Yeah, it always amazes me that we've been talking for years about web platforms, etc. No one wants to have to be logged on to write a quick letter in a word processor.
You might be too young to remember this, but that was for many years the last reason for many electric typewriter holdouts. "Why would you want minutes for your computer and word processor to start before you can type a letter, then have to wait another couple of minutes for it to print out?"
Those were valid points at the time, but as office workers moved to a mindset of having the computer powered up all the time, and as printers became shared resources, the objections were overcome.
So, applying the same ideas, I can see a situation in which being logged in to your PC (or whatever device is filling its shoes) means you're also logged in to whatever distributed applications you use. Microsoft tried this with Hailstorm, but public trust in Microsoft was around its low point at the time (assuming it hasn't significantly dropped since then), and they couldn't pull it off.
Civilization I was a game that you could play through in a few hours.
Civilization II (still my favorite!) sometimes took two sittings, but it was manageable.
Alpha Centauri took a bit longer, but the "storyline" helped break things up.
Call to Power and Civilization III each seemed to take longer than the last. I bought Civ III, spent several nights playing the same game, and uninstalled it.
Skill with a game is acquired through repeated plays, but each version of Civ has taken longer and longer to play through a game. Is Civilization IV continuing this tradition, or are you making changes to keep a game from taking weeks of real time?
I hear you. I find that in general, the able-bodied bristle more over inoffensive use of offensive terms than those with handicaps. For example, one of my best friends from high school (later my college roommate) was a double amputee. He frequently referred to parking spots marked "handicapped only" as "gimp slots", and when we were going out, if he were at the back of the group, he'd say "wait for the gimp!" and such.
Of course, if he were out in public and someone used the word to insult him, he would have taken offense. But then he would have had to take a number and get in line behind the rest of us, who would already have been beating down the offender.
I can't make a global statement--I can't read peoples' minds--but I imagine that taking unneccessary offense originates in the offended party's own guilt and insecurity.
When I read that the average age of the WoW player is 32, I was shocked. I read the boards for maybe a week before it just began to disgust me, and I havent been back.
The average age of the player base != the average age of the forum posting base. Most of the 20- and 30-somethings I know that play WoW don't post, and on the other side of things, adolescents tend to love the sound of their own voices.
If I was a developer, I'd REQUIRE insulation from that kind of thing.
Having been there, I found that people tend to behave the way you expect.
Read that again.
If you set things up expecting them to behave like immature nitwits, this will come out in your design decisions, in the way you address them, and in the way you talk to them. And they will act like immature nitwits.
Contrast this to a game like A Tale in the Desert, whose lead developer once broadcast his cell phone number in case a pending rollout caused problems for anyone. Given that level of trust (which permeates the game), people tend to act much more mature there.
Disclaimer: Gross oversimplification follows, but it gets close enough.
HTML, as originally developed, was a hodgepodge of structural ("this is a paragraph; this is a link; this is a header") and stylistic ("align this left; make that italic, make this text blink, f00l!") specifications.
When W3 (who manage the HTML spec) realized this, they came out with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), which is a way to specify the stylistic bits outside the structural bits. At that point, they deprecated the stylistic elements and attributes (like align="left"). Deprecation means "it will still work, for a while, but you ought to be using the new stuff".
"For a while" tends to get really long, when businesses are concerned. If Internet Explorer suddenly decided to throw the switch and reject anything that wasn't by-the-book correct, people would run to Mozilla in droves. In fact, for a long time Netscape was a lot more strict than IE when it came to "broken" HTML, and thus IE gained a reputation for being more "stable" on certain sites, because end-users don't see broken HTML--they see a browser that doesn't work on certain sites. So, yes, broken and non-validating HTML will be accepted by browsers for the next few decades.
Anyway, to answer your question: yes, you've been writing bad HTML code for a very long time.
At what point would you, if you were the interviewer, just get pissed of and start yelling...
That would be the point at which you decide you want a different career. The kind of reporter whose job it is to do interviews for BusinessWeek would see it getting hard to find people willing to be interviewed if he did that.
Yes, it sucks, but that's the reality of that corner of the industry.
That doesn't sound quite right, either. In a free market economy a chip maker is not required to do anything
Good point--"required" has a bit of semantic baggage attached to it.
I didn't mean it in the sense of "I am required to pay my taxes." I meant it in the sense of "I am required to breathe"--a company ignores the "requirement" at significant peril to its existence.
Perhaps you can find some Communist country where chip makers are required to produce CPUs for whatever price the buyer deems reasonable.
