... remember the Evil Empire brought you Home PC's Free Internet browsers, Human Friendly Operating systems etc...
Well, actually
a) IBM created the home PC market b) NCSA Mosaic and Netscape first provided free browsers c) Apple created the first Human Friendly OS
The only part MS played in these were
a) Good marketing and creative legal contract negotiating b) Copying the competition and using their OS monopoly to push their own product c) Copying the competition and using their App - OS relationship to aggressively kill off the competition... yeah they don't stick to Standards, but again they mostly do the standard and more as most of the little tricks that MS put in are then adopted by Open Source Developers...
You need to expand your mind more and read things other than what Microsoft's propaganda machine puts out. This is just not true.... don't get me wrong, I don't support MS i have just been the the business long enough to remember what it was like before Windows.
For someone who "remembers", you seem to have little knowledge of the facts.
Microsoft is not considered the Evil Empire for making money... it's the simple fact that innovation to them, means using creative marketing and legal tactics to conquer a market. The engineering of the product (what the customer most cares about) is inconsequential and not pursued. This ensures they get to maintain their 80% margins in their monopoly businesses. Create buggy OS, shove it down user's throats, repeat for next version.
I just don't get why some people allow themselves to be repeatedly victimized by a crappy vendor and instead of calling them on it, actually choose to defend them.
I've come to the belief that software is developed, goes through a repeated cycle of use and enhancement, and is then finally abandoned. But it is never "done".
... recognizing that a large enough project needs some structure...
Do you agree with that? In my experience, the size of the project is independent of the "structure". I use a CM system whether I'm working by myself or part of a 50 person team. I require having a way to repeatably build and test the product. I make sure that assembling all the artifacts for a release is as simple as pushing a button.
We encountered the same thing when we were shopping for a Tempur-Pedic mattress. It was the same price everywhere we looked. Except Brookstone managed a way around that by offering a $200 gift card to use in their store. So instead of cash, we got some extra junk. I'm still trying to figure out if we won or lost in that deal.
Paul Graham would disagree with you. Languages are tools, true. But not all tools are equally powerful. Some languages are better designed than others, and allow you to do things easily that are difficult (if not impossible) in other languages:
I am a big fan of Paul Graham's work -- read Hackers and Painters for an insightful series of essays that cover topics ranging from the education system to startups to Lisp. But I would disagree with him on the concept that good people can use Lisp effectively.... based on the type of people I've seen in a number of software companies, I would say that excellent people would be needed to effectively use Lisp as an advantage.
Paul had that small talented team working on Viaweb and Lisp was the tool that magnified their talent to effectively compete with companies using scores of engineers in their development shops. But then, Paul had a world class software team... how many projects have that kind of firepower at their disposal?
... and any software R&D project in the last 5 years was considered a failure if we weren't shipping in 4 months.
Sounds like you unfortunately joined the wrong companies who treated R&D as: quickly grab the low hanging fruit, sell like crazy and repeat.
Looks tempting on paper. But it never works since a whole bunch of other people have the same business plan. Since it's low hanging fruit, you're all competing in the same way, drive margins down to nil and go belly up.
I love it when companies call it R&D when it's really just rapid production. Or like Micr* who talks about innovation when all they do is copy and distort.
The short interaction I had with mainframes and JCL about 15 years ago still makes me shudder when the AC is turned up too high in my place. To me the mainframe world was all about central control and the individuals were like cogs in a giant machine. I can see why it holds a much smaller share of the marketplace.
I've not met many Windows programmers that really enjoy programming. Mostly they seem to enjoy slapping some windows together quick enough to sell to some unsuspecting user.
Unix users really enjoy programming, but they make the mistake in assuming that everyone can be as smart as them. They push the user to apply themselves, RTFM and work on a few open source projects. Lord knows I've tried but my Grandma just doesn't seem to do well in the code reviews.
But the OSX programmers have it the best. All the skill of the Unix programmers and an ease of use, sense of style and fanbase that Windows could only dream of having.
