It's the worst of all possible systems, except for all the rest.
Truly, I wish they'd fix bugs that folks like Woody Leonhard and the crew in his "Lounge" have been harping about for a seven years, now (example: GetCrossReferenceItems in Word's VBA returns the wrong number of items in some circumstances -- still broken from '97 to 2003 versions).
On the other hand, Office isn't going away: few large corporations are going to drop it in favor of OpenOffice, especially when you deal with partners, contractors, etc. etc. who all use Word.
On the still other hand... I can build you a template that will avoid 90% of the pitfalls that out-of-box Word places in your way. The other 10%? That's when you paste into this nice safe environment text you'd created elsewhere.
Failure to Plan = Planning to Fail
on
IT Myths
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
According to the Project Management Institute (PMI)(of which I'm a member but not quite yet certified as a Project Management Professional) failure is any condition that isn't planned for, or approved through change control, including:
Cost -- took more money than planned for
Time -- took longer than planned for
Quality -- product is not of the planned quality
Scope -- project does not match planned scope which includes situations where additional features were added. The PMI considers this "gold plating" and a failure on the part of the project manager to keep the project within scope.
Customer Satisfaction
Also ironic is that the above five items are called the "Triple Constraint"
> and do it inexpensively You hit the nail on the head: The manufacturers (Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, Nokia, Tapwave) aren't interested in selling you something cheap -- the box itself is a big cost, so adding more features amount to higher profit.
Another factor is the japanese real estate market: there isn't any real estate. Houses and apartments are tiny, so one device that does six things is a big help.
However, they make more money off the software licenses, so you'd think that a small price would help attract folks to their market.
Now in our house, the xbox is our 'junior' media center: The kids have music loaded into it, and watch DVD's on it, they're just begging for a bigger screen to do it all on (only 19" -- I'm a bad dad, but then again, my TV's only 27").
I would not mind unobtrusive advertising on Wikipedia if it was like the old days of PBS, where a program would begin with "The following was brought to you from a grant by Pan Am"
So, the following are things I could deal with: 1) A link on every page to "Sponsorship" which would list the biggest and/or most recent donations, and how You Too can contribute.
2) A logo-of-the-day on the start page, rotating amongst the major donors
3) This would push my limits, but the arrival page (where the referred is not on Wikipedia) could display a rotating sponsor ad, then take you on to the article. But that had better be the only time that happens, not like the every-five-or-so you see with, say Yahoo Groups.
A friend of mine is a photographer at the DNC, and aside from having to have all his gear inspected regularly (digital's great, no film to fog in X-rays), he's got one really big problem:
He's got these two heavy-duty custom battery packs for keeping the flash going full-tilt. They look like bombs. No lie. Aluminum case, heavy, solidly built, bolts at the corners... you can't get more suspicious looking.
I'm waiting for his report on enduring regular cavity searches. I told him anytime someone hassles him, he should just say, "Imshallah," and bear it.
ISBNs are also changing from 10 to 13 digits. In this case, it's easy: a new 3-digit prefix, and a new checksum, and you're done.
Why have a fixed length? (a) it's easier to read if you know where the end is, and (b) limited space on merchandise. Sure, books, tapes and CD's have reasonable quantities of space on them, but health and beauty items, spice bottles, etc. etc. get pretty small.
Let's keep packaging to a minimum, and please not blame it on the barcode.
Dean Ing's "The Big Lifters" talked about this 15 years ago, with a prototype unit that used a maglev train to push the orbiter to just about transsonic, a short-lived ramjet booster to get upright, then hit it in the @$$ with a laser to get to orbit.
Ing talked about other interesting transportation options in that book, such as delta dirigibles to handle cargo off-load from moving trains, and engineering trucks for intermodal hauling over short distances that are better at city driving than highway. Good socioeconomics for hard sci-fi.
My sons typically keep four consoles plugged into the set in the family room at any given time. This week, it's XBOX, SNES, NES, Genesis. Previously, the PlayStation took the place of the Genesis. When they get bored, it'll change again. All but the XBOX daisy-chain on the RF input to the tube.
