At least at the large financial corp. I work for what matters first (even before functionality sometimes!) is the contract, i.e. who has liability for what, followed by cost and vendor reputation.
I'm not talking desktop OS here as obviously most niche vendors with desktop products for $FinanceBusinessFunction require the desktop to run Windows.
But with regard to encouraging Open Source in server, backoffice, data center, mid range, etc etc etc, the decision makers don't really care if the code can be looked at by anyone, as long as it's as secure as possible and the contract is drawn up in such a way that the vendor shoulders as much liability as the collective lawyers can agree on.
So from where I sit the question of encouraging Open Source is sort of like asking what's being done to encourage more yellow and red colors on the company intranet... Who cares as long as the job is getting done and the price and $Lawyer-Stuff is right.
That's not my answer but that is the Corporate Answer.
To the flame-bait moderator moron and any other knee-jerkers. That post makes fun of awful dialogue being horribly dubbed in old movies. It was funny then and still is. It's not an ethnic slur, it would be just as funny in any language.
(IANAL blah blah): Shouldn't Theft of Services be enough? That law is already in existence and what you're talking about with "as a whole" is really the theft of a service, the service of collecting, collating, and storing facts.
I agree that any database you take the time to put together should indeed have the protection it is already afforded under current law (AFAIK).
What this new law does is turn facts into tangible property, to be bought and sold. Certainly a terrible joke of an idea, and a great way to ensure that poor by design equals ignorant if carried far enough.
Actually I read somewhere that the whole pepper genus evolved specifically to disperse seeds through birds alone. A bird has a much shorter less-acidic digestive tract than a mammal. A bird also has no teeth. So the bird can disperse the seeds, whereas a mammal's teeth and digestive tract would destroy, or at least sterilize, the seeds. So as a plant, how do you get birds to eat your seeds and not mammals? Simple, you "evolve" a compound that mammals find totally unpalatable, but that birds don't mind at all. Hence capsaicin.
AFAIK all birds are totally immune to capsicum/capsaicin. They can chomp through a pile of habeneros and not notice anything even zesty.
So all of us hot pepper lovers can thank birds for the very existence of hot peppers!
I've never worked at a technology company, I've always worked at companies in other sectors. All these companies use technology. That said, I would suggest getting your degree in Finance, or Business, or whatever floats your boat, and do a minor or second major in your school's equivalent of Applied Computing.
Here on/. you are mostly asking programmers about how to avoid programming. But one of the biggest problems in the industry has always been the Large Gap between the IT folks and the Business Line folks. The Business Line people don't know what's possible and don't know what to ask for. While the IT folks don't spend day-in-day-out working directly with a given business line. More often than not they don't know the business process from a grain auction, how it brings in money, what processes are necessary from a legal standpoint. What IS that crazy spreadsheet for? Why are piles of printouts stacked in storerooms rather than stored as searchable electronic files? What are all these ancient files on the server for, if anything? What does the VP fly to Louisiana every week? Is there a better way?
That's where you come in. Make it your goal to operate as a bridge between the technology folks (cost center) and the business lines (profit center). Become an expert in something + applied technology. Then instead of butting their heads against "clueless lusers" the tech folks can talk to you. And instead of feeling lost and at the mercy of the tech folks, the business folks can talk to you. You're a liaison. A facilitator. You have developed your business acumen and your people skills, AND you know what NAT is and the difference between a firewall and proxy server. You won't know how to program, but you'll know what programming can and can't accomplish for a given business need. You'll know how communicate needs and provide direction across the Business--Technology chasm.
That's what I'd shoot for if I were you. I wish there were many more people doing that.
Seriously though, the sauce wasn't hot enough. Red Hot and Tobasco really aren't too hot. When we got a new puppy, I put a mixture of water and Dave's Insanity sauce ( anything in this Scary Sauces category will do the same job) on the furniture legs, power & phone cables, and carpet fringes. As another poster said, 'Bitter Apple' would need to be stronger and come in cheap gallon sizes to really do the job. That's where the Dave's and water comes in. 1 teaspoon Dave's per 2 cups water. Guaranteed to work, unless your pet is a serious masochist.
Also have to remember to keep the water bowl full, or be a cruel jerk.
