I paid RH $60/year to keep my RH8 server up2date, and use the service religiously. I'd have kept paying RH that fee ad infinitum.
But I can't help but feel abandoned. It feels like my choices are to upgrade to Enterprise, which is more than I need and expensive, or find another distro, which I don't want to do either. It kind of pisses me off, because I chose RH because of up2date (among other things).
And now Progeny can keep me up to date for $5/month. OK, I'll consider it, but that's still 10 times what I was paying RedHat. Ouch.
Enlarge the screenshots. Look at the chat panes. Basically all they're chatting about is how to get the software to work. Talk about threadjacking! It's worse -- meetingjacking.
If your meeting software transforms your meeting into a multipoint tech support video conference, the software is not ready for primetime.
The software needs to be invisible - it can't impede the act of having the meeeting in any way. Currently no solution, including NetMeeting, truly achieves this goal.
The camera itself is shit. Take a look at thesestunningexamples of just how terrible the image quality is. It uses a CMOS sensor (not a CCD) and a hella-cheap fixed-at-infinity plastic lens.
It's a 1.3 megapixel sensor scaling up to 2 megapixels, as though the image weren't bad enough already.
The busniess model is not necessarily fundamentally broken just because a bunch of unwashed/. hackers buy these $10 cameras and never return them. Most dickhead consumers are lemmings, and they do what they're supposed to do. If those consumers wish their single-use cameras were digital so they could share their photos with their Internet pals, which is ostensibly one of the reasons to make this camera in the first place, then I expect that people will do just that if the price is right. That's the factor that could kill this product, not a bunch of freakish/.ers cutting up USB cables.
...but this time (the last big one that happened on a Friday) actually took out my modest little Linux server at home, which consequently needed a restart. It was the first time I could remember a solar event actually affecting me directly.
I've been thinking that locating the TV remote control, or other shit you lose in your house, seems like a nice (non-Big Brother) use for RFID.
If you had an array of RFID transcievers in different rooms, perhaps you're not that far from being able to let your home find something you lost. Or send your little robot pal with the RFID transciever to find it for you...
When I was an undergadutate (circa 1985), I worked in the University of California, Irvine Registrar's Office. I wrote a C64 program that took input (via the parallel port?) from buttons on each Registrar Window's desk to direct the next person in line to the next available window. The last time I checked, this system is still in use, despite having to be loaded from cassette periodically.
The thing was just terrible - a big centrally-mounted TV flashing day glow colors, ostensibily to get the attention of people in line, and little synthesized "ding" sounds and all. But I guess it worked, so it's still being used.
Slightly OT but...
Different code I wrote at UCI, probably about 1987, is still being used to print the quarterly Schedule of Classes booklet - complete with the last "graphic design" they bought from me in like 1988, coded directly in PostScript. Un-freaking-believable.
So the longest-lasting contributions to the world I ever made was when I was a part-time $12/hr UCI employee, and not at any of the startups or big companies I worked for after that. Hmmm. So it goes I guess...
I love the way the Computer History Museum occupies an overdesigned former SGI building. It's one of the many extravagant buildings SGI built then sold in the 90s before everyone noticed SGI was totally irrelevant.
"Goodwill" is the excess amount paid for a company (i.e. in this case a company acquired by SCO) over the book value of that company. Goodwill payments are amortized over periods up to 20 years, but generally companies try to get these kinds of payments out of the way much sooner than that.
______________________________ Sigs are insigificant.
Clearly, no/.er will read this article. Here's why:
As everyone knows, Slashdotters come in two flavors, those who read the articles, and those who don't.
The category of/.ers that do read articles also read the whole synopsis. They would have found a reference to Madonna in the synopsis for an article with "science" in the headline, and moved on.
The category of/.ers that don't read articles wouldn't have read the article anyway.
Ergo, vis-a-vis, concordantly: No Slashdotter read the article.
Those three books, by Kim Stanley Robinson, describe the colonization and terraforming of Mars. But there's so much exploration and description, by the end, you'll swear you've been there. Not a fast-paced read, but very good indeed. At least that way you'll get a nice dose of sci/tech, Mars politics, and space elevators along with your geographic descriptions.
I personally ported Macintosh Adobe Premiere 4.0 from 68000 to PowerPC. This was right when the PowerPC-based Macs were introduced (before, actually, since Apple was providing us with prerelease product). At that time, Apple's internal C compiler (then MrC) wasn't ready for primetime, nor was ThinkC. We'd been using MPW for the development, but the only good compiler for PowerPC was IBM's compiler. So I edited/built/linked the whole thing over the network on an RS/6000(?) somewhere at Adobe. I remember when I turned the optimizer on, Premiere got twice as fast, just like that.
The IBM compiler dis some wild instruction reordering which made the optimized compiled code really hard to understand, but somehow better fitted to the processor's pipeline structure. Fortunately the only thing that broke when I turned on the optimizer was the "marching ants" used for selection, and that was the result of some way-too-fancy-casting of Pattern pointers that fooled the optimizer.