Most of those consoles aren't very big (the NES is a 2nd-generation unit with the sloping top surface). I wouldn't want to put another XBOX-sized thing in that cabinet. Heck, I can get mini-ATX lan-party boxen smaller than that.
On the other hand, without a hard drive, the XENON/XBOX2 could be significantly smaller and cheaper than the next Sony box, which is designed to be a whole home entertainment box.
My guess? Microsoft is bowing to the pressure of the media companies to not build a media box that could be a PVR, hence no drive. Why they switched to ATI and PowerPC, I haven't a clue. Hmm.. perhaps we'll see Mac-based emulators of the XENON?
I was recently issued a Dell Inspiron 8600, and the top surface gets hot right where the left hand would rest while typing, to the point of being uncomfortable. I'd be happier if it vented out the bottom.
Regarding overheating: If the laptop is sitting on a wooden (or similar material) desk, very little heat is being absorbed by the surface, it's the airflow around it that's critical. Similarly, these pads should provide enough space for the feet on the laptop to give enough airflow. Wrapping it in a towel is likely much worse than a flat-surfaced pad.
Economic Impact
on
The 3Com Saga
·
· Score: 4, Informative
US Robotics secured major tax incentives from my town (Mt. Prospect, IL) and was expected to employ many engineers, etc.
Shortly after 3Com acquired USR, they abandoned that facility, and it lay idle (and earning little tax for the community) for more than a year. It's now occupied by Skil/Dremel, and I wouldn't be surprised if further tax incentives were given to move them in.
Sure, USR was getting to be a dinosaur when they were acquired (what's a modem without a cable, these days?), but 3Com really abandoned us here.
Unlikely to run out of oil -- ever!!
on
Out of Gas
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
...but it might cost too much to get at it.
There are current theories (that the oil companies don't want you to consider) that suggest that oil does not originate in dinosaur-era plant life, but in reactions to high pressure and temperature in carbon-bearing rock in the earth's crust. See here for an article.
Points to consider: Some of the major oil basins have no connection to the primordial seas, and are much deeper than life ever existed. Also, no remains of life have ever been found in oil-bearing rock. Lastly, the makeup of petroleum is consistent with what can be made from meteoric carbonaceous chondrite rock.
Who's going to port this to Carbon for the Mac, and one or more of the Linux GUIs? If Microsoft wanted to make this viral, goal #1 should be making a cross-platform GUI library.
Sure, there's vxWindows... but it doesn't have a Microsoft heritage, and such a background might impress a corporate IS director into implementing an OS-based solution.
It had all better be good: Fugu licensing is expensive, required highly trained certified chefs,, and a single incident of hospitalization closes the restaurant.
So if it's open, and has been for years, you've probably got a competent sushi chef.
While I'm not thrilled with the idea, I have no illusions that there is any kind of privacy in a public environment, where its a web forum or BLM grazing country.
I don't own it, it's not my castle.
It would be nice to have a focus group find optimal signage, a starting point would be,
For your safety, this trail is equipped with monitors to count the frequency of hikers, to enable rapid response to missing persons.
Stress the safety aspects, and perhaps few of the monitors will be vandalized.
Microsoft's Cloud9 blog had a question similar to this, and I answered pretty much what I'm saying here: A PDA is great to read a short story, when on a bus or plane, or on the can, when there's limited time and space spend on reading.
I won't take a PDA to the beach, and in my house there are enough dead tree books that I don't think I'll ever need to read off my PDA.
But for reasonable-size fiction, such as Cory Doctorow's A Place So Foreign and 8 More, are great to haul around. Note the e-version only has 6 more, not eight. Two clever stories are left for the dead tree version.
Some years, the Hugo nominees get e-published free, and I'll snag those and have enough short reading for a coupl'a months.
What am I reading on? A Palm 505 using Palm Reader. Would other things be better? Sure, but probably not enough to get me to read novels, or have it be my primary reading source.
For over $500, and $800+ for the 160GB, it seems overpriced.
For me to reach out and buy a server device like that, it's missing one thing: backup. If they included, say a DVD+/-R/RW drive, the price is still high. Is there something special about this drive? A RAID-5 hidden in that little box? Somehow, I doubt it.
