I've always wondered "what might have been" in terms of UID prestige if only I had been more eager about it.
Yah, same here....
I've been here since ~98. I resisted registering, until something or another forced me to create an account. I remember thinking, WTF, now even/. wants me to register, screw them, I don't need that damn site. My UID is pretty high considering I probably procrastinated a six months or so before registering. Its all fuzzy, but IIRC there was a time when the system didn't even require user ids to post, then along came the user ids and later the AC, which IIRC was about the time I registered...
The problem, is that like the other tablet manufactures, HP looked at apple getting fat on 50+% margins and wanted a piece of the pie. So, they bought webos, created a tablet, priced it like apple, and were amazed when it didn't sell.
There are two main reasons for that: first the touchpad is not a mature devices (aka more apps, more stable experience, etc), secondly HP in even their wildest dreams doesn't have anywhere the brand loyalty/following/premium that apple does. Apple is such a premium brand, that frankly it doesn't really matter what they charge, people will buy them the same way people buy Gucci.
In the end if HP had been willing to take a 10% margin on the device, and sell them for $200, they would have probably beaten apple, the same way that android _IS_ beating the iphone (aka larger market share, not necessarily larger profit). The only problem is that HP didn't have any interest in giving the consumer an inexpensive tablet, or even winning the market, if they couldn't have the margin...
So in the end, they were greedy, and that greed made them too stupid, to realize that they had to actually _COMPETE_ with Apple by providing more consumer value because they weren't going to win a battle with a mature product sold by a brand that inspires fanaticism.
The reason HP and everyone want(ed)s to get into the tablet market is they see apple making 50+% margin on them. That includes the base model, and there isn't any way that an extra 48G of flash and a 3G modem costs $300. The higher end ones are even higher margin.
Frankly, the three most expensive parts are the lcd, case and the battery. Two of which are significantly less expensive in the >500,000 quantity range.
The funny thing about these tear downs is that the parts costs are based on the kinds of prices you get when you call digikey and ask for 10k units. When you can go to walmart and buy some cheap garbage, pull it apart and find the exact same part already soldered to some junk you just paid less for than buying the part from digikey, you _KNOW_ that buying it in large unit quantities in china is significantly less expensive (digikey after all needs to make 50% margin too). Plus, in the case of Apple, they have cut out 1/2 the electronics middlemen because they are manufacturing the processor/etc themselves.
So, are you for or against government confiscating taxpayer's money to fund Wall Street and Big Businesses "too big to fail" like GM?
Its more complex than for/against.
I'm a FREE MARKET guy, but that doesn't mean I support propping up the very people who screwed everyone over, including shareholders..
I also understand that by itself, letting them all fail, would have been much uglier than the situation we now find ourselves in. I'm going to ignore GM for the moment because I believe its inconsequential to the discussion (financial meltdown). I also understand that it appears pumping $180B into AIG to save all those big banks was the safest way to resume business as usual. On the other-hand, I 100% disagree with the way the situation was handled (I like you don't believe those companies should still exist). Although, you have to admit TARP was pretty successful when you consider how much of the money has been repaid. Especially when viewed in light of the S&L crisis that preceded it.
Discussion of the finer points of what I believe should have been done differently will take more time that i'm willing to spend on it right now. Suffice to say, I don't believe that the majority of "wall street" serves to bring investors/capital together with entities needing it in order to strengthen business. In fact at this point I believe much of wall street servers the opposite, and weakens or destroys well run companies. So, I believe many of these activities should be illegal as they are the white collar equivalent of robbing the convenience store, or gambling with peoples futures.
I will second that, I found wavosaur one day when I discovered something really simple that audacity couldn't do (don't remember exactly what it was, maybe some kind of re-sampling from a flac?)... Anyway, wavosaur, actually worked, and now its my primary editor for basic stuff.
Frankly, I never understood all the noise about audacity, it just seemed to weak to be taken seriously.
What pisses me off is that I avoided both sides of the mess, but I'm supposed to pay for it all with more taxes.
