It takes a lot of money to build and maintain a solid infrastructure to support widespread VOIP, whereas Vonage, et al, are pretty much leeching on.
With all due respect, that's a bunch of horseshit.
The Government didn't force these guys to risk their capital on building this stuff. They did it to make a buck, typically with some LocGov collusion (monopoly grants, tax breaks, etc). They did it before VoIP popularly existed, and in 5 years we'll say they did it before legal movie downloads and videoconferencing over IP popularly existed. Any tinkering with ports based on new services is just a naked money grab, squeezing more $$$ out of an already built and largely depreciated infrastructure. Besides, any infrastructure in the future will live on dark fiber paid for by bankrupcies and families whose dads blew their own brains out because of the implosion of Global Crossing, WorldCom, and all those other telecom companies that buried all that excess fiber.
That said, private nets should be able to run their nets any way they want, as long as it's legal, consistent, and customers are adequately kept informed. The success of those policies will be determined by the profits of the network. Personally, I feel in most medium-sized and larger communities broadband is a competitive enough market for gross stupidity to be mitigated. Sure it's inconvenient, but in the long run history has proved that free and fair competition is the best way to "run" an economy.
So don't go playing the 'l33ch' card. The reason you have a job is because your network is useful, and the more use the better. eMail, IM and WWW only need 56-128k, for real. You are paid for by p2p, VoIP and Microsoft suicide packs.. Don't forget it.
I mean, I like my cable modem and all, but the day Time Warner decides to shit on my VoIP connection in favor of their overpriced junk ($15/mo Vonage does me just fine, don't need unlimited talking LD or local) is the day I drop the whole megillah.
I mean, that phone looked to be the shiznit. Now, bupkus. The A780 is the closest thing to something that may actually exist in white market form in the US, but it's way too expensive.
Then again, what with UMTS coming in the next year or so, it's probably a bad idea to get hung up on something that can only do GPRS..
KOTOR, Mechassault, Fable are the big non FPS hits, and they're all damned good. Jade Empire is going to f???ing PPWN. There's been some Crimson Skies raves, but I'm actually not a big fan of that game, I would have preferred a cockpit view game...
Anything that's on both platforms will look and sound better on XBox. For example, compare GTA3 and GTAVC on both. Does PS2 even do dolby digital 5.1? Guess what, playing in full surround is completely awesome, and it can be an unfair advantage in games that have good soundstage support (like Halo2.. You can tell by listening where fire is coming from).
And oh yeah, I frickin love Halo2 even when I'm getting waxed by 12-year-olds.
If you call mplayer (a media player with the most comprehensive format support you'll find anywhere) half-baked then you are sadly deluded.
JWZ made some very scathing and accurate comments about mplayer (and other OSS media playing software) years ago, and for the most part his opinions are valid still. How many 'mortal' end users were involved in the testing process for these apps? Was their feedback taken into account when developing the UI of the app? Of course, dealing with people and their criticism is not terribly fun, which is why it usually requires paying developers to put up with it.
I mean, for goodness' sake, Apple's paying for all the usability testing and whatnot.. Just steal everything they do, and have lots of 'advanced' preference modes and CLI stuff for the geeks.
With regards to your sarcastic take on KDE and Gnome, they are totally different DEs with different approaches, architecture, and language choice.
These really need to be Cocoa and Carbon. That is, it shouldn't matter what env I run in, I want all my chrome to be correctly rendered and behave identically. As an end-user I shouldn't have to give a goddamn how the app was developed, in C, Java, C#/MONO, P(erl|ython), etc. It should all look and feel consistently, clipboards should work as expected, etc.
fd.o really needs to be about declaring an agreed-upon supported foundation of libs for GTK/GNOME and Qt/KDE, preferably by integrating the libs while having the APIs remain familiar and functional to their existing developers.
Or are you going to say all the GNOME developers have to go and work on KDE (or vice versa)? So who says who "wins"? And who really cares if there are 2 seperate desktops if they integrate increasingly well via FD.o standards?
I always figured it should end up something along the lines of Carbon vs. Cocoa (GTK vs. Qt). The look & feel should be uniform, but coding with different languages, APIs, event models, etc. should be supported. There really needs to be a definitive UI guideline summit that would provide a uniform user experience regardless of the underlying development environments.
