If you click on his name, it shows he's one of those social media guys. "Slight" would be an understatement, and understandably - it's his job.
Plus, Facebook is in the news for its' privacy screw-ups. They have less than 3 months left in their deal with the Canadian government to bring their site into compliance with Canadian law (which is what got the whole "Facebook has a privacy problem" thing going 9 months ago, and got other governments to then launch similar probes).
It's about economies of scale, and the convenience that comes with it.
If you set up a project on Sourceforge, or Google Code, or Github, you get a VCS server (with a web-based browser), a forum, a wiki, a mailing list manager, and a bug tracker, all integrated together. Setting that up takes a few minutes. How long would it take you to set all those things up on your own server?
The trade-off is that you give up control of the project hosting. But for most of us, that's a good deal, since we can spend time coding (or drinking beer) instead of dealing with the infrastructure.
There's no reason why you can't run svn on your own server, and this way you can review code changes before they're committed. Post only tarballs of releases to the general public. Devs can take the tarball, untar it and svn update on their local vcs to stay in sync. They shouldn't be pushing updates willy-nilly anyway. One person should do the reviews.
Forum software is quick to set up - you just untar it, go to the appropriate url (something like yourdomain.tld/admin/install/), click on a few things, fill in a few more things, and you're done.
Same with a wiki.
Most hosting providers have a control panel so that you don't even need to look for the tarball to install - just pick it from the list of install scripts.
Ditto for mailing lists, bug tracking, etc.
Say you devote an entire evening to it (2-3 hours). You can pick the cms, bug tracker, wiki, mlm, etc., that YOU prefer, or try out a bunch of them.
And if there's a problem, or you want to do some customization, you can fix it yourself. Locked yourself out of the cms because you forgot your password? Create a new account, use a new password, then use your control panel to access the database back end and copy the encrypted password from your new account to your old account and the problem is fixed. No 3-hour wait, never mind 3 years.
Sure, post it to Freshmeat and Sourceforge, but don't be dependent on them. Things don't break often, but when they do, it's nice to be able to just go in and fix it.
You don't have much leverage when using a free service. It's not like web hosting is all that expensive. He could have registered the.com,.org, and.net addresses for a total of $30 (as of today the.com and.net are still available), spend another $100 a year on hosting, and had a 1-800 phone number to call.
With both hosting and domain names so cheap, it doesn't make sense not to grab the "top 3" if you're going to be doing an open-source project, like I recently did for unjava.com/org/net How many times have you gone to the wrong TLD and gotten a crappy squatter page, like php.org instead of php.net, or groklaw.org instead of groklaw.net, or mysql.net.
It also gives you the possibility, at a later date, to move different content and services to different domains. For example, the developers wiki could eventually be located at yourdomain.org, the public wiki and things like "get paid support" at yourdomain.com, and any interactive services (like game servers) located at yourdomain.net.
In the case of chess software based on python:
developers - pychess.org
game server - pychess.net
general - pychess.com
They could all be hosted on the same machine, but if, for example, the game server became popular, it could be moved to its own box.
There are still plenty of good, short domain names that are available on the "big 3" TLDs. You just have to be a bit imaginative.
The article is trying to claim that because people spent $100 on downloaded stuff (music, etc) they won't change to another phone and lose their content.
At 10 cents a day amortized over 3 years, that's cheap!
It just proves today's Apple customers are cheap.
on
Why Apple Is So Sticky
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
This averages to ~$100 of content for each installed device,' Whitmore writes, 'suggesting switching costs are relatively high
I've been saying for a while that the iPhone is no longer a "premium" brand. High school kids have them. If $100 is "relatively high", then those iPhone customers are not what Apple makes them out to be, especially when amortized over the cost of a 3-year phone plan - $100 is less than $3 a month. Less than $0.10 a day. How much cheaper can you get? Are iPhone customers reduced to saying "Buddy, can you spare a dime?"
I will claim that there is no such thing as a selfless act.
Why did Schindler help the jews? He was going against social pressure, risked having a bullet put through his head, etc.