Yah, those of us with a house we paid 20% (or more) down on, living in the "cheap" part of town because we don't believe in buying things we cannot afford are the ones getting the royal shaft over all this. Same as its been for at least last 25 years. All trickle down did, was trickle down the tax bill to the middle class, and fck us at the same time by causing our infrastructure to crumble. So, now that we pay a higher percentage of our income than the top few percent, we get to fight for our jobs vs some starving people in india/china/etc all the while sending our own children to schools marginally safer than the local drug house, where they learn less in 6 months than they can learn in 30 minutes with dad. And yet, everytime I turn the TV on I hear more of the same sh*t from our politicians, the radical right spewing absolute falsehoods, while the ones in the center/right soothingly try to convince us that everything will be fine if we just get more education, and CF light bulbs.
I've said enough, or rather the beer has said enough....
From my pov, this will ensure that I never go back to Firefox (after abandoning it a while back because of the memory leaks and denials that there was a problem.)
Don't worry the memory leaks are still there, a couple times I week I kill it and restart it just to lower its memory usage.
Yah, I've been seeing that kind of crap a lot lately, even at small companies. Its a cash flow problem, they have to pay the salaries, but they don't have the money for anything else. Doesn't matter if 1/2 the people on salary are sitting around wasting their time doing something an automated process could do.
The perfect example, is the last company I worked for had their top paid developer spending weeks hunting down memory leaks, and crap like that in their product. He kept asking for bounds checker, but they wouldn't spring for the 1.5k. So he "wasted" two months before he threw a fit, and they purchased it. A week later he had killed 99% of the random crashes.
Its just too easy for those people to say, "its going to cost us more money we don't have", rather than understanding the lost opportunity cost. Which is strange because I assume that stuff should be hammered into any MBAs head. Every single decision like that,digs you deeper into the hole your already in.
I just fixed my wife's personal T16p, its boots under 20 seconds now. Part of the problem with fast boot on that machine is the access connections software that is set to sync load during win login. Change it to async, and its 20 second scan all the network adapters can happen in the background without to many issues. It took me 2 years worth of screwing with that machine on/off to get it booting at a reasonable speed. There are tons of posts on the lenovo site about clean installing XP and making it go fast.
Actually it was Windows XP's naieve "get to the desktop at all costs, as fast as you can" strategy (an effort to speed apparent boot times) but which delayed a lot of stuff loading,
You mean all the crap that people install, that puts itself in the xp notification area? I have a metric I use to measure windows boot time. Its called time to google. Its the time it takes from the point that the BIOS releases control to the point where I have a web browser up with the google search screen. I recently tweaked a couple things on my wife's XP laptop, and now every single windows machine at my house can get to google in under 20 seconds. On my main XP desktop with a spinning hard drive it is 12 seconds. Which is roughly the same as my Win7 machine with a corsair F120 SSD. So XP can be just as fast if you clean out the unnecessary crap. Of course I use IE in this benchmark because FF adds a second or two.
Of course all the machines except the win7 machine with the Corsair SSD sit in S3 sleep 99% of the time. In that case its 2 seconds to resume. The Corsair F120 on the other-hand fails to resume, properly resulting blue screens (like the other 10k people in the forums). So that machine is left resuming from hibernate, which is roughly the same speed as actually booting the machine as I have 16G of ram in it.
Uh the VESA BIOS extensions support mode setting, and most cards that supported it had a fairly complete list of common resolutions/color depths. The protected mode API's were actually really nice on most cards as they generally allowed flat mapped frame buffer access. The problem was that generally the native drivers did a much better job of accelerated drawing.
I haven't tried running any of my code recently, but my understanding is that modern video cards may not actually support VBE >=2.0 anymore, which is sort of sad actually. Hence the nvidia frame buffer driver, etc in the linux kernel. As linux's fb device maps pretty well to the vesafb driver, which should have been sufficient to support nearly any card, if the cards actually had VBE.
I don't know where you have been buying printers, but most of the low end ones have their own printer language. Samsung uses SPL which is a windows GDI based language. HP uses PCL etc...
Last I checked most of the inkjets were what we used to call "win printers". In that the windows driver does all the rasterization.
You can go to the HP or Samsung site, and "compare" printer models. The language used is listed.
In fact, I believe it should qualify as gross negligence or outright maliciousness as it violates basic management best practices and should make those doing it personally and criminally liable.