I suspect the IBM compilers will continue to reign if performance is the goal.
In the trailer, the final "Matrix Revolution" titles have a lot more 8s and 4s in the streams of green text and katakana than the random sh*t seen before. Also, there were lots of "hachi" characters, which is the Japanese symbol for 8.
Anyone have ideas about that?
Didn't the product namers learn anything from Ford's Merkur XR4Ti? RIM BlackBerry 7230? I'm not buying until they get some memorable names that reflect the different models' typical use. My sugguestions:
RIM BlackBerry 875: Rim Fun RIM BlackBerry 5810: Rim Home RIM BlackBerry 7230: Rim Job
You're right about registries, that's for sure. I've heard Bill Gates himself thinks of the Windows Registry as a major screwup. The good news is that.NET eschews the registry to the extent that it can. Unlike COM (=OLE=ActiveX) which was highly dependent on the registry,.NET only uses the Registry to provide backwards-compatibility for COM hosts.
As for assemblies, you might just not know what they are. Really an assembly is just an object file with a bunch of meta-data about what's in the file and what it links to. Also, assemblies can be "strongly-named," which involves hashing and signing the assembly to ensure that it hasn't been modified. They've also used this mechanism to allow concurrent versions of the same assembly (=DLL or whatever), which helps alleviate the "DLL Hell" that everyone's been struggling with for the last ten years.
To top it off, for a lot of client-side programming, C# and the FCL (Foundation Class Library) are a good combination for new development. In fact, for a GUI client-side app (which is mostly what I do), I would probably choose C#/FCL over C++/ATL/WTL (and DEFINITELY over C++/MFC) from here out. Win32 programming is a bitch, and largely involves knowing tons of arcane undocumented minutiae about what actually works in the Win32 APIs and how to work around the bugs, and thankfully many of those bugs are worked around for you by the FCL. Not everything in Win32 is wrapped by FCL, but enough is to make it quite useful, and of course OOP, which is much better than raw:: Win32 APIs anyday.
It's a lot of new stuff, and it seems pretty daunting, but it's worth learning if you have to write Windows stuff.
IA(definitely)NAP, but even in a vacuum, shouldn't an ion engine work, just because of good 'ol equal-and-opposite-reaction? If you spew ions in one direction I'd expect it to propel your ion-spewer in the other...
Take AMD, the surveyors in this article. They took something that a fair number of people understood, CPU clock speeds in MHz or GHz, and they gave it a new meaning. Where there was once an apples-to-apples comparison (yeah, I know it's not _exactly_ apples-to-apples), they created an apples-to-oranges comparison. 2700 != 2.7 GHz. Thanks. That's helpful.
So if the jargon alone isn't enough to screw people up, we've got the marketers in there too, just in case someone starts to get it./sigh
I hate to rain on your parade, but Final Cut Pro _was_ a cross platform application. From the very start. Only when Apple bought it from Macromedia did Apple decied to drop the Windows side. That's another interesting business decision to ponder.
Slashdot Mirror
But I can't help but feel abandoned. It feels like my choices are to upgrade to Enterprise, which is more than I need and expensive, or find another distro, which I don't want to do either. It kind of pisses me off, because I chose RH because of up2date (among other things).
And now Progeny can keep me up to date for $5/month. OK, I'll consider it, but that's still 10 times what I was paying RedHat. Ouch.
If your meeting software transforms your meeting into a multipoint tech support video conference, the software is not ready for primetime.
The software needs to be invisible - it can't impede the act of having the meeeting in any way. Currently no solution, including NetMeeting, truly achieves this goal.
- The camera itself is shit. Take a look at these stunning examples of just how terrible the image quality is. It uses a CMOS sensor (not a CCD) and a hella-cheap fixed-at-infinity plastic lens.
- It's a 1.3 megapixel sensor scaling up to 2 megapixels, as though the image weren't bad enough already.
- The busniess model is not necessarily fundamentally broken just because a bunch of unwashed
/. hackers buy these $10 cameras and never return them. Most dickhead consumers are lemmings, and they do what they're supposed to do. If those consumers wish their single-use cameras were digital so they could share their photos with their Internet pals, which is ostensibly one of the reasons to make this camera in the first place, then I expect that people will do just that if the price is right. That's the factor that could kill this product, not a bunch of freakish /.ers cutting up USB cables.
_______________________Sigs are insignificant.
I wouldn't pay more than a dollar for that.
1. Naame aan ideaa aafter aan aanimaal.
2. Aad aa few extraa 'aa's.
3. Profit!
/lesson learned - putting on tinfoil hat
If you had an array of RFID transcievers in different rooms, perhaps you're not that far from being able to let your home find something you lost. Or send your little robot pal with the RFID transciever to find it for you...
The thing was just terrible - a big centrally-mounted TV flashing day glow colors, ostensibily to get the attention of people in line, and little synthesized "ding" sounds and all. But I guess it worked, so it's still being used.
Slightly OT but...
