Besides standard being an idiotic system and that even England switch away from it's own system in measuring many things, most people learn in 6th grade science class to use Metric dealing with science.
It seems engineers in Lockheed dropped the ball, not the Ivory Tower academics at Nasa.
I agree - but more from an POV that if the internet ever needs to be changed - it should be in strong hands that can decisions fast, not a committee like the European Union or UN which was and always will be slow to act.
Even though the US isn't perfect, they have a right to what they created - other countries could always set up a competing system if they wanted to even though it would be initially very painful - I feel this is especially true of 'closed systems' like China if they had the foresight to do that (thankfully they don't or think outside contact is vital).
If I were a company, I would hire someone to write product subscriptions for the competition that subtly make their products look inferior. And those $0.65 would be just a bonus to that guy to boot;)
As it is, while crappy pay in the US, I think this could be a good opportunity for an English speaking person in a poor country.......
The problem with simply boycotting (on a small scale, as I assume most non-geeks don't care) is that companies won't understand why sales for product X or for their company as a whole are down and it is human nature to look everywhere but within.
Look at the RIAA/MPAA and their correlation of sales/piracy. They'll never link sales could be down because the current music sucks or whatever - it's always the market's fault somehow - piracy, recession, depression, etcetera.
So next time you are tempted to buy a Sony product and instead decide to boycott it, write them a nice (I mean it) letter (not email) to their headquarters, preferable to a manager (find it on their site):
Explaining why you didn't buy their product. Specifically link it with their DRM practices. Include a copy of the reciept for the product you did buy - this way the impact on the bottom line is tangible and credible.
A small boycott without communication your frustration is nearly worthless.
Re:Makes a bit of sense
on
Pixar For Sale?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
But then the question is: why sell the company?
He has that 3bn either way, just as Bill's money really isn't liquid but is in his stock.
I assume that Apple is taking up most of his time and he doesn't feel comfortable running Pixar w/o running Pixar, so to speak. I don't think it's about the money alone.
I don't know much about this project, but perhaps the flak/non-repect that you are recieving is that by being Windows-only you are helping to support and maintain the MS monopoly/vendor lock-in.
Again, I don't know much about this project - but is there a specific reason for being Windows only instead of being multiplatform?
You do realize you've fallen victim to an extremely aggressive marketing campaign right?
I didn't know that, especially as I never bought an iPod^_^ However, I had enough portable mp3 players myself (Rio) and use some iPods though from my friends and I think the UI on the iPod is superior - the whole package is just more intuitive to me than the others (though I haven't been into music and thus haven't bought an mp3 player in 3 or so years).
Also tie in that I can buy a two or three songs for 99 cents each instead of having to get an entire album where I only like 2-3 songs for 12.99-19.99 pretty much wraps up the deal for me, if I were to get one.
The only problem with the iPod thus far is that it's becoming too popular. As more overweight, middle age, unkept guys are seen walking down the street with those little white ear buds, the less popular iPods are going to become. Popularity always kill fads though...
This isn't always the case - exclusivity can come from different iPod models afterall, like Mercedes has the cheapo C class, the E class executive model or the high end S class.
Though I view thet iPod like a console where everybody gets it because they want the games on it (saying like PS2). iPod has iTunes.
It's how exclusive iTunes stays that's the key (it's like the ebay of the online music world in terms of market/mind share) - if Napster.com or Yahoo starts getting more popular, then I'd see the descent of iPod popularity.
As it is, iPod just basically replace the mp3/cdplayer kids bought to school. Before that, in the eighties to the early nineties, it was the walkman.
Re:Allow me to be the first to say...
on
Vista To Get Symlinks?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I'm sure that's what those Plan9 folks are thinking of the Linux/BSD camp^_^
I believe the best advertising is still genuine word of mouth amoung your friends and associates - not paid schills who want to read you a bulleted list.
This goes for movies, games, hardware, and software.
The easiest way to get it is to stick your money/time not in marketing but into research/engineering/whatnot into making a great product.