>For a lot of people, free as in freedom/free as in free trade are great ideas as long as it's not their ox that's being gored.
I would think the best thing the World Summit could advocate would be Open Source operating systems, but like Ms. Shipman says, give no preferences whatsoever when it comes to any other (non-OS) software.
Let's face it, if enough people ran non-Windows OS's then companies would make and sell a lot more software for non-Windows OS's. The only ox that would really get gored here is MS. MS is not "a lot of people" in the grand scheme of things. This isn't a bash, just a fact.
There's certainly nothing wrong with running proprietary software on systems that boot to an Open Source OS. In fact, in a world of Open OS's, I have to believe we'd all have more job opportunities, not less. There's a lot of work, coding, etc., to be done to get things ready for a world where Windows doesn't rule most users.
The manager doesn't need to give you information as to why he made his decision, it is none of your business, you work underneath him.
And denying you pertinent information is exactly how how he's going to keep you there.. underneath. To the detriment of the company.
Your little soldier analogy is flawed and scary. Most employees are heavily (or more lately it's moderately) personally invested in the company..time, 401K, stock sharing, etc. They want to see the company do well just as badly as you do. Everyone can't be a chief. But if you treat your employees like automatons that's exactly what you'll get out of them. On the other hand, if you give your employees that broad "aerial view" you speak of, then you just taught many of them how to do their same job better, and how to make better suggestions, and so on.
Except for the most secretive of industries, it's not like a war, everyone CAN have the whole battle plan. And they should, unless management is more concerned with stroking their egos.
When employees stop being seen as resources and start being seen as assets, the corporate world will finally have advanced beyond barbarism.
If you don't understand the difference... assets get bought and sold when companies get bought and sold, companies invest time, money, and information flow into assets, etc. Resources just get discarded when they are no longer considered useful. A discarded resource can't be an asset to anyone.
Re:Manufacturers are doing what they're supposed t
on
KISS
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· Score: 1
I think that's misleading. My TV is "HDTV-Ready". Who spends all that money on a TV and then doesn't get cable or satellite? And since the latest converter boxes you get from those services are HDTV converters, whoala, I have an HDTV, and I didn't have to buy a set-top box. It would have been a waste of money to do so. Now I have up to 1080i, On Demand (not HD), and all the HD stations are stunning in native 1080i or up-res'd 720p.
So "I have an HDTV", but I bet by their measurement I'm one of those duped consumers because my TV is only "HDTV Ready". Yet buying a full-blown HDTV would've been a waste of money after Comcast bypasses it for their own converter.
I think the real dupe is getting people to pay for a converter when it comes automatically with most digital cable or satellite services now.
The charged more for it a few years ago, but now it's only a few dollars more than renting the analog box, throw in On Demand, and buying your own HDTV tuner or full blown HDTV with internal tuner is, again, a waste of money.
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I don't remember what song my first MP3 was but it was sometime in 1998. But I do remember thinking, man this sounds like somebody threw a wet towel over the speakers.
So I thought it must be lousy PC speakers.. tried a few different speakers, and many different downloads, some studio, some live, but nothing sounded right. And I don't mean 'right' as in 'decent', I mean right as in I don't want it to sound like I have a head cold. 2 years later I finally burned a small David Byrne concert to CD and listened in my car. STILL had the "wet towel over the speakers" effect. Or maybe more like "speakers in the bottom of a plastic bucket" effect.
It wasn't until someone here at/. posted a link to FurthurNET and I discovered lossless compression that things started sounding good. I downloaded the exact same David Byrne show in shorten(.shn) format and it blew the other one away. There was simply no comparison. (FYI There is a shorten plugin for Winamps 3 and earlier.)
Now, after having countless MP3's played for me, I have no interest at all in them. When I read this Ask Slashdot I wanted to post this without being trollish. So here's an honest non-troll question set:
Did most people give up on lossless? Do you try to find a lossless recording before resorting to MP3? Now that we can carry days worth of MP3's in our breast pocket does anyone think a popular mainstream lossless compression format is on the horizon?
