Sounds good. The past few large enterprises I've worked at all officially supported both IE6 (which they were locked in to because of all of their government-mandated training and timecard and expense report apps still only work in IE6), and Firefox, which they now try to test with and support with all new applications in order to avoid the IE6/ActiveX situation happening again. It's actually pretty awesome that Microsoft's embrace-extend-extinguish methodology worked so well that even Microsoft can't get anyone to upgrade to IE7/8/9, which pretty much leaves Firefox 3.x / 4.x / 5.x as the only modern browser supported by many enterprises for day-to-day use (and we whip out IE6 just for timecards and annual training).
It's kinda silly seeing the big brouhaha over the versioning change to 5.x, likely to keep pace with the version inflation practiced by Java and now Chrome (not to mention IE). But I'm pretty sure level heads will prevail.
Yeah, I enjoy MS and Apple -bashing as much as the next guy, but digging at the authenticity of some poor schlob's lame explanatory graphic that was probably pulled from a PPT slide is the argument a moron would make;-) A desperate moron at that:P
Having worked for some large companies that invested in some pretty slick video teleconferencing / telepresence setups, I'd include that while it is pretty slick, doing it "right" requires a fair amount of effort and additional staffing, especially when going to larger multi-party conferences.
First off, many people failed to do enough testing, so they'd waste the first few minutes of a meeting fiddling with their various mute controls (on the mic, on the mixer, and finally in the VTC hardware itself). Or else someone wouldn't have their audio settings right (with poor levels, noise cancellation, or without acoustic echo cancellation). People would get confused about audio conference bridging, and bring in the phone conference line in more than one location, leading to some awesome echoing and shouts of "please mute your line if you're not talking!" (which kind of destroys the line of open communications and immersiveness of meetings).
Finally, for large meetings, even when everything is working, you still sort of want someone to keep the cameras trained on the speaker/presenter and content, without being distracting by constantly fiddling with the view.
Personally, I do think it will catch on a bit more when the features and capabilities of the high end Tandberg / Polycom equipment becomes affordable as a separate device in your "telepresence room" that's outfitted more like a TV studio. But as a casual add-on to existing devices, it won't really take off due to casual presentation quality being not worthwhile.
Always looking for things to motivate my young aspiring computer-game-designer offspring. When I was their age (8) I wasn't really exposed to computers all that much, but did already have exposure to Logo. Any good sites online that might provide some experience similar to that? The only one I know of is Lightbot.
The wife and kids are heavily into Minecraft at the moment, and I'm hoping to get them into building more redstone circuits. (unfortunately, minecrafwiki's realstone circuits seem to be down at the moment). I'm pretty tickled by the whole concept of constructing complex circuits the size of buildings out of basic NOT-gate building blocks, which has kinda been a running joke in IC logic design classes forever.
What are other good programming games / intros to expose them to?
Meh, I've been served a takedown notice from my ISP before (some star wars video on my anonymous ftp site... that's how long ago it was), and it was more like my version. I promptly deleted all those videos and that was the last I heard of it.
I'm fairly certain Google would work a similar way, where maybe the studios would give them the list of md5sums of infringing content, and then they'd notify any customers with breaches without really telling the studios who they were.
Anyway, the RIAA/MPAA legal proceedings so far look more like a scare tactic, with the courts dropping most of the cases vs. John Does, except for a handful of high profile cases. And even those are mostly for file sharing, not just file having.
If later on they come back and say "hey! Here's a list of files you have that look like they were downloaded from illegal public torrents. Delete them and purchase them from us." Then you just delete them, and... don't purchase them.
Music is only popular because people listen to it. If you stop listening to certain music due to political reasons (i.e. DRM / enforcement), then that just becomes part of the cultural landscape of music. If you let the recording industry push their musical tastes onto you and charge you for it, then, well, there are other words for that kind of relationship.
I dunno, I would have dismissed her as an attention whore too if I hadn't found her via her Linux videos and saw how she was actually quite articulate with the subject (she also professes to be into video games, but the quality of her Linux coverage is much better). I kinda wish she'd do more Linux coverage than some of the other stuff, but whatever. Go watch them!
Thanks for, um, sharing your own stereotypes of geek girls. Isn't it more sexist to stick to stereotypes of how you expect a geek girl to behave, though? "Geek girls are butt ugly" isn't going to improve anything for anyone.
If you're looking for more down-to-earth geek girls, try http://www.unix-girl.com/ I guess. I've used her work for reference more than a few times. But it would be a bit more difficult to present her as a role model for my young geek-in-training daughter, since unix-girl sticks to the more traditional web formats.
