If JibJab was a parody poking fun AT THE SONG ITSELF, it would be protected. If it is just USING the song to poke fun at the presidential candidates, then it is not. It is a fine line, but the original lawsuit was based on the idea that they were just using the song.
I would have liked to see this go to court, because I think this is a fine line worth defining... As long as it came down under 'fair use for parody'... And I think it would have, because this WAS a parody of the song, as well as the candidates.
Since it turned out it is in the public domain, the decision isn't necessary.
If you want to help fix the political systmem in America, GET INVOLVED. We are in the boat we are in because we have record low numbers of americans actually voting and electing our leadership. Actually THINKING about the issues and MAKING AN INFORMED VOTE would be a big improvement. Get involed in a political party (not even one of the 'big two' - I bet a lot of slashdotters would like the libertarian party, for instance)
Doing this kind of vandalism is going to do nothing to engender anyone to any cause it might be supporting. It might even polarize people AGAINST the cause it might be supporting. Remember how linux developers were recently criticized for windows virii?
I bought a Magellan GPS for the sole purpose of hiking around Acadia National Park, and keeping track of my hikes as well as where I took specific pictures.
Even though I have all that data, it is not in a usable format and it seems to be a real chore to get it into one. I would love to be able to just take the data from the GPS unit and display it on any of several open source mapping packages, but the possibilities just sren't there yet.
I am the architect for Tracker, a project funded by the U.S. State Department and deployed in 9 countries.
This is a Java (J2EE) application using JBoss as our application server. We need to develop as well as deploy on Mac OS X, linux (Redhat 9), Solaris 8, and windows XP.
We use Cygwin on windows in both development and deployment environments, so that all of our scripts (administrative, start, stop, build, etc) are completely cross platform. Works like a champ. No complaints in production at all, although their installer interface seems a little wierd to me. It would be really useful if I could get some kind of report stting the exact configuration of a machine.
Martin Fowler makes a good argument in that article, but that doesn't mean it is true...
As developers, we all know some developers who are 'better' than others... What measurement are we using when we say that? Is it ineffable?
I would refine his argument to say the is not an 'objective' measurement of productivity... there isn't anything I can put on a scale and say "programmer A is better than programmer B because of X",
BUT, I think there is a 'subjective' measurement that is my opinion, based on working with programmers A and B. These are things like "Job knowledge and versatility", "communication", "Quality of Work", "Quantity of Work", "Teamwork", etc. There are no units by which to measure these things, but I can tell you if one person has more of it than another if I have been working with them for any length of time.
Java isn't going anywhere. Java has at least reached the status of 'the next cobol', to quote Stu Halloway. This isn't a comment on Java's speed, quality, and such, it simply means that even if all Java development stopped today (which it won't), there has been enough investment in Java'based intfrastructure that the maintenance alone will be quite a large job market for years to come.
Java is NOT dead/dying. New, important projects start with it every day. I am the president of the Northern Virginia Java Users Group, and we have a steadily growing membership (now over 1100 members). I am also a speaker for the No Fluff Just Stuff Software Symposiums, and the discussions about Java tools, techniques, etc dominate that conference. Why? Because it sells..NET has been gaining some momentum, and c# is undoubtedly the 'next big thing', but Java is here to stay. If you are a software engineer, Java is a 'safe place' to be for new and interesting work for the next 4+ years, at least. (That doesn't mean software engineers don't need to have diverse talent - but that is a topic for another rant).
Why not? The whole series is based on an F'ed up time travel story... They can do anything they want now, and always press the cosmic reset button. Enterprise has no credibility - the only way to redeem it at this point would be to have the series end with a small child reading a book, and at the end we come to find out it is 23rd century fiction about the 'past', and the person reading it is a young James T. Kirk. The story would be the childhood inspiration he had to become a starfleet officer.
Better yet, how about we get Fred Savage to play a father reading the book out loud to his son... the series can then alternate between Enterprise clips, and the son interrupting him with things like, "Eww... not that kissing stuff again", ala Princess Bride.