There is no such thing as absolute trust. The singular notion of trust is really an aggregation of many smaller, specific trust relationships that are evaluated over time.
How can you trust Firefox, you say. Well, how can you trust that the sun will rise in the east tomorrow? How can you trust that trees will grow new leaves yearly to replace the ones lost? How can you trust that Microsoft will spend far more time and energy marketing their products rather than actually making them good? It does not have to be this way... but history has shown us that like death and taxes, we can trust these to be the way life works.
This is Taco Hell. It's the test zone for me when I'm working on stupid features on Slash. It's the place where I'll post things that I feel like posting. Stuff that shouldn't go on Slashdot (for whatever reason).
Not exactly. We don't really hear about what Cmdr Taco had for breakfast or how Timmy's dog is chasing the neighbor's cat. Slashdot is really just a set of discussion boards that periodically post some story to talk about.
I used to be a big Quake III / Weapons Factory Arena fan but I got sick of the version upgrades (some didn't work) and getting owned by people who were upgrading their hardware more often than me.
Playing Socom II on the Playstation is awesome. No worries about having to get the latest video card or worrying that your hardware is out of date after 2 months. The gameplay is great, as is the ability to speak to your team with the headset. You can play strategies of run and gun or stealth... it's up to you.
Actually I should say more about the stealth aspect. This is the first FPS I've played where you can actually play slow and stealthily through the entire game. It's a great feeling when you sneak up behind someone to get a headshot with a pistol -- grenade launchers are for wimps -- if you're going to kill someone, you should be able to see them up close.;-)
There are people using glitches in the game -- but more often than not I've seen the community self policing this by voting off people who bend the rules. Socom is not perfect in this regard, but then I don't know if any game can be.
I actually purchased the PS2 simply for this game and I am an *extremely* happy buyer.
Live life to the fullest... until you stray in my sights.;-)
Well there you go, just make it a reality tv show.... something like 'Survivor: Mars (outwit, outbreathe, outlast)'.
You'll have NO problem finding volunteers, they'll do scientific experiments for the challenges and the tv ads will finance the mission. A win-win for everyone!
City pedestrians already have to deal with gas/electric hybrid vehicles that are nearly silent, so these luddites will simply have to evolve. Less noise in the world is a good thing.
On your second point about traditional versus inside-out electric motor -- I'm no mechanical engineer, but my guess is that this tech allows you to have a fixed axle (or perhaps even no axle) versus the old tech which requires a long rotating heavy axle to drive the wheels.
Don't kid yourself. Equity, smechwity... it's all about how much interest you have to pay. Besides, to get access to that equity you have to sell the roof over your head -- now where are you going to stay?
Read "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" and get your house paid off as soon as possible.
Because as others have already noted, the guys selling picks and shovels are the ones who make money during gold rushes.
Secondly, Microsoft is trying to seed the world with their proprietary wma format - that's the first wave of the assault. The second wave comes when/if their formats are the default - they then launch their music service that seamlessly works with your pc, pda and phone.
You see, first it was their operating system that helped sell applications. Then their OS helped sell PDA's and phones (well not really phones, but let's pretend for a minute). Now that their OS is under assault, their thinking is that their media format may become the common denominator.
WMA may become the driver to sell their OS, pda's, phones, etc.
So basically what you're saying is that the prefab music stores are simply an extension to the affiliate marketing programs that Amazon and other web sites currently have.
Don't you understand that a Coke branded prefab music store that sells a crappy boy band CD on a crappy proprietary media format is a strong competitive advantage to a Hostess Ho Ho's branded prefab music store that sells crappy boy band CD's on a crappy proprietary media format?
You must be a techie... you just don't appreciate the brilliance of this business strategy.
Re:There's still something that separates us
on
We Are All Nerds Now
·
· Score: 1
Dude, you need to read Ladder Theory. It would have helped you understand early in the relationship how you would have no chance to ever score with her. It's nothing against you, it's just a matter of how she perceived you, that's all.
