If your point is that "Palm Pilot" is an outdated name for the devices now known as Palms or Palm Handhelds, then you'll be pleased to learn that the project site doesn't use the term "Palm Pilot."
I know you're being funny, but this was actually exactly what I was thinking.
All these "user retention" studies seem predicated on the idea that if someone happens across your page and reacts well to it, they'll of course want to read the whole thing from end to end like a book. Honestly, who ever does that? So how much can we really infer from the number of times a user clicks on links? If they stop clicking, it could just as easily be because the page is boring, ugly, erroneous, offensive, too many pop-ups, etc.
everything from sprite movement to the individual cycles of the speaker had to be controlled directly by the cpu.
You're right about the speaker, but the Apple II could not, in strictest terms, handle sprites. That is to say, there was no way to create a shape that could be drawn to the hi-res screen independently of the background. "Shape tables" had to either be XOR'ed with the background or overwrite it completely. People made special add-on boards to provide sprite capabilities, in fact.
You're missing the point. Almost nobody is writing applications to run in Classic mode. People with a heavy investment in classic Mac OS development are coding their apps to the Carbon APIs, which run natively under Mac OS X. Still others have chosen to go with the more sophisticated Cocoa APIs, essentially abandoning the more traditional option that is still available to them.
Man, some of you just don't get it. Slashdot is not a news reporting agency. Slashdot does not try to report the news. Slashdot editors are, by no stretch of the imagination, journalists. All Slashdot does is report the existence of news stories. You have to RTFA to see any actual reporting.
Those of you decrying Slashdot's lack of "credibility" are missing the point -- the only Slashdot posts that aren't "credible" are the ones that don't include a link to a news story.
Generally speaking, after a story is posted to Slashdot, people are expected to comment on it. That is the purpose served by editorializing. It serves to incite, inflame, or encourage commentary -- whether you agree with the editorializing or not. Example: If thousands of people agreed that it was not satisfying to see Microsoft vouchers going to the FSF, then they would post here and say so. Thus, the Slashdot model -- the real Slashdot model, and not the one you imagine -- would continue to be a success.
Re:Products dont matter
on
Does IT Matter?
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Just look at the advances over the past few years in toys: Are they really all that fundamentaly diffrent? I mean, cards, cars, and dolls are still the top sellers. Why bother getting a new line of products for the holdiay season? It's not like there's anything new there.
I think I've pointed out the logical flaw sufficiently.
I was meaning to point out the inherent flaw of comparing the whims of children watching this year's crop of holiday ads on TV to the IT strategies of Fortune 500 companies... but then I forgot what my point was.
Well, a counter-example might be Mac OS X. You could write apps for OS 9 and they would run in Classic mode. Or, you could code to the Carbon libraries and your apps should work on both OS 9 and OS X. Or, you could write your apps to the Cocoa frameworks, and they'll only work on OS X, yet they'll be "better."
Seems to me that, while the initial reaction was to code to Carbon, most brand-new applications being written (or rewritten) for OS X these days are Cocoa applications.
It's not the same thing as the OS/2 example, exactly, because Apple controls both the Carbon and Cocoa libraries and has pretty much announced the death of OS 9, so backward compatibility is not an issue. But if you consider that even established Mac OS developers have begun coding to Cocoa in spite of their past investments in Carbon/Mac OS 7-9.x development, it seems that some vendors, at least, are capable of seeing the value in doing something the "better" way, rather than just sticking to what they know.
Where hardware vendors and Linux drivers are concerned, we'll just have to wait and see. This seems like a case where everybody really should hope Linux gets "ready for the desktop" -- because a couple million laptops out there running Linux as a primary OS are going to convince the hardware manufacturers a lot more quickly than a bunch of servers will.
I find executives as a class get a surprising amount of info from word-of-mouth, Forbes [& such], and CNN...far more often than say..googling for a copy of the LAW, or court cases/common practice to support their claims
Too true! A friend of mine works for an unnamed company that spiders P2P networks looking for infringeing MP3s. I asked my friend how long he expected the company to really remain in business. He replied that his CEO had told him that the company had a pretty much locked-in business model. The CEO explained that companies with intellectual property portfolios have to pursue infringers or they lose their copyrights.
I walked away a little taken aback that the CEO of a company, the very existence of which depends on copyright, could be so completely ignorant of the facts of copyright law.
Even more disturbing, though -- who actually invested in this guy's business plan??!
It sounds like a shift towards a consulting/service business model as hardware becomes a commodity.
