You are aware that they set out to make a 60's style sci-fi movie right? You know, the kind where a difficult problem is discovered and some "smart" people solve it. It's a style of movie where the "truth" is irrelevent. The whole point is not whether you believe the science, but whether you feel the suspense. As a matter of fact, the genre counts on pseudo-scientific babbling only to drive the story forward. These types of movies are not intended to be "accurate".
I've got a wireless keyboard and mouse that stop working when my cellphone is sitting on the desk and it rings. It will continue to interfere unless I move the phone when I start talking (I use a headset).
" Who are people calling at 7am? Are they just calling the other folks on the road that have a cell phone?"
For years, I've been at my desk at 7am or earlier as a matter of course. Oftentimes, when co-workers discover this fact, they begin to call me from the road. I'm always amazed when people (not necessarily you) seem to assume that the whole world starts up at 8 or 9am when they roll into the office.
Incidentally, I'm *never* alone at that time in any office I've worked in. In many offices there are quite a few people working then.
Of course this comes with another downside of people complaining when you leave at 4:00. People who actually didn't arrive until 9:30 will say things like, "I wish *I* could leave at 4:00" while completely oblivious to the stupidity of the statement.
Yeah. The Decaf Decision of 1999 nearly sunk them. Fortunately they hired Juan Valdez to take over their coffee decisions and managed to recover.
Re:Definitely
on
Real Security?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The problem with even this is when you're in an environment where all of the passwords expire, but not on the same schedule. If your email password expires every 21 days, your network logon every 45 and they can't be any of the last 6, and they need to be unique and secure, it just encourages things like appending 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 in sequence to a single password or using Post-Its everywhere with their new passwords.
Re:5 years in the business...
on
Effective XML
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
"2) XSLT Have you tried it? I rest my case."
Yes and I wouldn't rest my case on that statement if I were you.
I've been working with XSLT professionally (for big clients including 3M) for 3 years, building the top tier in 3 tier architectures and have no problems working with it. It makes perfect sense for what it is: a solution for turning XML into something else, whether another XML document, another XSLT stylesheet (which I'll admit can be a brainbending exercise), HTML or plain formatted ASCII. In places where multiple presentations will exist for a given dataset or the presentation will change due to constantly redefined presentation requirements (ahem marketing ahem), XSLT gives you the flexibility to just keep building the same XML documents in your app and make them look like they're supposed to with different XSLT.
<shamelessplug> Incidentally, I'm looking for a web development contract in St. Paul/Minneapolis if anyone's looking for an XSLT expert (or PHP or any of my other areas of expertise) who actually knows how to solve real problems. Email me for more info. </shamelessplug>
Re:milaf, if you could expand a bit...
on
Effective XML
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Unfortunately, most Slashdot reviews are little more than book reports with pretty much no analysis. They end up just listing what the chapters contain.
Incidentally, one of the main reasons to choose XML over either CSV or INI is that both of those formats are pretty driven by rigid "column" type structures. In most INI files there's only room for pairs of names and single values. In CSV records are one row with a set number of fields.
XML lets you expand the children fully and represent more complex data. For instance, a classical CSV file with address information for customers would have columns for street address, city and then start to have problems when you start having columns for State (when you actually consider the world outside the US), postal codes, etc. If this is in XML, you can have your schema be more flexible and say that each <customer> contains a <shippingaddress> element which can contain either a <state> or a <province> or neither.
In other words, you can use trees to represent data instead of flat rows. I'm not saying that it's the be-all and end-all that the evangelists say it is. There are still lots of places that simpler text files and other data storage formats are better, but XML can be useful.
They don't really "wear out" so much as get dull. In order to scrape the hair off your face, they need to be really sharp. A really good straight razor (what your grandfather probably shaved with) does last a lifetime, but needs to be sharpened each time you shave. If you could figure out a way to resharpen your disposable blades, you could use them for much longer.
If a computer gets hot enough to start a wooden case on fire, you've got much bigger problems with that computer.
Re:Digital Rebel...delibratly cheaped out
on
Digital 35mm SLRs?
·
· Score: 1
Actually the EOS 50mm f/1.8 can be had for something like $65 *new* from places like BHphoto.com. On the DR, it becomes more like an 80-85mm, but I love it for handheld portraits.
1000GB a week isn't really that expensive. I currently pay $99 for 700GB/month *including* the server cost at rackshack.net. I could handle that amount of bandwidth with 6 of these $99/month servers. Assuming the half million songs per week, even dropping down to $0.75/song if lots of albums are bought (13 songs for $9.99), you're still looking at $1,500,000 per month, with the bandwidth costing *me* (I certainly hope Apple can get a better deal than I can) only $594. While bandwidth isn't free, it's certainly not even a significant portion of the expense of running the service. That amount doesn't even pay for someone to answer to answer the phone part time.