Today's VB and similar derivatives bears so little resemblance to Dartmouth BASIC that it's hardly the same language. If it wasn't for FOR/NEXT and DIM, you might not recognize it at all.
But the old line-oriented BASIC had some advantages in the bad, old days: 1) Interactive editing is difficult to do on a teletype -- many schools only had a hardcopy terminal to a timeshare service. Being able to drop a line in the middle, or retype a single statement really really helped learn what was going on, without having to re-send the entire program. Even with a primitive CRT, full-screen text editors were of poor quality -- dropping in statements helped to debug and fix features.
2) Later, it was ubiquitous: You could write the same abusive repeating naughty-word program at a Radio Shack, an Apple Dealer, or a department store selling Commodore PETs.
3) It beat COBOL or FORTRAN. The only thing with BASICs interactivity might be FORTH -- imagine if we'd been saddled with page-delimited, stack-based code in all our micros. It's a lot harder to learn, but would have helped modularity and library development.
I'm assuming it's my machine, and I'm moving licenses, so...
ZoneAlarm Norton Antivirus ActivePerl WinZip Lavasoft AdAware Microsoft games from an ancient Home Essentials disk (Rat Poker!) Office 2000 Acrobat 6 UltraEdit SecureCRT
I actually enjoyed the Super Mario Brothers movie. It was campy, but it was supposed to be. Leguizamo is always a stitch, and Hoskins is a perfect match for Mario. I don't mind making Koopa 'human' -- after all, any time you let Dennis Hopper chew scenery, it's a good thing.
Resident Evil sucked a lot less than Tomb Raider. I've never gotten around to the Mortal Kombat movie, but I've been told it was at least watchable, and a bit fun.
Final Fantasy? 90 minutes of my life I want back. It was pretty... lame. House of the Dead? Not interested.
Aliens vs. Predator? Hard to say if that is based on a game, a comic or just an ordinary franchise sequel. Did it even come out?
Others? I found this list. I'd managed to forget Wing Commander, Street Fighter, and those celluloid cases for ritalin, the Pokemon movies.
Ok, there are PC-based units, but will you find one with two DirecTV tuners and two terrestrial HD tuners? I saw this demo'd at CES in January, and it looks very nice.
Of course there's barely 4 channels worth of HD I'd want to record at once, but it's certainly a nice package. Like the other DirecTiVos, though, it does not have an MPEG encoder, so no cable or analog antenna inputs -- you're stuck with DirecTV and broadcast digital.
There's no reason to assume that hard drives in the 1.8" and smaller form factor won't get bigger and cheaper, so a 20GB unit with the iPod Mini's size (like, maybe the Archos Gmini?) will be available shortly (The Gmini is only a little higher priced, only because nobody discounts the iPods much -- they don't have to).
So with 20GB, you can have more songs, or about 28 70-minute CD's-worth of uncompressed music. Seeing as most discs aren't full 70 minutes, we're probably talking close to 400 songs, without a lick of compression.
And if my math's a bit fuzzy? Six months later, it's moot, and you're back to 1000 songs... uncompressed.
Now uncompressed songs may not be optimal: you're running the drive more, probably shortening the battery life. Between the (usually) ever-cheaper, ever-denser RAM, and shrinking hard drives, battery life will probably depend on the amp circuit power eventually.
But what to put on a huge portable hard drive? When I bought a 20MB (yes MB) drive for a Mac in 1986 or 7, I barely filled it, because I had to fill it with stuff on 1.4MB floppies and 14Kbaud modems. My next PC in the early 90's with a 1.2GB drive seemed endless, because the CD-ROM held most of the media.
When games started shipping with 5-10 CD's, that's when HD capacity started to get tight. So now, it's easy to fill a 30GB drive (although the one on my laptop is 1/3 empty, mostly because I don't have an iPod).
So what else will you fill your jukebox with? Video? I don't think so. I want to watch on a 50" screen, not a 5" one. Photos? Maybe for pros, but my 256MB CF card is usually enough for a short vacation. Even for a couple weeks, I'm only eating a small piece of 20GB.