And, sadly, even that is nothing new. IBM did it years ago.
It's advice. It's probably biased. And while it's probably better than what you'd get from a dozen O'reilly books at a tenth of a percent of the cost, it's not a magic box that you plug in so no one has to code anymore.
Not "better." I've gotten advice from such people, and in some case I've been the little Oz guy behind the scenes who's actually giving the advice. Opinions are like assholes. The difference here is that the advice you'll be getting is speciically tailored to your business. You can't tell an O'Reilly book how many servers you have, so it can't spell out exactly how many adaptive synergies you should buy.
Here is huge list of MySQL Gotcha's that absolutely floored me when I first read it.
Oh, I dunno. I'd hardly say I'm "floored" after reading that.
Failure to throw a division-by-zero error, returning NULL instead? Udefined behavior when you insert a negative value into an auto-increment column (when it's not clear why you'd insert any value in the first place)? Sure, these may be "gotchas," but they're hardly deal-breakers.
I think calling this list "huge" is a bit of an exaggeration, too.
BTW... anyone who's running high-availability, mission-critical financial applications on MySQL, raise your hand. Anyone? Anyone? I'd say it's sort of a moot argument.
I just launched a copy of Microsoft Word 2003, opened a copy of one of my documents, selected "Save As..." and chose "XML Document." I then tried to open the resulting *.XML file in TextPad, which gave me the following error:
WARNING: "r1-Vendor_Evaluations.xml" contains characters that do not exist in code page 1252 (ANSI - Latin I). They will be converted to the system default character, if you click OK.
Am I misinterpreting something, or is not the whole point of XML that it is both human- and machine-readable? This doesn't even seem to be properly machine-readable.
I agree -- be thankful for what you have. But not because you're fortunate (though I'll agree, you probably are if you have an IT job), but because it's only a matter of time before somebody tries to take what you have away from you.
Example: At the last company I worked at, they were under a hiring freeze and a salary freeze (no raises for anybody) from almost the day I started working there. Now, making the same money year after year is one thing... but when you factor in the fact that the deductible on our health plan would seemingly get bigger each year while the benefits would get fewer and fewer, the provider network would shrink, etc., we were all actually making less compensation each year than the one previous. And that's not even including inflation. How's that for a reward for your hard work?
And Nobel discovered that dynamite could be used to kill people as easily as it could be used in mining or construction. What's new?
Actually, this is a fine example... because, though Nobel did not initially conceive of dynamite as a product for military use, it quickly became used for such... and, in fact, Nobel himself became closely involved with the military munitions industry and the questions and problems surrounding it.
Particularly germane to the subject of nuclear weapons, Nobel felt that the deterrent nature of explosives was its most valuable asset.
"...on the day that two army corps can mutually annihilate each other in a second, all civilised nations will surely recoil with horror and disband their troops," he once wrote.
One could certainly argue that Nobel's belief was naive, especially considering the advancement in destructive power of weaponry we've seen throughout the 20th century. But it's certainly significant that his stated views did not stop him from continuing to work on problems of munitions and explosives. "Good wishes alone," he once said, "will not ensure peace."
Whether every single open source developer who has contributed to the Linux kernel feels the same way as Nobel is beside the point. Nobel clearly believed that the ills that can come of science do not outweigh the good merely by virtue of their existence. As evidence of the wisdom of this belief, I doubt many people will point to dynamite as one of the world's lasting evils today, and yet in Nobel's time some people would probably have characterized it as such.
And, one could further infer that Nobel recognized that man's propensity for war has far predated any kind of scientific or technical advancement and that, therefore, the latter cannot be blamed for the former.
It isn't their fault.. I hear a long story on NPR about it a while ago. Universities tried to stay out of the patent game, but companies would take their research and patent it and then charge the university to use it.. researchers having to pay to use their own findings.
Boy, I'd love to see you substantiate this assertion with a source. If what you say is true, then it sounds to me like the entire university system in this country is essentially already undermined completely. No wonder researchers are flocking to Europe and other overseas locations to carry on their work.
Then again, this sounds a lot more like one of those "damn it all" type statements that sound so inflammatory, they must be true... How do these companies get around the obvious prior art of published research?
Suppose you host some infringeing MP3s with the express purpose of making those files available to all and sundry on the Web.
You then meet with a group of "link site" operators in person (no paper/email trail) and disclose to them the URLs of your files. These people then proceed to post the links to your infringeing material on their own sites.
The copyright cops take notice. They find these links to your files over 50% of the sites on the Internet. They track you down and bust you.
