While I can't defend the FCC (I think it's a largely useless bureaucracy), I'm glad we are going digital.
I seriously have not attempted to tune in analog TV OTA since I was in 4th grade or something. 1984 if I had hazard a guess. For me (and a vast majority of the population), OTA is a non-issue.
What makes you think that the American government won't retain control of the armed forces in case of an "emergency"? What makes you think that a significant portion of potential paramilitary groups won't support the government in an "emergency"? Well remember now that we're a nation of 50 states. There's plenty of issues that split the states. If there were one that was so heinous and so large that it resulted in actual armed rebellion, it's not hard to imagine that a revolutionary group could attain the support at the highest levels of a single state, and then gain sympathies from states with a similar political demographic. It happened once before in American "Civil War" (somewhat jokingly referred to as the "War of Northern Aggression" by some of us southerners), it could happen again with the right (admittedly huge) spark.
Since when did the 'rightist faction' of Americans start admitting that America does make mistakes? ?? Daily? And even more often when the "leftist faction" is in power of one or more branches of the government, such as it is right now with the Democrats controlling the Congress. And the exact inverse is true with the "rightist faction" is in control over one or more branches of the government, such as it is right now with the executive branch...I could go on.
I dare you to give me a recent example where the population was able to successfully organize a resistance against a relatively well funded/organized government that was willing to use military force to remain in power.[...] We both know that if your government allows you to bear arms, chances are your democratic institutions are sufficiently developed for a rebellion not to occur in the first place. Totally agree.
Reply to this thread if you've got some good apps to check out. I've been searching the web a little bit and it seems there's a lot of "samples" and a few alpha quality apps that have not been updated in a year. Ebay Desktop (desktop.ebay.com) was rather cool, but there's no seller's interface so it's only 50% complete in my view.
But seriously--saw them a few months ago on some award show I had flipped past on the tube. I actually stopped and went back and listened. They are still GOOD. Awesome live show.
[so much for the modding I'd done in this thread.]
Due to an infection I obtained when I was 2, I've got partial blindness in both eyes. The infection caused scar tissue to form on my retina smack in the good part (center of the optic nerve junction) of my left eye. I can see objects and make out large things but I can't read with that eye at all. Think of it like your peripheral vision. Try this: put a page of text a foot from your ear and try to read it--while looking straight ahead. That's what my vision is like when I close my right eye.
The right eye has some similar damage, but luckily the scar tissue formed only over a smaller area which is not positioned over the center of the optic nerve junction. So back to the parent's comment about your brain compensating, I can tell you from experience--it depends on how much damage there is. I can read, I can drive and so on, but my brain has to work a bit harder to make a complete image. I don't have 20/20 vision (even with glasses), it's more like 20/50. (I can read text at 20 feet that you can read at 50 feet.) I have to hold things closer to read them than most people, and it's pretty hard to read road signs while driving.
So the moral to the story is twofold:
1. Sandboxes are bad, toxoplasmosis bacteria likes to grow there and kids that play in sandboxes inevitably will rub their eyes. 2. Don't mess with lasers. Holes in your vision--not cool.
(I almost died laughing when I saw the "donotlookatlaserwithremainingeye" tag. I have a special place in my heart/right-eye for that line.)
I agree with you, but I'm a bit more cynical about it. What you are saying is that market forces will prevail. I'm about as pro-capitalist as you can get, so I support this stance for sure. But in this case we are not talking about a tangible asset with limited supply. We're talking about recorded soundwaves which are licensed like intellectual property. Toss in a huge entrenched industry with expensive lobbyists which want to pay to ensure government protects their business model and well--I trust Congress about as far as I can throw them.
Dude, I am right there with ya every time but eventually the world moves on and the status quo changes. Before you know it something requires.NET 4 or whatever the latest bizapp is built on and here comes the upgrade cycle same as it ever was.
And so you know where I'm coming from: I installed various builds of Vista and was hoping RTM would fix this fatal flaw that kept my "supported" vidcard and my "supported" motherboard and my "supported" CPU from working together. No such luck, so I too am sworn off of Vista till I can afford to upgrade.
due to poor programming practices (perhaps Microsoft, equally or more likely third-party programmers), an application depends on a flaw in order to function as expected
a patch tightens permissions on a file or object (e.g. DCOM or ActiveX component)
an application checks for certain file versions or datestamps of a file that is patched
obviously, if there is a bug in the patch
I'm sure there's other reasons.