Why do people unthinkingly (before they even have time to formulate the thought) dive on live grenades to save strangers? They're certainly not going to get anything out of it? The pressure of the social norm doesn't come into it - they simply have no time to even consider it, and if they did, they might not have acted. I go with the "ghost in the machine" theory for most of our actions.
Also this test does not measure actual empathy (as in, what you do for your neighbour -- where current generations are in fact better than their elders)
I think it might have to do with the idea that if you help out someone close to you, it may be because of either social pressure or the expectation of a quid pro quo. Helping out strangers because you feel for them is a different matter, and a better measure of empathy, since it means expending resources without expecting a return - an activity that would be contrary to a person's self-interest in a purely "I've got mine, Jack" economy.
I agree with you on certain points. I just think that, for certain products (software development) we're still not using the available tools as much as we should. Sort of like the best barber in town has a lousy haircut because he has to get his hair cut by another barber, instead of himself.
It's an evolving situation, and I wouldn't be surprised if, 20 years from now, it's the norm, just like 20 years ago having a land line as your main phone line was the norm, but almost everyone I know has dropped theirs and now uses a cell phone as their only phone line. The only hold-outs are the ones who have 5-6 people in the house (and they end up not answering the home line most of the time anyway, because it's never for them, because their friends all call them on their cell phones).
One of the unforeseen consequences in offices is friction caused by co-workers with really annoying cell-phone ring tones. And other co-workers who don't charge their phones, causing everyone to look for the UPS that is emitting a "battery low" beep. And other co-workers who have lousy phones so they have to shout.
Working apart solves that problem. People can dress as they want (or not at all), don't have to miss meetings because their car won't start, and issues like personal hygiene (a problem when you get too many programmers under one roof), sexual harassment, and most important - accommodating handicapped workers, are either minimalized or disappear.
It's time that handicapped workers assert their rights under the ADA in more novel ways.
Q. What happened when the Pope went to Mount Olive?
A. Popeye kicked the s*** out of him.
For the olive oil thing, they've been running it for over a year with no problems. If you're still worried, you can use mineral oil.
The disadvantage of mineral oil is that it's not as environmentally friendly. You can't filter it and throw it in your diesel engine and burn it when you're done with it.
I guess it boils down to the game in question. Some games, unless you're actually standing and moving the controller a LOT, you'll get your ass kicked. And then there are games that just beg you to get off the couch - like the sword-fighting game in Wii Sports Resort. I thought that would be the dumbest/lamest game in the bundle, but was I wrong!
It's so much fun that you don't even mind losing that much...
So you're posting this from Mosaic, I take it? I suspect not, because, despite your "get off my lawn" posturing, you recognize in practice that modern software actually does do more than twenty-year-old software.
[X] I post using telnet, you inconsiderate clod! Now wget off my lawn!
the ability to expand comments and comment forms in-line is a genuine improvement
You're kidding, right> I just leave it in nested mode - far fewer clicks.
Removing airbags, brakes, and the body of the car leaving a chassis will surely make a car run faster.
No it won't - removing the body creates a more drag.
I would imagine that you'd want the interior of the CPU casing to be flooded with something that conducts heat but not electricity - fluorinert does a good job there
Say you have your choice of two cars. One is reliable works well in the snow but costs 30k. Now say that the other one is somewhat unreliable and dubious in the snow, but it costs only 20k. The implication you're making is that you would ignore the lesser quality and save the money.
You mean:
One is reliable works well in the snow and only costs $15k. Now say that the other one is somewhat unreliable and dubious in the snow, and costs $30k. The implication you're making is that you would ignore the lesser quality and spend more money because your parents always bought GM, and so do you, because paying more means it "must" be better..
It's far easier to work with someone in the same building as you are than it is to work with someone 1000 miles away. This is especially true if you work together closely.
Two words: "Office Politics".
Two more words: "Body Odor".
Yet two more words: "Sexual harassment".
The "Work together closely" costs businesses lots of money from time wasted in office politics and sexual harassment lawsuits.
you don't see all those jobs that were outsourced to India requiring that their workers move to North America or Europe.