Excellent point. We *should* have lawers writing our laws, every much as we should have software engineers writing our software.
But just like software engineers need domain experts for the software they are writing, we *also* need politicians who know the domains they are writing the laws about.
As a software engineer, I couldn't write sotware to aid in music composition unless I knew about music composition, or was workling closely with someone who did...
The problem is we have politicians writing laws about technology they don't understand, and I don't see them consulting the 'experts'. Just look at the controversy over electronic voting.
Ok, fine, the company wants to protect its 'intellectual property'... That language alone should be enough to scare away most sane people.
Since when is the process by which we elect our leaders the 'property' of anyone except the citizenry? If a company wants to 'own' a process like that, fine, I just think that is obviously opposite that of a democratic, transparent process.
Surely, most people have an attention span long enough to grasp that simple concept.
This falls under science? This is solely an artifact of our time measuring system. The moon is full every 28 days, but months are slightly longer than that. If a full moon is early enough in the month, it will be full twice.
Being slashdot, I feel obliged to offer the most like conspiracy theory (the one I believe, anyway)...
AMD has their 64 bit chips out. Rorking. Running. Here NOW.
Intel does not. They changed course a few months ago... they were originally going to have 64 bit chips that were not backwards compatible with x86, following AMDs lead (They put their own market-speak on it, but yes, they are following AMD's lead in this area. more info.
So, Intel has to catch up. Intel are Microsoft are pretty buddy-buddy, being two halves of the Wintel hegemony.
Intel figures out that if Windows releases a 64 bit version before their chip is out, they will LOSE MARKET SHARE to AMD. They can't let that happen.
A few phone calls later, and Microsoft delays. Hell, they could use the time anyway to fix bugs, but its not like they wouldn't release it with those bugs anyway... The primary reason for the delay is to preserve intel's market share and screw AMD.
But the GPL is 'viral'... Anything distributed with it on the same CD must be accompanied under the same license. How can their logos, etc avoid this clause of the GPL?
Did that weblog actually contain any substance? It doesn't say a thing about WHY this person doesn't like Maven, it just criticizes the people that code and maintain it. It doesn't even really criticize them, as much as call them names.
Give me a concrete reason why Maven isn't worth using... This weblog doesn't do that.
For the record, I am well aware of Maven's shortcomings - the draconian 'one size fits all' approach to some aspects of the build system. While I don't agree that 'one size fits all', I DO believe that Maven fits many, many projects quite nicely.
If you work in a shop obsessed with process management (CMM, CMMi, ISO900x, and even some 'agile' stuff), if you work with Java, and/or if you just want a no-hassle build system that gives you a bunch of stuff 'boiler-plate', check it out.
Love it or hate it, form your own opinion and be 'in the know'. Maven is not going away anytime soon. (And it is NOT an Ant replacement.)
Wow... I wish I had thought of that when I got married. If he owns the copyright, can he do things with them that I wouldn't agree with? Could he sell them to news media if I became famous (or infamous)? Could he decide to sell them to a stock photo service, and then suddenly my wedding photo would turn up as the 'stock' photo that comes in a frame when you purchase it?
Is that why you always see pictures from people's high school photo albums whenever someone needs a mug shot?
Must be slow news day... but then again, I'm taking the time to reply to this...
1) When someone tries to send an email to a non-existent address, either the mail server at that domain will rejct (or swallow) the email. If the domain doesn't exist, your mailer will bounce it back to you. There is no internet equivalent of the 'dead letter office' where all the mail sent to Santa goes.
2) Potenial for abuse? Well, that is why so many listservs actually send a confirmation email that you have to reply to. Email is inherintly insecure, but this is at least something. This is just the internet's equivalent to signing someone up to receive magazine subscriptions they didn't ask for. Nothing new here... move along.
I haven't purchased a TMBG album since FLOOD (a lifetime ago, I know), but was ready to purchase both the albums just to show support. The little help window mentioned specific browser versions needed on Windows and Mac, and I would have preferred to either see Linux mentioned in that window, or some explanation as to why specific versions were necessary to download. Not sure what would happen with Mozilla, so I figure I'll wait until someone posts here.
