You know, where you _review_ the book? As in whether the book is high-quality, or not. As in whether the author is a good writer, or not. As in whether the contents are relevant, or not. As in whether I should buy the book rather than some other book.
Instead, we get a synopsis of what the book covers, plus a blurb for why the topic is important. Yes, securing databases is important! Yes, Part 4 provides Java examples! But why do I want to buy THIS book about securing databases? Why do I want to buy THIS book with Java examples?
They should have some sort of guidelines to follow. They could call them "Slashdot Book Review Guidelines". The guidelines could include points like "Is the book readable as well as technically accurate?" and "How gracefully do you expect the content to age?" That would be amazing.
Great post! I came online in 1987 (ah, BITNET, how little I miss you), and Mentifex has been like an old... well, not friend. Like that person who always comes along when you go out, but you don't want him along, but he's such an obvious loser and you don't want to be MEAN. Anyhow, I had developed immunity, and thus hadn't seen that FAQ. Very nice.
> So why not let me do my work when I'm most productive?
I was self-employed for many years, then telecommuting for many more, so I set my own schedule. Know what? While I did often work really strange hours, and did some really good _research_ during those hours, I can honestly say that the quality of my output didn't go up in proportion to the lateness of my hours. Turns out I can do good work at 8am as easily as 8pm, the late hours were simply because I was disorganized and letting work get out of hand.
While I completely agree that you can often work better at 10pm because nobody is bugging you every ten minutes - I disagree that there's anything magic about 10pm. If the problem is people bugging you every ten minutes, then fix the problem.
For someone who's only been out there for a bit over a year, this guy has a pretty damn big chip on his shoulder. I saw the "problem" in the first two paragraphs. He went to work for some random company just because they called him at a time when he needed a job. Duh?
[_I_, on the other hand, have a huge-ass chip on my shoulder. I've had it for 15 years, I can't seem to get rid of it. I worked with some clunkers in the first couple years, and was stiffed for substantial income a couple times, but, you know what? It was my own damn fault. EVERYTHING wrong with them was recognizable from the get-go, and it wasn't whether they put people in cubicles or offices.]
There was a great movie about how VC ruined a company, the DVD is called startup.com.
Wow, I'm totally positive that you took the wrong point home from that one. The world is full of smart guys with great ideas, people so smart that they can't be bothered to spend five minutes thinking about why the solution they're proposing doesn't solve a problem people are willing to pay to solve. There were a lot of.com companies that were basically smart people with a great idea EXCEPT [fill in a blank]. Note that "smart people" and "great idea" isn't the important point, the Valley has those in droves, the important point is whatever it was that comes after EXCEPT. If you don't know what comes after EXCEPT, you have no business building a startup.
[FYI, I pretty much understand that what comes after EXCEPT for most of my ideas isn't a positive thing. That's why I'm unlikely to ever found a startup.]
Webvan wasn't a bad idea, it just wasn't implemented correctly
Webvan was a great idea. I was working from home at the time, so I could order one day and they'd drop things off the next day. As the orders progressed, it got to where 90% of what we ever ordered was already in the system, so I could order a week worth of groceries in under 10 minutes - which meant I was basically making money by paying them to do it for me. safeway.com SUCKS compared to Webvan (that, and my wife is a stay-at-home mom, now, so shopping in the real world is actually a nice change of pace).
Unfortunately, the number of people who "work from home" AND "get paid well" (or at all!) perhaps isn't great enough to support something like Webvan, well-implemented or otherwise.
Of _course_ career centers see an average of 4-6 months. People who walk out one door and in another generally don't use career centers. It's the people who've already been looking for two months that they're counting.
Did you read the article you linked to? It sounds to me like there is no causal relationship. Instead, it may be that people who are gaining weight switch to diet sodas in an attempt to stop the gain. In which case saying that diet soda causes weight gain is like saying that applying the brakes causes car accidents.
You mean like a Marc Andresson for the new millenium?