Actually, I'd bet you'd see the exact same thing happening in India. You think all the tech jobs in India are spread out all over the sub-continent? From what I understand there's two cities where all the action happens.
... which doesn't change my initial argument - that people don't have to be where the work is - that New York legal work is being done in another continent. They could have "local-sourced" it and still kept their body count down.
Creative and brainy people want creative and brainy things. Creative and brainy things can largely only be supported in places where there's large concentrations of creative and brainy people. Therefore the creative and brainy people will tend to conglomerate together into population centers. If you think the internet and UPS can solve this, then you don't realize that "things" can mean other creative and brainy people, and things like an theatre district or a good selection of ethnic restaurants.
Real "creative and brainy people" would find your argument to be the typical "snobby geek wanna-be-chic". Creative and brainy people find diversity to be more interesting than a mono-culture. Albert Einstein was asked why he spent hours helping an 8-year-old girl with her math homework. He said "We have an understanding. I help her with her homework, and she shares her jellybeans."
The last thing I want to do after a day of writing code is hang out with other programmers.
The "theatre district"? I'd rather walk my dogs.
Ethnic restaurants? We have thousands of them (literally - something like 5,000 restaurants. Montreal is more than just poutine, hookers, and hockey).
Do we technical people put interesting work and the concentration of human educational capital ahead of other considerations when deciding on a move?
So why would you have to move to create a concentration of "human educational capital"? We've got this think called the Internet... you don't see all those jobs that were outsourced to India requiring that their workers move to North America or Europe.
They make it available a the bottom of this page. And the framesets work just fine without needing a web server - just open up docs/api/index.html wherever you untarred the files.
It only makes sense, since they have the source for the documentation.
Yeah, but you need to run the wiki software on your machine (or download a static set of pages that will have a lot of non-working links that you have to clean up - after all, you can't "edit" the page, and the random page link has to be replaced with some big horking javascript that has a list of all pages), unlike static html framesets.
I was just showing that frames have their uses - not that Java is great. To the contrary, I think Java has major suckage:
no preprocessor
import * crappiness
"everything is a class" causes "too many trees"
single inheritance
overly-verbose (see "everything is a class")
I wouldn't be working on unjava if I thought otherwise.
As for the driver issue - that's stupidity on the part of developers. The cpu provides 4 levels of privilege, and everyone decided to go all binary - ring 0 or ring 3. Ring 0 should be for the core - the system clock, time-slicing, etc. ring 1 for system processes, ring 2 could be for I/O (drivers), and ring 3 for userland. This way, system processes can verify the integrity of drivers.
Of course, r00ting a system is still an issue, but only at boot time.
It *is* static html and css. You can download it and view it directly off your local file system - no server or internet connection needed. They generate the pages once, then put them on the server, the same as I generate many of the unjava header files using a perl script. It makes it a lot easier to change a class name in one place and have it propagate through much of the source.
Slashdot Mirror
Good thing, too - you wouldn't want to roll up the power supply, shove it in your pocket, and have it burst into flames. After all, "It's a SONY!"
If you click on his name, it shows he's one of those social media guys. "Slight" would be an understatement, and understandably - it's his job.
Plus, Facebook is in the news for its' privacy screw-ups. They have less than 3 months left in their deal with the Canadian government to bring their site into compliance with Canadian law (which is what got the whole "Facebook has a privacy problem" thing going 9 months ago, and got other governments to then launch similar probes).
There's no reason why you can't run svn on your own server, and this way you can review code changes before they're committed. Post only tarballs of releases to the general public. Devs can take the tarball, untar it and svn update on their local vcs to stay in sync. They shouldn't be pushing updates willy-nilly anyway. One person should do the reviews.
Forum software is quick to set up - you just untar it, go to the appropriate url (something like yourdomain.tld/admin/install/), click on a few things, fill in a few more things, and you're done.
Same with a wiki.
Most hosting providers have a control panel so that you don't even need to look for the tarball to install - just pick it from the list of install scripts.
Ditto for mailing lists, bug tracking, etc.