Chuckle, I'm there with you, and a lot of the manufacturing industry just woke up to the fact that the Toyota just in time models blow up spectacularly. Of course that doesn't solve the problems everywhere in the system, because every single MBA stamped out in the last 20 years has been taught that stocking parts, and having multiple suppliers is a death blow to efficiency.
The fact that even MS didn't buy into the.Net hype speaks volumes...
And thirty seconds of analysis can bring up a half dozen total deal killers for nearly any pre-existing application. Take office for example, it runs on the mac, that means ms either has to support a.net version and a non.net version, or they have to port.net to the mac too. Another is the fact that porting an existing application to.net isn't a customer facing benefit (for the ones where it is even "possible"). As a project architect, if someone came to me and said, we should port our application to.net, I would go "Nice idea, here lets make a first pass guess at how long it would take, ok, now lets try to prioritize that with these 200+ other items my team is busy adding to the product...
Frankly, they lacked the ability to achieve long-term results.. Microsoft failed to port their MOST IMPORTANT PRODUCTS (Office and VS) to the new language.
I think you fail to understand the momentum a code base gets after a few years. Porting an application to.net was a nightmare for most established applications (I personally know of a couple name brand applications that simply could not get a port "working" even with MS assistance in the early 2000s). That is one reason why you don't see a.net Photoshop, quicken, etc. Another reason is that porting something like office (or photoshop/quicken) would have required porting.net to the mac. Something MS still hasn't done. Frankly, while.net is a fantastic piece of technology, its not really the kind of technology you should base an entire application framework on. Its fine for most things, but there are simply to many unsolved problems with regard to heavily threaded applications, large memory subsystems, the GC, application latency requirements, etc. MS has made great strides in these areas but they continue to trail behind what is possible just using the native APIs. Plus, anyone interested in the possibility of cross platform (or anyone who questions whether windows will be the OS of choice in 10 years) isn't willing to tie themselves as closely to a MS only solution.
I know, it sucks, I can only run.Net apps on any Windows system from the past 10 years!
But if you had used win32, you could probably get an application to run on anything from NT 3.1, 95,etc to win7 if you were careful. Heck if you were _really_ careful, you could probably stick to the win32s subset and get windows 3.1 in there too. That is nearly twenty years of compatibility with a single ABI!
Then you might want to send a cease and desist to President Obama. In his remarks to the press today, he mentioned "patent reform" as part of his agenda for the next 14 months.
Patent reform from Obama, with the R's in the house? Right... I'm skeptical, but if we get a bill it will go something like this. Obama says "We need to remove patents from certain areas like software, and we need to shorten the length of time for other areas." The R's will say no we need "To extend the lifetimes of patents indefinitely, and they need to cover all aspects of life." After a long drawn out fight, Obama will cave and we will get "Patents that last 70 years beyond the lifetime of the author/corporation, and patent extensions extended into more areas of the economy to grow d'a jobs". Of course hidden in the bill will be a little blurb that only fortune 500's can sue other people for patent infringement and you can't file a patent unless you have a average yearly revenue of 10 million dollars.
The problem with w2k3, is that a lot of software detects its running on a "server" and won't install without the "extra special bend your wallet over", server edition of the software.
I know, I ran w2k3 for a few years as an upgrade to win2k, before downgrading to XP. Plus, there seems to be a certain number of titles that validate they are running on a supported platform before actually installing. The problem is that often w2k3 isn't included by vendors that think their software is desktop only. Therefore the supported list is XP,Vista,7.
In both of these cases its often possible to run the software in compatibility mode using the application compatibility toolkit. But the effort is often just not worth it.
There is a "hacky" but semi legit (as compared with actually hacking the 4G memory limit in the license) way to get around this. That is, install >4G of ram, and create a ramdisk with the extra memory. There are a number of free ramdisk products that will use the ram XP refuses to use. I'm using vsuite ramdisk (free). I've then moved my swap file to the ramdisk. Initially I thought it was going to be pretty horrible performance, but was shocked to barely notice the difference running a lot of vmware sessions consuming >6G of RAM. Same thing with photoshop.
Heck if this trick was good enough for the mac, its good enough for windows...