At least it's easy to understand WTF they're doing
on
Technorati Does Tags
·
· Score: 1
So, I go to their tags/ page. And I see:
Tags: The real-time web, organized by you
Followed by a hundred or so randomly shuffled, randomly sized, very generic words. First off, my organizational skills obviously SUCK. So, I randomly click on "Culture", and get articles like:
- More Positive Articles on Bishop Olmsted - Coming next: The Mongolian-American Curling Club - It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, (iPod) World
OK, so, yes, I'm an old fogey. This seems really neat in an engineering this-doesn't-really-mean-anything sense, but going by the comments, I feel let-down. This is finding that, gosh, the trees all look the same. But it's still not giving me any handle on the size of the forest, or my position within it.
Well, ignoring for the moment that the post was about televisions rather than monitors...
Awhile back, I replaced my old Hitachi Superscan Elite 19" in my home office with a pair of Princeton 19" LCDs from CostCo, mounted on arms. They are each bigger and clearer than the Hitachi was. My home office runs much cooler (my overhead lights no longer dim momentarily when I turn the damn things on!). I don't have to worry about throwing my back out when I move things around. Though I have 2x the monitors, I have significantly more desk space because the arms float them above the desk.
The kicker? They only cost $1000. I paid something like $600 for that CRT, years ago. Likewise for the 17" Viewsonic I had before that - and I'm sure you paid more than $500 apiece for your 21" monitors 7 and 8 years ago! [Much more, if I remember pricing from those days correctly.] Sure, today I could get a decent 19" CRT for $200-$250, but if I was willing to pay many times that for decent kit a decade ago, why not today?
> That single place should be my computer (or, perhaps, a USB pen drive).
No. The problem with all of the single-signon solutions I've seen is that they make it easy for me to blanket the earth with my personal information. They're solving the problem of how annoying it is to enter the information, but not the problem of how annoying it is to have to enter the information in the first place.
Instead, I want my personal information stored with an escrow agent (such as a bank), and then I want to use their information to buy things, etc. The escrow agent would act as a proxy for transaction-related information. For instance, if the vendor needs to contact me, they call the escrow agent, who then forwards the call. The vendor gets to talk to me, but they don't know my phone number.
Similar for the rest of the voluminous information that most vendors require to buy stuff online. Think in terms of the one-off credit card numbers you can get from amex and other companies for online transactions, but extended to all personal information.
What benefit, exactly, do Linux users get from the proliferation of distros?
jcr, IF THAT IS YOUR REAL NAME, we obviously have so many Linux distros for the same reason that we have so many variants of any other kind of software - it's easier to start over than it is to understand the problem and fix it.
Repeat after me: At the same power level. At the same power level. At the same power level.
All of you guys wearing your Big Brains on the outside: would you expect a base station plugged into an essentially infinite source of power to transmit with more or less power than a handset probably carrying 3 A or AA cells?
And, beyond that, what's the likelihood that the FCC has authorized 2.4Ghz and 900Mhz operations at the exact same power levels?
Could you not find any links to articles which said things like "Africa ONE has completed..."? Because all of your "More info" links say things like "The Africa ONE project will create...". I could find no proof that it actually was ever completed, or even started, so the fiber is possibly very dark indeed.
I was able to find links about this from 199519981999. So it's not like this was necessarily imminent just because Wired was writing about it.
www.africaone.com says "No web site is configured at this address." which isn't particularily promising.
The CIA World Factbook says that Namibia has an Africa ONE connection. But only Namibia, which isn't encouraging.
Of course, it's possible/likely that this project is now on someone else's books, and is called something else. I've already spent my 15 minutes poking the web...
This seems like as good a time as any to ask - how CAN they do that?
I once heard a story about this. Apparently, they have to get everyone to sign a form allowing things to be broadcast - including the suspect. They touched on the problem of the suspect assuming they're with the police. Apparently they explain the situation in some detail, and, for the most part, they get willing cooperation. The crazy guy running around shirtless in his yard sporting a shotgun actually wants to be on TV.
I think the summary of the piece was "People who commit crimes, in general, are just not very smart." Of course, in this case, it's self-selecting (the smart criminals maybe don't sign the forms).
