At least get desks with fronts on them, so everyone doesn't have to look at the boss' hairy legs and to give the people who prefer skirts a sense of privacy.
I'm serious, too. Legs are distracting. Especially the pretty ones.
They ended up advancing him so far that he was shunned by society and try to kill himself but found out that the nanobots would fix whatever he did
Why wouldn't starvation work? Once the raw materials go away, he couldn't stay warm-blooded nor move, no matter how much physical damage is repaired. His body would eventually--and literally--burn out.
I'll refrain from addressing the troll aspects of your message.
I didn't mean to sound like a troll; rather, I'm pretty jaded by some of the DoD contracts I've seen. Some projects are an easy way to settle into job-security through lack of progress and a pile of money somewhere up in the food chain.
Most officials, when it comes to technology, are stupid so educate them!
One problem is that by the time someone is old enough and has the right type of experience to get into legislature, they are (1) not technically inclined, (2) their existing technical knowledge is likely obselete, (3) they try to think about technology in non-technological terms, (4) the learning curve to really understand modern technology is simply too high. As an example to (4), how many slashdotters could learn what they know now through some sort of one-time "education campaign" aimed as more of a slap in the face than anything?
It is more likely a matter of preference. For example, my PS2's fan is tolerable, in general, but is clearly audible during quiet periods of movies or classical music. If your PS2's fan is really quiet, you may be lucky, where manufacturing variations erred in your favor, or its location causes the sound to be absorbed or reflected away somehow.
Does that mean that people who work for organizations that do DoD work can no longer protect their home systems, and thus protect the governmental work systems?
If you are able access DoD systems from home, then whatever is on those systems isn't very important to begin with. The level of trust on any home computer is pretty darn low, considering how many "untrusted" people have access to it (friends, relatives, neighbors, etc.). Additionally, while SecureID cards work very well, I wouldn't bet national security on them, and many home router applicances have simple back doors or weak passwords.
My bet is that your contracts are for either DoD websites or academic-type research that is inconsequential to national security. There is also a good chance the projects are simply pork won by your congressman--such projects are often inconsequential in any capacity.
Who the hell needs to script anything in a WORD PROCESSOR??
It's to enable the "computer guy" in the office to create Word-document forms that are frustratingly inflexible to fill out, crash half the time, and end up corrupting whatever database they are imported into, all in the name of "increased efficiency".
Microsoft's motto should be "One step forward; two steps back."
"Due to recent analysis, and given our commitment to quality,...
If they are so committed to quality, why do their CPUs have more published errata than their competitors? I read that the Pentium, for example, had dozens of errata, but that the UltraSPARC, for example, had about five or so.
Intel is pushing 3+ GHz chips and I can still only type ~70 WPM.
I type a measly 35 WPM or so, and have occasionally found myself typing faster than Word will accept input. This is on 500MHz to 750MHz class computers. I'm not sure what Word is doing behind the scenes (leaky abstractions?), but it can't be pretty. It almost seems that Word typesets the whole page or document with every character typed. Ah, the dillema of WYSIWYG.
Seriously, though, you have a good point, where the problem of data entry was solved long long ago. Now-a-days, getting interrupted 350 or so times a minute must get really boring, where there's potentially 8.5 million idle cycles between keystrokes on a 3GHz CPU.
An informed public is necessary to maintain ones freedoms, but i guess we already missed the "informed public" boat too early to avoid draconian laws like the DMCA anyhow.
Now that most people get their information from TV, the notion of an "informed public" has ceased to exist. For example, to attract ratings, Headline News now has some sort of worthless "Entertainment Tonight" segment, constant mentions of "We're the most trusted name in news", constant interruptions to learn that Jessica Lynch brushed her teeth this morning, and on and on. If I watch it for more than five minutes, I get angry at how absurd "news" has become and turn off the TV in disgust.
There's a reason Homer Simpson gets so many laughs...it's because he's so damn accurate, anymore, that we are laughing at ourselves!
I thought about a design like this many years ago and concluded that there would be major difficulties sealing in the combustion gases. I guess time will tell whether the problem has been solved.