I understand and agree with your point, but your phrasing is off. It's not in a communist (i.e., command) economy but in a free market economy that a chip maker is required to produce CPUs for whatever price the buyer deems reasonable. If they don't, and there exists viable competition, the chip maker will suffer.
I think what you meant to say is "...where chip makers are required to produce CPUs for whatever price non-buyer entities (i.e., the government) deem reasonable."
Doubtful, given that the creator of Freespire had already changed the name before they started the publicity stunt.
It's not the first time they've offered limited-time free downloads, either--they offered a "Linspire Developers' Edition" some time ago, in a similar way.
It's just a way to drum up interest in their product. I don't see any deception in it.
Given the ratio of usb-drives-I've-owned to usb-drives-I've-killed-presumably-from-ESD (which currently sits at 1:1), I'd be more worried about non-physical threats to the integrity of the device.
Last time I zapped a usb drive, I drove home and burned a CD from the backup I'd made. That might be problematic in this case.
Take a look at the amount of "ice pack" that floats on water, vs the amount of ice sitting on land (i.e., most of northern Canada Russia, and just about all of Greenland).
Then look at which is further south, and think about which is likely to melt first...
One of my favorite interview questions if I suspect someone has "book learning" rather than real knowledge is to ask them to sketch out the OSI model. If they can do that, I ask what layer TCP/IP represents. If they fail to acknowledge TCP and IP as separate layers, then they probably only have a passing knowledge of network programming.
Right. My point is that while the model has been dusted off and retrofitted to more or less match reality, the OSI stack itself is dead (except for a few protocols which survive in legacy systems).
Ack. That came out much harsher that I'd intended.
The last part wasn't aimed at you in any event--it's just that those guys have some fabulous stories that don't ever get told in the "official" literature.
Defining Ethernet and TCP/IP as layers of the OSI stack is about as correct as defining the XBox as the successor to the Playstation.
The OSI stack was a failed, over-complex set of network protocols that tried to wrest control from the established, pragmatic, but not-officially-ISO-sanctioned TCP/IP (aka DARPA) protocol suite.
The TCP/IP suite model defined four layers: Network, Internetwork, Transport, and Application. That's (for example) Ethernet, IP, TCP, and HTTP for most implementations of teh Intarweb.
The OSI _model_ (not stack) is, in fact, the seven-layer cake you mention. Over the past decade or so, networking companies have "retrofitted" the OSI model onto the de facto stack, but you'll notice that they get a little wishy-washy at Layer 1, Layer 6, and Layer 7. Guess why? Because in the OSI Stack, there were actual protocols specified for those levels.
(definitely glad I learned the networking side of CS from folkswhoinvented it, rather than someone who learned it later, out of a book...)
It would, if the game company made it possible to import a full roster with artwork, and if it didn't take an army of very football-savvy statisticians and artists to come up with a full roster to download.
Even more to the point, that feature just won't happen. That would be asking the game company to expend effort on a feature that would kill their revenue.
Symbol has had a similar device that handles 48 access ports (access points stripped of their switching hardware) for about two years now. That's three times what this does.
Yes, it's all in one device. To me, that's a bad idea. With the Xirrus device, you're forced to have all the transceivers in one place, even if it would be better (due to shadowing and multipath issues) to split them into two groups. With the Symbol device, you can split up the access ports however you need them, to cover dead zones, etc.
I mean, you did do a site survey before installing your large-scale wireless network, didn't you?
(Disclaimer: I used to work for Symbol, but I'm not really a Symbol promoter. I don't even have stock.)
Not quite. Claims in a patent are independent, except where they specifically refer to other claims. If you infringe on one claim but not the other 20, you're still in infringement.
That's why patents usually have a long list of claims, starting with the first, most general claim and ending with the last, most specific claims.
It's a defensive technique: prior art can invalidate the most general claims, but not the later, specific claims. Competitors' design-around-patent efforts can avoid the later specific claims, but may still infringe on the earlier, general ones.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, it always amazes me that we've been talking for years about web platforms, etc. No one wants to have to be logged on to write a quick letter in a word processor.
You might be too young to remember this, but that was for many years the last reason for many electric typewriter holdouts. "Why would you want minutes for your computer and word processor to start before you can type a letter, then have to wait another couple of minutes for it to print out?"
Those were valid points at the time, but as office workers moved to a mindset of having the computer powered up all the time, and as printers became shared resources, the objections were overcome.