The Apple iPod is a great example of this - I heard of it from my friends as recommendations long before I've seen it advertised by the company.
With this in mind, the problem is reduced to getting the attention of those hardcore 5% who will get excited over it and evangelizse it. This can be done by targetted advertised like trade publications, going to conventions and offering discounts on said product, etcetera.
Of course this is assuming the product is excellent. If it's mediocre or lower, the advertising won't take care of itself and it'll have to be given a bigger shove out the door.
My worry over this shill advertising is that it has reached, not just campuses, but online reviewers/posters (like say slashdot or Tom's hardware) under the guise of a disgenuine recommendation. In real life, I can tell when a guy is playing the salesman, but not always so in a "review" or post. The good thing is the internet is so vast and broad, I can get a 500th opinion on things.
I noticed the same: all MS seems to do lately is flail about blindly attacking fad after fad to make money. It seems to be a lack of vision for what the future holds so they instead chase after every rainbow for that pot of gold at the end.
Of course, with billions in the bank and their core businesses still sucessful - they can afford to do this. But for how long? I doubt with this (lack of) leadership, they'll innovate anything in the next 10-15 years. Though the one big sucess with this tactic was that they had was the Xbox, though I argue that this was a natural outgrowth of the PC/OS business, but at least they have a decent games division for it.
The reason they do this is mentioned previously: cash in the bank - it wants to flow places and be put to use. However, I think Google has the better idea with employees playing around in their spare time and from that new business ideas get implemented.
I'm sure enough people at MS are just as smart but the management is stifling them because they are too scared and want to protect the core businesses. Thus any 'new' business ideas are reactionary - the managers are reacting. Not acting on their own initiative.
While I agree, it doesn't help that one of the more prolific writers for the Windows Platforms give bad advice right off the bat (at least when I started Windows coding with his Windows book back in '99) - such as using Hungarian notation.
Is it me or does it seem that the more 'piracy' is fought, the crappier the content gets. I know correlation doesn't signify causation, but I can't help but wonder if this is also a new innovative feature to fight 'piracy?'
If so, congrats Disney. In which case from my own experience, it must be working. You don't pirate what you don't want.
I agree. Undo isn't that hard. You may have used specific undo alogirithms for every functions back in the day when harddrives were small and ram was scarce, but for picture programs, they easiest/fastest/best implementation would be to just put the original picture/steps in a temporary file.
Or the temporary with a script on how it got from point A -> B and saving only the intermediate steps that took more than X seconds to compute.
In my first paragraph were I trailed off, I wanted to say:
"Also, he implied the "Are you sure you want to do this?" message boxes which I couldn't agree with more - for every 20 that pop up - I may want to cancel the action once. The way to fix that is to be able to undo more things. If an action can be undone, hardly any reason to stop and ask you if you are 'sure.'"
I don't think Dvorak expressed himself well but I think he saying he wants user flexibility. He didn't say how this would be achieved, but perhaps a UI that adapts/evolves to how you work instead you adapting to the interface. Also, he implied the "Are you sure you want to do this?" message boxes which I couldn't agree with more - for every 20 that pop up - I may want to cancel the action once. The way to fix
I often had the same gripe about rigid UI - where I wondered one way around this and invariably my answer came to that each major application should have an [b]optional[/b] internal pop-up/transparent/small one line CLI box. If you turn this box on, it would pop up and for at least every major action button/option have an equivalent CLI command, but the CLI command would be much more flexible. Also, once turned on, you could have interact with the GUI and the CLI box would automatically print out what the equivalent CLI command would have been so it'd be easy to learn. Say the back button on your browser would have a CLI command of back. Then, instead of pressing back six times, you type 'back -m 6' or something like that. How far the inner CLI would go would be up to the company of course but think of the flexibility, reduction in redundant chores you as a user would have to do. The other nice thing would be that many applications would become easily scriptable without having to deal with the extraneous kludge of other massive languages like vbscript.