Leave the exploiting of fantasies to Hollywood. Ech if I can't stop rolling my eyes at Trinity on The Matrix, and even Felicia Day on The Guild overdoes it a bit (though I guess that's the point).
Or at least they get paid virtual currency for it. Are these hookup services catering to the "need" for girl gamers to capitalize in the "oldest profession" style? Is this an overall good trend in getting the industry to pay more attention to girl gamers, or will it only detract from gender equity? Discuss.
At some point I found a clothing store that I actually liked (Today's Man). Needless to say, they promptly went out of business.
And that's why I ignore the fashion industry.
Well, that, and because my extended family in Thailand is always sending me surplus apparel from the factory markets before they get their name-brand markups.
We just need more geek girls in the media, that should help bring their plight front and center.
This vloguer is also a Linux geek, which is how I originally stumbled upon her (she has some of the most articulate compiz nowto videos I've ever seen) http://www.nixiepixel.com/
I'm curious to see what that looks like in their bookkeeping accounts.
Whenever Verizon overcharges me, I put it under "Expenses | Prostitution", since whining at their customer support feels like phone sex. Probably could be just as illegal as supporting terrorists!
To this day, Verizon is the only company that I still pay bills to using paper checks... I refuse to enroll into any auto billing scheme that lets them dip into my accounts of their own free will.
Nope. Didn't even notice MySpace come and go. I might have had a Geocities site at some point, but it was just a mirror.
I already had a web page with all my stuff on it, and most of my closer friends still hang out on IRC. So there wasn't really much point to Facebook until it hit critical mass among non-computer geeks.
Word... I got sucked in during the early days when there wasn't really much to do other than play Mafia Wars (I blame my wife, it was one of the few games she's ever gotten into). Was primarily interested in figuring out the game mechanic, as well as marveling at their psychological hacking techniques (pure genius... if only someone would apply this type of random reward & leveling system to education, we could work wonders, or churn out our own suicide bombers, or at least do something amazing). Anyway, after playing through some of our cultural heritage "campaigns" (Moscow and Bangkok), got stuck on some glitch and took that opportunity to quit cold turkey and never looked back.
But then a lot of my childhood friends started popping up, and now that a lot of these "too cool for facebook" people are finally leaving, it's actually becoming kind of nice again.
Since ethanol has ~66% (OK, actually closer to 64%) lower energy density than gasoline, then you will need to carry 50% more ethanol get the same power out of it.
If your fuel is watered down with 10% ethanol, you'll need somewhere between 3% and 5% more fuel to store the same amount of energy in a tank of gas, which was my claim.
Ethanol does have a higher octane rating of 109. Which means when you buy 87 Octane E10, they're probably mixing it with even lower grade gasoline. Not that they're passing any of these savings on to the consumer.
But yeah, no wonder they're pushing for an increase to E15.
Guess what? No-one wants to deal with a department.
Makes sense to me... Also, no reason to single out the IT department... there are lots of departments involved whenever you want to turn on a new service, and even if your IT department is very competent that still adds lots of extra bureaucracy and coordination ( =meetings)
So you want to turn on a simple new service, say a little website and a database that runs on a single box connected to the internet? With the traditional approach, you would have needed to do stuff like:
Get project launched with signoff from management, so the beancounters can allocate budget and resources for it
Get everyone together to come up with a design, deal with guy who wants to push past the corporate standard HW/SW builds
Put the equipment through procurement. Since you often want to kind of infrastructure stuff like this fall under capital budget rather than expense, so you can write off depreciation for a few years, you end up overspec'ing the box to be $3k-$5k so it meets the capital threshold, when it otherwise a $1k machine would have been fine. Wait 6-12 weeks for the equipment to actually arrive.
Get equipment checked in and tracked by inventory
Deploy and test, yay!
Pass some security audit so the network people finally open up the firewall to let your server out in the open.
Make sure you have some rotation of IT staff available on a 24x7 rotation to service the machine if something breaks. When something breaks, tap into the spares pile, and go through the RMA process to replace the broken parts.
Going with cloud provisioning, you pretty much bypass most of that. Even if your IT department already operates like they maintain a private cloud, they probably don't have excess budget/capacity to just take your order and provision a piece out of their cluster... since they tend to only get just barely enough budget approved to support the bare minimum projects on their plate at the beginning of the year. The commercial clouds have likely invested in excess capacity in advance, and already run a hardware maintenance rotation, and have dark hardware sitting by ready to power on and slice you a piece of the pie.
Yay! So if this eventually leads to E10 going away, does that mean we can all look forward to a 3% increase in gas mileage? Will gas prices go up 3% to compensate for not being watered down? Were gas prices reduced 3% in the first place to compensate for ethanol having only ~66% of the energy density of gasoline in the first place?
