PCs are increasingly complex and there are lots and lots of things that can go wrong with them. Users are desperate for explanations for why their particular machine doesn't seem to run as well as it used to or is supposed to. Snake oil salesman like this doofus make a living selling simple explanations to complex problems that seem logical but are often wrong. Sometimes not just wrong but maliciously wrong. Instead of helping they're just making things worse. And rags like InfoWorld are just as bad, overlooking conflicts of interest and technical correctness in their pathetic quest for pageviews. Don't give them the attention they so desperately crave otherwise you're just playing their game.
Yes, Obama screwed up (and lost my vote). But saying it's sort of okay just because McCain is just as much of a screw up is just plain wrong. They're both on a race to the bottom. Both of them. If we're lucky we'll get the lesser of two evils, but it's still evil.
Surprisingly, Hillary Clinton voted against the FISA bill.
Free is hardly the only reason people are choosing open source software. If it was, Apple would have disappeared a long time ago. No one uses software that doesn't work or doesn't do what they need it to do. Vendors are discovering that once their products are subject to some competition, they have to compete on merit. For some of them, this is the last thing they want.
Since they can't admit that open source software does the same thing, they are left with the cost argument. On its face, it sounds good, it truly is difficult to compete with free. But look at Adobe's Photoshop. It costs a ungodly amount of money, yet more graphic artists and photographers use it than use The Gimp.
Exactly. I've seen the "no assigned seating" idea applied to tech support people and they were all miserable. The rules included no personal effects allowed so many of them carried a floppy with pictures of their family that they would load into whatever computer they were assigned and display on the desktop or in a screensaver. I think there's something fundamental about having a space of your own, no matter how small or humble, and I wonder how long this will last before people start claiming a particular place.
Too bad it's bogus. You probably can burn calories while drinking this, provided you're running a marathon at the time, but even when the Coke PR flack was on NBC's Today, she was careful not to say definitively that it did.
How long before Debian comes out with the own version of this, too? If there was an issue about the logo in Firefox, I can only imagine what having code from a proprietary product will do.
...I never quite understood Scoble's impact or why so many people considered his tenure at Microsoft so important. I can't think of a single Microsoft product that has significantly changed as a result of his interceding on some poor user's behalf. It was more like a grand, and public, experiment in listening to the users. Considering they let him leave and especially since they haven't replaced him, it says they've heard enough.
In other words, Alienware charges £400 for a fancy case and craptastic support. My idea of "luxury" also includes value for money, and since I also consider that performance is a major element of value for any computer, Alienware fails on both counts.
I was almost intrigued enough to head over to SCO's site just to see what "biztones" are, but then I realized I don't have all afternoon to scrub my browser clean.
I work for a company (not Sun) that makes high-priced, highly reliable machines that competes with other companies that make low-priced, less reliable machines. They're beating us in every market. Customers simply value low acquistion cost over low cost of ownership. It's annoying and counterintuitive, but I've seen it happen over and over again. Sun is facing that situation and you can see what has resulted. Like my company, they've gone from a market maker to an also-ran. It's inevitable, or seems so. And it has nothing to do with quality or capability.
We're due for a major RIF, too. Too many employees for the level of business, I'm afraid.
...do people keep trying to redesign the keyboard despite numerous failed attempts? Dvorak may have a theoretical speed advantage, but how many work situations actually have sufficient periods of sustained typing that the improvement is measureable over a work day? I personally wish some of the design effort wasted on alternative keyboard layouts went into better overall interfaces, but that's me.
Back in the 80's I worked for a company that made control systems for the chemical and petroleum industries. The systems included enormous consoles (think NASA) with numerous displays and data entry stations. Input devices included standard QWERTY keyboards, alphabetic keypads, mice, trackballs and touchscreens. Guess which got used the most. If you guessed the QWERTY keyboards and the mice, you guessed right. Doug Engelbart was a wise, wise man.