Then you could also have programmable buttons through the CLI as well, but I'm getting ahead of myself. In short, every GUI should have a readily accessible CLI hidden beneath it......
Moving it to 3rd world countries is even worse because they have no regulations on this stuff and it will just accumulate (and probably come back to haunt us). At least when 1st world countries are forced with the byproducts of living, they have the resources and knowledge to combat it and make the process cleaner (like the forced improvement of emissions on cars that began, for the US, in California because of the smog).
What is a poor country to do with all the byproducts of other countries? Force their people to live in it while the government officials pocket a few bucks for taking it in?
And I think that storing and using hydrogen in cars is not a problem, I read of a guy who converted his 1950's car (diesel?) to run hydrogen in the 1960's (teenager at the time with a handmedown). He had to make some modifications to certain components because hydrogen is a gas, not a liquid, and is also corrosive to certain metals/alloys but nothing major.
Correct me if I wrong, but isn't hydrogen's biggest problem simply that it's stored in water (for us on earth) and that the electrolysis to seperate it has like only 8% efficiency? Steam Electrolysis is more efficient, but how is this a breakthrough?
for a newbie, it's overly short and the succinctness leaves you scratching your head.
It's good for the experienced programmer but gave me ulcers when trying to learn from it as a brand new programmer. I always thought it was overrated for learning C (yes, I know who the authors are) when I was in college. The same goes for Bjarne Stroustrop's book on C++. These books are much better for someone who already knows the language reasonably well and wants insights to the language, not to learn it from scratch.
My C teacher in college had another book as a side companion that was absolutely wonderful called "Pointers on C" by Kenneth Reek. Easy to read, details not likely to leave you with a million questions, and excercises that make you think about what you need to think about.
It's one of the few C books I encountered that really dealt with pointers, all the others books including K&R simply skimmed over it, which is a joke when you consider that pointers and their various forms are probably the largest source of bugs/security problems on code level itself:
I am less interested in why he gets to grade Linus anything versus why he would. I read the entire exchange between the two and I came out thinking that the F was because Linus and him diverged on fundamental questions about how one should approach designing an operating system - not that Linus himself lacked understanding (at the time) about the issues nor that he didn't put in his own effort. This is not how anybody should be graded - it'd be like a liberal political science professors grading his conservative students with F- or the other way around.
But since Tanenbaum and Linus weren't actually teacher/student this matters very little.
Out of interest what is you have done?
And what have you done monumentally? Let's keep this apples to apples here - Tanenbaum vs. Linus if you want to devolve it to that level of debate.
I'm more interested in real world results than theoretically conceptions from years ago that haven't bought in anything yet......
BTW, I'm not trying to belittle the man as much as wonder why good sounding theoretical OSes should be upheld in the classroom instead of tested practical ones - once the students get into the real world OS designing, assuming they ever do, perhaps they would be better prepared by studying a successful real world OS.
If you want simplicity, introduce them to DOS or amiga. If Microkernel is superior, prove it first in some way.
that he'd give him an F in Operating System design in the mid-90s right when linux was getting started.
Given that I never heard of minix being used outside the academic world (and even then, not much) I have to wonder if this guy is some type of Ivory Tower type or if this OS has any intriqueing feature over anything else out there. The only other mention of minix I've seen was the Filesystem to format floppies with...
I'd agree with you, but companies/individuals have a nasty habit of price gouging in emergencies when they can (yeah, yeah, maximise profit, blah, blah, blah) and as evidenced by the hugely varying prices on drugs in 1st World countries with more similiar pay scales, drug companies may do this too.
Though I'm not asserting this is the necessarily case here. Taiwan itself may be the party in wrong just as well.
Not being in Taiwan, this makes me wonder how bad the situation would have to be for some of the other governments to follow a path of violating patent and copyright laws for the benefit of the general population. Are there precedents, procedures for doing so?"