I'm not disagreeing with your statement that a large portion of the $1/song goes to expenses, but a lot of those expenses aren't where you'd think they are. Remember, whereever 2 or 3 million dollars are gathered, there also gather middle managers and expense accounts.
If you still want this on a POTS line, you can use MCI's <a href="http://www.theneighborhood.com/res_local_se<nobr>r<wbr></wbr></nobr> vice/jsps/default.jsp">Neighborhood</a>. Unlimited local and long distance for $50/month.
It can absolutely work without a web server. I use it for a lot of utility-type work with it on the commandline. Using our own PriadoBlender, I get EXE's from my PHP. The way we blend PHP is technically possible on UNIX as well.
I just love it when people make proclamations about the complete uselessness of an entire range of products. The funniest part of these statements is that if you listened to them all, you'd be living in a cardboard box with a smug look on your face from having avoided all the useless technology out there.
I use a wireless keyboard and mouse daily and will NEVER go back. Right now, I'm sitting in my leather recliner and the PC, printer and all peripherals are tucked back behind my chair with the monitor on a high table next to me. When I first set this up, I tried a regular keyboard and mouse, but stringing cables around my chair was just stupid. Now, I have my main computer in the living room, while the only evidence of it when I'm not around is an LCD monitor. I just pull out the keyboard and mouse when I need them. With the PS/2 dongles, there's no configuration at all, I replace the batteries in the keyboard about once every 6 months and the mouse about once a month and I've never had them not work.
Re:Keep putting it off. Please !
on
Longhorn in 2006
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
This was actually the big objection that photographers had when IE added it's little image toolbar a few versions ago. If you haven't seen the toolbar, when you mouse over an image, it appears with buttons to save the image, print it or send it by email. The photographers were wondering if Microsoft would enjoy an "email this application to a friend" entry in a toolbar as well as they enjoy an "email this photo" button which sends copies of copyrighted photos all over.
Wow. Either you fail in a sarcastic attempt at humor or you are a classic example of what happens when you attempt to "correct" someone based on your own ignorance. Another poster already addressed the fact that "toeing the line" is actually the correct usage, but the fact that your additional statement is also wrong as well just made me smile and prompted a response. "Bated" is an abbreviated form of "abated" and is the proper form of this phrase. You can go check out a copy of Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice if you don't believe me (the first recorded use of the phrase). Since I assume your preferred useage of the second phrase is "baited breath", I won't even ponder your idea of the proper use of fishing worms.
Maybe the fact that consumers can not only change companies, but keep the same number will get the cellphone companies to actually pay attention to existing customers. Right now, the whole industry is geared to kissing the butts of potential and new customers. Once you've been with a company for a year or two and your contract is up, trying to get even a small discount on a new phone is nearly impossible with many of them. So, it breeds a situation where people fulfill their contract and move on to get another new phone for free. That's going to happen more as the only reason some people don't do that now is they want to keep their number.
If burn->rip->encode is "circumventing", then burn by itself would be as well, even though the whole setup explicitly allows burning. After all, if you burn *using their software*, you end up with an un-DRM-ed, plain CD.
Re:Due to circumstance I am a good example of that
on
TV's Tipping Point
·
· Score: 1
Anecdotal evidence isn't evidence. I grew up working outside on a farm, working HARD. I watched tons of TV and yet I still read Asimov, Heinlein, Dick, etc. as well as Hemmingway, Melville and more. I hunted, fished, learned to play the piano and guitar and still managed to enjoy watching TV. I still watch a lot of TV and movies and somehow manage to participate in technical user groups, take my dog for walks, do some outdoor photography and generally live a busy, diverse life.
TV is only 1 factor in most people's lives and, contrary to most anti-TV nuts, is not the PRIMARY determining factor in most people's lives. While most of the anti-TV Slashdotters seem to believe that simply turning off the TV will turn the average American into a Nobel laureate, the simple reality is that most of those people wouldn't replace TV with anything substantial or really enriching.