I know as soon as they come out with a portable lossless player and start pumping out lossless downloads to go with it, I'll own one. The shorten format sure gets my vote. I'm not a nitpicky person, or anything close to an 'audiophile', but listening to an MP3 version of a terrific piece of music [to me] is like cooking sushi, or putting cheap BBQ sauce on a filet mignon. Just for kicks awhile back I wrapped my pc speakers up in plastic wrap and turned the volume up to compensate for the wrap. Whoala! Instant real-time conversion from.shn to.mp3. The likeness was amazing.
The worrisome part to me is that the lossy MP3 format is a relatively old stepping-stone technology. Built for a time when space and bandwidth were more limited. The problem is, as technology improves, I don't see many folks asking for a better format. Instead they want 9 thousand hours of downloads in a square inch. Quantity is great. But what about quality? Seriously?
Anybody remember those commercials on TV: "There are 50 thousand ice machines in the US and somebody needs to fix them." And then they'd offer to send you to ice-machine-fixing school. There are others, fixing/ driving the "Big Rigs", learning how to be an X-Ray Technician in 6 months, etc. etc. etc.
Well recently I've seen at least one each for "IT Manager", "Computer Technician", and "Internet Technologist"... "learn in 6 months!"
They might as well be playing "Taps" as far as I'm concerned. Well not quite but those ads are ALWAYS for commodity positions, "anyone can learn", etc etc.
And if there are any ice-machine repair-folks reading this, there's nothing wrong with that, it's just that most of us have spent our entire lives deeply involved with technology, and we are used to our compensation reflecting that. Those ads tell us that people think they can learn in 6 months, and schools are filling up with people doing just that.
No they're not going to directly take our jobs if we have 10 years of experience, but all those folks sure will lower the paycheck bar for the entire spectrum of IT workers. It's called Flooding the Market.
Add that to overseas outsourcing... it's so depressing.
I used to console myself with the adage "You get what you pay for.", but way too often the people doing the hiring don't understand what they need or what they're getting anyway, they don't understand the benefits of paying for something better, so they go cheaper, time and time again.
There are 50 million computers in the US and somebody needs to fix them.
[buries face in hands]
And the 2nd question is
on
Cube House
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With apologies to the late Douglas Adams, AKA, Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz:
Oh freddled codebuggly
Thy micturations are to me
As plurdled gabble/BASHits on a lurgid BSD.
GroopID I implore thee, my foonting turlingdromes
And hooptiously compile me with thunkly bindlewurdles,
Or I will ^H^H^H^H thee in the gobberwarts with my numbercruncheon,
See if I don't!
> They are all horribly framed, overlighted in an horrible, cheesy manner, and the music is always way overboard.
Interesting. Bear with me for a second here. For contrast I'm going to compare to David Lynch's "Dune"
First off - if Lynch had been allowed to make it a 4 hour extended DVD then most of the movie's problems would've arguably been solved. With that in mind, the style Lynch used was an odd dark mixture, the lighting was convoluted, the scenes were framed in a very "staged" manner, the set was just plain over-the-top weird, and the score by Toto was incredibly melodramatic. I loved it. It fit perfectly with the mood Herbert developed so well in the novel. It fit perfectly with a quasi-religious messianic jihad sci-fi story set in the year 10000AD.
Back to LotR. Tolkein's storytelling is highly grandoise while still being deeply intimate, his elves are glowing with mystique, his scenes are rich and fantastic, even the colors seem saturated when reading the novels. What you describe as horribly framed, overly lit, cheesy and overboard, I would describe simply as 'Fantasy', especially Tolkien fantasy. Peter used that style I think in a similar manner to the way Lynch went over the top with his style in filming Dune, albeit in a more accessable, less esoteric way. And I think in both cases it worked GREAT. Sci-Fi is funky strange worlds. Fantasy is fantastic magical worlds. It's only cheesy when some goof applies it to say.. The Titanic.
I agree with much of what you said. However I think the cold emotionless snapping of the infants neck was quite spine-chilling. Sick, sure but it was a Cylon doing it with no emotion, but more as an experiment. If she would so coldly experiment with a baby's neck, then she would surely be capable of coldly experimenting with some guy's emotions and private parts.
Anyway, I thought it did add something. More than anything it dehumanized the human looking Cylons. It didn't demonize them, that wouldn't have been nearly as frightening as an emotionless calculating unfathomable inhuman enemy. It showed how atrocious they can be just on a whim. Kind of scary if you ask me.