So, applying the same ideas, I can see a situation in which being logged in to your PC (or whatever device is filling its shoes) means you're also logged in to whatever distributed applications you use. Microsoft tried this with Hailstorm, but public trust in Microsoft was around its low point at the time (assuming it hasn't significantly dropped since then), and they couldn't pull it off.
...is that stories like this could be duplicates, and you'd never know it.
Civilization I was a game that you could play through in a few hours.
Civilization II (still my favorite!) sometimes took two sittings, but it was manageable.
Alpha Centauri took a bit longer, but the "storyline" helped break things up.
Call to Power and Civilization III each seemed to take longer than the last. I bought Civ III, spent several nights playing the same game, and uninstalled it.
Skill with a game is acquired through repeated plays, but each version of Civ has taken longer and longer to play through a game. Is Civilization IV continuing this tradition, or are you making changes to keep a game from taking weeks of real time?
I hear you. I find that in general, the able-bodied bristle more over inoffensive use of offensive terms than those with handicaps. For example, one of my best friends from high school (later my college roommate) was a double amputee. He frequently referred to parking spots marked "handicapped only" as "gimp slots", and when we were going out, if he were at the back of the group, he'd say "wait for the gimp!" and such.
Of course, if he were out in public and someone used the word to insult him, he would have taken offense. But then he would have had to take a number and get in line behind the rest of us, who would already have been beating down the offender.
I can't make a global statement--I can't read peoples' minds--but I imagine that taking unneccessary offense originates in the offended party's own guilt and insecurity.
When I read that the average age of the WoW player is 32, I was shocked. I read the boards for maybe a week before it just began to disgust me, and I havent been back.
The average age of the player base != the average age of the forum posting base. Most of the 20- and 30-somethings I know that play WoW don't post, and on the other side of things, adolescents tend to love the sound of their own voices.
If I was a developer, I'd REQUIRE insulation from that kind of thing.
Having been there, I found that people tend to behave the way you expect.
Read that again.
If you set things up expecting them to behave like immature nitwits, this will come out in your design decisions, in the way you address them, and in the way you talk to them. And they will act like immature nitwits.
Contrast this to a game like A Tale in the Desert, whose lead developer once broadcast his cell phone number in case a pending rollout caused problems for anyone. Given that level of trust (which permeates the game), people tend to act much more mature there.
Disclaimer: Gross oversimplification follows, but it gets close enough.
HTML, as originally developed, was a hodgepodge of structural ("this is a paragraph; this is a link; this is a header") and stylistic ("align this left; make that italic, make this text blink, f00l!") specifications.
When W3 (who manage the HTML spec) realized this, they came out with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), which is a way to specify the stylistic bits outside the structural bits. At that point, they deprecated the stylistic elements and attributes (like align="left"). Deprecation means "it will still work, for a while, but you ought to be using the new stuff".
"For a while" tends to get really long, when businesses are concerned. If Internet Explorer suddenly decided to throw the switch and reject anything that wasn't by-the-book correct, people would run to Mozilla in droves. In fact, for a long time Netscape was a lot more strict than IE when it came to "broken" HTML, and thus IE gained a reputation for being more "stable" on certain sites, because end-users don't see broken HTML--they see a browser that doesn't work on certain sites. So, yes, broken and non-validating HTML will be accepted by browsers for the next few decades.
Anyway, to answer your question: yes, you've been writing bad HTML code for a very long time.
At what point would you, if you were the interviewer, just get pissed of and start yelling...
That would be the point at which you decide you want a different career. The kind of reporter whose job it is to do interviews for BusinessWeek would see it getting hard to find people willing to be interviewed if he did that.
Yes, it sucks, but that's the reality of that corner of the industry.
That doesn't sound quite right, either. In a free market economy a chip maker is not required to do anything
Good point--"required" has a bit of semantic baggage attached to it.
I didn't mean it in the sense of "I am required to pay my taxes." I meant it in the sense of "I am required to breathe"--a company ignores the "requirement" at significant peril to its existence.
Perhaps you can find some Communist country where chip makers are required to produce CPUs for whatever price the buyer deems reasonable.
I understand and agree with your point, but your phrasing is off. It's not in a communist (i.e., command) economy but in a free market economy that a chip maker is required to produce CPUs for whatever price the buyer deems reasonable. If they don't, and there exists viable competition, the chip maker will suffer.
I think what you meant to say is "...where chip makers are required to produce CPUs for whatever price non-buyer entities (i.e., the government) deem reasonable."
Yes, that was a Logitech mouse as well. I was a bit sorry that it didn't really catch on.
