If you were fast/strong enough, you could pull down a helicopter using only your own mass. You'd have to be moving "a little" faster than 60mph though...
Of course by jerking downwards so fast you'd also launch yourself. Depending on the mass difference between you and the helicopter, you'd perhaps have to put yourself into orbit.
Ever used one of those HP bundles with the special internet keyboard, the special edition of Windows 98 with the special drivers for the special CD writer? (short summary: they're awful) And a little jiggering around will teach you that you can never really de-HP the machine.
Would it be a good thing if more OEM's did things like this? We could all have special pre-installed Bonzi buddies! Worked into the OS so they're impossible to remove for most people! YAY!
Perhaps MS is doing consumers a service by preventing more OEM tinkering.
Also, would MS charge less or more for a machine without Internet Explorer? More of course - MS wants people to have it.
Note that I don't actually disagree with you - MS does screw people into one choice. I'm just saying that there's a good chance other companies would screw Average Joe just as bad as MS does.
Ahh, the same sort of thing religions require. Interesting, that. Most of the rational people I know a) don't follow mass-religion and b) know that the US democracy is a crock of shit.
"Purple unicorns ate my baby" is not true, whether people believed it and acted accordingly or not. After all, everyone knows that the dingoes at my baby.
"US democracy is a crock of shit" is not true, but it would be if everybody believed it and acted accordingly.
You're right, Bill isn't used to failure. But at the same time, I'm impressed that they seem to be handling this without too much hubris getting in the way.
Over the years, MS has had a lot of dumb ideas - but they never let an error become fatal.
Of course a lot of that has to do with their "big cushion made out of our money". But I think it also reflects that there's still some good business judgement there.
I'll do what I can to try and change what I can, but I'm perfectly realistic about my chances, without large sums om money.
Democracy requires faith. Faith that a million others will do the right thing. As long as people like you continue to "do what [you] can" then America will continue to be great.
When people give up, thinking that their vote or their input or their work doesn't matter (and in some sense, they're right - the odds are low that a single vote will swing an election or change a nation), then America is a lost cause.
I've only ever written one Palm app - Jumpman Zero (freeware if anyone wants to try it, source on request).
While big players could spell doom for the Palm game cottage industry, I don't think they will. On other platforms, Sega has an insurmountable advantage (compared to one-man outfits) - they have thousands of man hours. They have lots of hardware. They have dedicated artists and musicians. They have a budget. On Palm, they can't really leverage those strengths.
Music and graphics suck on the Palm, even if you're Sega. (And yes, I know some games have good graphics and some have even tried.mod-type music, but the best graphics and sound are still attainable by a hobbyist).
Also, I don't think Sega's going to commit a lot of resources to a market where the sales are going to be slow (despite huge installed base), and where piracy is going to be utterly rampant (they can't really make a 30 meg game here - will they base a game on a springboard module?...).
So I think we'll see the Palm game market support a variety of players - and it won't be like the PC market where you there's a huge difference between commercial games and "hand made" ones.
At least for a while.
Re:The people who care....
on
Carnivore Update
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Interesting isn't it..
I for one have always thought of my e-mail as being essentially public information. I guess the problem is that most people don't understand how insecure e-mail is.
I think the worst thing about Carnivore is that they seem to have some expectation that it will work.
Who meets the following criteria:
1. Has something to communicate that would be interesting to the feds. 2. Is stupid enough to talk about it in a plain text e-mail, especially when Carnivore is fairly well talked about.
I don't think anyone does, and I'm sure the feds realize this. I'm guessing that what Carnivore really does is track the sending of encrypted e-mails - and the better the encryption the more the attention.
I rarely see docs from commercial companies that say what something *can't* do. Your expections seem a little high. Does Sun regularly do that?
I'm not saying that MS is evil. I'm saying that sometimes you make a choice without all the information. Read the thread.
How about this question: What is the *most* scriptish language currently available (or at least in alpha) on CRL?
I suppose it depends on what you mean by "scriptish". I'm guessing from the thread that the most important "scriptish" feature is loose typeing.
There are no real loosely typed languages in.NET - but probably VB.net gives the best idea of how they'd implement one. They replaced Variants from VB6 (which also worked well enough in the very loosely typed VBScript) with a wrapper class that does the same thing (and yes, I haven't actually used them).
I don't know why this would be a particularly hard chore for the CLR. All it means is calling a function or two every time a variable is referenced. Lots of overhead - same as you'd get from the script interpreter doing the same calls.
Good solution to most things, but riddled with gotchas...