Not only that, but now we the audience hate the Cylons even more for doing such a sick thing as casually as tipping one's hat. We're drawn in, before she did that I wanted to rip her clothes off, afterwards I wanted to rip her head off, but wait! I still want to rip her clothes off! Great way to put the audience in conflict with themselves. Darn good TV really.
Hmmm.. side note: If you had read that scene in some original BSG novel first, would you be as put off by it?
If they're so completely ineffective at one of the most fundamental tasks they've been assigned, maybe they'll be ineffective at further eroding our civil rights.
They got off to a bad start much earlier, when they created the department, named it, and put Ridge in charge. Apparently he is well atuned to the media though...
Remarks by Secretary Tom Ridge at the National Cyber Security Summit
Re:Stick with Windows and if you do...
on
PC Annoyances
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Time to torch some karma..
I haven't used linux in years, and even then not much. You just might be the perfect person to give me an update (answers from anyone are most welcome), as I've been thinking about running Debian at home, maybe as dual boot with XP, but going cold turkey on Windows would be nice.
So if you or anyone has the time to answer, here's my list of possible concerns:
Can you plug cameras, flash card readers, printers, etc etc, into the USB ports and "they just work"? It's not that I'm lazy (well yes that's exactly what it is) but there are a ton of doo-dads that I own/borrow/swap and I don't want to have to do a driver dance every time I plug one in. I don't have to do it when I plug in a toaster, and I don't have to do it w/ XP.
Same question as above only Firewire/1394?
Windows emulator, I'll need one for some things. Which one?
SHN files? WinAmp replacement?
Managing multiple connections... XP (finally) does it fairly well. VPN's, Dial-out, broadband ISP, 802.11g to my laptop, etc. A dummy could do it. I appreciate that, I've outgrown the thrill configuring routers via CLI and telnet. I've outgrown the thrill of patting myself on the back because I know the 7 layer OSI model and can therefore figure out all over again how to tunnel through this, NAT that, etc. I spent half a day on the hardware firewall, it's already configured, after that, I want point and click.
MS Outlook (NOT Express), I love it. I love all the non-email extras and use them for work so I'm not switching. Can I run it via an emulator and will it suck?
There's an insightful post above claiming it's fear of other OS's that keep people with Windows. Pending any (much appreciated) answers, I'm betting its lazyness, or in other words, I'm fearful of all the effort I'll have to put it.;)
That's the whole problem with SETI in a nutshell. It only looks for radio signals. Meaning we are looking for signs of alien intelligence in that super-narrow drop-in-the-bucket window in any given alien civilization's development when they MAY have used radio signals, and it assumes those signals penetrated the aliens upper atmosphere so that we could detect them.
It's like looking for that needle in the haystack, except the needle is only in 1 of a trillion haystacks, and then it's only there for a split second before it disappears and moves to another haystack.
Not to mention almost every instance of convincing alien life in SF and "xenobiology" is so strange and different that the likelihood of them using radio is very small. Think of Card's Buggers, or Vinge's ant-like aliens, or the ever infamous super-intelligent shade of blue.
Maybe their version of a brain sees radio waves the way we see color. Why then would they ever broadcast a global signal? It would be like broadcasting a red tint over everything you see. They would communicate so differently that the idea of them broadcasting radio might be insane. Come to think of it, the whole idea of broadcasting a one-to-many signal might be a human idea. Maybe that kind of broadcasting would be like a human broadcasting something inside a movie theater.. RUDE.
you could go on like this forever. I'm not against SETI. But it sure seems like the equivalent of looking for human life by sticking a big microphone out the window, and then arguing over squirrell chatter vs. possible Bantu language clicks.
In other words, neat, but let's not get carried away.
The law says that phone companies have to allow for number portability. The law does NOT say the phone companies have to make it easy for the consumer.
For instance, when switching from AT&T to Verizon (while keeping your number the same) in my area you are forced to carry both your old phone and your new phone until May 2004. You place calls on your new phone but you still receive them on your old phone.
Call me crazy but I'll wait a good year or so until it's at least a bit more customer friendly.