In my experience, it doesn't actually happen that often. But when it does--it's a huge frickin' deal to the customer with a down ecommerce or accounting system. Therefore (if you care about uptime), you have to treat your apps with kid gloves and test everything. Fact of life.
And as an aside, I'm not sure why the article author thinks this is a Microsoft thing. Many companies try to stick to cycles like this. Some Unix vendors like to do it quarterly. It's a very practical thing to do. Once the number of systems you manage is higher than...ten, you (should be) are immediately looking for ways to automate and reduce workload. Having patches released on a perodic schedule is a very good way to help address this. Microsoft has this schedule because customers insisted on it, not because Microsoft just decided to do so. I was surprised it took so long actually.
Some genres from "back in the day" hardly exist anymore, and there are some new ones that we didn't have when we were kids. This isn't news. The classics will get improved upon if they are still marketable. Take the "breakout" genre for example. People are still making play-alikes (not clones necessarily) and there are some really high-quality flash-based ones out there. It's funny that the only games we had as kids are now known as "casual games". They live on now with a wider audience than before, really.
Civilization is an excellent turn-based strategy game and a new one came out recently (Civ IV & Warlords expansion). I'm sure there are several other good ones.
i wish apps went back to the old.ini method of storing config data, much more secure and no messing in the registry looking for obscure keys and entries, deleting a single ini file is a lot easier than digging through the registry
I'll have to disagree with you here. The registry is a vastly superior method of recording configuration data for many reasons. I won't go into them here (but you can read about it here), but suffice to say there's a lot of good reasons to keep it around.
But there's nothing stopping a developer from using an INI file instead of or even alongside registry entries. If this is done, I think it's very important to use current standards in Windows for such things, and giving the user (or more importantly in a corporate environemnt--the system administrator) the option for how configuration / metadata storage is handled. For example, I think a good policy is to use the registry by default. Include an option to support a config file, and by default make it go to the user profile (specifically, a folder under %appdata%). And lastly, provide an option for the config file to be located in an arbitrary user-specified location, or failing that, the location should be set to the location the binaries are stored. Under no circumstances should you be writing things to c:\, or c:\windows, and other rude behavior like that. Just keep it predictable, and start with the most accepted current standards FIRST. Doing otherwise ends up costing tons of time & money later in extra user support problems.
Let me also add--don't ditch the registry or go your own way because you think it's cool. Have a good reason for it please! Plausible deniability--that's a good reason. Portability (USB key/external drive storage) that's a good reason. Ignorance of standard practices, that's not a good reason. Using the latest fad meta-format, that isn't a very good reason either.
I disagree with the parent on one point. There is no fundamental reason that a given solution is bad simply because a state conceived or implemented it. None of our states are so resource-poor that they cannot take a problem, say standardized ID, and solve it. Now the *quality* of said solution may certainly (and rather likely) be crap, we are talking about government here. But what I am getting at is that the Feds will do no better. If you throw more money and more bureaucracy at a problem, does that guarantee a better solution? Hell no!
Just do your research! If a widget normally sells for $50 then don't go above that no matter how much you want it. If you do, you get what you deserve.
So what amazes me is that people consider this a *good* thing. Where I come from, that's not working for a living, that's armed robbery. You are asking for a handout and the funds were taken from others by force of government, ultimately at the cost of life (police action) or liberty (prison). And why does a government bureaucrat get to choose what music I should hear? Why employ a person or a department of people whose sole job it is to give welfare checks to "starving artists"?
When I was sandbox-age, my eyes were infected with toxoplasmosis (the bacteria that grows on kitty poo). It caused scar tissue to form on my retinas, rendering my left eye all but useless, and impaired my right to a moderate degree as well. If you look at magnified pictures of my retina, it's one of those textbook cases where even a layperson can look at it and say "whoah that's messed up".
The lack of light receptors in my left retina occurs right in the center of the optical cortex, basically leaving me with some peripheral vision. No depth perception, can't read with it, just recognize shapes and movement. My right eye was spared somewhat, although I can see no better than 20:40 - 20:60 (when tired) and that's _with_ some pretty high-index lenses to correct nearsightedness. There just ain't enough data getting to the brain for me to read most things beyond a couple of feet. Road signs--forget it.