I also didn't like the '6 hour time window' in which to download my purchase... I'd like more time to resolve any issues that might come up doring download - in fact, I'd like them to create an account for me, and let me download them at any time - and possibly again in the future if for some reason I lose them.
Well, this would be comparable today to giving a bunch of users accounts and allowing them to use telnet or ssh to get to a shell account. In a setting like that, I bet your average computer today would support hundreds if not thousands of simultaneous users. With X terminals, I bet you could have a bunch of gui interfaces too.
This is a lot different than that - this is about taking an interface that has been designed assuming there is one user in front of it, and hacking it to support multiple users. Multiple keyboards, mice, and displays on one box, don't normally work this way.
Cool? yes... Practical? probably for someone... but in a world where people hack web servers onto commodore 64s and overclock their Sega Genesis, rank this toward the top of the list.
This is not a list of software development guidelines... Although there are some good things on this list, it is peppered with spin control (3 of the 21 rules are about how to deal with slippage), and rules that protect the hegemony (don't write cross-platform software - wow... what a surprise Microsoft would feel this way).
You want a real list of things software developers should think about? Read Hunt & Thomas' 'The PRagmatic Programmer'
Either the writer of this article doesn't understand the issues involved, or the parties involved are all boobs. LEts look at some of the quotes from the article
The SCO Group's marketing manager Marc Modersitzki doesn't even use the lingo correctly - lets analyze some of his statements:
"However, they still have licence restrictions that would prevent them from contributing our licensed works wholesale to the GPL."
This statement makes it sound as if Sun is talking about transferring ownership to some GROUP - 'contributing wholesale to the GPL'... The proper statement would be something like "They still have license restrictions that would prevent them from releasing our intellectual property under the GPL license", and this may be true... Anything that Sun owns they can do whatever they want with - anything they license they have to comply with any terms of that license... nothing new here.
Lehey said the GPL has the so-called "viral" effect, and that would theoretically cause the remainder (of code) to fall under the GPL as well, "but that's so preposterous that I can't think of any way it could happen".
The viral clause of the GPL cannot affect things that you don't have the intellectual property rights to. I couldn't write a contract that required you to give me your neighbors car... it is not yours to give (Even if he let you drive it once or twice). Sun is free to release their code under the GPL... if it relies on things that are not GPLed that they don't have the intellectual property rights to, well, that sucks, but it is not within Sun's power to decide to GPL it. The viral clause only affects the rights of DOWNSTREAM users - it is a condition of the terms of granting the copyright. If Sun were to GPL solaris, minus the parts it doesn't have the rights to, I'm sure armies of developers will step up to provide a clean room implementation.
I am not a lawyer, but this stuff is not rocket science...
The//todo,//xxx, and//fixme comments have been part of the official Sun coding conventions since circa 1997. That reference should be early enough for prior art, but circa 1984 I learned those conventions from my high school com sci teacher.
http://java.sun.com/docs/codeconv/index.html
The whole reason these exist is for developers to use tools like grep to find all of these items. The output of grep might not be a pretty html page, but it is clearly a 'todo list'; a list of all the 'todo' references found. I'm sorry, but I see no innovation her that would 'not be obvious to practitioners of the art'.
This weekend I was at Hershey Park, and practically filled a 4GB flash drive with photos from my Nikon D100 (photos in raw mode, shooting 3 a second of some action shots eats storage space fast).
With my current camera, 16GB would be comfortable.
I can remember, the year was 1984, and I was walking down a hallway in high school talking to a friend of mine about 'Apple's new Macintosh', which came in two flavors - 128k and the 512k 'Fat Mac'. I remeber, clear as anything, saying "Why would you need 512k? You can only fit 400k on one of its floppies...". I will never, ever make that mistake again. I can remember staring, dropjaw, at the first 400Mhz Pentium II we got in my office, thinking it was amazing. No matter how high I (realistically at the time) raise my expectations, they are always beaten.
I didn't even realize it until I saw tihs article, but my first programming gig was with Visicalc...