The only thing keeping them from making it worse is that no one wants to get the worst press. So it appears they're going to drag their feet and make things as difficult as possible for as long as possible, and they're going to do it just up to the point that they can't get slammed any worse than anyone else in the industry. Like some inverse version of competition.
Q-"How poorly can we comply?"
A-"What are our competitors getting away with?"
Slashdot Mirror
At least at the large financial corp. I work for what matters first (even before functionality sometimes!) is the contract, i.e. who has liability for what, followed by cost and vendor reputation.
I'm not talking desktop OS here as obviously most niche vendors with desktop products for $FinanceBusinessFunction require the desktop to run Windows.
But with regard to encouraging Open Source in server, backoffice, data center, mid range, etc etc etc, the decision makers don't really care if the code can be looked at by anyone, as long as it's as secure as possible and the contract is drawn up in such a way that the vendor shoulders as much liability as the collective lawyers can agree on.
So from where I sit the question of encouraging Open Source is sort of like asking what's being done to encourage more yellow and red colors on the company intranet... Who cares as long as the job is getting done and the price and $Lawyer-Stuff is right.
That's not my answer but that is the Corporate Answer.
To the flame-bait moderator moron and any other knee-jerkers. That post makes fun of awful dialogue being horribly dubbed in old movies. It was funny then and still is. It's not an ethnic slur, it would be just as funny in any language.
No no. Don't you watch old Samurai flicks?
50,000 words in just enough to ask where the men's room is.
with four-hundred and eighty-nine quintillion-zillion blogs, how many did they think were going to be original?
As a whole, I mean..
(IANAL blah blah):
Shouldn't Theft of Services be enough? That law is already in existence and what you're talking about with "as a whole" is really the theft of a service, the service of collecting, collating, and storing facts.
I agree that any database you take the time to put together should indeed have the protection it is already afforded under current law (AFAIK).
What this new law does is turn facts into tangible property, to be bought and sold. Certainly a terrible joke of an idea, and a great way to ensure that poor by design equals ignorant if carried far enough.
Actually I read somewhere that the whole pepper genus evolved specifically to disperse seeds through birds alone. A bird has a much shorter less-acidic digestive tract than a mammal. A bird also has no teeth. So the bird can disperse the seeds, whereas a mammal's teeth and digestive tract would destroy, or at least sterilize, the seeds. So as a plant, how do you get birds to eat your seeds and not mammals? Simple, you "evolve" a compound that mammals find totally unpalatable, but that birds don't mind at all. Hence capsaicin.
AFAIK all birds are totally immune to capsicum/capsaicin. They can chomp through a pile of habeneros and not notice anything even zesty.
So all of us hot pepper lovers can thank birds for the very existence of hot peppers!
Time to burn some Karma.
/. you are mostly asking programmers about how to avoid programming. But one of the biggest problems in the industry has always been the Large Gap between the IT folks and the Business Line folks. The Business Line people don't know what's possible and don't know what to ask for. While the IT folks don't spend day-in-day-out working directly with a given business line. More often than not they don't know the business process from a grain auction, how it brings in money, what processes are necessary from a legal standpoint. What IS that crazy spreadsheet for? Why are piles of printouts stacked in storerooms rather than stored as searchable electronic files? What are all these ancient files on the server for, if anything? What does the VP fly to Louisiana every week? Is there a better way?
I've never worked at a technology company, I've always worked at companies in other sectors. All these companies use technology. That said, I would suggest getting your degree in Finance, or Business, or whatever floats your boat, and do a minor or second major in your school's equivalent of Applied Computing.
Here on
That's where you come in. Make it your goal to operate as a bridge between the technology folks (cost center) and the business lines (profit center). Become an expert in something + applied technology. Then instead of butting their heads against "clueless lusers" the tech folks can talk to you. And instead of feeling lost and at the mercy of the tech folks, the business folks can talk to you. You're a liaison. A facilitator. You have developed your business acumen and your people skills, AND you know what NAT is and the difference between a firewall and proxy server. You won't know how to program, but you'll know what programming can and can't accomplish for a given business need. You'll know how communicate needs and provide direction across the Business--Technology chasm.
That's what I'd shoot for if I were you. I wish there were many more people doing that.