An additional problem is the law of conservation of energy or Newton's third law. It'll be interesting to see how his "patentable" design keeps the pistons rotating within a common torus.
Someday, I'll be able to write a highly graphical game like Doom 3 in a beautiful language like Python.:)
When this is possible, Doom III will look primitive when compared to the simultaneously released C-language based games. Games are the one market where high-level languages will probably never catch on.
We call it "bloat" normally, but then we usually forget about that and accept it as the norm and shun everyone who's running less than 2Ghz.
It seems the niches get smaller and smaller each time. 200MHz Pentiums reached an important threshold of usefulness. For example, I was able to use a AMD-K6 200-based computer up until recently and was tolerably productive (GNOME 1.4, burning CD-R, Mozilla 1.2, etc.)
500MHz seems about right for Windows XP, Office, etc. for good productivity. This is also getting to a point where modest CAD models are comfortable.
1GHz and above...games, simulations, games, video, games, big CAD models, games, etc.
Quite honestly, the simulation, video, and big CAD model markets are niches. Big niches in themselves, but very small relative to office desktops and home desktops. Intel will have to face this eventually, if they aren't already.
...technologies like COM and ActiveX have permitted modular and reusable components where previously code would have to be re-written and re-developed for every application.
Don't forget Java, Qt, and the like. Why not also add portability rather than chaining yourself to Windows? If the MS ship sinks, why not have a life raft handy? Linux? No problem. UNIX? No problem. Mac OS? No problem. Companies should take advantage of portable APIs at every practical opportunity.
Even if your whole company changes over to a new suite of office tools, you still have the odious problem of sending and receiving "standard" MS office documents to all the people you do business with.
A compromise would be to switch the entire company over to OpenOffice.org or equivalent, and, then, establish a small number of shared Windows workstations to maintain compatibility.
One good way to do this with Sun equipment is to set up a server with multiple SunPCi x86 co-processor cards and share them over X Windows sessions to the users. Alternatively, VM software could accomplish about the same effect without the co-processors. Perhaps five Windows/MS Office licenses per 100 users would work well. I'd bet this is still much cheaper and much safer from lock-in than an all Microsoft solution.
It all feels cobbled together to me, and I get sluggish performance.
I agree with this. This is due to the unchecked flexibility in the X architecture (it was designed by academics rather than "usability engineers"). The X architecture explicitly allows for the hundreds of window managers, toolkits, desktops, etc. out there.
Remote X is not as widely used as it is endlessly hyped to be. If you want that, use the normal XFree86 project. Linux needs a real, innovative desktop environment. If you really need remote capabilities, can't it be added on or kept as a separate build option?
Modular or not, remote X sessions, or their equivalent, need to be preserved for wide-spread acceptance of the forked X among UNIX/Linux users. There is substance behind the hype, because remote X sessions are genuinely useful to many people. In fact, the lack of remote sessions in Windows is one of my primary criticism of it (there are hacks for Windows, but they are not widely installed and are more difficult to depend on).
For example, some (very expensive) software is licensed or configured on a per-host basis. If it isn't configured for my workstation, but my co-worker who uses it is on vacation or tasked elsewhere, remote X sessions allow me to use his license no questions asked. This has been useful to me several times.
Remote X sessions are useful for software testing, because it allows convenient access to multiple workstations and servers, each of which might have a different configuration.
They can allow running X applications on powerful servers with no graphics hardware. This wouldn't be useful for OpenGL apps, but it would certainly be useful for CPU-bound apps.
They allow the use of non-native applications on the local desktop. For example, I could run a GNOME app from an x86-based server on a Sun workstation with the ability to cut-and-paste text. If NFS is available, the remote app could even save files locally.
Remote X sessions allow the X-terminal network archtecture. This is used in many companies to centralize administration, which can be a cost saver. Sun is marketing this architecture (with a twist) in its SunRay products.
I'm sure there are other examples. My point is that remote sessions are one of the most concretely useful features of X.
But I like Apple and don't like Universal, won't this simply create a contradiction in the universe that will require the universe to implode and be replaced by a more confusing one?