I personally use the reviews section of movies.com to get a pretty good idea of what's worth seeing and what's not. Because they grab the reviews of most of the reputable sources, it's a pretty good measure of whether I'm going to bother going to the theater. I find that the real thing that pisses most viewers off is not so much how good/bad the movie is (that's in there somewhere), but how well it meets their expectations. If you go into a movie like American Pie expecting sophisticated humor, you're going to be disappointed no matter how funny the rude humor happens to be. When someone asks me whether a movie is "good" or not, the answer I give is almost always more related to whether it's good for "what it is". Is a movie like Bulletproof Monk a great cinematic work that's going to make you rethink your life? No. But it's an entertaining buddy/kung fu movie.
Incidentally, I see about 25-30 movies per month between the theater and DVD and find I am rarely actually disappointed. Rather, I frequently find myself saying, "Well, they *said* that movie sucked. Why did I think they were wrong?"
Somehow these advanced, future devices are all voice commanded despite the fact that in almost ALL cases, having people talking to a computer is disruptive. Even on the bridge of the Enterprise, if all of those people were doing their work with the computer by voice, you'd have chaos. The show acknowledges that, even if not consciously, in the fact that everyone except the "main" person in a given scene is doing all of their work using touchscreens of a sort to allow the main character of the scene to do their job.
Until something can be created that be as quiet or quieter than a keyboard/mouse AND also faster/more efficient, those input methods will rule.
Actually, if you make your server serve up *real* error pages above a certain size, I believe IE honors them and uses your errors instead of those default, useless pages that differ from each other only in the tiny error code at the very bottom of the page.
Your examples are almost entirely "secondary" food items. None of them are worldwide staples like rice, wheat(flour), meat, corn, etc that compose the vast majority of diets. In my fridge (in the US), most of my vegetables and fruit were grown in California or Florida, the wheat(flour) and other grains from the American midwest, the meats raised either locally (to me) in Minnesota or in places like Wyoming, etc.
And that's great for you. But, your story is a prime example of someone who's working on software for reasons other than truly loving it. The very comparison you lay out as the choice screams that. If you view writing software as putting random ones and zeros into a specific order rather than solving intellectual problems, you probably should do something else. I so thoroughly enjoy solving programming problems that when my wife is out of town, I work 16-20 hours per day with a big smile on my face. I wake up in the morning excited because as I was waking up, I thought of an interesting solution to the problem I'd been working on. When my wife asks me, "What are you thinking about", the answer is almost always something related to the program I'm working on at the moment. In short, this isn't only what I "do", but what I would be doing even if I wasn't paid for it.
My dad and brother are big into the "built it with my hands" type of euphoria, but it's never done anything for me.
I don't think we have to worry. Someone who uses the phrase "mutext lock on you" in normal conversation probably doesn't get all that many "personal" calls.
Slashdot Mirror
You are aware that they set out to make a 60's style sci-fi movie right? You know, the kind where a difficult problem is discovered and some "smart" people solve it. It's a style of movie where the "truth" is irrelevent. The whole point is not whether you believe the science, but whether you feel the suspense. As a matter of fact, the genre counts on pseudo-scientific babbling only to drive the story forward. These types of movies are not intended to be "accurate".
I've got a wireless keyboard and mouse that stop working when my cellphone is sitting on the desk and it rings. It will continue to interfere unless I move the phone when I start talking (I use a headset).
" Who are people calling at 7am? Are they just calling the other folks on the road that have a cell phone?"
For years, I've been at my desk at 7am or earlier as a matter of course. Oftentimes, when co-workers discover this fact, they begin to call me from the road. I'm always amazed when people (not necessarily you) seem to assume that the whole world starts up at 8 or 9am when they roll into the office.
Incidentally, I'm *never* alone at that time in any office I've worked in. In many offices there are quite a few people working then.
Of course this comes with another downside of people complaining when you leave at 4:00. People who actually didn't arrive until 9:30 will say things like, "I wish *I* could leave at 4:00" while completely oblivious to the stupidity of the statement.
Yeah. The Decaf Decision of 1999 nearly sunk them. Fortunately they hired Juan Valdez to take over their coffee decisions and managed to recover.
The problem with even this is when you're in an environment where all of the passwords expire, but not on the same schedule. If your email password expires every 21 days, your network logon every 45 and they can't be any of the last 6, and they need to be unique and secure, it just encourages things like appending 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 in sequence to a single password or using Post-Its everywhere with their new passwords.
"2) XSLT
Have you tried it? I rest my case."
Yes and I wouldn't rest my case on that statement if I were you.
I've been working with XSLT professionally (for big clients including 3M) for 3 years, building the top tier in 3 tier architectures and have no problems working with it. It makes perfect sense for what it is: a solution for turning XML into something else, whether another XML document, another XSLT stylesheet (which I'll admit can be a brainbending exercise), HTML or plain formatted ASCII. In places where multiple presentations will exist for a given dataset or the presentation will change due to constantly redefined presentation requirements (ahem marketing ahem), XSLT gives you the flexibility to just keep building the same XML documents in your app and make them look like they're supposed to with different XSLT.