They ended up with a dog that liked hot sauce.
Seriously though, the sauce wasn't hot enough. Red Hot and Tobasco really aren't too hot. When we got a new puppy, I put a mixture of water and Dave's Insanity sauce ( anything in this Scary Sauces category will do the same job) on the furniture legs, power & phone cables, and carpet fringes. As another poster said, 'Bitter Apple' would need to be stronger and come in cheap gallon sizes to really do the job. That's where the Dave's and water comes in. 1 teaspoon Dave's per 2 cups water. Guaranteed to work, unless your pet is a serious masochist.
Also have to remember to keep the water bowl full, or be a cruel jerk.
>For a lot of people, free as in freedom/free as in free trade are great ideas as long as it's not their ox that's being gored.
I would think the best thing the World Summit could advocate would be Open Source operating systems, but like Ms. Shipman says, give no preferences whatsoever when it comes to any other (non-OS) software.
Let's face it, if enough people ran non-Windows OS's then companies would make and sell a lot more software for non-Windows OS's. The only ox that would really get gored here is MS. MS is not "a lot of people" in the grand scheme of things. This isn't a bash, just a fact.
There's certainly nothing wrong with running proprietary software on systems that boot to an Open Source OS. In fact, in a world of Open OS's, I have to believe we'd all have more job opportunities, not less. There's a lot of work, coding, etc., to be done to get things ready for a world where Windows doesn't rule most users.
The manager doesn't need to give you information as to why he made his decision, it is none of your business, you work underneath him.
And denying you pertinent information is exactly how how he's going to keep you there.. underneath. To the detriment of the company.
Your little soldier analogy is flawed and scary. Most employees are heavily (or more lately it's moderately) personally invested in the company..time, 401K, stock sharing, etc. They want to see the company do well just as badly as you do. Everyone can't be a chief. But if you treat your employees like automatons that's exactly what you'll get out of them. On the other hand, if you give your employees that broad "aerial view" you speak of, then you just taught many of them how to do their same job better, and how to make better suggestions, and so on.
Except for the most secretive of industries, it's not like a war, everyone CAN have the whole battle plan. And they should, unless management is more concerned with stroking their egos.
When employees stop being seen as resources and start being seen as assets, the corporate world will finally have advanced beyond barbarism.
If you don't understand the difference... assets get bought and sold when companies get bought and sold, companies invest time, money, and information flow into assets, etc. Resources just get discarded when they are no longer considered useful. A discarded resource can't be an asset to anyone.
I think that's misleading. My TV is "HDTV-Ready". Who spends all that money on a TV and then doesn't get cable or satellite? And since the latest converter boxes you get from those services are HDTV converters, whoala, I have an HDTV, and I didn't have to buy a set-top box. It would have been a waste of money to do so. Now I have up to 1080i, On Demand (not HD), and all the HD stations are stunning in native 1080i or up-res'd 720p.
So "I have an HDTV", but I bet by their measurement I'm one of those duped consumers because my TV is only "HDTV Ready". Yet buying a full-blown HDTV would've been a waste of money after Comcast bypasses it for their own converter. I think the real dupe is getting people to pay for a converter when it comes automatically with most digital cable or satellite services now. The charged more for it a few years ago, but now it's only a few dollars more than renting the analog box, throw in On Demand, and buying your own HDTV tuner or full blown HDTV with internal tuner is, again, a waste of money.
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I don't remember what song my first MP3 was but it was sometime in 1998. But I do remember thinking, man this sounds like somebody threw a wet towel over the speakers.
/. posted a link to FurthurNET and I discovered lossless compression that things started sounding good. I downloaded the exact same David Byrne show in shorten(.shn) format and it blew the other one away. There was simply no comparison. (FYI There is a shorten plugin for Winamps 3 and earlier.)
.shn to .mp3. The likeness was amazing.
So I thought it must be lousy PC speakers.. tried a few different speakers, and many different downloads, some studio, some live, but nothing sounded right. And I don't mean 'right' as in 'decent', I mean right as in I don't want it to sound like I have a head cold. 2 years later I finally burned a small David Byrne concert to CD and listened in my car. STILL had the "wet towel over the speakers" effect. Or maybe more like "speakers in the bottom of a plastic bucket" effect.