... Was there much in the way of WM updates? Distros other than Linspire? Productivity apps? Prosumer (iLife-style) apps?
I mean, it looks like pretty much a Michael Robertsonfest going on, a few interesting bits, but nothing that's gonna give MS cause to worry...
Now a solid production IMAP or WebDAV groupware release with a free Outlook plugin, _that_ would be cause for partying.. And getting full xinerama support for OpenGL....
With electronic distribution, there's a tempation to distribute cut-down copies to save bandwidth (even allowing for more modern codecs). If I've got a pressed CD from a company, I can tell there's a certain minumum.
Fair nuff, though any decent content download system would provide different bitrate versions of the same content. Audible does this, for example, giving you the choice of bitrate/format when you download audiobooks.
The point being don't spend forever telling me how much you love your music if you're listening to it on crappy mp3s, ripped god knows how, at 192, on ear phones that use cone drivers.
To a point, you can definitely cheat with good speakers though. Personally, I prefer Klipsch, best value for money IMHO. OTOH IANAA, and in fact I have a mild case of tinnitus which drowns out the cost-asymptotic 10-20% of difference between a good CD hooked to a clean amp and Klipsches and serious high-end componentry.
Not to mention the portable and automotive experiences really lend themselves to good economical performance. For multi-thousand-dollar aphile componentry to be worth it you really need to own and control the soundstage (even with headphones you need a good quiet (preferably soundproof) room). In a car, that kind of spending is just silly: there's plenty of good-enough stuff at reasonable prices.
Then again, I tend to be a price/performance freak. I'm not the type to typically buy the most expensive/fastest CPU, vidcard, etc.. I buy the best balance at the time which offers the longest service life possible.
like the meal plans at colleges. they make it so expensive and force you to get it if you live in the dorms. they only give you crap food and give you so little to eat. the cafes are only open for a short period of time so if you have classes during those hours, it's your lost.
Man, dunno where you went, but the biggest problem with dorm food back when I was a lad was there was too _much_ food, causing the infamous Freshman Fifteen (or more)... Seconds, thirds, salad bar, dessert bar, etc..
But yeah, the scrambled eggs and waffles were prefabricated and yankee goulash was pretty f???ing vile.. Even after I got off the plan I would still pay cash for breakfasts on occasion, since the fried eggs were fresh and you could get as much bacon and sausage as you could cram down... Mmm.. Breakfast...
.... campus phones were such a cash cow racket, especially the long distance rates.. Luckily my family was somewhat clueful in the day and I could send them email via internet-fidobbs gateways with only the occasional call for emergency fundage;)
And with increasing manditoriality of computers (laptop required policies) on campus and dorm ethernet/campus wireless, it would be silly to not be running some cheap VoIP and/or Skype..
Between this and eBay for textbooks, it's fun to watch all these excessive student ripoffs get the rich fisting they deserve...
Perhaps everyone who's pushing to have official transcripts and videos released is a "full of shit right-winger", but the man voluntarily resigned first.
Now I call bull on that.. Why didn't he just have his full transcript and video released, then stand by his comments? I mean, out of principle? I mean, if the man was railroaded, he should have stood his ground and had the full comments released, since they would obviously disprove all his antagonists.
Basically discussing accounting shenanigans before the bubble burst, and I remember reading it at the time (though this comes from this weeks' article links)..
"The late Frank Gaudette was Microsoft's first-ever Chief Financial Officer. He was also Microsoft's first head of Human Resources, first head of Facilities, first at running just about every department that had to do with operations but not product development, sales, or marketing....
My question was based on the idea that nothing goes up forever and there must come a time when even Microsoft is no longer a good buy. How can we tell when that time has come?... He explained that Microsoft carried on its books no value at all for its software. Assets like Microsoft Windows or Microsoft Office, which might be given some book value and depreciated over time were carried on the books as valueless. This contrasted at the time with IBM, which valued its software assets at billions of dollars.
"Watch for any changes in our accounting," said Gaudette. "If I need to I can start, depreciating the software and maintain earnings growth for years on flat revenue. Watch for the accounting changes, wait for the next uptick in the stock price, and then sell.""
... All my logins are on my Camino keychain and there's no migration tool for keychains to Safari, and Camino seems to behave better (though at this point it's pretty much a wash)..