Doubtful, given that the creator of Freespire had already changed the name before they started the publicity stunt.
It's not the first time they've offered limited-time free downloads, either--they offered a "Linspire Developers' Edition" some time ago, in a similar way.
It's just a way to drum up interest in their product. I don't see any deception in it.
Given the ratio of usb-drives-I've-owned to usb-drives-I've-killed-presumably-from-ESD (which currently sits at 1:1), I'd be more worried about non-physical threats to the integrity of the device.
Last time I zapped a usb drive, I drove home and burned a CD from the backup I'd made. That might be problematic in this case.
Take a look at the amount of "ice pack" that floats on water, vs the amount of ice sitting on land (i.e., most of northern Canada Russia, and just about all of Greenland).
Then look at which is further south, and think about which is likely to melt first...
One of my favorite interview questions if I suspect someone has "book learning" rather than real knowledge is to ask them to sketch out the OSI model. If they can do that, I ask what layer TCP/IP represents. If they fail to acknowledge TCP and IP as separate layers, then they probably only have a passing knowledge of network programming.
Right. My point is that while the model has been dusted off and retrofitted to more or less match reality, the OSI stack itself is dead (except for a few protocols which survive in legacy systems).
Ack. That came out much harsher that I'd intended.
The last part wasn't aimed at you in any event--it's just that those guys have some fabulous stories that don't ever get told in the "official" literature.
Defining Ethernet and TCP/IP as layers of the OSI stack is about as correct as defining the XBox as the successor to the Playstation.
The OSI stack was a failed, over-complex set of network protocols that tried to wrest control from the established, pragmatic, but not-officially-ISO-sanctioned TCP/IP (aka DARPA) protocol suite.
The TCP/IP suite model defined four layers: Network, Internetwork, Transport, and Application. That's (for example) Ethernet, IP, TCP, and HTTP for most implementations of teh Intarweb.
The OSI _model_ (not stack) is, in fact, the seven-layer cake you mention. Over the past decade or so, networking companies have "retrofitted" the OSI model onto the de facto stack, but you'll notice that they get a little wishy-washy at Layer 1, Layer 6, and Layer 7. Guess why? Because in the OSI Stack, there were actual protocols specified for those levels.
(definitely glad I learned the networking side of CS from folks who invented it, rather than someone who learned it later, out of a book...)
Excise the word "paid". This is the poster getting free advertising, I think
It would, if the game company made it possible to import a full roster with artwork, and if it didn't take an army of very football-savvy statisticians and artists to come up with a full roster to download.
Even more to the point, that feature just won't happen. That would be asking the game company to expend effort on a feature that would kill their revenue.
Symbol has had a similar device that handles 48 access ports (access points stripped of their switching hardware) for about two years now. That's three times what this does.
Yes, it's all in one device. To me, that's a bad idea. With the Xirrus device, you're forced to have all the transceivers in one place, even if it would be better (due to shadowing and multipath issues) to split them into two groups. With the Symbol device, you can split up the access ports however you need them, to cover dead zones, etc.
I mean, you did do a site survey before installing your large-scale wireless network, didn't you?
(Disclaimer: I used to work for Symbol, but I'm not really a Symbol promoter. I don't even have stock.)
Finally! We're only a few decades away from the projection technology used in the old Scooby Doo cartoons.
Not quite. Claims in a patent are independent, except where they specifically refer to other claims. If you infringe on one claim but not the other 20, you're still in infringement.
That's why patents usually have a long list of claims, starting with the first, most general claim and ending with the last, most specific claims.
It's a defensive technique: prior art can invalidate the most general claims, but not the later, specific claims. Competitors' design-around-patent efforts can avoid the later specific claims, but may still infringe on the earlier, general ones.
You're either young or have a short memory.
No serious gamers wanted to play games in Windows 3.1.
Then no serious gamers wanted to play games in Windows 95... but that got better with DirectX.
Then no serious gamers wanted to play games in Windows NT (~Windows 2000 timeframe)... but that got better with XP.
Now maybe no serious gamers will want to play games in the first release of Windows Vista. Have patience...
And just for the trifecta, I want to see 300,00 whitebox Linux machines NAKED and PETRIFIED.
It's a pity they couldn't have mounted a "scratch shuttle" for this flight and flown it with "scratch monkeys."
:-)
(Am I now so old that no one else will get the joke?)
You might be old. On the other hand, you might just have read The New Hacker's Dictionary, or its current incarnation, The Jargon File.