Your meta-comment regarding copy-paste karma whoring on repeated stories is intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter. Please only subscribe me once, as I will no doubt post this comment again.
I didn't realize I was reading an article about physical shopping carts in the real world. I figured the first line of "walking down a supermarket aisle" was a metaphor. I had the presumption that it was regarding e-commerce from the start, and I was wondering to myself why someone would want to add a piece of hardware to their computer to beep at them when they were in certain sections of a web store. Anyway, I have now come to the conclusion that my working on shopping cart software IRL for so long has caused me to completely lose touch with reality. Its actually kind of liberating.
The problem is that programming is a creative work that is in many ways its own reward. The tedious work of sampling and re-sampling hours of voice, and then splicing it properly for a computer to parse is akin to washing dishes in terms of creativity. I don't foresee someone going through the effort unless they have some other reward involved (like a grant, or its on the company's dime already and they're willing to share).
Why not use 4 firewire ports on both machines and have one loop per drive? More cables, but as a bonus you'll get better throughput per disk. I couldn't tell on first glance at the site, does EVMS support software RAID5?
I have made a couple of the more popular mixes made of the Terrible Secret of Space (Down the Stairs Mix, Protected Mix). The guy who did the original song truly is the Laziest Man on Mars, I've been pestering him since Terrible's heyday to add me to his MP3.com page. If he thought my stuff sucked all that bad, he could at least compose a two word "fuck off" email.:) In other news, my my sig is eerily on-topic today.
What, you don't believe in faith-based best practices for IT? A righteous server will not fail. If a server does falter, it was the will of God. Repent and give three syncs and Hail Maries before rebooting.
If PHP gives you a rash and you've had a taste of the Perl punch, another good open source e-commerce package available is Interchange (formerly minivend).
Are you sure of what you want?
on
Storefront-in-a-Box
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I understand that being a system admin for a mom and pop store can be fun, you get to be the hero, you get to put your mark on the world. But you're also costing mom and pop a lot more to have someone on staff to patch the system if problems crop up. You're also tying yourself to all the responsibility, becoming a single point of failure for their online business. Nobody ever likes being the single point of failure for anything. Are you sure you really want to own the software and the hardware?
There are a lot of e-commerce services out there... you may not 'own' the hardware or software for them, but any of them worth their salt will allow you to export all of the crucial information into file formats that can be read into another piece of software. Yahoo Stores takes this model, and so does my employer Zoovy. Better still, you have a company that you can hold accountable in case something goes pear-shaped. They consolidate the resources of administering the systems, patching the e-commerce software, and making security upgrades, saving mom and pop money. For the same reason that managed hosting is useful, so is going for an e-commerce service that doesn't require you to maintain everything. Who actually enjoys dealing with SSL certificates, DNS hiccups, troubleshooting credit card gateways, backing up databases. A service can take away these not-so-fun parts all while giving higher availability, leaving you to play around with HTML templates and finding better ways to make the store make money. And making money is what you're there to help mom and pop do, right?
The problem isn't that he feels tied down to using special software, or that he needs to be able to access his media from anywhere on the net. Though laudable concepts that your software addresses very well, they have nothing to do with his problem: he needs an interface that suits the task (specifically ease of use with a remote control). The web is great for creating applications that can be accessed from a variety of hardware configurations and locations. The web is not suited for applications which have a specific human interface limitation such as a hand-held remote, voice control, small screens, etc. I'm not saying that it is impossible to support them, just that interface limitations will usually result in one of 3 possibilities:
An inefficient rich interface (accessing common thinga will be more difficult than neccessary)
An efficient light interface (people with the capability of a rich interface will be anchored to the lowest common denominator)
Forking the code to tune it for two separate interfaces
If you fork, in most cases you may as well develop an application-specific product instead (one interface inevitably ends up as the red-headed stepchild). Catering to the lowest common denominator is the goal of the web*, but it still isn't trimmed down enough to make for good use of a hand-held remote control. Using a mouse-remote is cumbersome and error-prone, and seems silly since the regular clicker is already suited for the purpose, familiar, easy to use... especially if all you're doing is playing media files.
You have a fine product I'm sure. It could even support this user's baseline requirements with some hacking, hardware notwithstandingm (I get the impression that he's looking for an actual box). But I stand by my notion that a browser is not an ideal interface when your only input device is a clicker (mouse-enabled or not).
Exactly. People often fall into the trap of "When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail". I'm a perl web application programmer by trade, so I'm by no means immune. Perl has enough utility to be referred to as a "swiss army chainsaw", and the web has become the most ubiquitous application platform ever created. That doesn't mean it makes sense for me to build an interface to flush toilets or operate vehicles through CGI (even with JavaScript to patch up the misgivings of HTML forms).