I'm not blind--in fact far from it as compared to someone who never had sight, but this crappy vision thing affects my quality of life every waking second of every day. You know how stupid it feels not to be able to recognize a friend or co-worker walking towards you until they are 15-20 feet away? Or heaven forbid if my glasses were to go missing! I wouldn't be able to read except in an excruciating exercise of a fixed two-inch focal length and the facial recognition goes down to just a few feet.
Anyway, this article is precisely the sort of future biotech that I follow very closely.
P.S. Try catching a line drive baseball with one eye closed.
The thing that pisses me off the most here (ok that was a hard decision) is the inability to sync over wifi. This is the same stunt MS pulled with the very popular Windows Mobile 5 platform. Devices that run Windows CE (in its many names) prior to Windows Mobile 2005 can sync over wifi. But starting with WM5 which requires Activsync 4, Microsoft has removed this feature. Why? They claim it's to close security holes. Well I believe that it's security related with MSFT's stellar record in this area. But I think that they had a 3rd party look at the code and they came to the decision that it would take too long and too much money to fix the wifi holes so they removed the feature and called it a "benefit" of upgrading to AS4. Too bad it's a mandatory upgrade...
Hear me out. (Because I know nobody *ever* goes for conspiracy theories on slashdot. That was irony.)
I like Weird Al. In fact his stuff is usually better than the pop crap he parodies. I bet that he is genuinely bummed about the way this has panned out. He plays the part well of the "little guy" as you said.
However--what if AOL was banking on this? What if this was a ploy intended to garner support for their aging business models? It's easier to keep the status quo than to develop new business models, that's easily understood. There is financial motive (the best kind of motive really) for AOL & every other media company to retain the value in their library and to extend the marketing program for a given property out as far as they possibly can to get the most sales.
So. I am not saying anything was intentionally leaked by management. Far from it, that is probably beyond their skills. What I am saying is that the contingency plan, let's call it "The Pity Ploy", was made well in advance of this premier date. They figured that if it got leaked, which they knew was likely, they might be able to manipulate common opinion by taking advantage of Weird Al's "little guy" status.
It makes a good story and AOL (and Weird Al!) gets free publicity.
(I work for one of the largest global outsourcing services companies.)
One thing I don't see mentioned in the comments so far is mention of a very popular reason that companies decide to outsource. It's related to Step 5: seek expertise. Companies outsource because they do not want to be in the IT business! It may make a lot of sense to outsource some or all of IT so that you can focus on the bottom-line: your product or service. You can treat IT like a utility. How many companies run their own power plant?
Slashdot Mirror
Dude--get cable. :)
While I can't defend the FCC (I think it's a largely useless bureaucracy), I'm glad we are going digital.
I seriously have not attempted to tune in analog TV OTA since I was in 4th grade or something. 1984 if I had hazard a guess. For me (and a vast majority of the population), OTA is a non-issue.
Let's move on. TV isn't even that important!
Guys--keep up! We're in a cooling trend now. Ice age is coming. Global Warming is so last year.
Reply to this thread if you've got some good apps to check out. I've been searching the web a little bit and it seems there's a lot of "samples" and a few alpha quality apps that have not been updated in a year. Ebay Desktop (desktop.ebay.com) was rather cool, but there's no seller's interface so it's only 50% complete in my view.
in sunglasses.
But seriously--saw them a few months ago on some award show I had flipped past on the tube. I actually stopped and went back and listened. They are still GOOD. Awesome live show.
[so much for the modding I'd done in this thread.]
Due to an infection I obtained when I was 2, I've got partial blindness in both eyes. The infection caused scar tissue to form on my retina smack in the good part (center of the optic nerve junction) of my left eye. I can see objects and make out large things but I can't read with that eye at all. Think of it like your peripheral vision. Try this: put a page of text a foot from your ear and try to read it--while looking straight ahead. That's what my vision is like when I close my right eye.
The right eye has some similar damage, but luckily the scar tissue formed only over a smaller area which is not positioned over the center of the optic nerve junction. So back to the parent's comment about your brain compensating, I can tell you from experience--it depends on how much damage there is. I can read, I can drive and so on, but my brain has to work a bit harder to make a complete image. I don't have 20/20 vision (even with glasses), it's more like 20/50. (I can read text at 20 feet that you can read at 50 feet.) I have to hold things closer to read them than most people, and it's pretty hard to read road signs while driving.