It was 1982, I was 13, and a guy paid me $50 to create a spreadsheet for him that would let him calculate his cost per share of some stock he was buying over multiple purchases (dollar cost averaging).
That post says it all... I wish it could be modereated higher than 5.
In some UPN Boardroom:
Lackey #1: Uh, sir, there were 42593 people who voted on a popular geek message board, simply said "no" to the whole Kirk on Enterprise deal.
Guy with Cigar: Huh? Those nerds love him, don't they? Why wouldn't they want him back?
Lackey #2: Best we could do dir is bring him back as his own great-grandfather, or maybe as a completely unrelated villian.
Guy with Cigar: But... TIME TRAVEL! TIME TRAVLEL! The WHOLE FUCKING SERIES IS ABOUT TIME TRAVEL! I don't understand... they loved the Next Gen episode with the previous Enterprise from the rift-thing... They loved the DS9 episode with the tribbles, why wouldn't they want Kirk back?
Lackey #1: He's too old and fat, sir.
Lackey number #2 nods, almost unfraid to make eye contact.
Guy with Cigar: "Oh. Well, what else did they say? Maybe we could use this to our advantage..."
Lackey #2: Well, sir, the next highest comment was "I can't believe you still watch Trek. Why is it that Trek can go forever while shows like Firefly and the one with all the muppets on Sci-Fi get cancelled?"
Lackey #1: From there, the conversation degenerated to the Sci-Fi's remake of Battlestar Galactica.
Guy with Cigar: I see... the nerds have abandonded us... maybe we should abandon them. (Picks up Phone) "Jane? Get me Wil Smith on the phone... I want to see if he wants to help produce a new idea I just had... Moesha - the Next Generation."
Slashdot Mirror
That was defined in part of the lawsuit...
If JibJab was a parody poking fun AT THE SONG ITSELF, it would be protected. If it is just USING the song to poke fun at the presidential candidates, then it is not. It is a fine line, but the original lawsuit was based on the idea that they were just using the song.
I would have liked to see this go to court, because I think this is a fine line worth defining... As long as it came down under 'fair use for parody'... And I think it would have, because this WAS a parody of the song, as well as the candidates.
Since it turned out it is in the public domain, the decision isn't necessary.
If you want to help fix the political systmem in America, GET INVOLVED. We are in the boat we are in because we have record low numbers of americans actually voting and electing our leadership. Actually THINKING about the issues and MAKING AN INFORMED VOTE would be a big improvement. Get involed in a political party (not even one of the 'big two' - I bet a lot of slashdotters would like the libertarian party, for instance)
Doing this kind of vandalism is going to do nothing to engender anyone to any cause it might be supporting. It might even polarize people AGAINST the cause it might be supporting. Remember how linux developers were recently criticized for windows virii?
I bought a Magellan GPS for the sole purpose of hiking around Acadia National Park, and keeping track of my hikes as well as where I took specific pictures.
Even though I have all that data, it is not in a usable format and it seems to be a real chore to get it into one. I would love to be able to just take the data from the GPS unit and display it on any of several open source mapping packages, but the possibilities just sren't there yet.
This is an excellent step in the right direction!
I am the architect for Tracker, a project funded by the U.S. State Department and deployed in 9 countries.
This is a Java (J2EE) application using JBoss as our application server. We need to develop as well as deploy on Mac OS X, linux (Redhat 9), Solaris 8, and windows XP.
We use Cygwin on windows in both development and deployment environments, so that all of our scripts (administrative, start, stop, build, etc) are completely cross platform. Works like a champ. No complaints in production at all, although their installer interface seems a little wierd to me. It would be really useful if I could get some kind of report stting the exact configuration of a machine.
Martin Fowler makes a good argument in that article, but that doesn't mean it is true...
As developers, we all know some developers who are 'better' than others... What measurement are we using when we say that? Is it ineffable?