On the other hand... my PDA is habitually short on space, I want a GPS with maps on it, I want all my data in one place... What I really want is to carry the 'brains' of my computer around, and use it on whatever KVM (keyboard/video/mouse) I'm near.
Slashdot Mirror
It's the worst of all possible systems, except for all the rest.
Truly, I wish they'd fix bugs that folks like Woody Leonhard and the crew in his "Lounge" have been harping about for a seven years, now (example: GetCrossReferenceItems in Word's VBA returns the wrong number of items in some circumstances -- still broken from '97 to 2003 versions).
On the other hand, Office isn't going away: few large corporations are going to drop it in favor of OpenOffice, especially when you deal with partners, contractors, etc. etc. who all use Word.
On the still other hand... I can build you a template that will avoid 90% of the pitfalls that out-of-box Word places in your way. The other 10%? That's when you paste into this nice safe environment text you'd created elsewhere.
Also ironic is that the above five items are called the "Triple Constraint"
> and do it inexpensively
You hit the nail on the head: The manufacturers (Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, Nokia, Tapwave) aren't interested in selling you something cheap -- the box itself is a big cost, so adding more features amount to higher profit.
Another factor is the japanese real estate market: there isn't any real estate. Houses and apartments are tiny, so one device that does six things is a big help.
However, they make more money off the software licenses, so you'd think that a small price would help attract folks to their market.
Now in our house, the xbox is our 'junior' media center: The kids have music loaded into it, and watch DVD's on it, they're just begging for a bigger screen to do it all on (only 19" -- I'm a bad dad, but then again, my TV's only 27").
I would not mind unobtrusive advertising on Wikipedia if it was like the old days of PBS, where a program would begin with "The following was brought to you from a grant by Pan Am"
So, the following are things I could deal with:
1) A link on every page to "Sponsorship" which would list the biggest and/or most recent donations, and how You Too can contribute.
2) A logo-of-the-day on the start page, rotating amongst the major donors
3) This would push my limits, but the arrival page (where the referred is not on Wikipedia) could display a rotating sponsor ad, then take you on to the article. But that had better be the only time that happens, not like the every-five-or-so you see with, say Yahoo Groups.
A friend of mine is a photographer at the DNC, and aside from having to have all his gear inspected regularly (digital's great, no film to fog in X-rays), he's got one really big problem:
He's got these two heavy-duty custom battery packs for keeping the flash going full-tilt. They look like bombs. No lie. Aluminum case, heavy, solidly built, bolts at the corners... you can't get more suspicious looking.
I'm waiting for his report on enduring regular cavity searches. I told him anytime someone hassles him, he should just say, "Imshallah," and bear it.
Sharks, of course.
But are they ill tempered?
ISBNs are also changing from 10 to 13 digits. In this case, it's easy: a new 3-digit prefix, and a new checksum, and you're done.
Why have a fixed length? (a) it's easier to read if you know where the end is, and (b) limited space on merchandise. Sure, books, tapes and CD's have reasonable quantities of space on them, but health and beauty items, spice bottles, etc. etc. get pretty small.
Let's keep packaging to a minimum, and please not blame it on the barcode.
Dean Ing's "The Big Lifters" talked about this 15 years ago, with a prototype unit that used a maglev train to push the orbiter to just about transsonic, a short-lived ramjet booster to get upright, then hit it in the @$$ with a laser to get to orbit.
Ing talked about other interesting transportation options in that book, such as delta dirigibles to handle cargo off-load from moving trains, and engineering trucks for intermodal hauling over short distances that are better at city driving than highway. Good socioeconomics for hard sci-fi.
- Sender is out of the country
- Sender is a zombie with fake credentials
- Sender is a zombie sending a virus, not advertising anything
Sorry, charlie, but much of the spam will be impossible to prosecute.Don't forget to make sure it's not programmed to go back in time and kill your mother. She's not named Sarah Connor, is she?
My sons typically keep four consoles plugged into the set in the family room at any given time. This week, it's XBOX, SNES, NES, Genesis. Previously, the PlayStation took the place of the Genesis. When they get bored, it'll change again. All but the XBOX daisy-chain on the RF input to the tube.