Still, I'd be interested to see benches on some of the newer 0.9ish nightlies..
I figure this might be the same kind of thing, where you can download a canned stream (X hrs of channel Y, or the Howard Stern show for date Z) or have a new playlist pop up in iTunes (ala the Music Store 'playlist')...
It could work, and be quite cool, and something that would get me to consider subscribing since I would rather iPod stuff like the Stern show and be able to listen to it on the subway or inside the ferry...
But while we don't have that I hope that we don't destroy our research and academic infastructure in CS trying to accomodate a lack of good job training, or just a lack of good Techology Associate Degree programs.
I figure in the short-to-medium term, the answer will be "bone up on your GREs".
Yeah, I know, obvious, but still.... And I woulda scrounged for it before, but I just got home after a bunch of job interviews.. (I friggin hate ties:ppppp)
Man if only Google's HR were as fast as their searches:p..
And Python is one where the blades won't open unless you hold it _just so_...
(And C is one which you assemble from kit parts, bunging in small ikea shelf pegs to replace the hinge pieces that fell out of a corner of the box it came in..);)
Undergraduate courses are not the place for vocational training no matter how good the stats look for the government.
OK then, what is?
The US doesn't have a German-style 'meister' crafts system for coding or other IT functions. BA in CS is as close as it gets, or you could go for an EE degree to swap Sun FRUs and be completely stupid overkill.
You have a point in that undergrads are not the place for vocational training, but my response is that we really don't have any current workable alternative that has the interview-respect of a guild-style system or a meister system.
If your goal is to build CS into a taller ivory tower, fine, but not until there's a legitimate alternative that can give people, say, two years of all the theory that's going to be used in the real world today and a couple years of practicum (building infrastructure, doing documentation, coding, internship) that will garner some form of vocational accreditation that people will accept.
Frankly, for most of the work I do (sysadmin hardware/software, networks, etc) I would rather have someone who had 2 years in CS foundations and 2+ years doing labs with 'standard' stuff like Solaris, Linux, VxVM/VCS, EMC gear, etc. from a legit institution than a newly-minted BSCS or BSEE.
But there is one thing that is always true, on every platform, and that's the theories of Computer Science.
However, to be quite honest, they relate very little to the needs of most mundane business IT requirements. Or, rather, the ones that do are pretty much handled by the first two years of a decent undergrad CS program. Everything beyond that is really only applied in software businesses (like Google, iD, MSFT, etc) rather than the majority of corps that are software consumers (Home Depot, DaimlerChrysler, etc..) Let's face it, a CS grad would come out of a good program looking to build stuff in all her favorite languages and paradigms, but lo and behold, there's legacy code, greybeards who swear by C, managers demanding that you code to standards so new hires can read your stuff.... All the things that didn't matter really back in the academy but are cruelly part of computing in private industry.
Most modern IT is building software that incorporates business practices and logic, or glues disparate systems together. In the real world you need a limited number of designers (who needn't be CS PhDs) to build a coherent design, and a bunch of codemonkeys to build, document, test, debug, wash, rinse, repeat.
The reality of corporate computing in most real-world applications (where IT and software development are a cost center not a revenue generator) is undoubtedly dull and boring to enthusiastic CS grads. As it is, the US really doesn't have much in the way of an analogue to German 'meister' vocational programs, excepting in guilded apprentice trades (like plumbing, carpentry, etc), that get much in the way of respect..
And off all the games I've seen on the cell phone, the ones i actually enjoyed playing were very simplistic, and probably were better off programmed in C.
Which API?
J2ME is constant across all mobile envs (symbian UIQ/Nokia, M$, Linux). What C-based phone multimedia API is?
Slashdot Mirror
.... You're not gonna be able to get any of these in a MS shop.
Unfortunate but true.
Are they the same thing?
.ics files, I can subscribe to various calendars via webcal:// URLs.
That is, in iCal which uses WebDAV to store
Is CalDAV the 'official' way of doing this?
It takes a lot of money to build and maintain a solid infrastructure to support widespread VOIP, whereas Vonage, et al, are pretty much leeching on.
With all due respect, that's a bunch of horseshit.
