why wasn't this story called "Go to the toilet... and die!?"
PHB: Good point, outsider. If he'd only stayed in his seat he'd still be alive today.
Dilbert, I'd like you to write a proposal to choose a committee to draft a proposal for a new company policy that forbids programmers from leaving their seats during working hours.
Asok: Why can't we just implement the new policy?
PHB: Asok, go back to your seat right now if you want to live.
I heard Jack In The Box is working on similar software that can determine where you work and how large your cubicle is based on the hours and locations you visit them. They insist they'll only use it to help them staff their restaurants more efficiently during the graveyard shift...
...Just because Google news provides a disproportionate number of links to its stories. Google news has no concept of news value or attribution. Link to VOA if it really contributes something, but in general:
VOA stories often read like federal government press releases because (guess what?) it's owned and operated by the federal government.
VOA's reporting is generally just garbage. Reading their stories reminds me of those people who flunked out of JOUR 101 because they didn't show up.
The reporter who wrote this story did no work work of his own... he wrote the story based on a press release and stories written by other news organizations.
First he quotes Russia's Interfax news agency, which quotes the television station's press release. He couldn't even bother to read the press release himself, which means he has no insight into this story, which explains why it is only six sentences long! Then at the end, the article notes, "Some information for this report provided by AFP."
We would have been better off reading the press release itself, or an AP story. Diversity of news sources is a good thing that should be encouraged on slashdot, but not at the expense of quality.
This is not a troll. All I'm saying is link to primary or knowledgeable impartial secondary sources -- not clueless, biased quaternary sources.
Jim Balcom, Polyfuel's CEO, the US DOT said that a fuel cell designed by his company could be taken into aircraft cabins when it goes on sale because it contains a relatively low concentration of methanol.
So are the security personnel going to sample your methanol before you board the plane to make sure it's not a higher-concentration or some other fuel? I know they make you start up your laptop, but a terrorist could presumably pass that test with a modified fuel cell.
As much as I'd like to run my laptop on fuel cells, this sounds like a potential loophole for carrying far more-flammable fuels onto airplanes. Not that there are people who would go to the trouble of implementing something like that when they could just fill their shoes...
>
This discovery is being hailed as the most important solar system discovery in the past 72 years."
You mean a little frozen ball of dirt at the edge of the solar system is a more important discovery than the news that we have two... er, three... no two moons orbiting our own planet? or Neil Armstrong's discovery that the moon is, in fact, not made of green cheese? Wow.
The vast majority of Mac users do note have Unix experience. Most Windows users don't have Unix experience either. This is one of primary reasons for the relatively slow adpotion of Linux.
There are many Mac and Windows users who do have Unix experience, but your comments suggest that your perspective is skewed because you work in a Unix environment. We're talking about people who are not using Unix (hence the title of this discussion, "Learning UNIX for Mac OS X) but could benefit from it.
The only thing unique about shell scripting OS X
on
Learning UNIX for Mac OS X
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Is the audience.
Mac users will require more initial hand-holding to become comfortable with the command line. And they'll need instant gratification to convince them that dealing with such an apparently-archaic interface is worth the effort.
If you know someone who is in this situation, get them:
The latest version of BBEdit.
An easy-to-use shell scripting book as a reference. Reading a book like Teach Yourself Shell Programming from beginning to end is going to either bore them or scare them off. But as they are experimenting at their own pace and discovering just what they can do with shell scripting, they'll want a reference to thumb through for solutions to the problems they encounter.
Start them out with something simple and relatively familiar, like df, and explain what information it provides.
Then show them df | bbedit. They'll feel more comfortable seeing a connection between the GUI world they know.
Work on basic one-liners first, then show them sed, head, tail, wc, etc. And when you go to show them something new one day and you discover that they wrote something on their own purely because they were interested, you know the fire has been lit.
And if they have any doubts about the value of shell scripting, show them the Linux version of my Buddy program, which is really just a collection of over 70 shell scripts (most of which are reasonably-well commented) and explain that the Mac OS X version is just the Linux version with an AppleScript Studio GUI slapped on top.
MS bought 150M $ USD worth of NON-voting shares of Apple back in 1996. That's peanuts. Apple was worth net 2.1 billion at that time.
