"Next week on Mythbusters, Grant and Tori will test whether or not you can bring down a car park with a tanker truck full of diet coke and a thousand Mentos. Kari will see if fiberglass surf boards and an upside-down motorcycle can be combined into a deadly needle gun. And... the US Government will not negotiate with terrorists? Adam and Jamie put this myth... to the test."
Don't forget that the internet was designed to survive a nuclear attack. We basically built something bomb proof, and are now looking around saying "well, what if we want to bomb it?"
Internet-based networking technology is the cheapest available method to move bits from one place to another. That doesn't mean that networking system needs to be on "the" internet.
Lots of companies, the military, etc has private networking that isn't part of the internet. You just run some T1 lines around, which you'd have to do anyway to get on the internet, and make some basic configuration changes. Everything behaves the same as before, just with a separate network.
Considering how long it takes for Windows to shutdown, and how often it fails, I'd say that allowing applications full control over aborting the shutdown process is not a valid tradeoff.
I can't tell you how often I've had shutting down in Windows 7 (and vista, and XP) get stuck. It's like they're asking each individual process if they'd like to do anything before shutting down, waiting for 60 seconds on every process that doesn't respond, politely prompting the user about processes that didn't respond, moving on to the next process, etc, etc. SHUT OFF! I understand that it is good to shut down cleanly, but your car doesn't ask you when you turn it off if you're sure you're not at your destination yet. "I see you're near your house. Is this the closest parking spot you could find? Y/N. Did you remember to pick up dinner? Y/N The following processes have failed to respond and will be terminated [Did you finish work? Are you wearing pants? Did you pay off your secretary?]" The order to shut down is user input, and user input needs to be prioritized. If you can get that in one prompt, that's great, but right now it's sewage.
And maybe the shutdown command should have a built in "Save open docs and shut down?" prompt, if saving work is the important part. Or maybe there is a special prepend for files saved automatically at the last shutdown. Or maybe we have a built-in "Save State" for each program, whereby on re-launch it rebuilds to the previous state by default.
And while we're at it, has anyone EVER gotten a solution when Windows "checks online for a solution" to a crash? It's just another useless prompt on a string of useless prompts. "Close program" "The program has ceased responding." "Force close." "Would you like to force this program to close." "Yes" "Could not force close program, kill process?" "Yes" "Could not kill process. Murder electrons?" "Yes" "Murdering electrons. Would you like to check online for a solution to this problem." "Yes" "No solution to this, or the previous 9,871 crashes, has been found."
I remember back when DSL last-mile resellers would sell access per-user access to ISP's for $5 per month more than they were charging direct customers, for whom they also provided backbone access, service, and aquisition. It met the letter of the law for open networks, but it basically guaranteed that they wouldn't have to compete with small ISP's for service and access charges.
MPEG-LA basically claims certain financial rights over your project in exchange for the right to use the h.264 codec. This means that if you shoot a scene in h.264, but switch to something else to release on the web, they still have rights over you. If a contractor shoots in h.264 but sends you the video in a different format, they still claim rights over you. As far as I know, pretty much all HD cameras shoot in h.264.
Some of this is definitely winnable in court, some isn't. But if you're an independent filmmaker, you don't have the money to go against one of the biggest legal groups in filmmaking.
So yes, this particular situation is a bit Orwellian.
The Mac office team is small, light, and fast. There was a time in the XP days when Office on the Mac was considered better than Office on Windows. It gets certain features later than the windows version, if ever. But the core feels faster, more responsive, and less buggy. I'd take Office on the Mac any day over Office on Windows.
The language seems a little strange, but the article implies that they were using the DSM-IV as quoted in Wikipedia as a source.
The DSM, for those who don't know, is basically the official manual of mental problems. Every clinician should have one. Here's the Wikipedia article on it. The DSM is exactly where you should go to prove mental problems, as that is unimpeachably A if not The source.
Not going directly to the DSM, but rather citing a wikipedia article about what the DSM says, is just sloppy. It would be like a judge citing a law by citing the wikipedia article about a law. Why not just go straight to the obvious and ubiquitous source is beyond me.
The rule-of-thumb I've heard from business associates is that overhead accounts for 2-3 times the cost of salary. This includes real estate, equipment, health care, taxes, managerial overhead, etc. A designer that is being a bit underpaid at $25 an hour is actually running the company between $75 and $100 an hour total.
If I'm not mistaken, Flex is required for Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Flash, InDesign, and After Effects. Except for After Effects, you won't find any real professional-level alternatives for any of them.