Bad customer service is being put on hold or numbers being busy for hours. It's not abuse, threats and unethical behavior. I don't expect low price retailers to have "operators standing by" or the fanciest web site with one-click shopping but I also don't expect them to threaten me with a visit from the FBI.
Sadly, in the real world governments often respond to non-problems with short-sighted (non-)solutions. We like to give lip-service to the idea of representational government here in the US but the reality is that power is seldom in the hands of the majority. The UN ambassadors really only answer to whomever appointed them, so their voice is even less representational than an elected official.
Is RSS 2.0 one of the Unlikable Paranoid Beardo Dave Winer http://www.memepool.com/Date/253/ RSS formats or one of the rival RSS formats created to annoy Unlikable Paranoid Beardo Dave Winer?
Sorry, but the problem isn't your keyboard layout, it's that you're using a keyboard to enter information to begin with. I'm a decent typist, but in the few minutes it's taken me to compose this, I could have had a couple of phone conversations on the same topic and transmitted more information. Altering the layout is like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, you feel like you've accomplished something but the ship's still sinking.
While I think voice recognition systems would be ideal (given the information density that I mentioned above) I don't think any of the currently available ones could completely replace the keyboard under all circumstances. Given that we know how to build alternative input devices for those who can't type, can't we leverage that knowledge to enable faster input?
I might have been more impressed with the article had the author been more careful with his spelling and grammar. Or perhaps that was the point: society as a whole has embraced mediocrity.
The problem with the ebb and flow is the lag. On the assumption that it takes 4 (or 5) years for someone to earn a Bachelor's degree the downturn in the number of new CS students will be felt for at least that many years in industry. Companies, faced with a problem that can't be solved in the traditional way in a timely manner, will turn to other solutions (off-shoring, H1B visas, etc.). I really think that people without credentials will have a much harder time than you did getting employed in the face of these options.
High school students, if they're smart, will see the drop in demand and seek other professions and the lag time will increase. They'd be right to think they can't compete four years from now with someone who's available (and qualified) to work today.
It would be nice to think the companies would be patient and wait for graduates, but we all know that The Street has no patience.
BSD has at least the tradition and mindset of the Berkley distributions behind it and carries a different approach to security than Linux does (out of the box). But the various BSDs have always been behind in hardware support. Not a big deal for those seeking a stable server platform, but almost totally fatal for most desktop users. HURD is likely to be as behind or moreso than BSD, couple that with the lack of anything compelling about it other than the philosophy and you've got nothing more than a curiosity.
I've actually had a couple of people, not techies by any means, ask me if they should install Firefox. I said "yes, by all means" of course. But I have to say I'm surprised, I've known about Mozilla/Firefox for a long time, even did some bug work on it at one time, but never had anyone other than other techies even mention it, let alone ask about using it. It's certainly gained a lot of mindshare recently.
Except for some minor exceptions, the overall job outlook (tech jobs included) in upstate NY isn't good. Locally (Rochester) the unemployment rate has officially gone below 5%, but that has to be taken in light of significantly fewer jobs and an overall declining population. The number of people who've simply given up is not known, of course.
My company, one of the major local employers, is slowly abandoning engineering and manufacturing for a strategy of purchased products and service offerings. The number of engineering openings in the company these days is roughly about 1/10 of the total. The rest are sales and marketing, particularly for acquired products.
Mail programs and browsers do allow you to turn image expansion off, but in this case all it does it postpone the attack unless they've configured Windows to use an image viewer that doesn't use the affected code.
Pentel, the world's leading provider of 0.5mm mechanical pencils has predicted the World Wide Web cannot continue to function at its present level for much longer. Pentel is offering an alternative, called WSD, or Writing Stuff Down, that is virtually immune to scaling problems currently plaguing the Web. Industry experts have been slow to respond to this proposal but their responses are expected any day now, via another new technology called the Post Office.