Your defense? "Honest, your honor... I had no idea that other people knew where to find those files. I just stuck them in a directory on my machine for my own use!"
Obviously this was a conspiracy, and obviously you are the one who provided the infringeing materials to begin with. How should the law be enforced (assuming you believe it should be in the first place, that is)?
How do you manage the weather conditions on a bike? Do you have snow tires etc.? I'd be concerned most about safety, especially in those northern states where most people are in cars and aren't expecting to see bikes on the road in bad weather.
The system throttles performance of the processor down to pda speeds when on battery (i.e. about 400mHz).
Current Centrino laptops do this also.
When on battery, it still only has an expected battery life of 3-4 hours. Laptops get easily as much battery power
That's because their batteries are physically much larger.
And it is very expensive especially considering you can get a high end laptop AND a high end PDA for the same price (or less!) then an Antelope.
It does seem expensive. That's often the case with pilot projects, of course... and current subnotebooks are more expensive that regular notebooks... but this one seems to have fallen past the diminishing returns event horizon...
very true, but wouldn't microsoft want people to be driven towards IIS because of.NET and not allow them to use an open source solution instead?
Perhaps, but since it's pretty much a given that Mono will always lag behind the real.NET so long as Microsoft has the freedom to change its APIs at will, it stands to reason that those developers who are really in love with the.NET way of doing things will eventually migrate to the real thing.
BTW, don't you mean "Windows" rather than "IIS"? IIS is a Web server...
I would wager some money on the fact that this new WinFX is basically.NET with new APIs and some kind of code signing technology with enforced DRM to finally kill Project Mono.
Why would they bother to kill Project Mono? Seems to me there's precious little enough code that runs on.NET right now, let alone that runs on Mono. If anything, Mono could be seen as helping to drive more developers to the.NET model. I don't see how it could be viewed as "competition."
Yeah, but I have a digital camera already. It's just a point-and-shoot job, though, and the results are less than impressive (especially at night/in low light -- and, hell, isn't that when most of the stuff worth shooting pictures of happens anyway?)
Slashdot Mirror
If your point is that "Palm Pilot" is an outdated name for the devices now known as Palms or Palm Handhelds, then you'll be pleased to learn that the project site doesn't use the term "Palm Pilot."
Before you confuse people, though: the Zire 21, Zire 71, Tungsten E and Tungsten T2 models all have ARM processors and ship with Palm OS 5.x.
I know you're being funny, but this was actually exactly what I was thinking.
All these "user retention" studies seem predicated on the idea that if someone happens across your page and reacts well to it, they'll of course want to read the whole thing from end to end like a book. Honestly, who ever does that? So how much can we really infer from the number of times a user clicks on links? If they stop clicking, it could just as easily be because the page is boring, ugly, erroneous, offensive, too many pop-ups, etc.
Awesome that they're looking for .Net developers...
You're missing the point. Almost nobody is writing applications to run in Classic mode. People with a heavy investment in classic Mac OS development are coding their apps to the Carbon APIs, which run natively under Mac OS X. Still others have chosen to go with the more sophisticated Cocoa APIs, essentially abandoning the more traditional option that is still available to them.
Man, some of you just don't get it. Slashdot is not a news reporting agency. Slashdot does not try to report the news. Slashdot editors are, by no stretch of the imagination, journalists. All Slashdot does is report the existence of news stories. You have to RTFA to see any actual reporting.
Those of you decrying Slashdot's lack of "credibility" are missing the point -- the only Slashdot posts that aren't "credible" are the ones that don't include a link to a news story.
Generally speaking, after a story is posted to Slashdot, people are expected to comment on it. That is the purpose served by editorializing. It serves to incite, inflame, or encourage commentary -- whether you agree with the editorializing or not. Example: If thousands of people agreed that it was not satisfying to see Microsoft vouchers going to the FSF, then they would post here and say so. Thus, the Slashdot model -- the real Slashdot model, and not the one you imagine -- would continue to be a success.
Well, a counter-example might be Mac OS X. You could write apps for OS 9 and they would run in Classic mode. Or, you could code to the Carbon libraries and your apps should work on both OS 9 and OS X. Or, you could write your apps to the Cocoa frameworks, and they'll only work on OS X, yet they'll be "better."
Seems to me that, while the initial reaction was to code to Carbon, most brand-new applications being written (or rewritten) for OS X these days are Cocoa applications.