The Government didn't force these guys to risk their capital on building this stuff. They did it to make a buck, typically with some LocGov collusion (monopoly grants, tax breaks, etc). They did it before VoIP popularly existed, and in 5 years we'll say they did it before legal movie downloads and videoconferencing over IP popularly existed. Any tinkering with ports based on new services is just a naked money grab, squeezing more $$$ out of an already built and largely depreciated infrastructure. Besides, any infrastructure in the future will live on dark fiber paid for by bankrupcies and families whose dads blew their own brains out because of the implosion of Global Crossing, WorldCom, and all those other telecom companies that buried all that excess fiber.
That said, private nets should be able to run their nets any way they want, as long as it's legal, consistent, and customers are adequately kept informed. The success of those policies will be determined by the profits of the network. Personally, I feel in most medium-sized and larger communities broadband is a competitive enough market for gross stupidity to be mitigated. Sure it's inconvenient, but in the long run history has proved that free and fair competition is the best way to "run" an economy.
So don't go playing the 'l33ch' card. The reason you have a job is because your network is useful, and the more use the better. eMail, IM and WWW only need 56-128k, for real. You are paid for by p2p, VoIP and Microsoft suicide packs.. Don't forget it.
And you can tell them to go fuck themselves, by voting with your wallet.
As Buckwheat might say, "it's as simple as dat!"
I mean, I like my cable modem and all, but the day Time Warner decides to shit on my VoIP connection in favor of their overpriced junk ($15/mo Vonage does me just fine, don't need unlimited talking LD or local) is the day I drop the whole megillah.
I mean, that phone looked to be the shiznit. Now, bupkus. The A780 is the closest thing to something that may actually exist in white market form in the US, but it's way too expensive.
Then again, what with UMTS coming in the next year or so, it's probably a bad idea to get hung up on something that can only do GPRS..
Which PS2 games support dolby digital 5.1?
;) has a SPDIF out, but from what I know it's only useful for cutscenes and DD/DTS DVDs.
In gameplay, not cutscenes.
My teeny tiny ps2 (which I got for GTASA
Many XBox games (particularly the tier-1 stuff) support full discrete 5.1 sound in 'realtime' gameplay. Including the GTA double pack.
Some XBox games also support 720p, though I don't have a HDTV (yet).. I'm thinking even the 480p widescreen support would be handy...
KOTOR, Mechassault, Fable are the big non FPS hits, and they're all damned good. Jade Empire is going to f???ing PPWN. There's been some Crimson Skies raves, but I'm actually not a big fan of that game, I would have preferred a cockpit view game...
Anything that's on both platforms will look and sound better on XBox. For example, compare GTA3 and GTAVC on both. Does PS2 even do dolby digital 5.1? Guess what, playing in full surround is completely awesome, and it can be an unfair advantage in games that have good soundstage support (like Halo2.. You can tell by listening where fire is coming from).
And oh yeah, I frickin love Halo2 even when I'm getting waxed by 12-year-olds.
If you call mplayer (a media player with the most comprehensive format support you'll find anywhere) half-baked then you are sadly deluded.
JWZ made some very scathing and accurate comments about mplayer (and other OSS media playing software) years ago, and for the most part his opinions are valid still. How many 'mortal' end users were involved in the testing process for these apps? Was their feedback taken into account when developing the UI of the app? Of course, dealing with people and their criticism is not terribly fun, which is why it usually requires paying developers to put up with it.
I mean, for goodness' sake, Apple's paying for all the usability testing and whatnot.. Just steal everything they do, and have lots of 'advanced' preference modes and CLI stuff for the geeks.
With regards to your sarcastic take on KDE and Gnome, they are totally different DEs with different approaches, architecture, and language choice.
These really need to be Cocoa and Carbon. That is, it shouldn't matter what env I run in, I want all my chrome to be correctly rendered and behave identically. As an end-user I shouldn't have to give a goddamn how the app was developed, in C, Java, C#/MONO, P(erl|ython), etc. It should all look and feel consistently, clipboards should work as expected, etc.
fd.o really needs to be about declaring an agreed-upon supported foundation of libs for GTK/GNOME and Qt/KDE, preferably by integrating the libs while having the APIs remain familiar and functional to their existing developers.
Or are you going to say all the GNOME developers have to go and work on KDE (or vice versa)? So who says who "wins"? And who really cares if there are 2 seperate desktops if they integrate increasingly well via FD.o standards?