Doesn't seem all that great when modern versions of old technology like tape can store 4TB uncompressed and write at 650MByte/sec per drive. Actually, they will fit significantly more, as the tape drives all do inline compression in hardware. Plus, while dropping it isn't recommended, you can, and its rare to actually have data loss because of it.
Stack a few dozen drives and a few thousand tapes into a library and there isn't anything on the planet that even comes close as a backup medium in nearly any metric (TB per $, watts per TB, footprint, etc).
Git is popular because SVN is so bad.
on
The Rise of Git
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· Score: 1
SVN was promised as the solution to everyone CVS woes. In the end it solved one or two problems and created a half dozen new ones more severe than anything wrong with CVS. At least, with CVS, when the crap hit the fan you fired up your favorite text editor and fixed the repository.
Git on the other-hand, when managed properly, doesn't seem to push people into corners that are extremely difficult to recover from.
Or at least its better than SVN, the previous darling of the open source movement. Frankly, its hard to imagine anything worse than CVS, but I believe SVN might actually take that cake. On the surface it sounds like such a bunch of good ideas, but the details quickly prove otherwise.
Yes, really. If you don't understand the benefits of (at the minimum) atomical multifile commits, then I question how much you've really been using CVS (and the size of your project).
Well to jump in here, CVS has warts, but nearly all of them are "tool dependent" or easy to work around. The problems with lack of atomic commits in CVS are mostly solved if a tool like bonsai is running against the CVS repository. The remaining problems are ones that aren't really solved in any of the "distributed" VCS's because they lack a way to exclude people from making conflicting changes.
The nice thing about CVS is that the file format is so simple and well understood that there are a metric crapload of tools out there, many of which reduce or remove problems associated with core deficiencies in the command line tools everyone generally associates with CVS. Furthermore, the format has been stable for so long that tools created ten years ago continue to work. For example, tkcvs provides a nice per file branch/commit graph with diffing that I want to cry when using many competing VCS tools.
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I've always wondered "what might have been" in terms of UID prestige if only I had been more eager about it.
Yah, same here....
I've been here since ~98. I resisted registering, until something or another forced me to create an account. I remember thinking, WTF, now even /. wants me to register, screw them, I don't need that damn site. My UID is pretty high considering I probably procrastinated a six months or so before registering. Its all fuzzy, but IIRC there was a time when the system didn't even require user ids to post, then along came the user ids and later the AC, which IIRC was about the time I registered...
The problem, is that like the other tablet manufactures, HP looked at apple getting fat on 50+% margins and wanted a piece of the pie. So, they bought webos, created a tablet, priced it like apple, and were amazed when it didn't sell.
There are two main reasons for that: first the touchpad is not a mature devices (aka more apps, more stable experience, etc), secondly HP in even their wildest dreams doesn't have anywhere the brand loyalty/following/premium that apple does. Apple is such a premium brand, that frankly it doesn't really matter what they charge, people will buy them the same way people buy Gucci.
In the end if HP had been willing to take a 10% margin on the device, and sell them for $200, they would have probably beaten apple, the same way that android _IS_ beating the iphone (aka larger market share, not necessarily larger profit). The only problem is that HP didn't have any interest in giving the consumer an inexpensive tablet, or even winning the market, if they couldn't have the margin...
So in the end, they were greedy, and that greed made them too stupid, to realize that they had to actually _COMPETE_ with Apple by providing more consumer value because they weren't going to win a battle with a mature product sold by a brand that inspires fanaticism.
The reason HP and everyone want(ed)s to get into the tablet market is they see apple making 50+% margin on them. That includes the base model, and there isn't any way that an extra 48G of flash and a 3G modem costs $300. The higher end ones are even higher margin.
Frankly, the three most expensive parts are the lcd, case and the battery. Two of which are significantly less expensive in the >500,000 quantity range.
The funny thing about these tear downs is that the parts costs are based on the kinds of prices you get when you call digikey and ask for 10k units. When you can go to walmart and buy some cheap garbage, pull it apart and find the exact same part already soldered to some junk you just paid less for than buying the part from digikey, you _KNOW_ that buying it in large unit quantities in china is significantly less expensive (digikey after all needs to make 50% margin too). Plus, in the case of Apple, they have cut out 1/2 the electronics middlemen because they are manufacturing the processor/etc themselves.
it's still not exactly Chinese innovation; it's Chinese copying.