So the moral to the story is twofold:
1. Sandboxes are bad, toxoplasmosis bacteria likes to grow there and kids that play in sandboxes inevitably will rub their eyes.
2. Don't mess with lasers. Holes in your vision--not cool.
(I almost died laughing when I saw the "donotlookatlaserwithremainingeye" tag. I have a special place in my heart/right-eye for that line.)
I agree with you, but I'm a bit more cynical about it. What you are saying is that market forces will prevail. I'm about as pro-capitalist as you can get, so I support this stance for sure. But in this case we are not talking about a tangible asset with limited supply. We're talking about recorded soundwaves which are licensed like intellectual property. Toss in a huge entrenched industry with expensive lobbyists which want to pay to ensure government protects their business model and well--I trust Congress about as far as I can throw them.
s/XP/3.1/g; s/Vista/XP/g
.NET 4 or whatever the latest bizapp is built on and here comes the upgrade cycle same as it ever was.
Dude, I am right there with ya every time but eventually the world moves on and the status quo changes. Before you know it something requires
And so you know where I'm coming from: I installed various builds of Vista and was hoping RTM would fix this fatal flaw that kept my "supported" vidcard and my "supported" motherboard and my "supported" CPU from working together. No such luck, so I too am sworn off of Vista till I can afford to upgrade.
I love that some guy made up this new buzzword. After all, there are no other words in existence today which can convey the same meaning!
:)
Well, except for compartmentalization which I guess has been used alongside words like virtualization & partitioning in computer science for ages.
Dude, +10 insightful & funny. Someone needs to make a movie about the violent peace activistas. :)
Patching can break applications when:
I'm sure there's other reasons.
In my experience, it doesn't actually happen that often. But when it does--it's a huge frickin' deal to the customer with a down ecommerce or accounting system. Therefore (if you care about uptime), you have to treat your apps with kid gloves and test everything. Fact of life. And as an aside, I'm not sure why the article author thinks this is a Microsoft thing. Many companies try to stick to cycles like this. Some Unix vendors like to do it quarterly. It's a very practical thing to do. Once the number of systems you manage is higher than...ten, you (should be) are immediately looking for ways to automate and reduce workload. Having patches released on a perodic schedule is a very good way to help address this. Microsoft has this schedule because customers insisted on it, not because Microsoft just decided to do so. I was surprised it took so long actually.
Some genres from "back in the day" hardly exist anymore, and there are some new ones that we didn't have when we were kids. This isn't news. The classics will get improved upon if they are still marketable. Take the "breakout" genre for example. People are still making play-alikes (not clones necessarily) and there are some really high-quality flash-based ones out there. It's funny that the only games we had as kids are now known as "casual games". They live on now with a wider audience than before, really.
Civilization is an excellent turn-based strategy game and a new one came out recently (Civ IV & Warlords expansion). I'm sure there are several other good ones.
Whuddayaknow, here's a list of graphic adventure games. :)
Yeah, and that's too bad. I'm very much anti-Democrat but that has zero bearing on the fact that what this guy did was:
1. effective
2. well-made
3. pretty damn cool
4. free speech
Why was he fired exactly? For embarrassing the less creative of his co-workers and bosses I guess...
I'll have to disagree with you here. The registry is a vastly superior method of recording configuration data for many reasons. I won't go into them here (but you can read about it here), but suffice to say there's a lot of good reasons to keep it around.
But there's nothing stopping a developer from using an INI file instead of or even alongside registry entries. If this is done, I think it's very important to use current standards in Windows for such things, and giving the user (or more importantly in a corporate environemnt--the system administrator) the option for how configuration / metadata storage is handled. For example, I think a good policy is to use the registry by default. Include an option to support a config file, and by default make it go to the user profile (specifically, a folder under %appdata%). And lastly, provide an option for the config file to be located in an arbitrary user-specified location, or failing that, the location should be set to the location the binaries are stored. Under no circumstances should you be writing things to c:\, or c:\windows, and other rude behavior like that. Just keep it predictable, and start with the most accepted current standards FIRST. Doing otherwise ends up costing tons of time & money later in extra user support problems.