On a side note, we adventured with the rich text box too - we ended up implementing printing via the DHTML edit control in IE 5.5 (with a custom print template). That's a mess too, if you're wondering...
It only takes minor Linux (or even Linux app) security breaches before the excuse becomes:
"Well, every OS has security problems."
and the whole issue is filed away. It's hard to sell change because change is inconvenient.
"This can help you cover your bum" is a good way to sell to managers, but it only works if public perception is overwhelmingly set in one direction. As long as managers feel MS is sufficiently covering them (or at least appearing to do so), security will be a tough sell as a reason for migration.
As long as you're doing what everyone else is doing, nobody's going to fire you.
I'll tell you about it when I try it out...but you shouldn't just assume that it's going to be less stable than running it on Windows (that shows a definite bias). Codeweavers have done a great job with Crossover Plugin - I have yet to have either Quicktime or Windows Media Player crash on me. Not once.
It'll be interesting to see. You're right, you can't assume anything. Especially on a project this complex.
That's an interesting question, though. Why do businesses need to buy new versions of Office? Do their needs change that much? What about "If it ain't broke, don't fix it?"
Many in our company still run Word 95 on NT 4.0. Both of these products still work, just as well as when they were new.
But people like new versions, even if they can't name one new feature they'll use. Might be a good subject for a research paper.
If Office was indeed the last app a business needed to move to Linux (and I think that's fairly common), support via Crossover may well be just what the doctor ordered. However, I don't think it's likely the decision will come down to the price of Crossover.
There are also the other advantages (security, stability) over Windows that Linux offers.
I'd like to see a comparison of stability between, say, "Office 2000 running on Windows 2000" and "Office 2000 running on Crossover on (whatever)". I don't know if it would turn out the way you think (despite Linux being more stable in general).
I don't know how much play Linux advocates are getting out of security issues right now. I think you'll need to see another big (ie. well covered by regular news channels) security breach or two before security really becomes a factor in migration again.
The other consideration is future. Many businesses spend much more than $55/desktop to keep current with the latest version of Office. Is Crossover going to work for the next version? Only MS (well, depending on how courts move) really knows the answer to that.
Who knows, maybe MS will just start selling Office for Linux. Could happen...
We develop a lot of web apps, and we keep wondering if.NET and Soap and Webservices and whatever else _really_ work yet. Clients do want it (though they seldom know why). We still implement things with pop-under data retrieval and the like.
Anyone out there done a large project using MS's new web philosophy? How has it gone?
I'm probably going to buy it. Then in a few years I'm going to buy the box set of the series. And then the ultra-gold UVSQVD version the year after that.
Sounds like a very ambitious project to me. Any chance you'd explain more about the situation? Why the move? What are you going to do with all the other hardware?
Back in University we shared Solaris machines for development. Right around project due dates, things really dragged as everyone was compiling (and someone was playing Doom on the console).
At least as far as processor time, compiling seems extraordinarily "all-or-none". If your company is like ours (only much larger), you'll have some real spikes when everyone makes one last build just before 5:00. But I guess that doesn't really hurt anything, except perhaps dinner will be a little colder for somebody.
We've tried to guess how much(bandwidth/processing power/memory/disk space) we'll need a few times - and we've tried to be thorough - but the only way we've ever got within a factor of 2 is by talking to someone with a similar setup already running.
This got a redundant moderation 14 days after it was posted. Wow....
Wouldn't want those people reading comments on two week old stories to have to see a "redundant" comment like this... Flamebait I could understand, even troll. I mean, it is a dumb comment. But Redundant?
Despite having hit the Karma Kap long ago, I've never been given mod points - I'd like to think that I could help the discussion more than whoever modded this....
Slashdot Mirror
Now would spider-man have fallen fast enough to catch her? No. Would the plot have sucked if she died? Probably
Would my wife have actually removed my arm at this point? Most likely. I think she dislocated my shoulder when Goblin was after Aunt Mae.
Great movie.
If you were fast/strong enough, you could pull down a helicopter using only your own mass. You'd have to be moving "a little" faster than 60mph though...
Of course by jerking downwards so fast you'd also launch yourself. Depending on the mass difference between you and the helicopter, you'd perhaps have to put yourself into orbit.
.
I tried using a 9-volt battery with my X10. No extra hardware, just stripped the wires and pressed them against the terminals.
Works fine. I use it all the time on little RC cars. Lots of fun.
Also tried a 1 pint 12 volt lead battery - ran for like 3 days with the one I used. RC car had a little trouble hefting the battery though.
Of course, I'm not going to accept any blame if you fry yours.
.