And as any schoolchild can tell you, first you copy what has been done, then you invent your own using the knowledge obtained...
So, are you for or against government confiscating taxpayer's money to fund Wall Street and Big Businesses "too big to fail" like GM?
Its more complex than for/against.
I'm a FREE MARKET guy, but that doesn't mean I support propping up the very people who screwed everyone over, including shareholders. .
I also understand that by itself, letting them all fail, would have been much uglier than the situation we now find ourselves in. I'm going to ignore GM for the moment because I believe its inconsequential to the discussion (financial meltdown). I also understand that it appears pumping $180B into AIG to save all those big banks was the safest way to resume business as usual. On the other-hand, I 100% disagree with the way the situation was handled (I like you don't believe those companies should still exist). Although, you have to admit TARP was pretty successful when you consider how much of the money has been repaid. Especially when viewed in light of the S&L crisis that preceded it.
Discussion of the finer points of what I believe should have been done differently will take more time that i'm willing to spend on it right now. Suffice to say, I don't believe that the majority of "wall street" serves to bring investors/capital together with entities needing it in order to strengthen business. In fact at this point I believe much of wall street servers the opposite, and weakens or destroys well run companies. So, I believe many of these activities should be illegal as they are the white collar equivalent of robbing the convenience store, or gambling with peoples futures.
I will second that, I found wavosaur one day when I discovered something really simple that audacity couldn't do (don't remember exactly what it was, maybe some kind of re-sampling from a flac?)... Anyway, wavosaur, actually worked, and now its my primary editor for basic stuff.
Frankly, I never understood all the noise about audacity, it just seemed to weak to be taken seriously.
What pisses me off is that I avoided both sides of the mess, but I'm supposed to pay for it all with more taxes.
Yah, those of us with a house we paid 20% (or more) down on, living in the "cheap" part of town because we don't believe in buying things we cannot afford are the ones getting the royal shaft over all this. Same as its been for at least last 25 years. All trickle down did, was trickle down the tax bill to the middle class, and fck us at the same time by causing our infrastructure to crumble. So, now that we pay a higher percentage of our income than the top few percent, we get to fight for our jobs vs some starving people in india/china/etc all the while sending our own children to schools marginally safer than the local drug house, where they learn less in 6 months than they can learn in 30 minutes with dad. And yet, everytime I turn the TV on I hear more of the same sh*t from our politicians, the radical right spewing absolute falsehoods, while the ones in the center/right soothingly try to convince us that everything will be fine if we just get more education, and CF light bulbs.
I've said enough, or rather the beer has said enough....
From my pov, this will ensure that I never go back to Firefox (after abandoning it a while back because of the memory leaks and denials that there was a problem.)
Don't worry the memory leaks are still there, a couple times I week I kill it and restart it just to lower its memory usage.
Yah, I've been seeing that kind of crap a lot lately, even at small companies. Its a cash flow problem, they have to pay the salaries, but they don't have the money for anything else. Doesn't matter if 1/2 the people on salary are sitting around wasting their time doing something an automated process could do.
The perfect example, is the last company I worked for had their top paid developer spending weeks hunting down memory leaks, and crap like that in their product. He kept asking for bounds checker, but they wouldn't spring for the 1.5k. So he "wasted" two months before he threw a fit, and they purchased it. A week later he had killed 99% of the random crashes.
Its just too easy for those people to say, "its going to cost us more money we don't have", rather than understanding the lost opportunity cost. Which is strange because I assume that stuff should be hammered into any MBAs head. Every single decision like that ,digs you deeper into the hole your already in.
I just fixed my wife's personal T16p, its boots under 20 seconds now. Part of the problem with fast boot on that machine is the access connections software that is set to sync load during win login. Change it to async, and its 20 second scan all the network adapters can happen in the background without to many issues. It took me 2 years worth of screwing with that machine on/off to get it booting at a reasonable speed. There are tons of posts on the lenovo site about clean installing XP and making it go fast.