Most of those consoles aren't very big (the NES is a 2nd-generation unit with the sloping top surface). I wouldn't want to put another XBOX-sized thing in that cabinet. Heck, I can get mini-ATX lan-party boxen smaller than that.
On the other hand, without a hard drive, the XENON/XBOX2 could be significantly smaller and cheaper than the next Sony box, which is designed to be a whole home entertainment box.
My guess? Microsoft is bowing to the pressure of the media companies to not build a media box that could be a PVR, hence no drive. Why they switched to ATI and PowerPC, I haven't a clue. Hmm.. perhaps we'll see Mac-based emulators of the XENON?
I was recently issued a Dell Inspiron 8600, and the top surface gets hot right where the left hand would rest while typing, to the point of being uncomfortable. I'd be happier if it vented out the bottom.
Regarding overheating: If the laptop is sitting on a wooden (or similar material) desk, very little heat is being absorbed by the surface, it's the airflow around it that's critical. Similarly, these pads should provide enough space for the feet on the laptop to give enough airflow. Wrapping it in a towel is likely much worse than a flat-surfaced pad.
US Robotics secured major tax incentives from my town (Mt. Prospect, IL) and was expected to employ many engineers, etc.
Shortly after 3Com acquired USR, they abandoned that facility, and it lay idle (and earning little tax for the community) for more than a year. It's now occupied by Skil/Dremel, and I wouldn't be surprised if further tax incentives were given to move them in.
Sure, USR was getting to be a dinosaur when they were acquired (what's a modem without a cable, these days?), but 3Com really abandoned us here.
...but it might cost too much to get at it.
There are current theories (that the oil companies don't want you to consider) that suggest that oil does not originate in dinosaur-era plant life, but in reactions to high pressure and temperature in carbon-bearing rock in the earth's crust. See here for an article.
Points to consider: Some of the major oil basins have no connection to the primordial seas, and are much deeper than life ever existed. Also, no remains of life have ever been found in oil-bearing rock. Lastly, the makeup of petroleum is consistent with what can be made from meteoric carbonaceous chondrite rock.
Who's going to port this to Carbon for the Mac, and one or more of the Linux GUIs? If Microsoft wanted to make this viral, goal #1 should be making a cross-platform GUI library.
Sure, there's vxWindows... but it doesn't have a Microsoft heritage, and such a background might impress a corporate IS director into implementing an OS-based solution.
It had all better be good: Fugu licensing is expensive, required highly trained certified chefs,, and a single incident of hospitalization closes the restaurant.
So if it's open, and has been for years, you've probably got a competent sushi chef.
I don't own it, it's not my castle.
It would be nice to have a focus group find optimal signage, a starting point would be,
Stress the safety aspects, and perhaps few of the monitors will be vandalized.
Microsoft's Cloud9 blog had a question similar to this, and I answered pretty much what I'm saying here:
A PDA is great to read a short story, when on a bus or plane, or on the can, when there's limited time and space spend on reading.
I won't take a PDA to the beach, and in my house there are enough dead tree books that I don't think I'll ever need to read off my PDA.
But for reasonable-size fiction, such as Cory Doctorow's A Place So Foreign and 8 More, are great to haul around. Note the e-version only has 6 more, not eight. Two clever stories are left for the dead tree version.
Some years, the Hugo nominees get e-published free, and I'll snag those and have enough short reading for a coupl'a months.
What am I reading on? A Palm 505 using Palm Reader. Would other things be better? Sure, but probably not enough to get me to read novels, or have it be my primary reading source.
For over $500, and $800+ for the 160GB, it seems overpriced.
For me to reach out and buy a server device like that, it's missing one thing: backup. If they included, say a DVD+/-R/RW drive, the price is still high. Is there something special about this drive? A RAID-5 hidden in that little box? Somehow, I doubt it.
Today's VB and similar derivatives bears so little resemblance to Dartmouth BASIC that it's hardly the same language. If it wasn't for FOR/NEXT and DIM, you might not recognize it at all.