I always figured it should end up something along the lines of Carbon vs. Cocoa (GTK vs. Qt). The look & feel should be uniform, but coding with different languages, APIs, event models, etc. should be supported. There really needs to be a definitive UI guideline summit that would provide a uniform user experience regardless of the underlying development environments.
... Was there much in the way of WM updates? Distros other than Linspire? Productivity apps? Prosumer (iLife-style) apps?
I mean, it looks like pretty much a Michael Robertsonfest going on, a few interesting bits, but nothing that's gonna give MS cause to worry...
Now a solid production IMAP or WebDAV groupware release with a free Outlook plugin, _that_ would be cause for partying.. And getting full xinerama support for OpenGL....
With electronic distribution, there's a tempation to distribute cut-down copies to save bandwidth (even allowing for more modern codecs). If I've got a pressed CD from a company, I can tell there's a certain minumum.
Fair nuff, though any decent content download system would provide different bitrate versions of the same content. Audible does this, for example, giving you the choice of bitrate/format when you download audiobooks.
The point being don't spend forever telling me how much you love your music if you're listening to it on crappy mp3s, ripped god knows how, at 192, on ear phones that use cone drivers.
To a point, you can definitely cheat with good speakers though. Personally, I prefer Klipsch, best value for money IMHO. OTOH IANAA, and in fact I have a mild case of tinnitus which drowns out the cost-asymptotic 10-20% of difference between a good CD hooked to a clean amp and Klipsches and serious high-end componentry.
Not to mention the portable and automotive experiences really lend themselves to good economical performance. For multi-thousand-dollar aphile componentry to be worth it you really need to own and control the soundstage (even with headphones you need a good quiet (preferably soundproof) room). In a car, that kind of spending is just silly: there's plenty of good-enough stuff at reasonable prices.
Then again, I tend to be a price/performance freak. I'm not the type to typically buy the most expensive/fastest CPU, vidcard, etc.. I buy the best balance at the time which offers the longest service life possible.
like the meal plans at colleges. they make it so expensive and force you to get it if you live in the dorms. they only give you crap food and give you so little to eat. the cafes are only open for a short period of time so if you have classes during those hours, it's your lost.
Man, dunno where you went, but the biggest problem with dorm food back when I was a lad was there was too _much_ food, causing the infamous Freshman Fifteen (or more)... Seconds, thirds, salad bar, dessert bar, etc..
But yeah, the scrambled eggs and waffles were prefabricated and yankee goulash was pretty f???ing vile.. Even after I got off the plan I would still pay cash for breakfasts on occasion, since the fried eggs were fresh and you could get as much bacon and sausage as you could cram down... Mmm.. Breakfast...
.... campus phones were such a cash cow racket, especially the long distance rates.. Luckily my family was somewhat clueful in the day and I could send them email via internet-fidobbs gateways with only the occasional call for emergency fundage ;)
And with increasing manditoriality of computers (laptop required policies) on campus and dorm ethernet/campus wireless, it would be silly to not be running some cheap VoIP and/or Skype..
Between this and eBay for textbooks, it's fun to watch all these excessive student ripoffs get the rich fisting they deserve...
Funny, you didn't mention a word about Easongate.
Perhaps everyone who's pushing to have official transcripts and videos released is a "full of shit right-winger", but the man voluntarily resigned first.
Now I call bull on that.. Why didn't he just have his full transcript and video released, then stand by his comments? I mean, out of principle? I mean, if the man was railroaded, he should have stood his ground and had the full comments released, since they would obviously disprove all his antagonists.
Right?
... here..
... He explained that Microsoft carried on its books no value at all for its software. Assets like Microsoft Windows or Microsoft Office, which might be given some book value and depreciated over time were carried on the books as valueless. This contrasted at the time with IBM, which valued its software assets at billions of dollars.
Basically discussing accounting shenanigans before the bubble burst, and I remember reading it at the time (though this comes from this weeks' article links)..
"The late Frank Gaudette was Microsoft's first-ever Chief Financial Officer. He was also Microsoft's first head of Human Resources, first head of Facilities, first at running just about every department that had to do with operations but not product development, sales, or marketing....
My question was based on the idea that nothing goes up forever and there must come a time when even Microsoft is no longer a good buy. How can we tell when that time has come?