I think we need a period where products sold in the USA have to be 100% made in the USA, from the first stroke of the pen to the last decal on the front panel. Otherwise, this illusory period of "production" of IP will collapse with the illusion of protection our IP laws are (just barely) shoring up; other countries don't give the south end of a northbound rat for our IP laws. By pulling the entire product process within our borders, we create a level playing field for our manufacturing economy to restart. Then we could see the large, competent pool of engineers and programmers we already *have* rehired.
That's pretty much what the "job security clearance" does for defense work. It's like a big corporate welfare program that sucks up half the US discretionary budget, and all you really have to do to take part in this lucrative market is be a US citizen and have a clean drug and criminal history and agree to get kicked out of the program and maybe get some additional criminal charges if you don't follow the somewhat ridiculous IP protection procedures.
The work improves national security on two fronts! One by sort of staying "ahead" of other countries' military technology, maybe (as long as everything is shielded in secrecy, no one really knows! And that's really all that matters as a deterrent). Meanwhile, on the home front, it pretty much keeps a ton of smart, resourceful people who might otherwise participate in revolutions (because they like to fix problems) from doing anything even remotely against the current government out of fear of falling off their bacon train.
So defense spending is pretty much genius from that perspective, for keeping the power structure within a country stable, even if it isn't particularly useful for much else.
Engineers like to solve problems. I think it's fair to say that China is running some awesome production efficiency, even if they're treating their people like tools. But people are their greatest resource, and the world is reaping the rewards of Chinese productivity (for better or for worse).
In the west, we've sort of run out of meaningful problems that absolutely need to be tackled (or "declared war" upon), so politicians are mainly just here to redistribute wealth.
Doh! And I had just paid money for some (on sale) version of Trackmania. Thanks for the link! Especially since all these new games sound like boring "fantasy" MMO grindfests.
Had a lot of fun with Alien Swarm back in the day... hoping they start exchanging features with Tremulous!
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds good. The past few large enterprises I've worked at all officially supported both IE6 (which they were locked in to because of all of their government-mandated training and timecard and expense report apps still only work in IE6), and Firefox, which they now try to test with and support with all new applications in order to avoid the IE6/ActiveX situation happening again. It's actually pretty awesome that Microsoft's embrace-extend-extinguish methodology worked so well that even Microsoft can't get anyone to upgrade to IE7/8/9, which pretty much leaves Firefox 3.x / 4.x / 5.x as the only modern browser supported by many enterprises for day-to-day use (and we whip out IE6 just for timecards and annual training).
It's kinda silly seeing the big brouhaha over the versioning change to 5.x, likely to keep pace with the version inflation practiced by Java and now Chrome (not to mention IE). But I'm pretty sure level heads will prevail.
Yeah, I enjoy MS and Apple -bashing as much as the next guy, but digging at the authenticity of some poor schlob's lame explanatory graphic that was probably pulled from a PPT slide is the argument a moron would make ;-) A desperate moron at that :P
Having worked for some large companies that invested in some pretty slick video teleconferencing / telepresence setups, I'd include that while it is pretty slick, doing it "right" requires a fair amount of effort and additional staffing, especially when going to larger multi-party conferences.
First off, many people failed to do enough testing, so they'd waste the first few minutes of a meeting fiddling with their various mute controls (on the mic, on the mixer, and finally in the VTC hardware itself). Or else someone wouldn't have their audio settings right (with poor levels, noise cancellation, or without acoustic echo cancellation). People would get confused about audio conference bridging, and bring in the phone conference line in more than one location, leading to some awesome echoing and shouts of "please mute your line if you're not talking!" (which kind of destroys the line of open communications and immersiveness of meetings).
Finally, for large meetings, even when everything is working, you still sort of want someone to keep the cameras trained on the speaker/presenter and content, without being distracting by constantly fiddling with the view.
Personally, I do think it will catch on a bit more when the features and capabilities of the high end Tandberg / Polycom equipment becomes affordable as a separate device in your "telepresence room" that's outfitted more like a TV studio. But as a casual add-on to existing devices, it won't really take off due to casual presentation quality being not worthwhile.
Always looking for things to motivate my young aspiring computer-game-designer offspring. When I was their age (8) I wasn't really exposed to computers all that much, but did already have exposure to Logo. Any good sites online that might provide some experience similar to that? The only one I know of is Lightbot.