... not the only person with the last name "Dell" but he will be the only computer manufacturer with the Dell name featured, thus no manufacturer named "Delli" or "Dell2".
Understandably noone else could use the name "Dell" for a computer company, for that would be a name collision. But the connection to say that "Delli" and "Dell2" are then unusable is tenuous. If the names are not an exact match then how different must they be? Is it measured by number of characters, phenomes or special substrings?
What about "Diller", "Dille" or "Dill". At what point do you say something is okay versus not?
I think this whole thing is a crock. I happen to like "Apple Computer", but if you want to make a computer company and call it "Apple Delight Computer", you should be able to do so as long as you never try to use the shortened form of it.
Very good points. People who bundle their sense of self with their machine seem to get their panties in a bunch when their platform gets owned more than others. They seem to 'jump for joy' whenever a security vulnerability is distributed for some other platform. Personally I think this author should seek a priest, hobby or sufficiently drunk woman to help disassociate his feeling of being a man with owning a Windows machine.
Lance writes: I know this is wrong, but in one respect I was happy to learn earlier this month about the discovery of a significant security hole in the Jaguar and Panther versions (10.2 and 10.3, respectively) of the Apple operating system (OS).
Lance, let me tell you. It's not wrong for you to feel this way.... it's pathetic. Have you felt so diminished as a person this past summer, as wave after wave of virii pummeled your Windows box, that you now revel in the misfortune of others? Do you have these same insecurities about whether you purchased the correct toaster, hair dryer and nose hair clipper?
Get a grip on yourself, man! Stand up straight, take the panties off your head and start acting like you've got a pair! Repeat after me, I am not the products I buy. Sometimes the products I buy work out, sometimes they don't meet my expectations. When they fall short, it is not a reflection of who I am, my intelligence or the size of my magic wand. If the product fails, it is a reflection of the manufacturer.
Now go out there and do something useful with your life like kicking the butt of the manufacturers who sold you inferior products!
Slashdot Mirror
... remember the Evil Empire brought you Home PC's Free Internet browsers, Human Friendly Operating systems etc ...
... yeah they don't stick to Standards, but again they mostly do the standard and more as most of the little tricks that MS put in are then adopted by Open Source Developers ...
... don't get me wrong, I don't support MS i have just been the the business long enough to remember what it was like before Windows.
... it's the simple fact that innovation to them, means using creative marketing and legal tactics to conquer a market. The engineering of the product (what the customer most cares about) is inconsequential and not pursued. This ensures they get to maintain their 80% margins in their monopoly businesses. Create buggy OS, shove it down user's throats, repeat for next version.
Well, actually
a) IBM created the home PC market
b) NCSA Mosaic and Netscape first provided free browsers
c) Apple created the first Human Friendly OS
The only part MS played in these were
a) Good marketing and creative legal contract negotiating
b) Copying the competition and using their OS monopoly to push their own product
c) Copying the competition and using their App - OS relationship to aggressively kill off the competition
You need to expand your mind more and read things other than what Microsoft's propaganda machine puts out. This is just not true.
For someone who "remembers", you seem to have little knowledge of the facts.
Microsoft is not considered the Evil Empire for making money
I just don't get why some people allow themselves to be repeatedly victimized by a crappy vendor and instead of calling them on it, actually choose to defend them.
I've come to the belief that software is developed, goes through a repeated cycle of use and enhancement, and is then finally abandoned. But it is never "done".
... recognizing that a large enough project needs some structure ...
Do you agree with that? In my experience, the size of the project is independent of the "structure". I use a CM system whether I'm working by myself or part of a 50 person team. I require having a way to repeatably build and test the product. I make sure that assembling all the artifacts for a release is as simple as pushing a button.
Wow, you just totally ripped off someone else's work and tried to pass it off as your own. Unbelievable.
Your "post" was originally written at SatireWire where it is copyrighted.
We encountered the same thing when we were shopping for a Tempur-Pedic mattress. It was the same price everywhere we looked. Except Brookstone managed a way around that by offering a $200 gift card to use in their store. So instead of cash, we got some extra junk. I'm still trying to figure out if we won or lost in that deal.