Say you devote an entire evening to it (2-3 hours). You can pick the cms, bug tracker, wiki, mlm, etc., that YOU prefer, or try out a bunch of them.
And if there's a problem, or you want to do some customization, you can fix it yourself. Locked yourself out of the cms because you forgot your password? Create a new account, use a new password, then use your control panel to access the database back end and copy the encrypted password from your new account to your old account and the problem is fixed. No 3-hour wait, never mind 3 years.
Sure, post it to Freshmeat and Sourceforge, but don't be dependent on them. Things don't break often, but when they do, it's nice to be able to just go in and fix it.
You don't have much leverage when using a free service. It's not like web hosting is all that expensive. He could have registered the .com, .org, and .net addresses for a total of $30 (as of today the .com and .net are still available), spend another $100 a year on hosting, and had a 1-800 phone number to call.
With both hosting and domain names so cheap, it doesn't make sense not to grab the "top 3" if you're going to be doing an open-source project, like I recently did for unjava.com/org/net How many times have you gone to the wrong TLD and gotten a crappy squatter page, like php.org instead of php.net, or groklaw.org instead of groklaw.net, or mysql.net.
It also gives you the possibility, at a later date, to move different content and services to different domains. For example, the developers wiki could eventually be located at yourdomain.org, the public wiki and things like "get paid support" at yourdomain.com, and any interactive services (like game servers) located at yourdomain.net.
In the case of chess software based on python:
They could all be hosted on the same machine, but if, for example, the game server became popular, it could be moved to its own box.
There are still plenty of good, short domain names that are available on the "big 3" TLDs. You just have to be a bit imaginative.
The article is trying to claim that because people spent $100 on downloaded stuff (music, etc) they won't change to another phone and lose their content.
At 10 cents a day amortized over 3 years, that's cheap!
I've been saying for a while that the iPhone is no longer a "premium" brand. High school kids have them. If $100 is "relatively high", then those iPhone customers are not what Apple makes them out to be, especially when amortized over the cost of a 3-year phone plan - $100 is less than $3 a month. Less than $0.10 a day. How much cheaper can you get? Are iPhone customers reduced to saying "Buddy, can you spare a dime?"
Why did Schindler help the jews? He was going against social pressure, risked having a bullet put through his head, etc.
Why do people unthinkingly (before they even have time to formulate the thought) dive on live grenades to save strangers? They're certainly not going to get anything out of it? The pressure of the social norm doesn't come into it - they simply have no time to even consider it, and if they did, they might not have acted. I go with the "ghost in the machine" theory for most of our actions.
I think it might have to do with the idea that if you help out someone close to you, it may be because of either social pressure or the expectation of a quid pro quo. Helping out strangers because you feel for them is a different matter, and a better measure of empathy, since it means expending resources without expecting a return - an activity that would be contrary to a person's self-interest in a purely "I've got mine, Jack" economy.
I agree with you on certain points. I just think that, for certain products (software development) we're still not using the available tools as much as we should. Sort of like the best barber in town has a lousy haircut because he has to get his hair cut by another barber, instead of himself.
It's an evolving situation, and I wouldn't be surprised if, 20 years from now, it's the norm, just like 20 years ago having a land line as your main phone line was the norm, but almost everyone I know has dropped theirs and now uses a cell phone as their only phone line. The only hold-outs are the ones who have 5-6 people in the house (and they end up not answering the home line most of the time anyway, because it's never for them, because their friends all call them on their cell phones).
One of the unforeseen consequences in offices is friction caused by co-workers with really annoying cell-phone ring tones. And other co-workers who don't charge their phones, causing everyone to look for the UPS that is emitting a "battery low" beep. And other co-workers who have lousy phones so they have to shout.
Working apart solves that problem. People can dress as they want (or not at all), don't have to miss meetings because their car won't start, and issues like personal hygiene (a problem when you get too many programmers under one roof), sexual harassment, and most important - accommodating handicapped workers, are either minimalized or disappear.
It's time that handicapped workers assert their rights under the ADA in more novel ways.
Q. What happened when the Pope went to Mount Olive?
A. Popeye kicked the s*** out of him.
For the olive oil thing, they've been running it for over a year with no problems. If you're still worried, you can use mineral oil.