But the old line-oriented BASIC had some advantages in the bad, old days:
1) Interactive editing is difficult to do on a teletype -- many schools only had a hardcopy terminal to a timeshare service. Being able to drop a line in the middle, or retype a single statement really really helped learn what was going on, without having to re-send the entire program. Even with a primitive CRT, full-screen text editors were of poor quality -- dropping in statements helped to debug and fix features.
2) Later, it was ubiquitous: You could write the same abusive repeating naughty-word program at a Radio Shack, an Apple Dealer, or a department store selling Commodore PETs.
3) It beat COBOL or FORTRAN. The only thing with BASICs interactivity might be FORTH -- imagine if we'd been saddled with page-delimited, stack-based code in all our micros. It's a lot harder to learn, but would have helped modularity and library development.
I'm assuming it's my machine, and I'm moving licenses, so...
ZoneAlarm
Norton Antivirus
ActivePerl
WinZip
Lavasoft AdAware
Microsoft games from an ancient Home Essentials disk (Rat Poker!)
Office 2000
Acrobat 6
UltraEdit
SecureCRT
Do not look into laser with remaining eye!
I actually enjoyed the Super Mario Brothers movie. It was campy, but it was supposed to be. Leguizamo is always a stitch, and Hoskins is a perfect match for Mario. I don't mind making Koopa 'human' -- after all, any time you let Dennis Hopper chew scenery, it's a good thing.
Resident Evil sucked a lot less than Tomb Raider. I've never gotten around to the Mortal Kombat movie, but I've been told it was at least watchable, and a bit fun.
Final Fantasy? 90 minutes of my life I want back. It was pretty... lame. House of the Dead? Not interested.
Aliens vs. Predator? Hard to say if that is based on a game, a comic or just an ordinary franchise sequel. Did it even come out?
Others? I found this list. I'd managed to forget Wing Commander, Street Fighter, and those celluloid cases for ritalin, the Pokemon movies.
Ok, there are PC-based units, but will you find one with two DirecTV tuners and two terrestrial HD tuners? I saw this demo'd at CES in January, and it looks very nice.
Of course there's barely 4 channels worth of HD I'd want to record at once, but it's certainly a nice package. Like the other DirecTiVos, though, it does not have an MPEG encoder, so no cable or analog antenna inputs -- you're stuck with DirecTV and broadcast digital.
There's no reason to assume that hard drives in the 1.8" and smaller form factor won't get bigger and cheaper, so a 20GB unit with the iPod Mini's size (like, maybe the Archos Gmini?) will be available shortly (The Gmini is only a little higher priced, only because nobody discounts the iPods much -- they don't have to).
So with 20GB, you can have more songs, or about 28 70-minute CD's-worth of uncompressed music. Seeing as most discs aren't full 70 minutes, we're probably talking close to 400 songs, without a lick of compression.
And if my math's a bit fuzzy? Six months later, it's moot, and you're back to 1000 songs... uncompressed.
Now uncompressed songs may not be optimal: you're running the drive more, probably shortening the battery life. Between the (usually) ever-cheaper, ever-denser RAM, and shrinking hard drives, battery life will probably depend on the amp circuit power eventually.
But what to put on a huge portable hard drive? When I bought a 20MB (yes MB) drive for a Mac in 1986 or 7, I barely filled it, because I had to fill it with stuff on 1.4MB floppies and 14Kbaud modems. My next PC in the early 90's with a 1.2GB drive seemed endless, because the CD-ROM held most of the media.
When games started shipping with 5-10 CD's, that's when HD capacity started to get tight. So now, it's easy to fill a 30GB drive (although the one on my laptop is 1/3 empty, mostly because I don't have an iPod).
So what else will you fill your jukebox with? Video? I don't think so. I want to watch on a 50" screen, not a 5" one. Photos? Maybe for pros, but my 256MB CF card is usually enough for a short vacation. Even for a couple weeks, I'm only eating a small piece of 20GB.
On the other hand... my PDA is habitually short on space, I want a GPS with maps on it, I want all my data in one place... What I really want is to carry the 'brains' of my computer around, and use it on whatever KVM (keyboard/video/mouse) I'm near.
Hmmm.