The wife and kids are heavily into Minecraft at the moment, and I'm hoping to get them into building more redstone circuits. (unfortunately, minecrafwiki's realstone circuits seem to be down at the moment). I'm pretty tickled by the whole concept of constructing complex circuits the size of buildings out of basic NOT-gate building blocks, which has kinda been a running joke in IC logic design classes forever.
What are other good programming games / intros to expose them to?
Meh, I've been served a takedown notice from my ISP before (some star wars video on my anonymous ftp site... that's how long ago it was), and it was more like my version. I promptly deleted all those videos and that was the last I heard of it.
I'm fairly certain Google would work a similar way, where maybe the studios would give them the list of md5sums of infringing content, and then they'd notify any customers with breaches without really telling the studios who they were.
Anyway, the RIAA/MPAA legal proceedings so far look more like a scare tactic, with the courts dropping most of the cases vs. John Does, except for a handful of high profile cases. And even those are mostly for file sharing, not just file having.
Pretty much.
If later on they come back and say "hey! Here's a list of files you have that look like they were downloaded from illegal public torrents. Delete them and purchase them from us." Then you just delete them, and... don't purchase them.
Music is only popular because people listen to it. If you stop listening to certain music due to political reasons (i.e. DRM / enforcement), then that just becomes part of the cultural landscape of music. If you let the recording industry push their musical tastes onto you and charge you for it, then, well, there are other words for that kind of relationship.
I dunno, I would have dismissed her as an attention whore too if I hadn't found her via her Linux videos and saw how she was actually quite articulate with the subject (she also professes to be into video games, but the quality of her Linux coverage is much better). I kinda wish she'd do more Linux coverage than some of the other stuff, but whatever. Go watch them!
Thanks for, um, sharing your own stereotypes of geek girls. Isn't it more sexist to stick to stereotypes of how you expect a geek girl to behave, though? "Geek girls are butt ugly" isn't going to improve anything for anyone.
If you're looking for more down-to-earth geek girls, try http://www.unix-girl.com/ I guess. I've used her work for reference more than a few times. But it would be a bit more difficult to present her as a role model for my young geek-in-training daughter, since unix-girl sticks to the more traditional web formats.
Leave the exploiting of fantasies to Hollywood. Ech if I can't stop rolling my eyes at Trinity on The Matrix, and even Felicia Day on The Guild overdoes it a bit (though I guess that's the point).
In Soviet Russia, girl gamers play YOU!
Or at least they get paid virtual currency for it. Are these hookup services catering to the "need" for girl gamers to capitalize in the "oldest profession" style? Is this an overall good trend in getting the industry to pay more attention to girl gamers, or will it only detract from gender equity? Discuss.
At some point I found a clothing store that I actually liked (Today's Man). Needless to say, they promptly went out of business.
And that's why I ignore the fashion industry.
Well, that, and because my extended family in Thailand is always sending me surplus apparel from the factory markets before they get their name-brand markups.
We just need more geek girls in the media, that should help bring their plight front and center.
This vloguer is also a Linux geek, which is how I originally stumbled upon her (she has some of the most articulate compiz nowto videos I've ever seen)
http://www.nixiepixel.com/
That sounds a bit like how a friend of mine has to donate an equal amount to the EFF for every game he buys from Blizzard.
I'm curious to see what that looks like in their bookkeeping accounts.
Whenever Verizon overcharges me, I put it under "Expenses | Prostitution", since whining at their customer support feels like phone sex. Probably could be just as illegal as supporting terrorists!
To this day, Verizon is the only company that I still pay bills to using paper checks... I refuse to enroll into any auto billing scheme that lets them dip into my accounts of their own free will.
Some way that trackable, I suppose? Wired transfer with fractional pennies as a watermark?
Ooh, is this finally a thread in which Slashcode bashing isn't offtopic?
What would you use to write slashcode in today if not mod_perl?
Actually, are there any viable alternatives to javascript? Other than, you know, flash?
How can the Onion survive now that the real news is reporting the special election to fill Wiener's seat?
(and how are Japanese newscasts reporting it? rawr)
Nope. Didn't even notice MySpace come and go. I might have had a Geocities site at some point, but it was just a mirror.
I already had a web page with all my stuff on it, and most of my closer friends still hang out on IRC. So there wasn't really much point to Facebook until it hit critical mass among non-computer geeks.
Word... I got sucked in during the early days when there wasn't really much to do other than play Mafia Wars (I blame my wife, it was one of the few games she's ever gotten into). Was primarily interested in figuring out the game mechanic, as well as marveling at their psychological hacking techniques (pure genius... if only someone would apply this type of random reward & leveling system to education, we could work wonders, or churn out our own suicide bombers, or at least do something amazing). Anyway, after playing through some of our cultural heritage "campaigns" (Moscow and Bangkok), got stuck on some glitch and took that opportunity to quit cold turkey and never looked back.