No, things balance out across parallel universes. Over in U203, Microsoft just released Windows Media Player under a BSD licence and renounced patent claims!
Ha. Gripe to the human-interface people who get up on their soapbox and beat their drums to the tune of "nobody wants to see that debugging junk, its enough to know their program crashed. It shouldn't have crashed in the first place, so its the programmers fault that it happened."
So, the suits fall for the UI argument, and, then, follow-up by not increasing funding so the programmers can't write robust code. This makes me question whether EA would ever be a good place to work as a programmer.
To anyone who says, "programmers should write robust code by default", I say, "get a real job." To anyone who says "use Lisp or Python (or whatever) and all your woes magically disappear", I say, "no programming language yet invented fundamentally reduces the complexity of programming, even Lisp can break when lists take on nil values unexpectedly--you just don't get a core dump from it".
The only information that is returned from the game itself is that a "Serious Error" has occured.
This is EA's first mistake. How are they supposed to do tech support, when the customers can say only that a "serious error" occurred. Internet Explorer is just as bad when pages don't load. How are end-users supposed to learn anything when the programmers give up on reporting useful error information?
There does not seem to be a wide margin in the IT industry in US, but there is China.
Sun appears to be marketing agressively in Asia. There is a whole version of StarOffice, called StarSuite, geared towards the asian markets. They also donate lots of software to asian countries trying to seed the markets there. I guess one advantage of being a global company is that there are alternatives now that the U.S. is in the dumper for the near future.
Slashdot Mirror
Why not a open floor?
At least get desks with fronts on them, so everyone doesn't have to look at the boss' hairy legs and to give the people who prefer skirts a sense of privacy.
I'm serious, too. Legs are distracting. Especially the pretty ones.
After reading the review, this thing sounds like a nightmare.
No, the author of the review made it clear: "...suppository more adequately describes the Smart Display experience."
It's more like a trip to the doctor. What fun.
They ended up advancing him so far that he was shunned by society and try to kill himself but found out that the nanobots would fix whatever he did
Why wouldn't starvation work? Once the raw materials go away, he couldn't stay warm-blooded nor move, no matter how much physical damage is repaired. His body would eventually--and literally--burn out.
I'll refrain from addressing the troll aspects of your message.
I didn't mean to sound like a troll; rather, I'm pretty jaded by some of the DoD contracts I've seen. Some projects are an easy way to settle into job-security through lack of progress and a pile of money somewhere up in the food chain.
Most officials, when it comes to technology, are stupid so educate them!
One problem is that by the time someone is old enough and has the right type of experience to get into legislature, they are (1) not technically inclined, (2) their existing technical knowledge is likely obselete, (3) they try to think about technology in non-technological terms, (4) the learning curve to really understand modern technology is simply too high. As an example to (4), how many slashdotters could learn what they know now through some sort of one-time "education campaign" aimed as more of a slap in the face than anything?
Are you sure your PS2 ins't broken?
It is more likely a matter of preference. For example, my PS2's fan is tolerable, in general, but is clearly audible during quiet periods of movies or classical music. If your PS2's fan is really quiet, you may be lucky, where manufacturing variations erred in your favor, or its location causes the sound to be absorbed or reflected away somehow.
As you know marihuana is a drug and drugs support terrorism.
Don't forget oil, rubber, sugar, coffee, and diamonds! They support terrorists, too!! Stop these atrocities, now, while we still can!!!
Does that mean that people who work for organizations that do DoD work can no longer protect their home systems, and thus protect the governmental work systems?
If you are able access DoD systems from home, then whatever is on those systems isn't very important to begin with. The level of trust on any home computer is pretty darn low, considering how many "untrusted" people have access to it (friends, relatives, neighbors, etc.). Additionally, while SecureID cards work very well, I wouldn't bet national security on them, and many home router applicances have simple back doors or weak passwords.
My bet is that your contracts are for either DoD websites or academic-type research that is inconsequential to national security. There is also a good chance the projects are simply pork won by your congressman--such projects are often inconsequential in any capacity.