It wasn't until someone here at
Now, after having countless MP3's played for me, I have no interest at all in them. When I read this Ask Slashdot I wanted to post this without being trollish. So here's an honest non-troll question set:
Did most people give up on lossless? Do you try to find a lossless recording before resorting to MP3?
Now that we can carry days worth of MP3's in our breast pocket does anyone think a popular mainstream lossless compression format is on the horizon?
I know as soon as they come out with a portable lossless player and start pumping out lossless downloads to go with it, I'll own one. The shorten format sure gets my vote. I'm not a nitpicky person, or anything close to an 'audiophile', but listening to an MP3 version of a terrific piece of music [to me] is like cooking sushi, or putting cheap BBQ sauce on a filet mignon. Just for kicks awhile back I wrapped my pc speakers up in plastic wrap and turned the volume up to compensate for the wrap. Whoala! Instant real-time conversion from
The worrisome part to me is that the lossy MP3 format is a relatively old stepping-stone technology. Built for a time when space and bandwidth were more limited. The problem is, as technology improves, I don't see many folks asking for a better format. Instead they want 9 thousand hours of downloads in a square inch. Quantity is great. But what about quality? Seriously?
Anybody remember those commercials on TV: "There are 50 thousand ice machines in the US and somebody needs to fix them." And then they'd offer to send you to ice-machine-fixing school. There are others, fixing/ driving the "Big Rigs", learning how to be an X-Ray Technician in 6 months, etc. etc. etc.
Well recently I've seen at least one each for "IT Manager", "Computer Technician", and "Internet Technologist"... "learn in 6 months!"
They might as well be playing "Taps" as far as I'm concerned. Well not quite but those ads are ALWAYS for commodity positions, "anyone can learn", etc etc.
And if there are any ice-machine repair-folks reading this, there's nothing wrong with that, it's just that most of us have spent our entire lives deeply involved with technology, and we are used to our compensation reflecting that. Those ads tell us that people think they can learn in 6 months, and schools are filling up with people doing just that.
No they're not going to directly take our jobs if we have 10 years of experience, but all those folks sure will lower the paycheck bar for the entire spectrum of IT workers. It's called Flooding the Market.
Add that to overseas outsourcing... it's so depressing.
I used to console myself with the adage "You get what you pay for.", but way too often the people doing the hiring don't understand what they need or what they're getting anyway, they don't understand the benefits of paying for something better, so they go cheaper, time and time again.
There are 50 million computers in the US and somebody needs to fix them.
[buries face in hands]
Can you do other drugs there, or just pot?
With apologies to the late Douglas Adams, AKA,
Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz:
Oh freddled codebuggly
Thy micturations are to me
As plurdled gabble/BASHits on a lurgid BSD.
GroopID I implore thee, my foonting turlingdromes
And hooptiously compile me with thunkly bindlewurdles,
Or I will ^H^H^H^H thee in the gobberwarts with my numbercruncheon,
See if I don't!
For using "nano" three different ways in six different places, the author should opalogize.
> They are all horribly framed, overlighted in an horrible, cheesy manner, and the music is always way overboard.
Interesting. Bear with me for a second here. For contrast I'm going to compare to David Lynch's "Dune"
First off - if Lynch had been allowed to make it a 4 hour extended DVD then most of the movie's problems would've arguably been solved. With that in mind, the style Lynch used was an odd dark mixture, the lighting was convoluted, the scenes were framed in a very "staged" manner, the set was just plain over-the-top weird, and the score by Toto was incredibly melodramatic. I loved it. It fit perfectly with the mood Herbert developed so well in the novel. It fit perfectly with a quasi-religious messianic jihad sci-fi story set in the year 10000AD.
Back to LotR. Tolkein's storytelling is highly grandoise while still being deeply intimate, his elves are glowing with mystique, his scenes are rich and fantastic, even the colors seem saturated when reading the novels. What you describe as horribly framed, overly lit, cheesy and overboard, I would describe simply as 'Fantasy', especially Tolkien fantasy. Peter used that style I think in a similar manner to the way Lynch went over the top with his style in filming Dune, albeit in a more accessable, less esoteric way. And I think in both cases it worked GREAT. Sci-Fi is funky strange worlds. Fantasy is fantastic magical worlds. It's only cheesy when some goof applies it to say.. The Titanic.