Let me also add--don't ditch the registry or go your own way because you think it's cool. Have a good reason for it please! Plausible deniability--that's a good reason. Portability (USB key/external drive storage) that's a good reason. Ignorance of standard practices, that's not a good reason. Using the latest fad meta-format, that isn't a very good reason either.
Dude that was classic. Funniest /. comment in a while.
I disagree with the parent on one point. There is no fundamental reason that a given solution is bad simply because a state conceived or implemented it. None of our states are so resource-poor that they cannot take a problem, say standardized ID, and solve it. Now the *quality* of said solution may certainly (and rather likely) be crap, we are talking about government here. But what I am getting at is that the Feds will do no better. If you throw more money and more bureaucracy at a problem, does that guarantee a better solution? Hell no!
Just do your research! If a widget normally sells for $50 then don't go above that no matter how much you want it. If you do, you get what you deserve.
When I was sandbox-age, my eyes were infected with toxoplasmosis (the bacteria that grows on kitty poo). It caused scar tissue to form on my retinas, rendering my left eye all but useless, and impaired my right to a moderate degree as well. If you look at magnified pictures of my retina, it's one of those textbook cases where even a layperson can look at it and say "whoah that's messed up".
The lack of light receptors in my left retina occurs right in the center of the optical cortex, basically leaving me with some peripheral vision. No depth perception, can't read with it, just recognize shapes and movement. My right eye was spared somewhat, although I can see no better than 20:40 - 20:60 (when tired) and that's _with_ some pretty high-index lenses to correct nearsightedness. There just ain't enough data getting to the brain for me to read most things beyond a couple of feet. Road signs--forget it.
I'm not blind--in fact far from it as compared to someone who never had sight, but this crappy vision thing affects my quality of life every waking second of every day. You know how stupid it feels not to be able to recognize a friend or co-worker walking towards you until they are 15-20 feet away? Or heaven forbid if my glasses were to go missing! I wouldn't be able to read except in an excruciating exercise of a fixed two-inch focal length and the facial recognition goes down to just a few feet.
Anyway, this article is precisely the sort of future biotech that I follow very closely.
P.S. Try catching a line drive baseball with one eye closed.
The thing that pisses me off the most here (ok that was a hard decision) is the inability to sync over wifi. This is the same stunt MS pulled with the very popular Windows Mobile 5 platform. Devices that run Windows CE (in its many names) prior to Windows Mobile 2005 can sync over wifi. But starting with WM5 which requires Activsync 4, Microsoft has removed this feature. Why? They claim it's to close security holes. Well I believe that it's security related with MSFT's stellar record in this area. But I think that they had a 3rd party look at the code and they came to the decision that it would take too long and too much money to fix the wifi holes so they removed the feature and called it a "benefit" of upgrading to AS4. Too bad it's a mandatory upgrade...
Hear me out. (Because I know nobody *ever* goes for conspiracy theories on slashdot. That was irony.)
I like Weird Al. In fact his stuff is usually better than the pop crap he parodies. I bet that he is genuinely bummed about the way this has panned out. He plays the part well of the "little guy" as you said.
However--what if AOL was banking on this? What if this was a ploy intended to garner support for their aging business models? It's easier to keep the status quo than to develop new business models, that's easily understood. There is financial motive (the best kind of motive really) for AOL & every other media company to retain the value in their library and to extend the marketing program for a given property out as far as they possibly can to get the most sales.
So. I am not saying anything was intentionally leaked by management. Far from it, that is probably beyond their skills. What I am saying is that the contingency plan, let's call it "The Pity Ploy", was made well in advance of this premier date. They figured that if it got leaked, which they knew was likely, they might be able to manipulate common opinion by taking advantage of Weird Al's "little guy" status.
It makes a good story and AOL (and Weird Al!) gets free publicity.
(I work for one of the largest global outsourcing services companies.)
One thing I don't see mentioned in the comments so far is mention of a very popular reason that companies decide to outsource. It's related to Step 5: seek expertise. Companies outsource because they do not want to be in the IT business! It may make a lot of sense to outsource some or all of IT so that you can focus on the bottom-line: your product or service. You can treat IT like a utility. How many companies run their own power plant?
"My bad."
Seriously--four network control panels, that's awesome. That's way better than OS's that only have two or three.