I agree about the wack job; he's always there. I had one at the last place I worked, he loved to talk and talk and ask extremely dumb and often went into a long story. Everyone in the room pretty much looked at each other like, "Jesus, won't he stop talking?" but of course that was useless...
Remember buzzword bingo? We always would start all-hands meetings with bets on how many questions the "wack job" would ask. Unfortunately, since you didn't know if he would ask _another_, you couldn't stand up in the middle and shout "Bingo!".
Do they think their target audience has a 1600x1200 desktop, so that they can easily see the entire screenshot in a maximized browser (or graphic viewer) window? Or do they not bother to actually look at their screenshots to see if they really are viewable? Or do they think that their target audience enjoys being required to scroll around if they want to visit the corners?
The list can go on and on. I'm amazed now that there was any romance at all in the 1970's. The fact that childern were still born to people who went to lots of movies is a testament to the human spirit.
A couple years back, we were comparing some movie to Platoon. A friend said he had seen Platoon in the theater - but didn't remember what happened because he had been making out with his date. Nobody could think of a good followup statement.
Huh. In our theatre it was a cat-in-the-hat-related ad which was reversed.
Actually, it's not that hard to do. You can usually easily tell which way things go if you've got good light, but, half the time, you don't because "good light" isn't a high priority in the booth (you figure it out). More than likely the production company also required things to be loaded with minimal slack time so that someone couldn't see the movie early (my god!), making mistakes even easier.
Whatever. I sometimes have the same problem with my Bianci Eros. Which is a bicycle. But I've only found a small proportion of intersections that have a problem (it usually helps to stop close to the edge of the sensors, whereas the center distributes your weight).
Slashdot Mirror
You know, where you _review_ the book? As in whether the book is high-quality, or not. As in whether the author is a good writer, or not. As in whether the contents are relevant, or not. As in whether I should buy the book rather than some other book.
Instead, we get a synopsis of what the book covers, plus a blurb for why the topic is important. Yes, securing databases is important! Yes, Part 4 provides Java examples! But why do I want to buy THIS book about securing databases? Why do I want to buy THIS book with Java examples?
They should have some sort of guidelines to follow. They could call them "Slashdot Book Review Guidelines". The guidelines could include points like "Is the book readable as well as technically accurate?" and "How gracefully do you expect the content to age?" That would be amazing.
Great post! I came online in 1987 (ah, BITNET, how little I miss you), and Mentifex has been like an old ... well, not friend. Like that person who always comes along when you go out, but you don't want him along, but he's such an obvious loser and you don't want to be MEAN. Anyhow, I had developed immunity, and thus hadn't seen that FAQ. Very nice.
-scott
> So why not let me do my work when I'm most productive?
I was self-employed for many years, then telecommuting for many more, so I set my own schedule. Know what? While I did often work really strange hours, and did some really good _research_ during those hours, I can honestly say that the quality of my output didn't go up in proportion to the lateness of my hours. Turns out I can do good work at 8am as easily as 8pm, the late hours were simply because I was disorganized and letting work get out of hand.
While I completely agree that you can often work better at 10pm because nobody is bugging you every ten minutes - I disagree that there's anything magic about 10pm. If the problem is people bugging you every ten minutes, then fix the problem.
-scott
For someone who's only been out there for a bit over a year, this guy has a pretty damn big chip on his shoulder. I saw the "problem" in the first two paragraphs. He went to work for some random company just because they called him at a time when he needed a job. Duh?
[_I_, on the other hand, have a huge-ass chip on my shoulder. I've had it for 15 years, I can't seem to get rid of it. I worked with some clunkers in the first couple years, and was stiffed for substantial income a couple times, but, you know what? It was my own damn fault. EVERYTHING wrong with them was recognizable from the get-go, and it wasn't whether they put people in cubicles or offices.]
-scott
There was a great movie about how VC ruined a company, the DVD is called startup.com.
.com companies that were basically smart people with a great idea EXCEPT [fill in a blank]. Note that "smart people" and "great idea" isn't the important point, the Valley has those in droves, the important point is whatever it was that comes after EXCEPT. If you don't know what comes after EXCEPT, you have no business building a startup.