Try telling upper management that you banned your $100 an hour designers, artists, and developers from the tools they need to do their jobs, because you were worried about bootloader compatibility and proper code behaviors.
Can I install Boot Camp to my Dell to dual-boot Linux and Windows? Boot Camp is not an external bootloader. It's a loader within the OSX world that will let you fork off and run windows instead of OSX. Unfortunately, it's not a standard for dual or multi-booting: it's a way of adding features within OSX.
A great case can be made that the modern implementation of partitioning and bootloading is hideously outdated. And this is one area where we seem to be paralyzed by existing implementations.
On the other hand, user-level apps storing data on the hard disk outside of partitioned space is very bad mojo. They should not be doing that. Ever. Period.
You can go to fund raisers with a suggested donation, and not give any money. If their business model for their public mapping division is based around a project which is saving them significant expenditure compared to closed-mapping vendors, it's polite to find ways of helping support them. It helps maintain a healthy software ecosystem. Microsoft is a big company, and Bing is a huge project, which means somehow finding ways of supporting the developers would be polite. Not technically required, but polite.
And, of course, complaining is not the same thing as suing. The proper thing to do in situations like this would be to find unique ways that Bing or Microsoft can help support a bit the people who support this core part of their system.
If you're big enough that you're not just going to be scaling staff up and immediately down again, hire your people in-house. It's not a question of government vs private companies. It's a question of hiring your best people to be on staff, or outsourcing to someone who doesn't have the same motivations. This is true if you're a government, a corporation, a private entity, or a high school marching band. Plus the markup on external IT services is just obscene.
Poorly managed projects will be poorly managed internally or externally. But externally poorly managed projects are a lot more expensive, and harder to reign back under control.
So far, community broadband seems to have evolved in communities that traditional network providers refuse to service. As far as I know, no community simply decided that Comcast was too expensive, and tossed up their own solution. They've all been communities that couldn't get modern networking, until they threatened to put up their own.
Really, the question is should communities have a right to service markets themselves that the free market simply chooses not to. Framed in that way, the cable industry arguments seem incredibly hollow.
The original point seems to be that the Post Office has been a model for actual successful government programs (broke even, cheaper than anyone expected, and worked) for many years. The post was relied upon by most businesses in some form or another since 1775.
Recently, it has been evolved out. But the point still stands that successful government run programs do exist.
I feel like there is a quality scale in gaming, and a tickle-your-fancy factor. Borderlands is a reasonable quality game, but it never quite tickled my fancy. Some reviews were strongly positive (decent quality, very much of interest to the reviewer), while others just went "meh" (decent quality, not of interest to the reviewer). By comparison, I loved that terrible Burger King Pocket Bike Racer game. It wasn't amazing or terrible, but it happened to strike a sweet spot in my personal brain between a love of bikes, a love of kart racers, and a love of really, really short racing games. Similarly, I'm a fan of DeathSmiles. It is of moderate to high quality. But the appeal is on a razor edge of gothic bullet hell players. No matter the quality level, I can't think of a single friend that would enjoy playing the game.
I find it's most useful to skim the reviews to get a sense for the overall build quality of the game. And if the soul of the game also genuinely appeals, go for it.
Which works if you presume a linear fail rate, which is bonkers. Systems always run better at the beginning of their lifecycle. Static buildup, electrical interference, repeated heating and cooling cycles, etc all take a toll on the electronics. Would you really personally estimate a real-world MTBF of off-the-shelf SATA drives at 70 years? No, because they work perfectly well for the first year, start having trouble the second, and are all dead by the 8th. But if you presume linear dropoff using just that first year of testing, they look pretty damn bomb proof because that's when they work best. It's a stupid system that's only valid if you replace all of your hardware every year.
And all systems have moving parts. Electrons move. The circuit boards expand and contract. Crap builds up on important components. Electroplating can move move metals from one part of the design to another. Stuff gets plugged in and unplugged.
I realize that MTBF has a very technical definition that is different than marketing departments utilize it as. I might agree with you that any engineer worth their salt can extrapolate a proper MTBF. But most of the MTBF's I've seen are just stupidly wrong. If people really believe those published fantasy numbers, no wonder they don't put enough redundancy in their systems.