Slashdot Mirror
PCs are increasingly complex and there are lots and lots of things that can go wrong with them. Users are desperate for explanations for why their particular machine doesn't seem to run as well as it used to or is supposed to. Snake oil salesman like this doofus make a living selling simple explanations to complex problems that seem logical but are often wrong. Sometimes not just wrong but maliciously wrong. Instead of helping they're just making things worse. And rags like InfoWorld are just as bad, overlooking conflicts of interest and technical correctness in their pathetic quest for pageviews. Don't give them the attention they so desperately crave otherwise you're just playing their game.
Yes, Obama screwed up (and lost my vote). But saying it's sort of okay just because McCain is just as much of a screw up is just plain wrong. They're both on a race to the bottom. Both of them. If we're lucky we'll get the lesser of two evils, but it's still evil.
Surprisingly, Hillary Clinton voted against the FISA bill.
Free is hardly the only reason people are choosing open source software. If it was, Apple would have disappeared a long time ago. No one uses software that doesn't work or doesn't do what they need it to do. Vendors are discovering that once their products are subject to some competition, they have to compete on merit. For some of them, this is the last thing they want.
Since they can't admit that open source software does the same thing, they are left with the cost argument. On its face, it sounds good, it truly is difficult to compete with free. But look at Adobe's Photoshop. It costs a ungodly amount of money, yet more graphic artists and photographers use it than use The Gimp.
Exactly. I've seen the "no assigned seating" idea applied to tech support people and they were all miserable. The rules included no personal effects allowed so many of them carried a floppy with pictures of their family that they would load into whatever computer they were assigned and display on the desktop or in a screensaver. I think there's something fundamental about having a space of your own, no matter how small or humble, and I wonder how long this will last before people start claiming a particular place.
Just like OS/2 could run Windows executables. That didn't save OS/2 and I doubt this will do much for OpenBSD.
Too bad it's bogus. You probably can burn calories while drinking this, provided you're running a marathon at the time, but even when the Coke PR flack was on NBC's Today, she was careful not to say definitively that it did.
But wouldn't it be cool if it did?
How long before Debian comes out with the own version of this, too? If there was an issue about the logo in Firefox, I can only imagine what having code from a proprietary product will do.
...I never quite understood Scoble's impact or why so many people considered his tenure at Microsoft so important. I can't think of a single Microsoft product that has significantly changed as a result of his interceding on some poor user's behalf. It was more like a grand, and public, experiment in listening to the users. Considering they let him leave and especially since they haven't replaced him, it says they've heard enough.
...Web 2.0!
1) Change name to Napstr.
2) Profit!
In other words, Alienware charges £400 for a fancy case and craptastic support. My idea of "luxury" also includes value for money, and since I also consider that performance is a major element of value for any computer, Alienware fails on both counts.
I was almost intrigued enough to head over to SCO's site just to see what "biztones" are, but then I realized I don't have all afternoon to scrub my browser clean.
I work for a company (not Sun) that makes high-priced, highly reliable machines that competes with other companies that make low-priced, less reliable machines. They're beating us in every market. Customers simply value low acquistion cost over low cost of ownership. It's annoying and counterintuitive, but I've seen it happen over and over again. Sun is facing that situation and you can see what has resulted. Like my company, they've gone from a market maker to an also-ran. It's inevitable, or seems so. And it has nothing to do with quality or capability.
We're due for a major RIF, too. Too many employees for the level of business, I'm afraid.
...do people keep trying to redesign the keyboard despite numerous failed attempts? Dvorak may have a theoretical speed advantage, but how many work situations actually have sufficient periods of sustained typing that the improvement is measureable over a work day? I personally wish some of the design effort wasted on alternative keyboard layouts went into better overall interfaces, but that's me.
Back in the 80's I worked for a company that made control systems for the chemical and petroleum industries. The systems included enormous consoles (think NASA) with numerous displays and data entry stations. Input devices included standard QWERTY keyboards, alphabetic keypads, mice, trackballs and touchscreens. Guess which got used the most. If you guessed the QWERTY keyboards and the mice, you guessed right. Doug Engelbart was a wise, wise man.