A good web interface does not make for a good video / music player interface. Mousing using a remote is cumbersome and error-prone, especially if you have to select a bunch of small checkboxes to play the files you want. I get the impression the asker wants to know if there is something out there with an interface polished specifically for an AV component situation, which usually means navigating with button presses (and often without even a GUI for simple media functions like fast forward and pause).
I didn't mean physical switch buttons, but the little application icons along the right hand side of the screen. They would end up on the bottom of the unit in a traditional palm-held tablet mode with the screen flipped around.
I hope your contention that it is a PocketPC isn't the fact that it's got an Arm-based processor. 'Cause palms have those nowadays. In fact, the very palms they're mentioning in this article. Maybe the fact that they have keyboards? I suppose you're going to tell me the Zaurus is a PalmOS unit since they share those traits?
PocketPC is a Microsoft trademark for a specific OS product. The the Zaurus runs Linux with a QT-based UI. The claim that it is a PocketPC, made several times in your criticizing post, is utterly false.
I'm not usually one to pick nits, but this is slashdot, so my civic duty is to point out obvious inaccuracies and snerk under my breath mockingly.
Is is just me or does the screen look like it flips 180 degrees for a clie-style screen only tablet mode? It would explain the application button placement
I would personally avoid using terms that have specific legal interpretations like "libel" or "slander" when writing the letter myself. It sounds pretentious and, well, overdramatic. I think you can achieve the same effect by simply saying "I don't want my good name damaged by a misunderstanding and I am willing to defend it legally". Ask for an apology in front of anyone he may have said bad things about you in front of, this will strengthen your argument on the basis of your good name.
You are more likely to diffuse the situation by making your main point the interest in your reputation, your heart-felt intent to communicate the technical realities of the situation to him, and your concern over his ill-will toward you. I can see no good coming from starting a legal "arms race" by bandying about legal terms and threats. Make a very good case to him that you are correct on the technical grounds (i.e., lots of links to virus sites which back your story), and make the *subtle* indication that you are willing to defend yourself.
If you make sure to communicate politely (but pointedly), and you do end up in court, anyone looking at the communications between the CEO and the tech will realize that you made best efforts to explain the situation and he pushed the issue. Arbiters, judges and juries alike hate frivolous lawsuits, because it wastes everyone's time, and his lawyer will most likely tell him to drop it 'cause he won't win. If both him and his lawyer are stupid, and he has more cash, there's not alot you can do except go to court. But if you make good-faith attempts to rectify the situation before he escalates it, you will likely win.
Actually you're on to something. The crux of the CEO's position is the fact that he believes From: headers are gospel. If the tech has the ability to forge headers, then why the hell would he send the virus-infected email from his own address? It would make the foolishness of the CEO's conclusion apparent.
Pardon my over-generalization, I do know that evolution can be disproved by countless observations other than the supernatural. I think at this point that any observation that directly and credibly contradicts evolution is likely to disprove a lot of other areas of understanding our natural world as well. I just wanted to make the point clear in the same context that creationist usually place it.
Even though it was produced outside of natural selection, I'd imagine having the less tasty bits of your forebears would mean you'd survive longer in the wild.:)
I love the folks who like to tell you that "evolution is just a theory". The statement is rather loaded. It is a theory, yes. But so is the theory of gravity, and the round-earth theory. Just because a concept happens to be a theory doesn't preclude it from also being an observable fact. So far, evolutionary principles are a visisble, reproducible phenomenon, and has been observed in the laboratory and in the field. Most importantly, you could disprove evolution right now if you could show verifiable supernatural causality for what we observe in speciation. Creation "science" has no outlet to invalidate it, offers no verifiable causality for speciation, and presumes the existence of a supernatural event to explain the natural world. That's not even a theory, its a fairy tale.
At first I found your statement rather reactionary, especially since it didn't provide any calculations to back your statement that it could power a small city. Playing with the numbers, I discovered that they could indeed do so.
100 watt light bulb for 15 minutes translates into 25 watts / hour
Extrapolating based on the 10 billion figure, 250 billion watt hours were used in the year
The average home uses about 4.5 million watt hours per year
Meaning this project could power about 55 thousand homes during that year.
For that matter their calculations for 50 year supply of Big Mac value meals ends up being $539.00 per day. I knew geeks had a stereotype of being overweight, but isn't this taking it a bit far?