Wow, I'm totally positive that you took the wrong point home from that one. The world is full of smart guys with great ideas, people so smart that they can't be bothered to spend five minutes thinking about why the solution they're proposing doesn't solve a problem people are willing to pay to solve. There were a lot of
[FYI, I pretty much understand that what comes after EXCEPT for most of my ideas isn't a positive thing. That's why I'm unlikely to ever found a startup.]
-scott
Webvan wasn't a bad idea, it just wasn't implemented correctly
Webvan was a great idea. I was working from home at the time, so I could order one day and they'd drop things off the next day. As the orders progressed, it got to where 90% of what we ever ordered was already in the system, so I could order a week worth of groceries in under 10 minutes - which meant I was basically making money by paying them to do it for me. safeway.com SUCKS compared to Webvan (that, and my wife is a stay-at-home mom, now, so shopping in the real world is actually a nice change of pace).
Unfortunately, the number of people who "work from home" AND "get paid well" (or at all!) perhaps isn't great enough to support something like Webvan, well-implemented or otherwise.
Of _course_ career centers see an average of 4-6 months. People who walk out one door and in another generally don't use career centers. It's the people who've already been looking for two months that they're counting.
Did you read the article you linked to? It sounds to me like there is no causal relationship. Instead, it may be that people who are gaining weight switch to diet sodas in an attempt to stop the gain. In which case saying that diet soda causes weight gain is like saying that applying the brakes causes car accidents.
You mean like a Marc Andresson for the new millenium?
So, I go to their tags/ page. And I see:
Tags: The real-time web, organized by you
Followed by a hundred or so randomly shuffled, randomly sized, very generic words. First off, my organizational skills obviously SUCK. So, I randomly click on "Culture", and get articles like:
- More Positive Articles on Bishop Olmsted
- Coming next: The Mongolian-American Curling Club
- It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, (iPod) World
OK, so, yes, I'm an old fogey. This seems really neat in an engineering this-doesn't-really-mean-anything sense, but going by the comments, I feel let-down. This is finding that, gosh, the trees all look the same. But it's still not giving me any handle on the size of the forest, or my position within it.
-scott
Well, ignoring for the moment that the post was about televisions rather than monitors...
Awhile back, I replaced my old Hitachi Superscan Elite 19" in my home office with a pair of Princeton 19" LCDs from CostCo, mounted on arms. They are each bigger and clearer than the Hitachi was. My home office runs much cooler (my overhead lights no longer dim momentarily when I turn the damn things on!). I don't have to worry about throwing my back out when I move things around. Though I have 2x the monitors, I have significantly more desk space because the arms float them above the desk.
The kicker? They only cost $1000. I paid something like $600 for that CRT, years ago. Likewise for the 17" Viewsonic I had before that - and I'm sure you paid more than $500 apiece for your 21" monitors 7 and 8 years ago! [Much more, if I remember pricing from those days correctly.] Sure, today I could get a decent 19" CRT for $200-$250, but if I was willing to pay many times that for decent kit a decade ago, why not today?
Okay, so how many slashdotters remember when alta vista was just a dgital subdomain?
WTF is "Digital"?
> That single place should be my computer (or, perhaps, a USB pen drive).
No. The problem with all of the single-signon solutions I've seen is that they make it easy for me to blanket the earth with my personal information. They're solving the problem of how annoying it is to enter the information, but not the problem of how annoying it is to have to enter the information in the first place.
Instead, I want my personal information stored with an escrow agent (such as a bank), and then I want to use their information to buy things, etc. The escrow agent would act as a proxy for transaction-related information. For instance, if the vendor needs to contact me, they call the escrow agent, who then forwards the call. The vendor gets to talk to me, but they don't know my phone number.
Similar for the rest of the voluminous information that most vendors require to buy stuff online. Think in terms of the one-off credit card numbers you can get from amex and other companies for online transactions, but extended to all personal information.
-scott
> We did 68 Mill in VC in about 2.