Actually it was Windows XP's naieve "get to the desktop at all costs, as fast as you can" strategy (an effort to speed apparent boot times) but which delayed a lot of stuff loading,
You mean all the crap that people install, that puts itself in the xp notification area? I have a metric I use to measure windows boot time. Its called time to google. Its the time it takes from the point that the BIOS releases control to the point where I have a web browser up with the google search screen. I recently tweaked a couple things on my wife's XP laptop, and now every single windows machine at my house can get to google in under 20 seconds. On my main XP desktop with a spinning hard drive it is 12 seconds. Which is roughly the same as my Win7 machine with a corsair F120 SSD. So XP can be just as fast if you clean out the unnecessary crap. Of course I use IE in this benchmark because FF adds a second or two.
Of course all the machines except the win7 machine with the Corsair SSD sit in S3 sleep 99% of the time. In that case its 2 seconds to resume. The Corsair F120 on the other-hand fails to resume, properly resulting blue screens (like the other 10k people in the forums). So that machine is left resuming from hibernate, which is roughly the same speed as actually booting the machine as I have 16G of ram in it.
Uh the VESA BIOS extensions support mode setting, and most cards that supported it had a fairly complete list of common resolutions/color depths. The protected mode API's were actually really nice on most cards as they generally allowed flat mapped frame buffer access. The problem was that generally the native drivers did a much better job of accelerated drawing.
I haven't tried running any of my code recently, but my understanding is that modern video cards may not actually support VBE >=2.0 anymore, which is sort of sad actually. Hence the nvidia frame buffer driver, etc in the linux kernel. As linux's fb device maps pretty well to the vesafb driver, which should have been sufficient to support nearly any card, if the cards actually had VBE.
I don't know where you have been buying printers, but most of the low end ones have their own printer language. Samsung uses SPL which is a windows GDI based language. HP uses PCL etc...
Last I checked most of the inkjets were what we used to call "win printers". In that the windows driver does all the rasterization.
You can go to the HP or Samsung site, and "compare" printer models. The language used is listed.
In fact, I believe it should qualify as gross negligence or outright maliciousness as it violates basic management best practices and should make those doing it personally and criminally liable.
Chuckle, I'm there with you, and a lot of the manufacturing industry just woke up to the fact that the Toyota just in time models blow up spectacularly. Of course that doesn't solve the problems everywhere in the system, because every single MBA stamped out in the last 20 years has been taught that stocking parts, and having multiple suppliers is a death blow to efficiency.
The fact that even MS didn't buy into the .Net hype speaks volumes...
And thirty seconds of analysis can bring up a half dozen total deal killers for nearly any pre-existing application. Take office for example, it runs on the mac, that means ms either has to support a .net version and a non .net version, or they have to port .net to the mac too. Another is the fact that porting an existing application to .net isn't a customer facing benefit (for the ones where it is even "possible"). As a project architect, if someone came to me and said, we should port our application to .net, I would go "Nice idea, here lets make a first pass guess at how long it would take, ok, now lets try to prioritize that with these 200+ other items my team is busy adding to the product...
Frankly, they lacked the ability to achieve long-term results.. Microsoft failed to port their MOST IMPORTANT PRODUCTS (Office and VS) to the new language.
I think you fail to understand the momentum a code base gets after a few years. Porting an application to .net was a nightmare for most established applications (I personally know of a couple name brand applications that simply could not get a port "working" even with MS assistance in the early 2000s). That is one reason why you don't see a .net Photoshop, quicken, etc. Another reason is that porting something like office (or photoshop/quicken) would have required porting .net to the mac. Something MS still hasn't done. Frankly, while .net is a fantastic piece of technology, its not really the kind of technology you should base an entire application framework on. Its fine for most things, but there are simply to many unsolved problems with regard to heavily threaded applications, large memory subsystems, the GC, application latency requirements, etc. MS has made great strides in these areas but they continue to trail behind what is possible just using the native APIs. Plus, anyone interested in the possibility of cross platform (or anyone who questions whether windows will be the OS of choice in 10 years) isn't willing to tie themselves as closely to a MS only solution.
I know, it sucks, I can only run .Net apps on any Windows system from the past 10 years!