Who the hell needs to script anything in a WORD PROCESSOR??
It's to enable the "computer guy" in the office to create Word-document forms that are frustratingly inflexible to fill out, crash half the time, and end up corrupting whatever database they are imported into, all in the name of "increased efficiency".
Microsoft's motto should be "One step forward; two steps back."
"Due to recent analysis, and given our commitment to quality, ...
If they are so committed to quality, why do their CPUs have more published errata than their competitors? I read that the Pentium, for example, had dozens of errata, but that the UltraSPARC, for example, had about five or so.
Intel is pushing 3+ GHz chips and I can still only type ~70 WPM.
I type a measly 35 WPM or so, and have occasionally found myself typing faster than Word will accept input. This is on 500MHz to 750MHz class computers. I'm not sure what Word is doing behind the scenes (leaky abstractions?), but it can't be pretty. It almost seems that Word typesets the whole page or document with every character typed. Ah, the dillema of WYSIWYG.
Seriously, though, you have a good point, where the problem of data entry was solved long long ago. Now-a-days, getting interrupted 350 or so times a minute must get really boring, where there's potentially 8.5 million idle cycles between keystrokes on a 3GHz CPU.
An informed public is necessary to maintain ones freedoms, but i guess we already missed the "informed public" boat too early to avoid draconian laws like the DMCA anyhow.
Now that most people get their information from TV, the notion of an "informed public" has ceased to exist. For example, to attract ratings, Headline News now has some sort of worthless "Entertainment Tonight" segment, constant mentions of "We're the most trusted name in news", constant interruptions to learn that Jessica Lynch brushed her teeth this morning, and on and on. If I watch it for more than five minutes, I get angry at how absurd "news" has become and turn off the TV in disgust.
There's a reason Homer Simpson gets so many laughs...it's because he's so damn accurate, anymore, that we are laughing at ourselves!
I thought about a design like this many years ago and concluded that there would be major difficulties sealing in the combustion gases. I guess time will tell whether the problem has been solved.
An additional problem is the law of conservation of energy or Newton's third law. It'll be interesting to see how his "patentable" design keeps the pistons rotating within a common torus.
Someday, I'll be able to write a highly graphical game like Doom 3 in a beautiful language like Python. :)
When this is possible, Doom III will look primitive when compared to the simultaneously released C-language based games. Games are the one market where high-level languages will probably never catch on.
We call it "bloat" normally, but then we usually forget about that and accept it as the norm and shun everyone who's running less than 2Ghz.
It seems the niches get smaller and smaller each time. 200MHz Pentiums reached an important threshold of usefulness. For example, I was able to use a AMD-K6 200-based computer up until recently and was tolerably productive (GNOME 1.4, burning CD-R, Mozilla 1.2, etc.)
500MHz seems about right for Windows XP, Office, etc. for good productivity. This is also getting to a point where modest CAD models are comfortable.
1GHz and above...games, simulations, games, video, games, big CAD models, games, etc.
Quite honestly, the simulation, video, and big CAD model markets are niches. Big niches in themselves, but very small relative to office desktops and home desktops. Intel will have to face this eventually, if they aren't already.
...technologies like COM and ActiveX have permitted modular and reusable components where previously code would have to be re-written and re-developed for every application.
Don't forget Java, Qt, and the like. Why not also add portability rather than chaining yourself to Windows? If the MS ship sinks, why not have a life raft handy? Linux? No problem. UNIX? No problem. Mac OS? No problem. Companies should take advantage of portable APIs at every practical opportunity.
Even if your whole company changes over to a new suite of office tools, you still have the odious problem of sending and receiving "standard" MS office documents to all the people you do business with.
A compromise would be to switch the entire company over to OpenOffice.org or equivalent, and, then, establish a small number of shared Windows workstations to maintain compatibility.
One good way to do this with Sun equipment is to set up a server with multiple SunPCi x86 co-processor cards and share them over X Windows sessions to the users. Alternatively, VM software could accomplish about the same effect without the co-processors. Perhaps five Windows/MS Office licenses per 100 users would work well. I'd bet this is still much cheaper and much safer from lock-in than an all Microsoft solution.