I would refine his argument to say the is not an 'objective' measurement of productivity... there isn't anything I can put on a scale and say "programmer A is better than programmer B because of X",
BUT, I think there is a 'subjective' measurement that is my opinion, based on working with programmers A and B. These are things like "Job knowledge and versatility", "communication", "Quality of Work", "Quantity of Work", "Teamwork", etc. There are no units by which to measure these things, but I can tell you if one person has more of it than another if I have been working with them for any length of time.
Java isn't going anywhere. Java has at least reached the status of 'the next cobol', to quote Stu Halloway. This isn't a comment on Java's speed, quality, and such, it simply means that even if all Java development stopped today (which it won't), there has been enough investment in Java'based intfrastructure that the maintenance alone will be quite a large job market for years to come.
Java is NOT dead/dying. New, important projects start with it every day. I am the president of the Northern Virginia Java Users Group, and we have a steadily growing membership (now over 1100 members). I am also a speaker for the No Fluff Just Stuff Software Symposiums, and the discussions about Java tools, techniques, etc dominate that conference. Why? Because it sells. .NET has been gaining some momentum, and c# is undoubtedly the 'next big thing', but Java is here to stay. If you are a software engineer, Java is a 'safe place' to be for new and interesting work for the next 4+ years, at least. (That doesn't mean software engineers don't need to have diverse talent - but that is a topic for another rant).
Why not? The whole series is based on an F'ed up time travel story... They can do anything they want now, and always press the cosmic reset button. Enterprise has no credibility - the only way to redeem it at this point would be to have the series end with a small child reading a book, and at the end we come to find out it is 23rd century fiction about the 'past', and the person reading it is a young James T. Kirk. The story would be the childhood inspiration he had to become a starfleet officer.
Better yet, how about we get Fred Savage to play a father reading the book out loud to his son... the series can then alternate between Enterprise clips, and the son interrupting him with things like, "Eww... not that kissing stuff again", ala Princess Bride.
Excellent point. We *should* have lawers writing our laws, every much as we should have software engineers writing our software.
But just like software engineers need domain experts for the software they are writing, we *also* need politicians who know the domains they are writing the laws about.
As a software engineer, I couldn't write sotware to aid in music composition unless I knew about music composition, or was workling closely with someone who did...
The problem is we have politicians writing laws about technology they don't understand, and I don't see them consulting the 'experts'. Just look at the controversy over electronic voting.
Ok, fine, the company wants to protect its 'intellectual property'... That language alone should be enough to scare away most sane people.
Since when is the process by which we elect our leaders the 'property' of anyone except the citizenry? If a company wants to 'own' a process like that, fine, I just think that is obviously opposite that of a democratic, transparent process.
Surely, most people have an attention span long enough to grasp that simple concept.
This falls under science? This is solely an artifact of our time measuring system. The moon is full every 28 days, but months are slightly longer than that. If a full moon is early enough in the month, it will be full twice.
AMD has their 64 bit chips out. Rorking. Running. Here NOW.
Intel does not. They changed course a few months ago... they were originally going to have 64 bit chips that were not backwards compatible with x86, following AMDs lead (They put their own market-speak on it, but yes, they are following AMD's lead in this area. more info.
So, Intel has to catch up. Intel are Microsoft are pretty buddy-buddy, being two halves of the Wintel hegemony.
Intel figures out that if Windows releases a 64 bit version before their chip is out, they will LOSE MARKET SHARE to AMD. They can't let that happen.
A few phone calls later, and Microsoft delays. Hell, they could use the time anyway to fix bugs, but its not like they wouldn't release it with those bugs anyway... The primary reason for the delay is to preserve intel's market share and screw AMD.
But the GPL is 'viral'... Anything distributed with it on the same CD must be accompanied under the same license. How can their logos, etc avoid this clause of the GPL?
On a somewhat related question, how does SuSE, a German company, justify their '30 day evaluation' download under the terms of the GPL?
I downloaded it, right? Even if it is just a '30 day eval'. Shouldn't they give me the source code?
isn't this '30 day eval' against the premise of the PGL anyway, that I should be able to redistribute the software I use?