But if you had used win32, you could probably get an application to run on anything from NT 3.1, 95 ,etc to win7 if you were careful. Heck if you were _really_ careful, you could probably stick to the win32s subset and get windows 3.1 in there too. That is nearly twenty years of compatibility with a single ABI!
Then you might want to send a cease and desist to President Obama. In his remarks to the press today, he mentioned "patent reform" as part of his agenda for the next 14 months.
Patent reform from Obama, with the R's in the house? Right... I'm skeptical, but if we get a bill it will go something like this. Obama says "We need to remove patents from certain areas like software, and we need to shorten the length of time for other areas." The R's will say no we need "To extend the lifetimes of patents indefinitely, and they need to cover all aspects of life." After a long drawn out fight, Obama will cave and we will get "Patents that last 70 years beyond the lifetime of the author/corporation, and patent extensions extended into more areas of the economy to grow d'a jobs". Of course hidden in the bill will be a little blurb that only fortune 500's can sue other people for patent infringement and you can't file a patent unless you have a average yearly revenue of 10 million dollars.
How long it took the ISP's to detect the boxes and set their throttle algorithms to ignore streams from them.
The problem with w2k3, is that a lot of software detects its running on a "server" and won't install without the "extra special bend your wallet over", server edition of the software.
I know, I ran w2k3 for a few years as an upgrade to win2k, before downgrading to XP. Plus, there seems to be a certain number of titles that validate they are running on a supported platform before actually installing. The problem is that often w2k3 isn't included by vendors that think their software is desktop only. Therefore the supported list is XP,Vista,7.
In both of these cases its often possible to run the software in compatibility mode using the application compatibility toolkit. But the effort is often just not worth it.
There is a "hacky" but semi legit (as compared with actually hacking the 4G memory limit in the license) way to get around this. That is, install >4G of ram, and create a ramdisk with the extra memory. There are a number of free ramdisk products that will use the ram XP refuses to use. I'm using vsuite ramdisk (free). I've then moved my swap file to the ramdisk. Initially I thought it was going to be pretty horrible performance, but was shocked to barely notice the difference running a lot of vmware sessions consuming >6G of RAM. Same thing with photoshop.
Heck if this trick was good enough for the mac, its good enough for windows...
Doesn't seem all that great when modern versions of old technology like tape can store 4TB uncompressed and write at 650MByte/sec per drive. Actually, they will fit significantly more, as the tape drives all do inline compression in hardware. Plus, while dropping it isn't recommended, you can, and its rare to actually have data loss because of it.
Stack a few dozen drives and a few thousand tapes into a library and there isn't anything on the planet that even comes close as a backup medium in nearly any metric (TB per $, watts per TB, footprint, etc).
SVN was promised as the solution to everyone CVS woes. In the end it solved one or two problems and created a half dozen new ones more severe than anything wrong with CVS. At least, with CVS, when the crap hit the fan you fired up your favorite text editor and fixed the repository.
Git on the other-hand, when managed properly, doesn't seem to push people into corners that are extremely difficult to recover from.
git is better than all the other VCSes
Or at least its better than SVN, the previous darling of the open source movement. Frankly, its hard to imagine anything worse than CVS, but I believe SVN might actually take that cake. On the surface it sounds like such a bunch of good ideas, but the details quickly prove otherwise.
Yes, really. If you don't understand the benefits of (at the minimum) atomical multifile commits, then I question how much you've really been using CVS (and the size of your project).
Well to jump in here, CVS has warts, but nearly all of them are "tool dependent" or easy to work around. The problems with lack of atomic commits in CVS are mostly solved if a tool like bonsai is running against the CVS repository. The remaining problems are ones that aren't really solved in any of the "distributed" VCS's because they lack a way to exclude people from making conflicting changes.
The nice thing about CVS is that the file format is so simple and well understood that there are a metric crapload of tools out there, many of which reduce or remove problems associated with core deficiencies in the command line tools everyone generally associates with CVS. Furthermore, the format has been stable for so long that tools created ten years ago continue to work. For example, tkcvs provides a nice per file branch/commit graph with diffing that I want to cry when using many competing VCS tools.