It's not quite the same thing but close enough (emergency situations), but I heard that the US Government voided many radio patents beginning/during WW2 in the interest of advancing that technology ASAP.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, Lockheed Martin Engineering's team used the English system while Nasa was expecting Metric:
http://www.cnn.com/TECH/space/9909/30/mars.metric
Besides standard being an idiotic system and that even England switch away from it's own system in measuring many things, most people learn in 6th grade science class to use Metric dealing with science.
It seems engineers in Lockheed dropped the ball, not the Ivory Tower academics at Nasa.
I agree - but more from an POV that if the internet ever needs to be changed - it should be in strong hands that can decisions fast, not a committee like the European Union or UN which was and always will be slow to act.
Even though the US isn't perfect, they have a right to what they created - other countries could always set up a competing system if they wanted to even though it would be initially very painful - I feel this is especially true of 'closed systems' like China if they had the foresight to do that (thankfully they don't or think outside contact is vital).
If I were a company, I would hire someone to write product subscriptions for the competition that subtly make their products look inferior. And those $0.65 would be just a bonus to that guy to boot;)
As it is, while crappy pay in the US, I think this could be a good opportunity for an English speaking person in a poor country.......
The problem with simply boycotting (on a small scale, as I assume most non-geeks don't care) is that companies won't understand why sales for product X or for their company as a whole are down and it is human nature to look everywhere but within.
Look at the RIAA/MPAA and their correlation of sales/piracy. They'll never link sales could be down because the current music sucks or whatever - it's always the market's fault somehow - piracy, recession, depression, etcetera.
So next time you are tempted to buy a Sony product and instead decide to boycott it, write them a nice (I mean it) letter (not email) to their headquarters, preferable to a manager (find it on their site):
http://www.sony.com/SCA/senior_mgmnt.shtml (sorry, this is the best I can find, you'll have to go from there)
Explaining why you didn't buy their product. Specifically link it with their DRM practices. Include a copy of the reciept for the product you did buy - this way the impact on the bottom line is tangible and credible.
A small boycott without communication your frustration is nearly worthless.
But then the question is: why sell the company?
He has that 3bn either way, just as Bill's money really isn't liquid but is in his stock.
I assume that Apple is taking up most of his time and he doesn't feel comfortable running Pixar w/o running Pixar, so to speak. I don't think it's about the money alone.
I don't know much about this project, but perhaps the flak/non-repect that you are recieving is that by being Windows-only you are helping to support and maintain the MS monopoly/vendor lock-in.
Again, I don't know much about this project - but is there a specific reason for being Windows only instead of being multiplatform?
I didn't know that, especially as I never bought an iPod^_^ However, I had enough portable mp3 players myself (Rio) and use some iPods though from my friends and I think the UI on the iPod is superior - the whole package is just more intuitive to me than the others (though I haven't been into music and thus haven't bought an mp3 player in 3 or so years).
Also tie in that I can buy a two or three songs for 99 cents each instead of having to get an entire album where I only like 2-3 songs for 12.99-19.99 pretty much wraps up the deal for me, if I were to get one.
This isn't always the case - exclusivity can come from different iPod models afterall, like Mercedes has the cheapo C class, the E class executive model or the high end S class.
Though I view thet iPod like a console where everybody gets it because they want the games on it (saying like PS2). iPod has iTunes.
It's how exclusive iTunes stays that's the key (it's like the ebay of the online music world in terms of market/mind share) - if Napster.com or Yahoo starts getting more popular, then I'd see the descent of iPod popularity.
As it is, iPod just basically replace the mp3/cdplayer kids bought to school. Before that, in the eighties to the early nineties, it was the walkman.
I'm sure that's what those Plan9 folks are thinking of the Linux/BSD camp^_^
I believe the best advertising is still genuine word of mouth amoung your friends and associates - not paid schills who want to read you a bulleted list.
This goes for movies, games, hardware, and software.
The easiest way to get it is to stick your money/time not in marketing but into research/engineering/whatnot into making a great product.
The Apple iPod is a great example of this - I heard of it from my friends as recommendations long before I've seen it advertised by the company.