<shamelessplug>
Incidentally, I'm looking for a web development contract in St. Paul/Minneapolis if anyone's looking for an XSLT expert (or PHP or any of my other areas of expertise) who actually knows how to solve real problems. Email me for more info.
</shamelessplug>
Unfortunately, most Slashdot reviews are little more than book reports with pretty much no analysis. They end up just listing what the chapters contain.
Incidentally, one of the main reasons to choose XML over either CSV or INI is that both of those formats are pretty driven by rigid "column" type structures. In most INI files there's only room for pairs of names and single values. In CSV records are one row with a set number of fields.
XML lets you expand the children fully and represent more complex data. For instance, a classical CSV file with address information for customers would have columns for street address, city and then start to have problems when you start having columns for State (when you actually consider the world outside the US), postal codes, etc. If this is in XML, you can have your schema be more flexible and say that each <customer> contains a <shippingaddress> element which can contain either a <state> or a <province> or neither.
In other words, you can use trees to represent data instead of flat rows. I'm not saying that it's the be-all and end-all that the evangelists say it is. There are still lots of places that simpler text files and other data storage formats are better, but XML can be useful.
They don't really "wear out" so much as get dull. In order to scrape the hair off your face, they need to be really sharp. A really good straight razor (what your grandfather probably shaved with) does last a lifetime, but needs to be sharpened each time you shave. If you could figure out a way to resharpen your disposable blades, you could use them for much longer.
If a computer gets hot enough to start a wooden case on fire, you've got much bigger problems with that computer.
Actually the EOS 50mm f/1.8 can be had for something like $65 *new* from places like BHphoto.com. On the DR, it becomes more like an 80-85mm, but I love it for handheld portraits.
1000GB a week isn't really that expensive. I currently pay $99 for 700GB/month *including* the server cost at rackshack.net. I could handle that amount of bandwidth with 6 of these $99/month servers. Assuming the half million songs per week, even dropping down to $0.75/song if lots of albums are bought (13 songs for $9.99), you're still looking at $1,500,000 per month, with the bandwidth costing *me* (I certainly hope Apple can get a better deal than I can) only $594. While bandwidth isn't free, it's certainly not even a significant portion of the expense of running the service. That amount doesn't even pay for someone to answer to answer the phone part time.
I'm not disagreeing with your statement that a large portion of the $1/song goes to expenses, but a lot of those expenses aren't where you'd think they are. Remember, whereever 2 or 3 million dollars are gathered, there also gather middle managers and expense accounts.
If you still want this on a POTS line, you can use MCI's <a href="http://www.theneighborhood.com/res_local_se<nobr>r<wbr></wbr></nobr> vice/jsps/default.jsp">Neighborhood</a>. Unlimited local and long distance for $50/month.
It can absolutely work without a web server. I use it for a lot of utility-type work with it on the commandline. Using our own PriadoBlender, I get EXE's from my PHP. The way we blend PHP is technically possible on UNIX as well.
I just love it when people make proclamations about the complete uselessness of an entire range of products. The funniest part of these statements is that if you listened to them all, you'd be living in a cardboard box with a smug look on your face from having avoided all the useless technology out there.
I use a wireless keyboard and mouse daily and will NEVER go back. Right now, I'm sitting in my leather recliner and the PC, printer and all peripherals are tucked back behind my chair with the monitor on a high table next to me. When I first set this up, I tried a regular keyboard and mouse, but stringing cables around my chair was just stupid. Now, I have my main computer in the living room, while the only evidence of it when I'm not around is an LCD monitor. I just pull out the keyboard and mouse when I need them. With the PS/2 dongles, there's no configuration at all, I replace the batteries in the keyboard about once every 6 months and the mouse about once a month and I've never had them not work.
This was actually the big objection that photographers had when IE added it's little image toolbar a few versions ago. If you haven't seen the toolbar, when you mouse over an image, it appears with buttons to save the image, print it or send it by email. The photographers were wondering if Microsoft would enjoy an "email this application to a friend" entry in a toolbar as well as they enjoy an "email this photo" button which sends copies of copyrighted photos all over.