That's nowhere near 51%.
Correct, but you left out one important detail -- sometime in the last year or so Microsoft said it no longer owns any of those shares. This is one reason relations have been somewhat strained between the two companies in recent months -- that's one common thread that no longer connects them (remember the reports that Microsoft was attempting to steal Jobs's thunder a few days before MacWorld NY?).
We've posted a comprehensive guide on how to improve your console's image quality.
I thought the whole point of a console was that you assume you're going to end up with a museum-worthy case of burn-in, and you're only viewing lines of text anyway, so you use the crappiest monitor you can find. Who needs a guide for that?
I Had Something of a dialogue with Apple on this
on
No More Mac Tweaking?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
A few weeks ago I received an email from an Apple exec in response to my Apple essay (see my sig). The exec (no, it's probably no one you've heard of) also asked what I thought of Mac OS X, so I sent a rather long reply which included:
I love the stability and degree of control the underlying Unix
provides. Looking back, I can't imagine how I got by without shell
scripts, and I try to encourage others to discover them as well. Mac
users like an easy-to-use interface, but they're also adventurous.
They'll tackle any steep learning curve if the rewards are great enough,
as long as they have their safe Macintosh UI on which to fall back.
I also like the clean interface, though it would be nice if Apple
supported the third-party themes users have been waiting to create since
8.5 whet their appetites. In some ways, it seems almost too clean, like
a college dorm without posters or christmas lights.
Over the weekend I received a response which included:
many thanks for responding in such detail! i share many of your opinions and
you mentioned a couple of things i wasn't aware of- much appreciation for
that.
Former FTC chairman Robert Pitofsky said at the time that consumers had been overcharged by $480 million since 1997 and that CD prices would soon drop by as much as $5 a CD as a result.
In other words, over the course of three years the industry forced consumers to pay nearly half a billion dollars more than they would have if real competition had existed in the market. Now we know where they find the money to give reviewers CD players that are glued shut.
Yeah, I heard this one before. And the big bad wolf is going to come eat us all, right? You go hide in your cave. OK, see you later. Have fun. What the hell is-- ::BONK!::
<SARCASM>
You sort your applicants into piles of BullShit artists and MicroSoft users? I'd hate to see what categories fall under "etcetera."
</SARCASM>
Have a look at Daniel Jackson's Software Engineering lecture notes. He begins talking about the importance of good design and then cites Netscape as an example. He claims that the reason Netscape lost the browser war was because of poor design. He makes some valid points, but its interesting that he declines to factor in Microsoft's illegal use of its monopoly and even claims that Netscape's determination to remain platform independent was also partly responsible.
This sounds like Microsoft's commonly-touted line: "We didn't drive them out of business. Their incompetence drove them out of business." Is he teaching software engineering or business? He should stick to the former, because he's either inept or well-paid when it comes to the latter.
1.4.1 The Netscape Story
For PC software, there's a myth that design is unimportant because time-to-market is
all that matters. Netscape's demise is a story worth understanding in this respect.
The original NCSA Mosaic team at the University of Illinois built the first widely used
browser, but they did a quick and dirty job. They founded Netscape, and between April
and December 1994 built Navigator 1.0. It ran on 3 platforms, and quickly became the
browser of choice on Windows, Unix and Mac. Microsoft began developing Internet
Explorer 1.0 in October 1994, and shipped it with Windows 95 in August 1995.
In Netscape's rapid growth period, from 1995 to 1997, the developers worked hard to
ship new products with new features, and gave little time to design. Most companies
in the shrink-wrap software business (still) believe that design can be postponed: that
once you have market share and a compelling feature set, you can "refactor" the code
and obtain the benefits of clean design. Netscape was no exception, and its engineers
were probably more talented than many.
Meanwhile, Microsoft had realized the need to build on solid designs. It built NT from
scratch, and restructured the Office suite to use shared components. It did hurry to
market with IE to catch up with Netscape, but then it took time to restructure IE 3.0.
This restructuring of IE is now seen within Microsoft as the key decision that helped
them close the gap with Netscape.