With this in mind, the problem is reduced to getting the attention of those hardcore 5% who will get excited over it and evangelizse it. This can be done by targetted advertised like trade publications, going to conventions and offering discounts on said product, etcetera.
Of course this is assuming the product is excellent. If it's mediocre or lower, the advertising won't take care of itself and it'll have to be given a bigger shove out the door.
My worry over this shill advertising is that it has reached, not just campuses, but online reviewers/posters (like say slashdot or Tom's hardware) under the guise of a disgenuine recommendation. In real life, I can tell when a guy is playing the salesman, but not always so in a "review" or post. The good thing is the internet is so vast and broad, I can get a 500th opinion on things.
I noticed the same: all MS seems to do lately is flail about blindly attacking fad after fad to make money. It seems to be a lack of vision for what the future holds so they instead chase after every rainbow for that pot of gold at the end.
Of course, with billions in the bank and their core businesses still sucessful - they can afford to do this. But for how long? I doubt with this (lack of) leadership, they'll innovate anything in the next 10-15 years. Though the one big sucess with this tactic was that they had was the Xbox, though I argue that this was a natural outgrowth of the PC/OS business, but at least they have a decent games division for it.
The reason they do this is mentioned previously: cash in the bank - it wants to flow places and be put to use. However, I think Google has the better idea with employees playing around in their spare time and from that new business ideas get implemented.
I'm sure enough people at MS are just as smart but the management is stifling them because they are too scared and want to protect the core businesses. Thus any 'new' business ideas are reactionary - the managers are reacting. Not acting on their own initiative.
But it seems I can blame Petzold for passing that advice on^_^
While I agree, it doesn't help that one of the more prolific writers for the Windows Platforms give bad advice right off the bat (at least when I started Windows coding with his Windows book back in '99) - such as using Hungarian notation.
I would be interested to see what OSes those sites are running on, I'd suspect it would kill the "Linux is just as insecure as Microsoft" myth.
BTW, does Netcraft have a version of the DowJones 500 to see what the top 500 sites are running? I can't seem to find anything....
Is it me or does it seem that the more 'piracy' is fought, the crappier the content gets. I know correlation doesn't signify causation, but I can't help but wonder if this is also a new innovative feature to fight 'piracy?'
If so, congrats Disney. In which case from my own experience, it must be working. You don't pirate what you don't want.
I agree. Undo isn't that hard. You may have used specific undo alogirithms for every functions back in the day when harddrives were small and ram was scarce, but for picture programs, they easiest/fastest/best implementation would be to just put the original picture/steps in a temporary file.
Or the temporary with a script on how it got from point A -> B and saving only the intermediate steps that took more than X seconds to compute.
That would be one fast nad dirty way.
In my first paragraph were I trailed off, I wanted to say:
"Also, he implied the "Are you sure you want to do this?" message boxes which I couldn't agree with more - for every 20 that pop up - I may want to cancel the action once. The way to fix that is to be able to undo more things. If an action can be undone, hardly any reason to stop and ask you if you are 'sure.'"
I don't think Dvorak expressed himself well but I think he saying he wants user flexibility. He didn't say how this would be achieved, but perhaps a UI that adapts/evolves to how you work instead you adapting to the interface. Also, he implied the "Are you sure you want to do this?" message boxes which I couldn't agree with more - for every 20 that pop up - I may want to cancel the action once. The way to fix
I often had the same gripe about rigid UI - where I wondered one way around this and invariably my answer came to that each major application should have an [b]optional[/b] internal pop-up/transparent/small one line CLI box. If you turn this box on, it would pop up and for at least every major action button/option have an equivalent CLI command, but the CLI command would be much more flexible. Also, once turned on, you could have interact with the GUI and the CLI box would automatically print out what the equivalent CLI command would have been so it'd be easy to learn. Say the back button on your browser would have a CLI command of back. Then, instead of pressing back six times, you type 'back -m 6' or something like that. How far the inner CLI would go would be up to the company of course but think of the flexibility, reduction in redundant chores you as a user would have to do. The other nice thing would be that many applications would become easily scriptable without having to deal with the extraneous kludge of other massive languages like vbscript.