Slashdot Mirror
"Next week on Mythbusters, Grant and Tori will test whether or not you can bring down a car park with a tanker truck full of diet coke and a thousand Mentos. Kari will see if fiberglass surf boards and an upside-down motorcycle can be combined into a deadly needle gun. And... the US Government will not negotiate with terrorists? Adam and Jamie put this myth... to the test."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WSUYyWLyGQ
Wouldn't the SSN just be part of the information they get back when running a credit check on you?
"But my name really is Dogg6969! My parents loved animals... a lot."
Did the news industry forget what journalism is?
Journalism is whatever Reuters tells them it is.
Don't forget that the internet was designed to survive a nuclear attack. We basically built something bomb proof, and are now looking around saying "well, what if we want to bomb it?"
Internet-based networking technology is the cheapest available method to move bits from one place to another. That doesn't mean that networking system needs to be on "the" internet.
Lots of companies, the military, etc has private networking that isn't part of the internet. You just run some T1 lines around, which you'd have to do anyway to get on the internet, and make some basic configuration changes. Everything behaves the same as before, just with a separate network.
Considering how long it takes for Windows to shutdown, and how often it fails, I'd say that allowing applications full control over aborting the shutdown process is not a valid tradeoff.
I can't tell you how often I've had shutting down in Windows 7 (and vista, and XP) get stuck. It's like they're asking each individual process if they'd like to do anything before shutting down, waiting for 60 seconds on every process that doesn't respond, politely prompting the user about processes that didn't respond, moving on to the next process, etc, etc. SHUT OFF! I understand that it is good to shut down cleanly, but your car doesn't ask you when you turn it off if you're sure you're not at your destination yet. "I see you're near your house. Is this the closest parking spot you could find? Y/N. Did you remember to pick up dinner? Y/N The following processes have failed to respond and will be terminated [Did you finish work? Are you wearing pants? Did you pay off your secretary?]" The order to shut down is user input, and user input needs to be prioritized. If you can get that in one prompt, that's great, but right now it's sewage.
And maybe the shutdown command should have a built in "Save open docs and shut down?" prompt, if saving work is the important part. Or maybe there is a special prepend for files saved automatically at the last shutdown. Or maybe we have a built-in "Save State" for each program, whereby on re-launch it rebuilds to the previous state by default.
And while we're at it, has anyone EVER gotten a solution when Windows "checks online for a solution" to a crash? It's just another useless prompt on a string of useless prompts. "Close program" "The program has ceased responding." "Force close." "Would you like to force this program to close." "Yes" "Could not force close program, kill process?" "Yes" "Could not kill process. Murder electrons?" "Yes" "Murdering electrons. Would you like to check online for a solution to this problem." "Yes" "No solution to this, or the previous 9,871 crashes, has been found."
I remember back when DSL last-mile resellers would sell access per-user access to ISP's for $5 per month more than they were charging direct customers, for whom they also provided backbone access, service, and aquisition. It met the letter of the law for open networks, but it basically guaranteed that they wouldn't have to compete with small ISP's for service and access charges.
MPEG-LA basically claims certain financial rights over your project in exchange for the right to use the h.264 codec. This means that if you shoot a scene in h.264, but switch to something else to release on the web, they still have rights over you. If a contractor shoots in h.264 but sends you the video in a different format, they still claim rights over you. As far as I know, pretty much all HD cameras shoot in h.264.
Some of this is definitely winnable in court, some isn't. But if you're an independent filmmaker, you don't have the money to go against one of the biggest legal groups in filmmaking.
So yes, this particular situation is a bit Orwellian.
The Mac office team is small, light, and fast. There was a time in the XP days when Office on the Mac was considered better than Office on Windows. It gets certain features later than the windows version, if ever. But the core feels faster, more responsive, and less buggy. I'd take Office on the Mac any day over Office on Windows.
The language seems a little strange, but the article implies that they were using the DSM-IV as quoted in Wikipedia as a source.
The DSM, for those who don't know, is basically the official manual of mental problems. Every clinician should have one. Here's the Wikipedia article on it. The DSM is exactly where you should go to prove mental problems, as that is unimpeachably A if not The source.
Not going directly to the DSM, but rather citing a wikipedia article about what the DSM says, is just sloppy. It would be like a judge citing a law by citing the wikipedia article about a law. Why not just go straight to the obvious and ubiquitous source is beyond me.
How is it going over in Eurasiafrica?
The rule-of-thumb I've heard from business associates is that overhead accounts for 2-3 times the cost of salary. This includes real estate, equipment, health care, taxes, managerial overhead, etc. A designer that is being a bit underpaid at $25 an hour is actually running the company between $75 and $100 an hour total.