Netscape's development just grew and grew. By Communicator 4.0, there were 120
developers (from 10 initially) and 3 million lines of code (up a factor of 30). Michael
Toy, release manager, said:
"We're in a really bad situation... We should have stopped shipping this code a year
ago. It's dead... This is like the rude awakening... We're paying the price for going fast."
Interestingly, the argument for modular design within Netscape in 1997 was driven by
the desire to go back to small team development. Without clean and simple interfaces,
it becomes impossible to divide up the work into independent groups.
Netscape set aside 2 months to re-architect the browser, but it wasnt long enough. So
they planned to start again from scratch, with Communicator 6.0. But 6.0 was never
completed, and its developers were reassigned to 4.0. The 5.0 version, Mozilla, was
made available as open source, but that didnt help: nobody wanted to work on
spaghetti code. So Microsoft won the browser war, and AOL acquired Netscape.
This is not the entire story, by the way. Platform independence was a big issue right
from the start. Navigator ran on Windows, Mac and Unix from version 1.0, and
Netscape worked hard to maintain as much platform independence in their code as
possible. They even planned to go to a pure Java version ("Javagator"), and built a lot of
their own Java tools (because Sun's tools weren't ready). But in 1998 they gave up. Still,
Communicator 4.0 contains about 1.2 million lines of Java.
You can read the whole story in: Michael A. Cusumano and David B. Yoffie. Competing
on Internet Time: Lessons from Netscape and its Battle with Microsoft, Free Press, 1998.
See especially Chapter 4, Design Strategy.
Note, by the way, that it took Netscape more than 2 years to discover the importance
of design. Don't be surprised if you're not entirely convinced after one term; some
things come only with experience.
How long before we begin receiving emails like this?
Get an MIT Education for only $24.99! Our one-of-a-kind CD has lecture notes, diagrams, exams with answers and other materials provided by real MIT professors for HUNDREDS of courses.
Of course, this will have to wait until MIT posts a few more courses...
Since the article doesn't provide any of the unemployment statistics it talks about, here is the U.S. unemployment rate over the last 20 years, provided by the New Mexico Dept. of Labor:
It -may- be the longest bear market, but it certain is -not- the worst, job wise.
We're still under 7% unemployment (or is it still under 6?). That -by itself- tells me that while it's hanging on, it certainly isn't nearly as sever as it could have been.
There was an article in The New York Times just two days ago which claims the unemployment figure is wrong and misleading. Analysts say a significant and growing number of people either don't fit the government's inaccurate definition of unemployed, or the government has no way of counting them in the figure. The article says the real unemployment rate is probably closer to that of the recession-mired early 80s.
Computer: Thank you for pressing the self-destruct button. President Scroob: Hey Helmet! Check this out! I found an easter egg in the ship's computer. Computer: nine... eight... six... Helmet: And a pretty major bug. What happened to seven? President Scroob: No, Gates said that was a feature. Computer: Just kidding...
UC Santa Barbara is banning NT/2000 in favor of XP?
I thought UCSB was trying to shedits image as a place where people go to avoid real work:
August 26, 2002 AP article:
Often ranked as a top party school in college surveys, the University of California, Santa Barbara has recently gained respect from one reviewer.
A Newsweek-Kaplan guide to college admissions named UCSB one of the 12 "hottest" colleges. The report, which was on newsstands Monday, praises the university's faculty, which includes three professors who have won Nobel Prizes in recent years, and its reputable graduate physics program.
"UCSB used to be known as a major party school," according to the magazine. "Now it's the party school with an increasingly impressive academic reputation."
The guide also lauds UCSB's unique doctorate religious program and film studies program.
The campus' seaside location earned a mention in the Princeton Review's "The Best 345 Colleges" guide this year. Students who were surveyed voted UCSB one of the top academic destinations for "Quality of Life: Beautiful Campus."
The school also made the list that ranks school that lack racial diversity. It was mentioned in a list of "Monochromatic Institutes" in the Princeton Review.
China develops its own CPU.
Let the Chinese worry about developing their own CPU.
Yeah, I know what you meant. Just like you knew what I meant when I used an array in place of a scalar variable. But the only reader who mattered, the computer, was pissed.
Slashdot Mirror
Dilbert, I'd like you to write a proposal to choose a committee to draft a proposal for a new company policy that forbids programmers from leaving their seats during working hours.