Did that weblog actually contain any substance? It doesn't say a thing about WHY this person doesn't like Maven, it just criticizes the people that code and maintain it. It doesn't even really criticize them, as much as call them names.
Give me a concrete reason why Maven isn't worth using... This weblog doesn't do that.
For the record, I am well aware of Maven's shortcomings - the draconian 'one size fits all' approach to some aspects of the build system. While I don't agree that 'one size fits all', I DO believe that Maven fits many, many projects quite nicely.
If you work in a shop obsessed with process management (CMM, CMMi, ISO900x, and even some 'agile' stuff), if you work with Java, and/or if you just want a no-hassle build system that gives you a bunch of stuff 'boiler-plate', check it out.
Love it or hate it, form your own opinion and be 'in the know'. Maven is not going away anytime soon. (And it is NOT an Ant replacement.)
-db
Wow... I wish I had thought of that when I got married. If he owns the copyright, can he do things with them that I wouldn't agree with? Could he sell them to news media if I became famous (or infamous)? Could he decide to sell them to a stock photo service, and then suddenly my wedding photo would turn up as the 'stock' photo that comes in a frame when you purchase it?
Is that why you always see pictures from people's high school photo albums whenever someone needs a mug shot?
Must be slow news day... but then again, I'm taking the time to reply to this...
1) When someone tries to send an email to a non-existent address, either the mail server at that domain will rejct (or swallow) the email. If the domain doesn't exist, your mailer will bounce it back to you. There is no internet equivalent of the 'dead letter office' where all the mail sent to Santa goes.
2) Potenial for abuse? Well, that is why so many listservs actually send a confirmation email that you have to reply to. Email is inherintly insecure, but this is at least something. This is just the internet's equivalent to signing someone up to receive magazine subscriptions they didn't ask for. Nothing new here... move along.
Wow... I second the The Godel Escher Bach reference... but if you are looking for something more 'career' oriented:
1) The Pragmatic Programmer
2) After the Gold Rush (out of print, readily available, and about to come out in a second edition)
I haven't purchased a TMBG album since FLOOD (a lifetime ago, I know), but was ready to purchase both the albums just to show support. The little help window mentioned specific browser versions needed on Windows and Mac, and I would have preferred to either see Linux mentioned in that window, or some explanation as to why specific versions were necessary to download. Not sure what would happen with Mozilla, so I figure I'll wait until someone posts here.
I also didn't like the '6 hour time window' in which to download my purchase... I'd like more time to resolve any issues that might come up doring download - in fact, I'd like them to create an account for me, and let me download them at any time - and possibly again in the future if for some reason I lose them.
Well, this would be comparable today to giving a bunch of users accounts and allowing them to use telnet or ssh to get to a shell account. In a setting like that, I bet your average computer today would support hundreds if not thousands of simultaneous users. With X terminals, I bet you could have a bunch of gui interfaces too.
This is a lot different than that - this is about taking an interface that has been designed assuming there is one user in front of it, and hacking it to support multiple users. Multiple keyboards, mice, and displays on one box, don't normally work this way.
Cool? yes... Practical? probably for someone... but in a world where people hack web servers onto commodore 64s and overclock their Sega Genesis, rank this toward the top of the list.
This is not a list of software development guidelines... Although there are some good things on this list, it is peppered with spin control (3 of the 21 rules are about how to deal with slippage), and rules that protect the hegemony (don't write cross-platform software - wow... what a surprise Microsoft would feel this way).
You want a real list of things software developers should think about? Read Hunt & Thomas' 'The PRagmatic Programmer'
Either the writer of this article doesn't understand the issues involved, or the parties involved are all boobs. LEts look at some of the quotes from the article
The SCO Group's marketing manager Marc Modersitzki doesn't even use the lingo correctly - lets analyze some of his statements:
"However, they still have licence restrictions that would prevent them from contributing our licensed works wholesale to the GPL."
This statement makes it sound as if Sun is talking about transferring ownership to some GROUP - 'contributing wholesale to the GPL'... The proper statement would be something like "They still have license restrictions that would prevent them from releasing our intellectual property under the GPL license", and this may be true... Anything that Sun owns they can do whatever they want with - anything they license they have to comply with any terms of that license... nothing new here.