Slashdot Mirror
Your meta-comment regarding copy-paste karma whoring on repeated stories is intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter. Please only subscribe me once, as I will no doubt post this comment again.
I didn't realize I was reading an article about physical shopping carts in the real world. I figured the first line of "walking down a supermarket aisle" was a metaphor. I had the presumption that it was regarding e-commerce from the start, and I was wondering to myself why someone would want to add a piece of hardware to their computer to beep at them when they were in certain sections of a web store. Anyway, I have now come to the conclusion that my working on shopping cart software IRL for so long has caused me to completely lose touch with reality. Its actually kind of liberating.
The problem is that programming is a creative work that is in many ways its own reward. The tedious work of sampling and re-sampling hours of voice, and then splicing it properly for a computer to parse is akin to washing dishes in terms of creativity. I don't foresee someone going through the effort unless they have some other reward involved (like a grant, or its on the company's dime already and they're willing to share).
Why not use 4 firewire ports on both machines and have one loop per drive? More cables, but as a bonus you'll get better throughput per disk. I couldn't tell on first glance at the site, does EVMS support software RAID5?
I have made a couple of the more popular mixes made of the Terrible Secret of Space (Down the Stairs Mix, Protected Mix). The guy who did the original song truly is the Laziest Man on Mars, I've been pestering him since Terrible's heyday to add me to his MP3.com page. If he thought my stuff sucked all that bad, he could at least compose a two word "fuck off" email. :) In other news, my my sig is eerily on-topic today.
What, you don't believe in faith-based best practices for IT? A righteous server will not fail. If a server does falter, it was the will of God. Repent and give three syncs and Hail Maries before rebooting.
If PHP gives you a rash and you've had a taste of the Perl punch, another good open source e-commerce package available is Interchange (formerly minivend).
I understand that being a system admin for a mom and pop store can be fun, you get to be the hero, you get to put your mark on the world. But you're also costing mom and pop a lot more to have someone on staff to patch the system if problems crop up. You're also tying yourself to all the responsibility, becoming a single point of failure for their online business. Nobody ever likes being the single point of failure for anything. Are you sure you really want to own the software and the hardware?
There are a lot of e-commerce services out there... you may not 'own' the hardware or software for them, but any of them worth their salt will allow you to export all of the crucial information into file formats that can be read into another piece of software. Yahoo Stores takes this model, and so does my employer Zoovy. Better still, you have a company that you can hold accountable in case something goes pear-shaped. They consolidate the resources of administering the systems, patching the e-commerce software, and making security upgrades, saving mom and pop money. For the same reason that managed hosting is useful, so is going for an e-commerce service that doesn't require you to maintain everything. Who actually enjoys dealing with SSL certificates, DNS hiccups, troubleshooting credit card gateways, backing up databases. A service can take away these not-so-fun parts all while giving higher availability, leaving you to play around with HTML templates and finding better ways to make the store make money. And making money is what you're there to help mom and pop do, right?
The problem isn't that he feels tied down to using special software, or that he needs to be able to access his media from anywhere on the net. Though laudable concepts that your software addresses very well, they have nothing to do with his problem: he needs an interface that suits the task (specifically ease of use with a remote control). The web is great for creating applications that can be accessed from a variety of hardware configurations and locations. The web is not suited for applications which have a specific human interface limitation such as a hand-held remote, voice control, small screens, etc. I'm not saying that it is impossible to support them, just that interface limitations will usually result in one of 3 possibilities:
If you fork, in most cases you may as well develop an application-specific product instead (one interface inevitably ends up as the red-headed stepchild). Catering to the lowest common denominator is the goal of the web*, but it still isn't trimmed down enough to make for good use of a hand-held remote control. Using a mouse-remote is cumbersome and error-prone, and seems silly since the regular clicker is already suited for the purpose, familiar, easy to use... especially if all you're doing is playing media files.
You have a fine product I'm sure. It could even support this user's baseline requirements with some hacking, hardware notwithstandingm (I get the impression that he's looking for an actual box). But I stand by my notion that a browser is not an ideal interface when your only input device is a clicker (mouse-enabled or not).
* For proof, see geocities
Exactly. People often fall into the trap of "When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail". I'm a perl web application programmer by trade, so I'm by no means immune. Perl has enough utility to be referred to as a "swiss army chainsaw", and the web has become the most ubiquitous application platform ever created. That doesn't mean it makes sense for me to build an interface to flush toilets or operate vehicles through CGI (even with JavaScript to patch up the misgivings of HTML forms).