Asok: Why can't we just implement the new policy?
PHB: Asok, go back to your seat right now if you want to live.
I heard Jack In The Box is working on similar software that can determine where you work and how large your cubicle is based on the hours and locations you visit them. They insist they'll only use it to help them staff their restaurants more efficiently during the graveyard shift...
- VOA stories often read like federal government press releases because (guess what?) it's owned and operated by the federal government.
- VOA's reporting is generally just garbage. Reading their stories reminds me of those people who flunked out of JOUR 101 because they didn't show up.
The reporter who wrote this story did no work work of his own... he wrote the story based on a press release and stories written by other news organizations.First he quotes Russia's Interfax news agency, which quotes the television station's press release. He couldn't even bother to read the press release himself, which means he has no insight into this story, which explains why it is only six sentences long! Then at the end, the article notes, "Some information for this report provided by AFP."
We would have been better off reading the press release itself, or an AP story. Diversity of news sources is a good thing that should be encouraged on slashdot, but not at the expense of quality.
This is not a troll. All I'm saying is link to primary or knowledgeable impartial secondary sources -- not clueless, biased quaternary sources.
The Spirit of Justice's watchful gaze ends where Ashcroft's drapes begin.
As much as I'd like to run my laptop on fuel cells, this sounds like a potential loophole for carrying far more-flammable fuels onto airplanes. Not that there are people who would go to the trouble of implementing something like that when they could just fill their shoes...
When this case goes to trial, will the judge's decision link to a site that links to DeCSS?
There are many Mac and Windows users who do have Unix experience, but your comments suggest that your perspective is skewed because you work in a Unix environment. We're talking about people who are not using Unix (hence the title of this discussion, "Learning UNIX for Mac OS X) but could benefit from it.
Mac users will require more initial hand-holding to become comfortable with the command line. And they'll need instant gratification to convince them that dealing with such an apparently-archaic interface is worth the effort.
If you know someone who is in this situation, get them:
- The latest version of BBEdit.
- An easy-to-use shell scripting book as a reference. Reading a book like Teach Yourself Shell Programming from beginning to end is going to either bore them or scare them off. But as they are experimenting at their own pace and discovering just what they can do with shell scripting, they'll want a reference to thumb through for solutions to the problems they encounter.
Start them out with something simple and relatively familiar, like df, and explain what information it provides.Then show them df | bbedit. They'll feel more comfortable seeing a connection between the GUI world they know.
Then shown them df | grep disk0s9 | bbedit.
And df | grep disk0s9 | awk '{print "Disk Size: " $2/2000 " MB"}'.
Work on basic one-liners first, then show them sed, head, tail, wc, etc. And when you go to show them something new one day and you discover that they wrote something on their own purely because they were interested, you know the fire has been lit.
And if they have any doubts about the value of shell scripting, show them the Linux version of my Buddy program, which is really just a collection of over 70 shell scripts (most of which are reasonably-well commented) and explain that the Mac OS X version is just the Linux version with an AppleScript Studio GUI slapped on top.
Yeah, I heard this one before. And the big bad wolf is going to come eat us all, right? You go hide in your cave. OK, see you later. Have fun. What the hell is--
::BONK!::
You sort your applicants into piles of BullShit artists and MicroSoft users? I'd hate to see what categories fall under "etcetera."
</SARCASM>
This sounds like Microsoft's commonly-touted line: "We didn't drive them out of business. Their incompetence drove them out of business." Is he teaching software engineering or business? He should stick to the former, because he's either inept or well-paid when it comes to the latter.
Computer: Thank you for pressing the self-destruct button.
President Scroob: Hey Helmet! Check this out! I found an easter egg in the ship's computer.
Computer: nine... eight... six...
Helmet: And a pretty major bug. What happened to seven?
President Scroob: No, Gates said that was a feature.
Computer: Just kidding...
I thought UCSB was trying to shed its image as a place where people go to avoid real work:
August 26, 2002 AP article:
Great. I'll just go ahead and make sure you get another copy of that memo. Thanks a bunch.
Yeah, at the staff meeting on Thursday. They say we're looking at fire, brimstone, and a 60% chance of efficiency experts. Didn't you get that memo?