If I'm not mistaken, Flex is required for Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Flash, InDesign, and After Effects. Except for After Effects, you won't find any real professional-level alternatives for any of them.
Try telling upper management that you banned your $100 an hour designers, artists, and developers from the tools they need to do their jobs, because you were worried about bootloader compatibility and proper code behaviors.
Can I install Boot Camp to my Dell to dual-boot Linux and Windows? Boot Camp is not an external bootloader. It's a loader within the OSX world that will let you fork off and run windows instead of OSX. Unfortunately, it's not a standard for dual or multi-booting: it's a way of adding features within OSX.
A great case can be made that the modern implementation of partitioning and bootloading is hideously outdated. And this is one area where we seem to be paralyzed by existing implementations.
On the other hand, user-level apps storing data on the hard disk outside of partitioned space is very bad mojo. They should not be doing that. Ever. Period.
How do they avoid stomping on eachother?
You can go to fund raisers with a suggested donation, and not give any money. If their business model for their public mapping division is based around a project which is saving them significant expenditure compared to closed-mapping vendors, it's polite to find ways of helping support them. It helps maintain a healthy software ecosystem. Microsoft is a big company, and Bing is a huge project, which means somehow finding ways of supporting the developers would be polite. Not technically required, but polite.
And, of course, complaining is not the same thing as suing. The proper thing to do in situations like this would be to find unique ways that Bing or Microsoft can help support a bit the people who support this core part of their system.
If you're big enough that you're not just going to be scaling staff up and immediately down again, hire your people in-house. It's not a question of government vs private companies. It's a question of hiring your best people to be on staff, or outsourcing to someone who doesn't have the same motivations. This is true if you're a government, a corporation, a private entity, or a high school marching band. Plus the markup on external IT services is just obscene.
Poorly managed projects will be poorly managed internally or externally. But externally poorly managed projects are a lot more expensive, and harder to reign back under control.
Blackwater?
So far, community broadband seems to have evolved in communities that traditional network providers refuse to service. As far as I know, no community simply decided that Comcast was too expensive, and tossed up their own solution. They've all been communities that couldn't get modern networking, until they threatened to put up their own.
Really, the question is should communities have a right to service markets themselves that the free market simply chooses not to. Framed in that way, the cable industry arguments seem incredibly hollow.
The original point seems to be that the Post Office has been a model for actual successful government programs (broke even, cheaper than anyone expected, and worked) for many years. The post was relied upon by most businesses in some form or another since 1775.
Recently, it has been evolved out. But the point still stands that successful government run programs do exist.
I feel like there is a quality scale in gaming, and a tickle-your-fancy factor. Borderlands is a reasonable quality game, but it never quite tickled my fancy. Some reviews were strongly positive (decent quality, very much of interest to the reviewer), while others just went "meh" (decent quality, not of interest to the reviewer). By comparison, I loved that terrible Burger King Pocket Bike Racer game. It wasn't amazing or terrible, but it happened to strike a sweet spot in my personal brain between a love of bikes, a love of kart racers, and a love of really, really short racing games. Similarly, I'm a fan of DeathSmiles. It is of moderate to high quality. But the appeal is on a razor edge of gothic bullet hell players. No matter the quality level, I can't think of a single friend that would enjoy playing the game.
I find it's most useful to skim the reviews to get a sense for the overall build quality of the game. And if the soul of the game also genuinely appeals, go for it.
Full disclosure: I work in gaming.
"get 100 units and run them for 6 months..."
Which works if you presume a linear fail rate, which is bonkers. Systems always run better at the beginning of their lifecycle. Static buildup, electrical interference, repeated heating and cooling cycles, etc all take a toll on the electronics. Would you really personally estimate a real-world MTBF of off-the-shelf SATA drives at 70 years? No, because they work perfectly well for the first year, start having trouble the second, and are all dead by the 8th. But if you presume linear dropoff using just that first year of testing, they look pretty damn bomb proof because that's when they work best. It's a stupid system that's only valid if you replace all of your hardware every year.
And all systems have moving parts. Electrons move. The circuit boards expand and contract. Crap builds up on important components. Electroplating can move move metals from one part of the design to another. Stuff gets plugged in and unplugged.
I realize that MTBF has a very technical definition that is different than marketing departments utilize it as. I might agree with you that any engineer worth their salt can extrapolate a proper MTBF. But most of the MTBF's I've seen are just stupidly wrong. If people really believe those published fantasy numbers, no wonder they don't put enough redundancy in their systems.