Ever used one of those HP bundles with the special internet keyboard, the special edition of Windows 98 with the special drivers for the special CD writer? (short summary: they're awful) And a little jiggering around will teach you that you can never really de-HP the machine.
Would it be a good thing if more OEM's did things like this? We could all have special pre-installed Bonzi buddies! Worked into the OS so they're impossible to remove for most people! YAY!
Perhaps MS is doing consumers a service by preventing more OEM tinkering.
Also, would MS charge less or more for a machine without Internet Explorer? More of course - MS wants people to have it.
Note that I don't actually disagree with you - MS does screw people into one choice. I'm just saying that there's a good chance other companies would screw Average Joe just as bad as MS does.
.
EXTREME PROGRAMMING is edgy!
And it's already well advertised here. I think anyone who's been programming for 20 years has probably heard about it - here if nowhere else.
For me, "finding the zone"=="taking the phone off the hook". But unfortunately that's a super extreme way of losing my job.
.
"Purple unicorns ate my baby" is not true, whether people believed it and acted accordingly or not. After all, everyone knows that the dingoes at my baby.
"US democracy is a crock of shit" is not true, but it would be if everybody believed it and acted accordingly.
Just press your refresh button as fast as you can. And don't give up. Just keep on pressing it. Faster!
Make sure nobody enjoys it if you can't.
You're right, Bill isn't used to failure. But at the same time, I'm impressed that they seem to be handling this without too much hubris getting in the way.
Over the years, MS has had a lot of dumb ideas - but they never let an error become fatal.
Of course a lot of that has to do with their "big cushion made out of our money". But I think it also reflects that there's still some good business judgement there.
.
I'll do what I can to try and change what I can, but I'm perfectly realistic about my chances, without large sums om money.
Democracy requires faith. Faith that a million others will do the right thing. As long as people like you continue to "do what [you] can" then America will continue to be great.
When people give up, thinking that their vote or their input or their work doesn't matter (and in some sense, they're right - the odds are low that a single vote will swing an election or change a nation), then America is a lost cause.
.
Thinking like this is lazy, boring, and not helpful. This isn't the way things have to be.
Ordinary people can still change things in America. Cynical people can still sit on their hands.
I've only ever written one Palm app - Jumpman Zero (freeware if anyone wants to try it, source on request).
.mod-type music, but the best graphics and sound are still attainable by a hobbyist).
While big players could spell doom for the Palm game cottage industry, I don't think they will. On other platforms, Sega has an insurmountable advantage (compared to one-man outfits) - they have thousands of man hours. They have lots of hardware. They have dedicated artists and musicians. They have a budget. On Palm, they can't really leverage those strengths.
Music and graphics suck on the Palm, even if you're Sega. (And yes, I know some games have good graphics and some have even tried
Also, I don't think Sega's going to commit a lot of resources to a market where the sales are going to be slow (despite huge installed base), and where piracy is going to be utterly rampant (they can't really make a 30 meg game here - will they base a game on a springboard module?...).
So I think we'll see the Palm game market support a variety of players - and it won't be like the PC market where you there's a huge difference between commercial games and "hand made" ones.
At least for a while.
Interesting isn't it..
I for one have always thought of my e-mail as being essentially public information. I guess the problem is that most people don't understand how insecure e-mail is.
I think the worst thing about Carnivore is that they seem to have some expectation that it will work.
Who meets the following criteria:
1. Has something to communicate that would be interesting to the feds.
2. Is stupid enough to talk about it in a plain text e-mail, especially when Carnivore is fairly well talked about.
I don't think anyone does, and I'm sure the feds realize this. I'm guessing that what Carnivore really does is track the sending of encrypted e-mails - and the better the encryption the more the attention.
I rarely see docs from commercial companies that say what something *can't* do. Your expections seem a little high. Does Sun regularly do that?
.NET - but probably VB.net gives the best idea of how they'd implement one. They replaced Variants from VB6 (which also worked well enough in the very loosely typed VBScript) with a wrapper class that does the same thing (and yes, I haven't actually used them).
I'm not saying that MS is evil. I'm saying that sometimes you make a choice without all the information. Read the thread.
How about this question: What is the *most* scriptish language currently available (or at least in alpha) on CRL?
I suppose it depends on what you mean by "scriptish". I'm guessing from the thread that the most important "scriptish" feature is loose typeing.
There are no real loosely typed languages in
I don't know why this would be a particularly hard chore for the CLR. All it means is calling a function or two every time a variable is referenced. Lots of overhead - same as you'd get from the script interpreter doing the same calls.
.
You can only make a good choice if you have all the information.
.NET web apps were.