It's not the same thing as the OS/2 example, exactly, because Apple controls both the Carbon and Cocoa libraries and has pretty much announced the death of OS 9, so backward compatibility is not an issue. But if you consider that even established Mac OS developers have begun coding to Cocoa in spite of their past investments in Carbon/Mac OS 7-9.x development, it seems that some vendors, at least, are capable of seeing the value in doing something the "better" way, rather than just sticking to what they know.
Where hardware vendors and Linux drivers are concerned, we'll just have to wait and see. This seems like a case where everybody really should hope Linux gets "ready for the desktop" -- because a couple million laptops out there running Linux as a primary OS are going to convince the hardware manufacturers a lot more quickly than a bunch of servers will.
Dammit! Just when I thought I'd finally achieved maximum penetration, it seems someone hasn't read my comic strip yet. (See below.)
I walked away a little taken aback that the CEO of a company, the very existence of which depends on copyright, could be so completely ignorant of the facts of copyright law.
Even more disturbing, though -- who actually invested in this guy's business plan??!
Failure to throw a division-by-zero error, returning NULL instead? Udefined behavior when you insert a negative value into an auto-increment column (when it's not clear why you'd insert any value in the first place)? Sure, these may be "gotchas," but they're hardly deal-breakers.
I think calling this list "huge" is a bit of an exaggeration, too.
BTW ... anyone who's running high-availability, mission-critical financial applications on MySQL, raise your hand. Anyone? Anyone? I'd say it's sort of a moot argument.
I agree -- be thankful for what you have. But not because you're fortunate (though I'll agree, you probably are if you have an IT job), but because it's only a matter of time before somebody tries to take what you have away from you.
... but when you factor in the fact that the deductible on our health plan would seemingly get bigger each year while the benefits would get fewer and fewer, the provider network would shrink, etc., we were all actually making less compensation each year than the one previous. And that's not even including inflation. How's that for a reward for your hard work?
Example: At the last company I worked at, they were under a hiring freeze and a salary freeze (no raises for anybody) from almost the day I started working there. Now, making the same money year after year is one thing
Particularly germane to the subject of nuclear weapons, Nobel felt that the deterrent nature of explosives was its most valuable asset.
"...on the day that two army corps can mutually annihilate each other in a second, all civilised nations will surely recoil with horror and disband their troops," he once wrote.
One could certainly argue that Nobel's belief was naive, especially considering the advancement in destructive power of weaponry we've seen throughout the 20th century. But it's certainly significant that his stated views did not stop him from continuing to work on problems of munitions and explosives. "Good wishes alone," he once said, "will not ensure peace."
Whether every single open source developer who has contributed to the Linux kernel feels the same way as Nobel is beside the point. Nobel clearly believed that the ills that can come of science do not outweigh the good merely by virtue of their existence. As evidence of the wisdom of this belief, I doubt many people will point to dynamite as one of the world's lasting evils today, and yet in Nobel's time some people would probably have characterized it as such.
And, one could further infer that Nobel recognized that man's propensity for war has far predated any kind of scientific or technical advancement and that, therefore, the latter cannot be blamed for the former.
Then again, this sounds a lot more like one of those "damn it all" type statements that sound so inflammatory, they must be true... How do these companies get around the obvious prior art of published research?
OK, but how about a counter example?
... I had no idea that other people knew where to find those files. I just stuck them in a directory on my machine for my own use!"
Suppose you host some infringeing MP3s with the express purpose of making those files available to all and sundry on the Web.
You then meet with a group of "link site" operators in person (no paper/email trail) and disclose to them the URLs of your files. These people then proceed to post the links to your infringeing material on their own sites.
The copyright cops take notice. They find these links to your files over 50% of the sites on the Internet. They track you down and bust you.
Your defense? "Honest, your honor
Obviously this was a conspiracy, and obviously you are the one who provided the infringeing materials to begin with. How should the law be enforced (assuming you believe it should be in the first place, that is)?
How do you manage the weather conditions on a bike? Do you have snow tires etc.? I'd be concerned most about safety, especially in those northern states where most people are in cars and aren't expecting to see bikes on the road in bad weather.
BTW, don't you mean "Windows" rather than "IIS"? IIS is a Web server...
Is it a hotel? Man, that would be a fun hotel to play hotel hide-and-seek/capture-the-flag in ...
Yeah, but I have a digital camera already. It's just a point-and-shoot job, though, and the results are less than impressive (especially at night/in low light -- and, hell, isn't that when most of the stuff worth shooting pictures of happens anyway?)