But then a lot of my childhood friends started popping up, and now that a lot of these "too cool for facebook" people are finally leaving, it's actually becoming kind of nice again.
Fine, fine, I'll look it up for you :P
One liter of ethanol contain 21.1 MJ, [...] and a liter of gasoline approximately 32.6 MJ
. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_fuel (yeah, chastise me for citing wikipedia next :P )
Since ethanol has ~66% (OK, actually closer to 64%) lower energy density than gasoline, then you will need to carry 50% more ethanol get the same power out of it.
If your fuel is watered down with 10% ethanol, you'll need somewhere between 3% and 5% more fuel to store the same amount of energy in a tank of gas, which was my claim.
Ethanol does have a higher octane rating of 109. Which means when you buy 87 Octane E10, they're probably mixing it with even lower grade gasoline. Not that they're passing any of these savings on to the consumer.
But yeah, no wonder they're pushing for an increase to E15.
Guess what? No-one wants to deal with a department.
Makes sense to me... Also, no reason to single out the IT department... there are lots of departments involved whenever you want to turn on a new service, and even if your IT department is very competent that still adds lots of extra bureaucracy and coordination ( =meetings)
So you want to turn on a simple new service, say a little website and a database that runs on a single box connected to the internet? With the traditional approach, you would have needed to do stuff like:
Going with cloud provisioning, you pretty much bypass most of that.
Even if your IT department already operates like they maintain a private cloud, they probably don't have excess budget/capacity to just take your order and provision a piece out of their cluster... since they tend to only get just barely enough budget approved to support the bare minimum projects on their plate at the beginning of the year. The commercial clouds have likely invested in excess capacity in advance, and already run a hardware maintenance rotation, and have dark hardware sitting by ready to power on and slice you a piece of the pie.
Yay! So if this eventually leads to E10 going away, does that mean we can all look forward to a 3% increase in gas mileage? Will gas prices go up 3% to compensate for not being watered down? Were gas prices reduced 3% in the first place to compensate for ethanol having only ~66% of the energy density of gasoline in the first place?
I highly doubt it :-P
Where do all the whiners think their food currently comes from anyway?
Eat - shit - compost - grain - bovine - deadbeef - Eat.
We're just cutting out some of the middlemen! :-P
Gotta find something useful to do with urban agriculture
I think we need a period where products sold in the USA have to be 100% made in the USA, from the first stroke of the pen to the last decal on the front panel. Otherwise, this illusory period of "production" of IP will collapse with the illusion of protection our IP laws are (just barely) shoring up; other countries don't give the south end of a northbound rat for our IP laws. By pulling the entire product process within our borders, we create a level playing field for our manufacturing economy to restart. Then we could see the large, competent pool of engineers and programmers we already *have* rehired.
That's pretty much what the "job security clearance" does for defense work. It's like a big corporate welfare program that sucks up half the US discretionary budget, and all you really have to do to take part in this lucrative market is be a US citizen and have a clean drug and criminal history and agree to get kicked out of the program and maybe get some additional criminal charges if you don't follow the somewhat ridiculous IP protection procedures.
The work improves national security on two fronts! One by sort of staying "ahead" of other countries' military technology, maybe (as long as everything is shielded in secrecy, no one really knows! And that's really all that matters as a deterrent). Meanwhile, on the home front, it pretty much keeps a ton of smart, resourceful people who might otherwise participate in revolutions (because they like to fix problems) from doing anything even remotely against the current government out of fear of falling off their bacon train.
So defense spending is pretty much genius from that perspective, for keeping the power structure within a country stable, even if it isn't particularly useful for much else.
http://politics.slashdot.org/story/11/05/19/0219254/8-of-Chinas-Top-9-Govt-Officials-Are-Engineers
Engineers like to solve problems. I think it's fair to say that China is running some awesome production efficiency, even if they're treating their people like tools. But people are their greatest resource, and the world is reaping the rewards of Chinese productivity (for better or for worse).
In the west, we've sort of run out of meaningful problems that absolutely need to be tackled (or "declared war" upon), so politicians are mainly just here to redistribute wealth.
Why would you want to be an engineer?
I became an engineer because you get to play with better toys.
http://wallbase.cc/wallpaper/805000
Doh! And I had just paid money for some (on sale) version of Trackmania. Thanks for the link! Especially since all these new games sound like boring "fantasy" MMO grindfests.
Had a lot of fun with Alien Swarm back in the day... hoping they start exchanging features with Tremulous!