ads "shout" at me).
The "ad-punishement system" is simple, annoy me once, get blocked in
just my 2 cents
I read TFA and read it again, no test system was mentioned. My SAP days are over, but I distinctly remember that having a test system was a requirement, means there should be a comparable system to test patches and customizations to SAP and the OS first. If everything runs OK on the test system, then you are allowed to apply the modification to the production system. /etc/syslog.conf tells you a lot about your running system. You have to understand how to do it, though.
It seems that that didn't happen and that the SE(s) in question had no clue how to handle the installation in the first place. Two weeks, give me a break, none of them did an install for a production system before, I guess. Repeat with me: It is not a good idea to learn on a customer's system!
A little hint for the poor soul who did the install: a well-groomed
just my 3 cents
This would be like if the *AA immediately started suing all ISPs as if they were knowingly involved in large-scale copyright infringement.
Based on your comparison: they simply try to do the same thing as the *AAs. Both parties will keep trying until they find someone in power, lacking the knowledge about the linking system in the Internet, who pushes this behavior into law.
There seems to be a real test on real computers for the advanced exams, from what I found in the roadmap. If this is really the case, then the exam could be worth something.
Most of the other exams simply prove that the person to be tested was able to click on the right spot while taking said exam. The multiple choice exams tell nothing about the problem-solving skills of the tested person, IMHO.
I got into a discussion with the trainer while taking a training for a certain test, that very trainer told us all questions that might come up and require a "wrong" answer to pass the test. In that discussion said trainer told me: "I know this is wrong, but you want to pass, don't you?"
In short: I don't see any value in the "click-through" tests.
I think RSS is a great and efficient way to relay information, the protocol should be in the toolbox of every SysAdmin, IMHO. If a SysAdmin needs to keep the users of certain services posted about the latest developments, he/she could simply set up an RSS-Feed to allow the users to subscribe to the information they are interested in, e.g. the availability of a cluster-system, or a generated feed showing the current load on a render-farm, etc.
The beauty of RSS is choice, if you are not interested in the information, do not subscribe to the channel.
RSS started mainly as a way to syndicate information like a wire-service, but the protocol allows to quickly generate a feed with some lines of Perl or sh, so why not use it.
<shameless plug>
My upcoming book contains a short sh-script to generate a feed to keep users informed regarding developments in the data-center, it is called "Unix/Linux Survival Guide".
</shameless plug>
Maybe some of you remember the "old days" when there was actually an option which OS to choose for the workplace, e.g. OS/2, NetWare, *NIX, *BSD, etc. ?
M$ figured how to talk to the suits and convince them that "our product is not ready, yet. But it will be much better than the competition, you'll just have to wait a little longer." And lo and behold the PHBs fell for it! No big surprise here, but maybe M$ simply tries to get back to these wonderful times when telling a PHB that "Windows 95 will increase your productivity for sure! I would not use OS/2, I heard it is unstable." simply closed the deal and was deemed a believable statement in certain circles (hint PHBs, again).
The whole scheme worked until the late 90's, they convinced my, then, boss that replacing Sybase running a 1 TB database 24/7 with SQLServer was indeed possible and that even the released Beta [of SQLServer] was fit for production -- the poor guy never understood why I was laughing so hard. The application in question was Scopus, which would have simply ceased to work with the weird locking-scheme SQLServer used in these days (they came up with record-locking one or two releases down the road, though).
my 2 cents
My big beef with PPC such as the G5 is that they're expensive and generate a shit load of heat. :-( :-)
Even my G4 Laptop gets very hot sometimes
My bone to pick with AMD was a really strange behavior in a Game I wrote (time-pressed as always) regarding animations in a not-to-be-named commercial Game-FrameWork. I tried to hunt the bug down until the representative of the publisher arrived, to no avail. We demoed on an Intel-based box that did not make the animations look like a nervous breakdown of the GPU. I guess it was the manufacturers fault, they simply got the timing wrong on AMD, but experiences like that are hard to forget. The game was supposed to run on the GameCube BTW, so I was actually looking forward to do it right on RISC
Erik
I see your point, but, call me old-fashioned (I've been on RISC for most of my programming life), this: http://www.go-ecs.com/ppc/ppctek1.htm just makes me feel more comfortable.
I'll take a much closer look at the technical details you wrote about later, though.
Thanks for the answer.
Erik
I have no clue at all why you are getting so upset. The simple fact that I prefer to have 32 64-Bit GPRs should not influence your blood-pressure, or should it?
If Steve isn't willing to give me registers by switching to x86, then this CPU could be sitting on my desktop in the future instead of my Macs.
All arguments about OS and usability aside, the next evolutionary step in computing needs the functionality in the Cell and not growing stacks due to the lack of CPU registers.
IMHO, of course.
my 2 cents