Can we get some of the Windows, Outlook, and IE XAML security measures included with the first longhorn release?
Or are we going to be reactive only, as usual?
I agree with much of what you said. However I think the cold emotionless snapping of the infants neck was quite spine-chilling. Sick, sure but it was a Cylon doing it with no emotion, but more as an experiment. If she would so coldly experiment with a baby's neck, then she would surely be capable of coldly experimenting with some guy's emotions and private parts.
Anyway, I thought it did add something. More than anything it dehumanized the human looking Cylons. It didn't demonize them, that wouldn't have been nearly as frightening as an emotionless calculating unfathomable inhuman enemy. It showed how atrocious they can be just on a whim. Kind of scary if you ask me.
Not only that, but now we the audience hate the Cylons even more for doing such a sick thing as casually as tipping one's hat. We're drawn in, before she did that I wanted to rip her clothes off, afterwards I wanted to rip her head off, but wait! I still want to rip her clothes off! Great way to put the audience in conflict with themselves. Darn good TV really.
Hmmm.. side note: If you had read that scene in some original BSG novel first, would you be as put off by it?
If they're so completely ineffective at one of the most fundamental tasks they've been assigned, maybe they'll be ineffective at further eroding our civil rights.
They got off to a bad start much earlier, when they created the department, named it, and put Ridge in charge. Apparently he is well atuned to the media though...
I was going to pull out some quotes, but the fact that it came out 6 days before their 'F' says quite a bit already.
First Post on slashdot.org
I haven't used linux in years, and even then not much. You just might be the perfect person to give me an update (answers from anyone are most welcome), as I've been thinking about running Debian at home, maybe as dual boot with XP, but going cold turkey on Windows would be nice.
So if you or anyone has the time to answer, here's my list of possible concerns:
There's an insightful post above claiming it's fear of other OS's that keep people with Windows. Pending any (much appreciated) answers, I'm betting its lazyness, or in other words, I'm fearful of all the effort I'll have to put it.
Mod parent up!
That's the whole problem with SETI in a nutshell. It only looks for radio signals. Meaning we are looking for signs of alien intelligence in that super-narrow drop-in-the-bucket window in any given alien civilization's development when they MAY have used radio signals, and it assumes those signals penetrated the aliens upper atmosphere so that we could detect them.
It's like looking for that needle in the haystack, except the needle is only in 1 of a trillion haystacks, and then it's only there for a split second before it disappears and moves to another haystack.
Not to mention almost every instance of convincing alien life in SF and "xenobiology" is so strange and different that the likelihood of them using radio is very small. Think of Card's Buggers, or Vinge's ant-like aliens, or the ever infamous super-intelligent shade of blue.
Maybe their version of a brain sees radio waves the way we see color. Why then would they ever broadcast a global signal? It would be like broadcasting a red tint over everything you see. They would communicate so differently that the idea of them broadcasting radio might be insane. Come to think of it, the whole idea of broadcasting a one-to-many signal might be a human idea. Maybe that kind of broadcasting would be like a human broadcasting something inside a movie theater.. RUDE.
you could go on like this forever. I'm not against SETI. But it sure seems like the equivalent of looking for human life by sticking a big microphone out the window, and then arguing over squirrell chatter vs. possible Bantu language clicks.
In other words, neat, but let's not get carried away.
The law says that phone companies have to allow for number portability. The law does NOT say the phone companies have to make it easy for the consumer.
For instance, when switching from AT&T to Verizon (while keeping your number the same) in my area you are forced to carry both your old phone and your new phone until May 2004. You place calls on your new phone but you still receive them on your old phone.
Call me crazy but I'll wait a good year or so until it's at least a bit more customer friendly.
The only thing keeping them from making it worse is that no one wants to get the worst press. So it appears they're going to drag their feet and make things as difficult as possible for as long as possible, and they're going to do it just up to the point that they can't get slammed any worse than anyone else in the industry. Like some inverse version of competition.
Q-"How poorly can we comply?"
A-"What are our competitors getting away with?"