Then you could also have programmable buttons through the CLI as well, but I'm getting ahead of myself. In short, every GUI should have a readily accessible CLI hidden beneath it......
Moving it to 3rd world countries is even worse because they have no regulations on this stuff and it will just accumulate (and probably come back to haunt us). At least when 1st world countries are forced with the byproducts of living, they have the resources and knowledge to combat it and make the process cleaner (like the forced improvement of emissions on cars that began, for the US, in California because of the smog).
What is a poor country to do with all the byproducts of other countries? Force their people to live in it while the government officials pocket a few bucks for taking it in?
And I think that storing and using hydrogen in cars is not a problem, I read of a guy who converted his 1950's car (diesel?) to run hydrogen in the 1960's (teenager at the time with a handmedown). He had to make some modifications to certain components because hydrogen is a gas, not a liquid, and is also corrosive to certain metals/alloys but nothing major.
Correct me if I wrong, but isn't hydrogen's biggest problem simply that it's stored in water (for us on earth) and that the electrolysis to seperate it has like only 8% efficiency? Steam Electrolysis is more efficient, but how is this a breakthrough?
for a newbie, it's overly short and the succinctness leaves you scratching your head.
/ 0673999866/104-9332919-7759146?_encoding=UTF8
It's good for the experienced programmer but gave me ulcers when trying to learn from it as a brand new programmer. I always thought it was overrated for learning C (yes, I know who the authors are) when I was in college. The same goes for Bjarne Stroustrop's book on C++. These books are much better for someone who already knows the language reasonably well and wants insights to the language, not to learn it from scratch.
My C teacher in college had another book as a side companion that was absolutely wonderful called "Pointers on C" by Kenneth Reek. Easy to read, details not likely to leave you with a million questions, and excercises that make you think about what you need to think about.
It's one of the few C books I encountered that really dealt with pointers, all the others books including K&R simply skimmed over it, which is a joke when you consider that pointers and their various forms are probably the largest source of bugs/security problems on code level itself:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/customer-reviews
It's expensive but worth it if you really want to get into C programming. Half.com might have it cheaper.
But since Tanenbaum and Linus weren't actually teacher/student this matters very little.
And what have you done monumentally? Let's keep this apples to apples here - Tanenbaum vs. Linus if you want to devolve it to that level of debate.
I'm more interested in real world results than theoretically conceptions from years ago that haven't bought in anything yet......
BTW, I'm not trying to belittle the man as much as wonder why good sounding theoretical OSes should be upheld in the classroom instead of tested practical ones - once the students get into the real world OS designing, assuming they ever do, perhaps they would be better prepared by studying a successful real world OS.
If you want simplicity, introduce them to DOS or amiga. If Microkernel is superior, prove it first in some way.
that he'd give him an F in Operating System design in the mid-90s right when linux was getting started.
Given that I never heard of minix being used outside the academic world (and even then, not much) I have to wonder if this guy is some type of Ivory Tower type or if this OS has any intriqueing feature over anything else out there. The only other mention of minix I've seen was the Filesystem to format floppies with...
But does it run linux? :D
I'd agree with you, but companies/individuals have a nasty habit of price gouging in emergencies when they can (yeah, yeah, maximise profit, blah, blah, blah) and as evidenced by the hugely varying prices on drugs in 1st World countries with more similiar pay scales, drug companies may do this too.
Though I'm not asserting this is the necessarily case here. Taiwan itself may be the party in wrong just as well.
It's not quite the same thing but close enough (emergency situations), but I heard that the US Government voided many radio patents beginning/during WW2 in the interest of advancing that technology ASAP.
I'd love to find a direct link to info, but all I can find know is this website alluding to that:
http://www.daltonlp.com/daltonlp.cgi?item_id=97