...so that Adam Curry's name doesn't mysteriously appear in the definition.
Bad customer service is being put on hold or numbers being busy for hours. It's not abuse, threats and unethical behavior. I don't expect low price retailers to have "operators standing by" or the fanciest web site with one-click shopping but I also don't expect them to threaten me with a visit from the FBI.
Sadly, in the real world governments often respond to non-problems with short-sighted (non-)solutions. We like to give lip-service to the idea of representational government here in the US but the reality is that power is seldom in the hands of the majority. The UN ambassadors really only answer to whomever appointed them, so their voice is even less representational than an elected official.
Is RSS 2.0 one of the Unlikable Paranoid Beardo Dave Winer http://www.memepool.com/Date/253/ RSS formats or one of the rival RSS formats created to annoy Unlikable Paranoid Beardo Dave Winer?
Sorry, but the problem isn't your keyboard layout, it's that you're using a keyboard to enter information to begin with. I'm a decent typist, but in the few minutes it's taken me to compose this, I could have had a couple of phone conversations on the same topic and transmitted more information. Altering the layout is like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, you feel like you've accomplished something but the ship's still sinking. While I think voice recognition systems would be ideal (given the information density that I mentioned above) I don't think any of the currently available ones could completely replace the keyboard under all circumstances. Given that we know how to build alternative input devices for those who can't type, can't we leverage that knowledge to enable faster input?
I might have been more impressed with the article had the author been more careful with his spelling and grammar. Or perhaps that was the point: society as a whole has embraced mediocrity.
The problem with the ebb and flow is the lag. On the assumption that it takes 4 (or 5) years for someone to earn a Bachelor's degree the downturn in the number of new CS students will be felt for at least that many years in industry. Companies, faced with a problem that can't be solved in the traditional way in a timely manner, will turn to other solutions (off-shoring, H1B visas, etc.). I really think that people without credentials will have a much harder time than you did getting employed in the face of these options.
High school students, if they're smart, will see the drop in demand and seek other professions and the lag time will increase. They'd be right to think they can't compete four years from now with someone who's available (and qualified) to work today.
It would be nice to think the companies would be patient and wait for graduates, but we all know that The Street has no patience.
BSD has at least the tradition and mindset of the Berkley distributions behind it and carries a different approach to security than Linux does (out of the box). But the various BSDs have always been behind in hardware support. Not a big deal for those seeking a stable server platform, but almost totally fatal for most desktop users. HURD is likely to be as behind or moreso than BSD, couple that with the lack of anything compelling about it other than the philosophy and you've got nothing more than a curiosity.
I've actually had a couple of people, not techies by any means, ask me if they should install Firefox. I said "yes, by all means" of course. But I have to say I'm surprised, I've known about Mozilla/Firefox for a long time, even did some bug work on it at one time, but never had anyone other than other techies even mention it, let alone ask about using it. It's certainly gained a lot of mindshare recently.
Except for some minor exceptions, the overall job outlook (tech jobs included) in upstate NY isn't good. Locally (Rochester) the unemployment rate has officially gone below 5%, but that has to be taken in light of significantly fewer jobs and an overall declining population. The number of people who've simply given up is not known, of course.
My company, one of the major local employers, is slowly abandoning engineering and manufacturing for a strategy of purchased products and service offerings. The number of engineering openings in the company these days is roughly about 1/10 of the total. The rest are sales and marketing, particularly for acquired products.
Mail programs and browsers do allow you to turn image expansion off, but in this case all it does it postpone the attack unless they've configured Windows to use an image viewer that doesn't use the affected code.
"Pay me now, or pay me later."
Pentel, the world's leading provider of 0.5mm mechanical pencils has predicted the World Wide Web cannot continue to function at its present level for much longer. Pentel is offering an alternative, called WSD, or Writing Stuff Down, that is virtually immune to scaling problems currently plaguing the Web. Industry experts have been slow to respond to this proposal but their responses are expected any day now, via another new technology called the Post Office.