Wow. Either you fail in a sarcastic attempt at humor or you are a classic example of what happens when you attempt to "correct" someone based on your own ignorance. Another poster already addressed the fact that "toeing the line" is actually the correct usage, but the fact that your additional statement is also wrong as well just made me smile and prompted a response. "Bated" is an abbreviated form of "abated" and is the proper form of this phrase. You can go check out a copy of Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice if you don't believe me (the first recorded use of the phrase). Since I assume your preferred useage of the second phrase is "baited breath", I won't even ponder your idea of the proper use of fishing worms.
Maybe the fact that consumers can not only change companies, but keep the same number will get the cellphone companies to actually pay attention to existing customers. Right now, the whole industry is geared to kissing the butts of potential and new customers. Once you've been with a company for a year or two and your contract is up, trying to get even a small discount on a new phone is nearly impossible with many of them. So, it breeds a situation where people fulfill their contract and move on to get another new phone for free. That's going to happen more as the only reason some people don't do that now is they want to keep their number.
If burn->rip->encode is "circumventing", then burn by itself would be as well, even though the whole setup explicitly allows burning. After all, if you burn *using their software*, you end up with an un-DRM-ed, plain CD.
Anecdotal evidence isn't evidence. I grew up working outside on a farm, working HARD. I watched tons of TV and yet I still read Asimov, Heinlein, Dick, etc. as well as Hemmingway, Melville and more. I hunted, fished, learned to play the piano and guitar and still managed to enjoy watching TV. I still watch a lot of TV and movies and somehow manage to participate in technical user groups, take my dog for walks, do some outdoor photography and generally live a busy, diverse life.
TV is only 1 factor in most people's lives and, contrary to most anti-TV nuts, is not the PRIMARY determining factor in most people's lives. While most of the anti-TV Slashdotters seem to believe that simply turning off the TV will turn the average American into a Nobel laureate, the simple reality is that most of those people wouldn't replace TV with anything substantial or really enriching.
I personally use the reviews section of movies.com to get a pretty good idea of what's worth seeing and what's not. Because they grab the reviews of most of the reputable sources, it's a pretty good measure of whether I'm going to bother going to the theater. I find that the real thing that pisses most viewers off is not so much how good/bad the movie is (that's in there somewhere), but how well it meets their expectations. If you go into a movie like American Pie expecting sophisticated humor, you're going to be disappointed no matter how funny the rude humor happens to be. When someone asks me whether a movie is "good" or not, the answer I give is almost always more related to whether it's good for "what it is". Is a movie like Bulletproof Monk a great cinematic work that's going to make you rethink your life? No. But it's an entertaining buddy/kung fu movie.
Incidentally, I see about 25-30 movies per month between the theater and DVD and find I am rarely actually disappointed. Rather, I frequently find myself saying, "Well, they *said* that movie sucked. Why did I think they were wrong?"
Somehow these advanced, future devices are all voice commanded despite the fact that in almost ALL cases, having people talking to a computer is disruptive. Even on the bridge of the Enterprise, if all of those people were doing their work with the computer by voice, you'd have chaos. The show acknowledges that, even if not consciously, in the fact that everyone except the "main" person in a given scene is doing all of their work using touchscreens of a sort to allow the main character of the scene to do their job.
Until something can be created that be as quiet or quieter than a keyboard/mouse AND also faster/more efficient, those input methods will rule.
Actually, if you make your server serve up *real* error pages above a certain size, I believe IE honors them and uses your errors instead of those default, useless pages that differ from each other only in the tiny error code at the very bottom of the page.
Your examples are almost entirely "secondary" food items. None of them are worldwide staples like rice, wheat(flour), meat, corn, etc that compose the vast majority of diets. In my fridge (in the US), most of my vegetables and fruit were grown in California or Florida, the wheat(flour) and other grains from the American midwest, the meats raised either locally (to me) in Minnesota or in places like Wyoming, etc.
And that's great for you. But, your story is a prime example of someone who's working on software for reasons other than truly loving it. The very comparison you lay out as the choice screams that. If you view writing software as putting random ones and zeros into a specific order rather than solving intellectual problems, you probably should do something else. I so thoroughly enjoy solving programming problems that when my wife is out of town, I work 16-20 hours per day with a big smile on my face. I wake up in the morning excited because as I was waking up, I thought of an interesting solution to the problem I'd been working on. When my wife asks me, "What are you thinking about", the answer is almost always something related to the program I'm working on at the moment. In short, this isn't only what I "do", but what I would be doing even if I wasn't paid for it.
My dad and brother are big into the "built it with my hands" type of euphoria, but it's never done anything for me.
I don't think we have to worry. Someone who uses the phrase "mutext lock on you" in normal conversation probably doesn't get all that many "personal" calls.