It all feels cobbled together to me, and I get sluggish performance.
I agree with this. This is due to the unchecked flexibility in the X architecture (it was designed by academics rather than "usability engineers"). The X architecture explicitly allows for the hundreds of window managers, toolkits, desktops, etc. out there.
Remote X is not as widely used as it is endlessly hyped to be. If you want that, use the normal XFree86 project. Linux needs a real, innovative desktop environment. If you really need remote capabilities, can't it be added on or kept as a separate build option?
Modular or not, remote X sessions, or their equivalent, need to be preserved for wide-spread acceptance of the forked X among UNIX/Linux users. There is substance behind the hype, because remote X sessions are genuinely useful to many people. In fact, the lack of remote sessions in Windows is one of my primary criticism of it (there are hacks for Windows, but they are not widely installed and are more difficult to depend on).
For example, some (very expensive) software is licensed or configured on a per-host basis. If it isn't configured for my workstation, but my co-worker who uses it is on vacation or tasked elsewhere, remote X sessions allow me to use his license no questions asked. This has been useful to me several times.
Remote X sessions are useful for software testing, because it allows convenient access to multiple workstations and servers, each of which might have a different configuration.
They can allow running X applications on powerful servers with no graphics hardware. This wouldn't be useful for OpenGL apps, but it would certainly be useful for CPU-bound apps.
They allow the use of non-native applications on the local desktop. For example, I could run a GNOME app from an x86-based server on a Sun workstation with the ability to cut-and-paste text. If NFS is available, the remote app could even save files locally.
Remote X sessions allow the X-terminal network archtecture. This is used in many companies to centralize administration, which can be a cost saver. Sun is marketing this architecture (with a twist) in its SunRay products.
I'm sure there are other examples. My point is that remote sessions are one of the most concretely useful features of X.
Federal Judges have said Reverse engineering is now illegal under the DMCA. so if someone makes "a hack" they can be throwin in the can.
That's better than going to jail, I guess, unless a skunk had just gone potty.
But I like Apple and don't like Universal, won't this simply create a contradiction in the universe that will require the universe to implode and be replaced by a more confusing one?
No, things balance out across parallel universes. Over in U203, Microsoft just released Windows Media Player under a BSD licence and renounced patent claims!
Phil Schiller: "Hey Steve, look what I found under the sofa cushions!"
....nah.
Steve: A trillion dollar bill! Awesome! Should we tell ol' Monty?
Ha. Gripe to the human-interface people who get up on their soapbox and beat their drums to the tune of "nobody wants to see that debugging junk, its enough to know their program crashed. It shouldn't have crashed in the first place, so its the programmers fault that it happened."
So, the suits fall for the UI argument, and, then, follow-up by not increasing funding so the programmers can't write robust code. This makes me question whether EA would ever be a good place to work as a programmer.
To anyone who says, "programmers should write robust code by default", I say, "get a real job." To anyone who says "use Lisp or Python (or whatever) and all your woes magically disappear", I say, "no programming language yet invented fundamentally reduces the complexity of programming, even Lisp can break when lists take on nil values unexpectedly--you just don't get a core dump from it".
The only information that is returned from the game itself is that a "Serious Error" has occured.
This is EA's first mistake. How are they supposed to do tech support, when the customers can say only that a "serious error" occurred. Internet Explorer is just as bad when pages don't load. How are end-users supposed to learn anything when the programmers give up on reporting useful error information?
Try taking the card out of the box and plugging it into the PC.
I wonder how many tech support calls were resolved with exactly that answer.
This reminds me of Homer Simpson's first computer where he used the mouse as a microphone...
There does not seem to be a wide margin in the IT industry in US, but there is China.
Sun appears to be marketing agressively in Asia. There is a whole version of StarOffice, called StarSuite, geared towards the asian markets. They also donate lots of software to asian countries trying to seed the markets there. I guess one advantage of being a global company is that there are alternatives now that the U.S. is in the dumper for the near future.