"Watch for any changes in our accounting," said Gaudette. "If I need to I can start, depreciating the software and maintain earnings growth for years on flat revenue. Watch for the accounting changes, wait for the next uptick in the stock price, and then sell.""
Read the whole thing, very interesting stuff...
... I'm surprised that the submitter didn't mention the successes of the 'other side' of blogging...
But then again, maybe I'm not.
... All my logins are on my Camino keychain and there's no migration tool for keychains to Safari, and Camino seems to behave better (though at this point it's pretty much a wash)..
Still, I'd be interested to see benches on some of the newer 0.9ish nightlies..
.... through Audible, for some time now.
I figure this might be the same kind of thing, where you can download a canned stream (X hrs of channel Y, or the Howard Stern show for date Z) or have a new playlist pop up in iTunes (ala the Music Store 'playlist')...
It could work, and be quite cool, and something that would get me to consider subscribing since I would rather iPod stuff like the Stern show and be able to listen to it on the subway or inside the ferry...
But while we don't have that I hope that we don't destroy our research and academic infastructure in CS trying to accomodate a lack of good job training, or just a lack of good Techology Associate Degree programs.
I figure in the short-to-medium term, the answer will be "bone up on your GREs".
Yepper, right here!
.. And I woulda scrounged for it before, but I just got home after a bunch of job interviews.. (I friggin hate ties :ppppp)
:p..
Yeah, I know, obvious, but still..
Man if only Google's HR were as fast as their searches
And Python is one where the blades won't open unless you hold it _just so_...
;)
(And C is one which you assemble from kit parts, bunging in small ikea shelf pegs to replace the hinge pieces that fell out of a corner of the box it came in..)
Undergraduate courses are not the place for vocational training no matter how good the stats look for the government.
OK then, what is?
The US doesn't have a German-style 'meister' crafts system for coding or other IT functions. BA in CS is as close as it gets, or you could go for an EE degree to swap Sun FRUs and be completely stupid overkill.
You have a point in that undergrads are not the place for vocational training, but my response is that we really don't have any current workable alternative that has the interview-respect of a guild-style system or a meister system.
If your goal is to build CS into a taller ivory tower, fine, but not until there's a legitimate alternative that can give people, say, two years of all the theory that's going to be used in the real world today and a couple years of practicum (building infrastructure, doing documentation, coding, internship) that will garner some form of vocational accreditation that people will accept.
Frankly, for most of the work I do (sysadmin hardware/software, networks, etc) I would rather have someone who had 2 years in CS foundations and 2+ years doing labs with 'standard' stuff like Solaris, Linux, VxVM/VCS, EMC gear, etc. from a legit institution than a newly-minted BSCS or BSEE.
But there is one thing that is always true, on every platform, and that's the theories of Computer Science.
However, to be quite honest, they relate very little to the needs of most mundane business IT requirements. Or, rather, the ones that do are pretty much handled by the first two years of a decent undergrad CS program. Everything beyond that is really only applied in software businesses (like Google, iD, MSFT, etc) rather than the majority of corps that are software consumers (Home Depot, DaimlerChrysler, etc..) Let's face it, a CS grad would come out of a good program looking to build stuff in all her favorite languages and paradigms, but lo and behold, there's legacy code, greybeards who swear by C, managers demanding that you code to standards so new hires can read your stuff.... All the things that didn't matter really back in the academy but are cruelly part of computing in private industry.
Most modern IT is building software that incorporates business practices and logic, or glues disparate systems together. In the real world you need a limited number of designers (who needn't be CS PhDs) to build a coherent design, and a bunch of codemonkeys to build, document, test, debug, wash, rinse, repeat.
The reality of corporate computing in most real-world applications (where IT and software development are a cost center not a revenue generator) is undoubtedly dull and boring to enthusiastic CS grads. As it is, the US really doesn't have much in the way of an analogue to German 'meister' vocational programs, excepting in guilded apprentice trades (like plumbing, carpentry, etc), that get much in the way of respect..
And off all the games I've seen on the cell phone, the ones i actually enjoyed playing were very simplistic, and probably were better off programmed in C.
Which API?
J2ME is constant across all mobile envs (symbian UIQ/Nokia, M$, Linux). What C-based phone multimedia API is?