And, from your tone, you think this is a good thing?
What benefit, exactly, do Linux users get from the proliferation of distros?
jcr, IF THAT IS YOUR REAL NAME, we obviously have so many Linux distros for the same reason that we have so many variants of any other kind of software - it's easier to start over than it is to understand the problem and fix it.
At least it's easier at first...
The difference between an LCD TV and a LCD Monitor is the logic board stuck to the back of the panel, or even connected to it with a flexible circuit.
I'm sorry, but I'm not really interested in a 26" 1024x768 computer display. I want a 20" 1600x1200 display. How does a new logic board address that?
Repeat after me: At the same power level. At the same power level. At the same power level.
All of you guys wearing your Big Brains on the outside: would you expect a base station plugged into an essentially infinite source of power to transmit with more or less power than a handset probably carrying 3 A or AA cells?
And, beyond that, what's the likelihood that the FCC has authorized 2.4Ghz and 900Mhz operations at the exact same power levels?
Could you not find any links to articles which said things like "Africa ONE has completed..."? Because all of your "More info" links say things like "The Africa ONE project will create...". I could find no proof that it actually was ever completed, or even started, so the fiber is possibly very dark indeed.
...
I was able to find links about this from 1995 1998 1999. So it's not like this was necessarily imminent just because Wired was writing about it.
www.africaone.com says "No web site is configured at this address." which isn't particularily promising.
The CIA World Factbook says that Namibia has an Africa ONE connection. But only Namibia, which isn't encouraging.
Of course, it's possible/likely that this project is now on someone else's books, and is called something else. I've already spent my 15 minutes poking the web
This seems like as good a time as any to ask - how CAN they do that?
I once heard a story about this. Apparently, they have to get everyone to sign a form allowing things to be broadcast - including the suspect. They touched on the problem of the suspect assuming they're with the police. Apparently they explain the situation in some detail, and, for the most part, they get willing cooperation. The crazy guy running around shirtless in his yard sporting a shotgun actually wants to be on TV.
I think the summary of the piece was "People who commit crimes, in general, are just not very smart." Of course, in this case, it's self-selecting (the smart criminals maybe don't sign the forms).
I agree about the wack job; he's always there. I had one at the last place I worked, he loved to talk and talk and ask extremely dumb and often went into a long story. Everyone in the room pretty much looked at each other like, "Jesus, won't he stop talking?" but of course that was useless...
Remember buzzword bingo? We always would start all-hands meetings with bets on how many questions the "wack job" would ask. Unfortunately, since you didn't know if he would ask _another_, you couldn't stand up in the middle and shout "Bingo!".
Do they think their target audience has a 1600x1200 desktop, so that they can easily see the entire screenshot in a maximized browser (or graphic viewer) window? Or do they not bother to actually look at their screenshots to see if they really are viewable? Or do they think that their target audience enjoys being required to scroll around if they want to visit the corners?
The list can go on and on. I'm amazed now that there was any romance at all in the 1970's. The fact that childern were still born to people who went to lots of movies is a testament to the human spirit.
A couple years back, we were comparing some movie to Platoon. A friend said he had seen Platoon in the theater - but didn't remember what happened because he had been making out with his date. Nobody could think of a good followup statement.
Here's an idea:
Use the remote control to tell the speaker unit where you're sitting. Then modulate the sound so that the sweet spot is where you're sitting.
[Mod walls, etc. So build a sensor into the remote which provides a feedback loop.]
[Profit!]
Huh. In our theatre it was a cat-in-the-hat-related ad which was reversed.
Actually, it's not that hard to do. You can usually easily tell which way things go if you've got good light, but, half the time, you don't because "good light" isn't a high priority in the booth (you figure it out). More than likely the production company also required things to be loaded with minimal slack time so that someone couldn't see the movie early (my god!), making mistakes even easier.
[I _was_ a projectionist. So there.]
Whatever. I sometimes have the same problem with my Bianci Eros. Which is a bicycle. But I've only found a small proportion of intersections that have a problem (it usually helps to stop close to the edge of the sensors, whereas the center distributes your weight).