The disadvantage of mineral oil is that it's not as environmentally friendly. You can't filter it and throw it in your diesel engine and burn it when you're done with it.
I guess it boils down to the game in question. Some games, unless you're actually standing and moving the controller a LOT, you'll get your ass kicked. And then there are games that just beg you to get off the couch - like the sword-fighting game in Wii Sports Resort. I thought that would be the dumbest/lamest game in the bundle, but was I wrong!
It's so much fun that you don't even mind losing that much ...
[X] I post using telnet, you inconsiderate clod! Now wget off my lawn!
You're kidding, right> I just leave it in nested mode - far fewer clicks.
Olive oil works fine and is cheaper. You can stick everything but the disk drives in it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sP45uBj4-k&NR=1&feature=fvwp http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8shVDvMdo4
You mean:
One is reliable works well in the snow and only costs $15k. Now say that the other one is somewhat unreliable and dubious in the snow, and costs $30k. The implication you're making is that you would ignore the lesser quality and spend more money because your parents always bought GM, and so do you, because paying more means it "must" be better..
Two words: "Office Politics".
Two more words: "Body Odor".
Yet two more words: "Sexual harassment".
The "Work together closely" costs businesses lots of money from time wasted in office politics and sexual harassment lawsuits.
Real "creative and brainy people" would find your argument to be the typical "snobby geek wanna-be-chic". Creative and brainy people find diversity to be more interesting than a mono-culture. Albert Einstein was asked why he spent hours helping an 8-year-old girl with her math homework. He said "We have an understanding. I help her with her homework, and she shares her jellybeans."
The last thing I want to do after a day of writing code is hang out with other programmers.
The "theatre district"? I'd rather walk my dogs.
Ethnic restaurants? We have thousands of them (literally - something like 5,000 restaurants. Montreal is more than just poutine, hookers, and hockey).
They're also outsourcing business tax work, legal services, and scads of other stuff. It's not just "customer support."
So why would you have to move to create a concentration of "human educational capital"? We've got this think called the Internet ... you don't see all those jobs that were outsourced to India requiring that their workers move to North America or Europe.
Hospitals aren't installing any special software - they're just getting patients in physical rehab to play Wii Sports and Wii Fit.
It also works well in old-age homes - keeps people moving AND gives them social interaction.
This is something that the whole FPS-sitting-on-the-couch-killing-people crowd doesn't get.
They've used it to help rehabilitate patients, and noticed that patients who have a Wii and use it are healthier.
Bottom line - the military is finding out that the Wii kicks ass!
No more couch potatoes.
Of course the next problem will be that possession of a bunnch of Wiis could mark you as a terrorist training camp.
I wonder if they're still taking calls - it says to call 1-800-424-9393 (1 800 IBIX EXE) any time!
They make it available a the bottom of this page. And the framesets work just fine without needing a web server - just open up docs/api/index.html wherever you untarred the files.
It only makes sense, since they have the source for the documentation.
Yeah, but you need to run the wiki software on your machine (or download a static set of pages that will have a lot of non-working links that you have to clean up - after all, you can't "edit" the page, and the random page link has to be replaced with some big horking javascript that has a list of all pages), unlike static html framesets.
I was just showing that frames have their uses - not that Java is great. To the contrary, I think Java has major suckage:
I wouldn't be working on unjava if I thought otherwise.
As for the driver issue - that's stupidity on the part of developers. The cpu provides 4 levels of privilege, and everyone decided to go all binary - ring 0 or ring 3. Ring 0 should be for the core - the system clock, time-slicing, etc. ring 1 for system processes, ring 2 could be for I/O (drivers), and ring 3 for userland. This way, system processes can verify the integrity of drivers.
Of course, r00ting a system is still an issue, but only at boot time.
It *is* static html and css. You can download it and view it directly off your local file system - no server or internet connection needed. They generate the pages once, then put them on the server, the same as I generate many of the unjava header files using a perl script. It makes it a lot easier to change a class name in one place and have it propagate through much of the source.