Paul Graham would disagree with you. Languages are tools, true. But not all tools are equally powerful. Some languages are better designed than others, and allow you to do things easily that are difficult (if not impossible) in other languages:
.... based on the type of people I've seen in a number of software companies, I would say that excellent people would be needed to effectively use Lisp as an advantage.
... how many projects have that kind of firepower at their disposal?
I am a big fan of Paul Graham's work -- read Hackers and Painters for an insightful series of essays that cover topics ranging from the education system to startups to Lisp. But I would disagree with him on the concept that good people can use Lisp effectively
Paul had that small talented team working on Viaweb and Lisp was the tool that magnified their talent to effectively compete with companies using scores of engineers in their development shops. But then, Paul had a world class software team
Bah, I can't wait for POWF - Power Over WiFi. Now that would be pretty darn cool!
... and any software R&D project in the last 5 years was considered a failure if we weren't shipping in 4 months.
Sounds like you unfortunately joined the wrong companies who treated R&D as: quickly grab the low hanging fruit, sell like crazy and repeat.
Looks tempting on paper. But it never works since a whole bunch of other people have the same business plan. Since it's low hanging fruit, you're all competing in the same way, drive margins down to nil and go belly up.
I love it when companies call it R&D when it's really just rapid production. Or like Micr* who talks about innovation when all they do is copy and distort.
The short interaction I had with mainframes and JCL about 15 years ago still makes me shudder when the AC is turned up too high in my place. To me the mainframe world was all about central control and the individuals were like cogs in a giant machine. I can see why it holds a much smaller share of the marketplace.
I've not met many Windows programmers that really enjoy programming. Mostly they seem to enjoy slapping some windows together quick enough to sell to some unsuspecting user.
Unix users really enjoy programming, but they make the mistake in assuming that everyone can be as smart as them. They push the user to apply themselves, RTFM and work on a few open source projects. Lord knows I've tried but my Grandma just doesn't seem to do well in the code reviews.
But the OSX programmers have it the best. All the skill of the Unix programmers and an ease of use, sense of style and fanbase that Windows could only dream of having.
There is no such thing as absolute trust. The singular notion of trust is really an aggregation of many smaller, specific trust relationships that are evaluated over time.
... but history has shown us that like death and taxes, we can trust these to be the way life works.
How can you trust Firefox, you say. Well, how can you trust that the sun will rise in the east tomorrow? How can you trust that trees will grow new leaves yearly to replace the ones lost? How can you trust that Microsoft will spend far more time and energy marketing their products rather than actually making them good? It does not have to be this way
Not exactly. We don't really hear about what Cmdr Taco had for breakfast or how Timmy's dog is chasing the neighbor's cat. Slashdot is really just a set of discussion boards that periodically post some story to talk about.
Missing Matter ... still missing
Did anyone check under the cushions on the couch?
slashdotted already .... can someone post a mirror?
I used to be a big Quake III / Weapons Factory Arena fan but I got sick of the version upgrades (some didn't work) and getting owned by people who were upgrading their hardware more often than me.
... it's up to you.
;-)
... until you stray in my sights. ;-)
Playing Socom II on the Playstation is awesome. No worries about having to get the latest video card or worrying that your hardware is out of date after 2 months. The gameplay is great, as is the ability to speak to your team with the headset. You can play strategies of run and gun or stealth
Actually I should say more about the stealth aspect. This is the first FPS I've played where you can actually play slow and stealthily through the entire game. It's a great feeling when you sneak up behind someone to get a headshot with a pistol -- grenade launchers are for wimps -- if you're going to kill someone, you should be able to see them up close.
There are people using glitches in the game -- but more often than not I've seen the community self policing this by voting off people who bend the rules. Socom is not perfect in this regard, but then I don't know if any game can be.
I actually purchased the PS2 simply for this game and I am an *extremely* happy buyer.
Live life to the fullest
True, but they may be quickly employable by a number of irritating pop-up advertising companies.