A good web interface does not make for a good video / music player interface. Mousing using a remote is cumbersome and error-prone, especially if you have to select a bunch of small checkboxes to play the files you want. I get the impression the asker wants to know if there is something out there with an interface polished specifically for an AV component situation, which usually means navigating with button presses (and often without even a GUI for simple media functions like fast forward and pause).
I didn't mean physical switch buttons, but the little application icons along the right hand side of the screen. They would end up on the bottom of the unit in a traditional palm-held tablet mode with the screen flipped around.
I hope your contention that it is a PocketPC isn't the fact that it's got an Arm-based processor. 'Cause palms have those nowadays. In fact, the very palms they're mentioning in this article. Maybe the fact that they have keyboards? I suppose you're going to tell me the Zaurus is a PalmOS unit since they share those traits?
PocketPC is a Microsoft trademark for a specific OS product. The the Zaurus runs Linux with a QT-based UI. The claim that it is a PocketPC, made several times in your criticizing post, is utterly false.
I'm not usually one to pick nits, but this is slashdot, so my civic duty is to point out obvious inaccuracies and snerk under my breath mockingly.
Your point is valid (if it is true), but what self-respecting geek actually *prefers* the dos shell over a decent unix one?
Is is just me or does the screen look like it flips 180 degrees for a clie-style screen only tablet mode? It would explain the application button placement
Uh, you do know that a Zaurus is not a PocketPC, right? Right?
I would personally avoid using terms that have specific legal interpretations like "libel" or "slander" when writing the letter myself. It sounds pretentious and, well, overdramatic. I think you can achieve the same effect by simply saying "I don't want my good name damaged by a misunderstanding and I am willing to defend it legally". Ask for an apology in front of anyone he may have said bad things about you in front of, this will strengthen your argument on the basis of your good name.
You are more likely to diffuse the situation by making your main point the interest in your reputation, your heart-felt intent to communicate the technical realities of the situation to him, and your concern over his ill-will toward you. I can see no good coming from starting a legal "arms race" by bandying about legal terms and threats. Make a very good case to him that you are correct on the technical grounds (i.e., lots of links to virus sites which back your story), and make the *subtle* indication that you are willing to defend yourself.
If you make sure to communicate politely (but pointedly), and you do end up in court, anyone looking at the communications between the CEO and the tech will realize that you made best efforts to explain the situation and he pushed the issue. Arbiters, judges and juries alike hate frivolous lawsuits, because it wastes everyone's time, and his lawyer will most likely tell him to drop it 'cause he won't win. If both him and his lawyer are stupid, and he has more cash, there's not alot you can do except go to court. But if you make good-faith attempts to rectify the situation before he escalates it, you will likely win.
Actually you're on to something. The crux of the CEO's position is the fact that he believes From: headers are gospel. If the tech has the ability to forge headers, then why the hell would he send the virus-infected email from his own address? It would make the foolishness of the CEO's conclusion apparent.
Pardon my over-generalization, I do know that evolution can be disproved by countless observations other than the supernatural. I think at this point that any observation that directly and credibly contradicts evolution is likely to disprove a lot of other areas of understanding our natural world as well. I just wanted to make the point clear in the same context that creationist usually place it.
Even though it was produced outside of natural selection, I'd imagine having the less tasty bits of your forebears would mean you'd survive longer in the wild. :)
I love the folks who like to tell you that "evolution is just a theory". The statement is rather loaded. It is a theory, yes. But so is the theory of gravity, and the round-earth theory. Just because a concept happens to be a theory doesn't preclude it from also being an observable fact. So far, evolutionary principles are a visisble, reproducible phenomenon, and has been observed in the laboratory and in the field. Most importantly, you could disprove evolution right now if you could show verifiable supernatural causality for what we observe in speciation. Creation "science" has no outlet to invalidate it, offers no verifiable causality for speciation, and presumes the existence of a supernatural event to explain the natural world. That's not even a theory, its a fairy tale.
At first I found your statement rather reactionary, especially since it didn't provide any calculations to back your statement that it could power a small city. Playing with the numbers, I discovered that they could indeed do so.
100 watt light bulb for 15 minutes translates into 25 watts / hour
Extrapolating based on the 10 billion figure, 250 billion watt hours were used in the year
The average home uses about 4.5 million watt hours per year
Meaning this project could power about 55 thousand homes during that year.
There's a reason.
For that matter their calculations for 50 year supply of Big Mac value meals ends up being $539.00 per day. I knew geeks had a stereotype of being overweight, but isn't this taking it a bit far?
Mine came with a remote control. It was ultrasonic so I figured it had to be at least from the civil war.