Lehey said the GPL has the so-called "viral" effect, and that would theoretically cause the remainder (of code) to fall under the GPL as well, "but that's so preposterous that I can't think of any way it could happen".
The viral clause of the GPL cannot affect things that you don't have the intellectual property rights to. I couldn't write a contract that required you to give me your neighbors car... it is not yours to give (Even if he let you drive it once or twice). Sun is free to release their code under the GPL... if it relies on things that are not GPLed that they don't have the intellectual property rights to, well, that sucks, but it is not within Sun's power to decide to GPL it. The viral clause only affects the rights of DOWNSTREAM users - it is a condition of the terms of granting the copyright. If Sun were to GPL solaris, minus the parts it doesn't have the rights to, I'm sure armies of developers will step up to provide a clean room implementation.
I am not a lawyer, but this stuff is not rocket science...
The //todo, //xxx, and //fixme comments have been part of the official Sun coding conventions since circa 1997. That reference should be early enough for prior art, but circa 1984 I learned those conventions from my high school com sci teacher.
http://java.sun.com/docs/codeconv/index.html
The whole reason these exist is for developers to use tools like grep to find all of these items. The output of grep might not be a pretty html page, but it is clearly a 'todo list'; a list of all the 'todo' references found. I'm sorry, but I see no innovation her that would 'not be obvious to practitioners of the art'.
> Does anyone need 2GB of memory for their PDA?
Yes, absolutely.
This weekend I was at Hershey Park, and practically filled a 4GB flash drive with photos from my Nikon D100 (photos in raw mode, shooting 3 a second of some action shots eats storage space fast).
With my current camera, 16GB would be comfortable.
I can remember, the year was 1984, and I was walking down a hallway in high school talking to a friend of mine about 'Apple's new Macintosh', which came in two flavors - 128k and the 512k 'Fat Mac'. I remeber, clear as anything, saying "Why would you need 512k? You can only fit 400k on one of its floppies...". I will never, ever make that mistake again. I can remember staring, dropjaw, at the first 400Mhz Pentium II we got in my office, thinking it was amazing. No matter how high I (realistically at the time) raise my expectations, they are always beaten.
I didn't even realize it until I saw tihs article, but my first programming gig was with Visicalc...
It was 1982, I was 13, and a guy paid me $50 to create a spreadsheet for him that would let him calculate his cost per share of some stock he was buying over multiple purchases (dollar cost averaging).
That post says it all... I wish it could be modereated higher than 5.
In some UPN Boardroom:
Lackey #1: Uh, sir, there were 42593 people who voted on a popular geek message board, simply said "no" to the whole Kirk on Enterprise deal.
Guy with Cigar: Huh? Those nerds love him, don't they? Why wouldn't they want him back?
Lackey #2: Best we could do dir is bring him back as his own great-grandfather, or maybe as a completely unrelated villian.
Guy with Cigar: But... TIME TRAVEL! TIME TRAVLEL! The WHOLE FUCKING SERIES IS ABOUT TIME TRAVEL! I don't understand... they loved the Next Gen episode with the previous Enterprise from the rift-thing... They loved the DS9 episode with the tribbles, why wouldn't they want Kirk back?
Lackey #1: He's too old and fat, sir.
Lackey number #2 nods, almost unfraid to make eye contact.
Guy with Cigar: "Oh. Well, what else did they say? Maybe we could use this to our advantage..."
Lackey #2: Well, sir, the next highest comment was "I can't believe you still watch Trek. Why is it that Trek can go forever while shows like Firefly and the one with all the muppets on Sci-Fi get cancelled?"
Lackey #1: From there, the conversation degenerated to the Sci-Fi's remake of Battlestar Galactica.
Guy with Cigar: I see... the nerds have abandonded us... maybe we should abandon them. (Picks up Phone) "Jane? Get me Wil Smith on the phone... I want to see if he wants to help produce a new idea I just had... Moesha - the Next Generation."