Well there you go, just make it a reality tv show .... something like 'Survivor: Mars (outwit, outbreathe, outlast)'.
You'll have NO problem finding volunteers, they'll do scientific experiments for the challenges and the tv ads will finance the mission. A win-win for everyone!
City pedestrians already have to deal with gas/electric hybrid vehicles that are nearly silent, so these luddites will simply have to evolve. Less noise in the world is a good thing.
On your second point about traditional versus inside-out electric motor -- I'm no mechanical engineer, but my guess is that this tech allows you to have a fixed axle (or perhaps even no axle) versus the old tech which requires a long rotating heavy axle to drive the wheels.
Don't kid yourself. Equity, smechwity ... it's all about how much interest you have to pay. Besides, to get access to that equity you have to sell the roof over your head -- now where are you going to stay?
Read "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" and get your house paid off as soon as possible.
Because as others have already noted, the guys selling picks and shovels are the ones who make money during gold rushes.
Secondly, Microsoft is trying to seed the world with their proprietary wma format - that's the first wave of the assault. The second wave comes when/if their formats are the default - they then launch their music service that seamlessly works with your pc, pda and phone.
You see, first it was their operating system that helped sell applications. Then their OS helped sell PDA's and phones (well not really phones, but let's pretend for a minute). Now that their OS is under assault, their thinking is that their media format may become the common denominator.
WMA may become the driver to sell their OS, pda's, phones, etc.
So basically what you're saying is that the prefab music stores are simply an extension to the affiliate marketing programs that Amazon and other web sites currently have.
Don't you understand that a Coke branded prefab music store that sells a crappy boy band CD on a crappy proprietary media format is a strong competitive advantage to a Hostess Ho Ho's branded prefab music store that sells crappy boy band CD's on a crappy proprietary media format?
... you just don't appreciate the brilliance of this business strategy.
You must be a techie
Dude, you need to read Ladder Theory. It would have helped you understand early in the relationship how you would have no chance to ever score with her. It's nothing against you, it's just a matter of how she perceived you, that's all.
... not the only person with the last name "Dell" but he will be the only computer manufacturer with the Dell name featured, thus no manufacturer named "Delli" or "Dell2".
Understandably noone else could use the name "Dell" for a computer company, for that would be a name collision. But the connection to say that "Delli" and "Dell2" are then unusable is tenuous. If the names are not an exact match then how different must they be? Is it measured by number of characters, phenomes or special substrings?
What about "Diller", "Dille" or "Dill". At what point do you say something is okay versus not?
I think this whole thing is a crock. I happen to like "Apple Computer", but if you want to make a computer company and call it "Apple Delight Computer", you should be able to do so as long as you never try to use the shortened form of it.
Very good points. People who bundle their sense of self with their machine seem to get their panties in a bunch when their platform gets owned more than others. They seem to 'jump for joy' whenever a security vulnerability is distributed for some other platform. Personally I think this author should seek a priest, hobby or sufficiently drunk woman to help disassociate his feeling of being a man with owning a Windows machine.
.... it's pathetic. Have you felt so diminished as a person this past summer, as wave after wave of virii pummeled your Windows box, that you now revel in the misfortune of others? Do you have these same insecurities about whether you purchased the correct toaster, hair dryer and nose hair clipper?
Lance writes: I know this is wrong, but in one respect I was happy to learn earlier this month about the discovery of a significant security hole in the Jaguar and Panther versions (10.2 and 10.3, respectively) of the Apple operating system (OS).
Lance, let me tell you. It's not wrong for you to feel this way
Get a grip on yourself, man! Stand up straight, take the panties off your head and start acting like you've got a pair! Repeat after me, I am not the products I buy. Sometimes the products I buy work out, sometimes they don't meet my expectations. When they fall short, it is not a reflection of who I am, my intelligence or the size of my magic wand. If the product fails, it is a reflection of the manufacturer.
Now go out there and do something useful with your life like kicking the butt of the manufacturers who sold you inferior products!