Different code I wrote at UCI, probably about 1987, is still being used to print the quarterly Schedule of Classes booklet - complete with the last "graphic design" they bought from me in like 1988, coded directly in PostScript. Un-freaking-believable.
So the longest-lasting contributions to the world I ever made was when I was a part-time $12/hr UCI employee, and not at any of the startups or big companies I worked for after that. Hmmm. So it goes I guess...
Computer History indeed.
"Goodwill" is the excess amount paid for a company (i.e. in this case a company acquired by SCO) over the book value of that company. Goodwill payments are amortized over periods up to 20 years, but generally companies try to get these kinds of payments out of the way much sooner than that.
______________________________
Sigs are insigificant.
...I did not live through it. So now I'm forced to post from the Other Side, where we have a certifiably shitty Internet connection.
As everyone knows, Slashdotters come in two flavors, those who read the articles, and those who don't.
Ergo, vis-a-vis, concordantly: No Slashdotter read the article.
_______________________
Sigs are insigificant.
Those three books, by Kim Stanley Robinson, describe the colonization and terraforming of Mars. But there's so much exploration and description, by the end, you'll swear you've been there. Not a fast-paced read, but very good indeed. At least that way you'll get a nice dose of sci/tech, Mars politics, and space elevators along with your geographic descriptions.
/MTV Matrix Spoof, somehow seeming appropriate.
_______________________
Sigs are insiginificant.
The IBM compiler dis some wild instruction reordering which made the optimized compiled code really hard to understand, but somehow better fitted to the processor's pipeline structure. Fortunately the only thing that broke when I turned on the optimizer was the "marching ants" used for selection, and that was the result of some way-too-fancy-casting of Pattern pointers that fooled the optimizer. I suspect the IBM compilers will continue to reign if performance is the goal.
In the trailer, the final "Matrix Revolution" titles have a lot more 8s and 4s in the streams of green text and katakana than the random sh*t seen before. Also, there were lots of "hachi" characters, which is the Japanese symbol for 8. Anyone have ideas about that?
...that I don't have any friends.
______________________
Sigs are insigificant.
Didn't the product namers learn anything from Ford's Merkur XR4Ti? RIM BlackBerry 7230? I'm not buying until they get some memorable names that reflect the different models' typical use. My sugguestions:
RIM BlackBerry 875: Rim Fun
RIM BlackBerry 5810: Rim Home
RIM BlackBerry 7230: Rim Job
_______________________
Sigs are insignificant.
Do share...I did the lamer "write hex digits on a piece of paper then look them up on an ASCII chart" method.
I'd enjoy hearing your finger-binary shortcut!
Sigless and proud.
You're right about registries, that's for sure. I've heard Bill Gates himself thinks of the Windows Registry as a major screwup. The good news is that .NET eschews the registry to the extent that it can. Unlike COM (=OLE=ActiveX) which was highly dependent on the registry, .NET only uses the Registry to provide backwards-compatibility for COM hosts.
:: Win32 APIs anyday.
As for assemblies, you might just not know what they are. Really an assembly is just an object file with a bunch of meta-data about what's in the file and what it links to. Also, assemblies can be "strongly-named," which involves hashing and signing the assembly to ensure that it hasn't been modified. They've also used this mechanism to allow concurrent versions of the same assembly (=DLL or whatever), which helps alleviate the "DLL Hell" that everyone's been struggling with for the last ten years.
To top it off, for a lot of client-side programming, C# and the FCL (Foundation Class Library) are a good combination for new development. In fact, for a GUI client-side app (which is mostly what I do), I would probably choose C#/FCL over C++/ATL/WTL (and DEFINITELY over C++/MFC) from here out. Win32 programming is a bitch, and largely involves knowing tons of arcane undocumented minutiae about what actually works in the Win32 APIs and how to work around the bugs, and thankfully many of those bugs are worked around for you by the FCL. Not everything in Win32 is wrapped by FCL, but enough is to make it quite useful, and of course OOP, which is much better than raw
It's a lot of new stuff, and it seems pretty daunting, but it's worth learning if you have to write Windows stuff.
IA(definitely)NAP, but even in a vacuum, shouldn't an ion engine work, just because of good 'ol equal-and-opposite-reaction? If you spew ions in one direction I'd expect it to propel your ion-spewer in the other...
Hmmm...marketers renaming common ideas.
/sigh
Take AMD, the surveyors in this article. They took something that a fair number of people understood, CPU clock speeds in MHz or GHz, and they gave it a new meaning. Where there was once an apples-to-apples comparison (yeah, I know it's not _exactly_ apples-to-apples), they created an apples-to-oranges comparison. 2700 != 2.7 GHz. Thanks. That's helpful.
So if the jargon alone isn't enough to screw people up, we've got the marketers in there too, just in case someone starts to get it.
I hate to rain on your parade, but Final Cut Pro _was_ a cross platform application. From the very start. Only when Apple bought it from Macromedia did Apple decied to drop the Windows side. That's another interesting business decision to ponder.
I always thought it was my pot-smoking brother that was the bad influence...now I find out it was the floor, walls and ceiling all along...