The problem is that MS presents these options as good ideas, then shafts you when you're a month into development.
When you're looking at the examples and the docs, nowhere does it say "Oh yeah, when you go to print the contents of this box, you're screwed."
They don't say, "Oh yeah, we're going to make sure you can't do that in IE 6.0, even though you depended on it in IE 5.5".
That's why I asked the original question about how ready
MS always has great developer's tools - as long as you are doing the things they thought of.
In other news, I'm sure the CRL could certainly accomodate more "scriptish" languages, though I haven't heard of any Python projects.
.
Sort of what I expected...
Good solution to most things, but riddled with gotchas...
On a side note, we adventured with the rich text box too - we ended up implementing printing via the DHTML edit control in IE 5.5 (with a custom print template). That's a mess too, if you're wondering...
Thanks for the heads up.
...
It only takes minor Linux (or even Linux app) security breaches before the excuse becomes:
"Well, every OS has security problems."
and the whole issue is filed away. It's hard to sell change because change is inconvenient.
"This can help you cover your bum" is a good way to sell to managers, but it only works if public perception is overwhelmingly set in one direction. As long as managers feel MS is sufficiently covering them (or at least appearing to do so), security will be a tough sell as a reason for migration.
As long as you're doing what everyone else is doing, nobody's going to fire you.
.
I'll tell you about it when I try it out...but you shouldn't just assume that it's going to be less stable than running it on Windows (that shows a definite bias). Codeweavers have done a great job with Crossover Plugin - I have yet to have either Quicktime or Windows Media Player crash on me. Not once.
It'll be interesting to see. You're right, you can't assume anything. Especially on a project this complex.
That's an interesting question, though. Why do businesses need to buy new versions of Office? Do their needs change that much? What about "If it ain't broke, don't fix it?"
Many in our company still run Word 95 on NT 4.0. Both of these products still work, just as well as when they were new.
But people like new versions, even if they can't name one new feature they'll use. Might be a good subject for a research paper.
Have a good day.
.
If Office was indeed the last app a business needed to move to Linux (and I think that's fairly common), support via Crossover may well be just what the doctor ordered. However, I don't think it's likely the decision will come down to the price of Crossover.
There are also the other advantages (security, stability) over Windows that Linux offers.
I'd like to see a comparison of stability between, say, "Office 2000 running on Windows 2000" and "Office 2000 running on Crossover on (whatever)". I don't know if it would turn out the way you think (despite Linux being more stable in general).
I don't know how much play Linux advocates are getting out of security issues right now. I think you'll need to see another big (ie. well covered by regular news channels) security breach or two before security really becomes a factor in migration again.
The other consideration is future. Many businesses spend much more than $55/desktop to keep current with the latest version of Office. Is Crossover going to work for the next version? Only MS (well, depending on how courts move) really knows the answer to that.
Who knows, maybe MS will just start selling Office for Linux. Could happen...
.
We develop a lot of web apps, and we keep wondering if
Anyone out there done a large project using MS's new web philosophy? How has it gone?
.
I'm probably going to buy it. Then in a few years I'm going to buy the box set of the series. And then the ultra-gold UVSQVD version the year after that.
Damn you marketers (for doing your job so well)!
I have to make a plug here for my own Palm game, Jumpman Zero (based on Jumpman, a quality game from 1983).
Available here. Totally free. Source on request.
.
Sounds like a very ambitious project to me. Any chance you'd explain more about the situation? Why the move? What are you going to do with all the other hardware?
Back in University we shared Solaris machines for development. Right around project due dates, things really dragged as everyone was compiling (and someone was playing Doom on the console).
At least as far as processor time, compiling seems extraordinarily "all-or-none". If your company is like ours (only much larger), you'll have some real spikes when everyone makes one last build just before 5:00. But I guess that doesn't really hurt anything, except perhaps dinner will be a little colder for somebody.
We've tried to guess how much(bandwidth/processing power/memory/disk space) we'll need a few times - and we've tried to be thorough - but the only way we've ever got within a factor of 2 is by talking to someone with a similar setup already running.
That may be harder for you to find.
Good luck.
.
This got a redundant moderation 14 days after it was posted. Wow....
Wouldn't want those people reading comments on two week old stories to have to see a "redundant" comment like this... Flamebait I could understand, even troll. I mean, it is a dumb comment. But Redundant?
Despite having hit the Karma Kap long ago, I've never been given mod points - I'd like to think that I could help the discussion more than whoever modded this....
.
Learning or cheap?
:)
Ludicrous tuition. Online learning should be cheap. University of Phoenix is silly expensive, especially for out-of-country types (Canadians like me).
.