How is $0.10 a message (with Cingular) a free service? My carrier charges for both sent and received messages, although it's possible to buy your messages in bulk for a discount, i.e. 100 messages a month for $3.99, 200 for $5.99, etc.
> the underlying reasons Mac interfaces (Classic and OS X) work so well
I started using OS X when I started my new job, and I swear I had an open mind, but nonetheless, it can be quite frustrating to use. For example, there's two ways of minimizing windows. You can hit the yellow minimize button in the upper right corner, or you can hit command-H to hide the window. The only difference is that minimizing the window by clicking the button makes it appear in the dock. Functionally, both of these make the window vanish, which is what you want. But to get it back, you need to do two completely different things to get it back. Since I sometimes minimize with the keyboard and sometimes with the mouse, I now have to remember how I minimized a window, and I'm looking in the dock for my window, and its not there. This does not Just Work.
More on the dock: When you are using IE these days, popup windows are inevitable. In Windows (and Windows-like GUIs), you can quickly and easily get rid of them by rapidly rightclicking on them in the taskbar, and clicking close. Two mouseclicks is all that you need. No such luck in OS X. Yes, yes, 'Use Mozilla!', but the fact remains that its harder to remove unwanted windows.
iTunes: Sometimes, you listen to a radio station that for some reason, fails. What is that reason? iTunes won't tell you. It just doesn't work. Now, perhaps it makes sense to hide this information from the beginning user, instead presenting a uniform "This isn't working!" error message, but for a slightly more sophisticated user, its helpful to know why the stream failed. Could it not resolve the DNS address? If so, maybe the DNS servers haven't propagated yet, so I should try again in a few hours. No service is available? Maybe they are down for maintenance and I should check their website, or maybe they are down for good. Too many users? I will try again in a half an hour. So again, the much lauded OS X interface fails to impress me. Granted, iTunes is not the OS interface, but the same design philosophy is at work, and I'm not terribly impressed.
> Sure, suits don't care about the elegance of YOUR crap--but you don't care about [theirs].
Characterizing it like that is a blatant attempt to make the suit-geek dichotomy go away, and its not working. For one thing, everyone understands money, geeks included. When a suit is concerned with the bottom-line, we can at least understand where he's coming from. The converse is (often) not even remotely true. In the extreme, suits understand money, and money alone. Geeks, on the other hand, hold the position that while money is important, in some circumstances, elegance trumps money. So while geeks understand both the ephemeral "elegance" AND the more obvious bottom line, suits usually only understand money.
Therein lies the problem. If anything, the Geek is more dedicated to the bottom line than the Suit, because a more elegant solution is a part of or even the foundation of a sound business model, especially in the long run. However, a Suit who typically has little or no understanding of the domain, or the humility to take the advice of those who do often cuts technological corners (like hiring MSCEs) with deleterious effects on the bottom line. A geek suggesting the use of free open-source software will get modded down in the board room because "Everyone uses Microsoft." The reason for the stereotype of the Pointy Haired Boss is because it is unfortunately common. Not the pointy hair part, the inept technological aptitude part.
There is no book of David. Bathsheba was married to another man (Uriah), and she wasn't a prostitute. David saw her bathing one day, and had her summoned to the palace and slept with her. She became pregnant, and so David called up Uriah from the battle field on some pretext, hoping that when he sent Uriah home, he would sleep with Bathsheba and everyone would assume the baby was his. This didn't work, because Uriah was an honorable fellow and couldn't bring himself to go home and enjoy the all the comforts of home while his men were suffering on the battlefield, so he slept out on the street. David needed to cover his tracks, so he sent a message back to Joab (a general in the army) saying, "Place Uriah in the front line of the fiercest battle and withdraw from him, so that he may be struck down and die." So Uriah died, and David took Bathsheba to be one of his wives. God was not happy, and sent the prophet Nathan to inform David of this. David repented, and wrote Psalm 51.
> should there not be stories out when MS releases new versions
Er, no. Look at the top of the page. It says Slashdot. Slashdot is about open source. This story isn't supposed to be an announcement. If you jumped on the 1.2 release and installed it, chances are you already know about both the problem and the fact that there is a new release.
I don't know which alternate universe you are living, but in my world, Tomcat's documentation is awful - in fact, my frustrations with the docs led me to buy this very book. Server.xml is a very complicated configuration document and web.xml can be, so this book is great to have a handy reference for that part alone. Unlike a lot of people, I don't consider HOWTOs to be all that useful. The scope tends to be extremely limited and they often don't bother to reference other documents that you are expected to be familiar with in order to follow the instructions.
I agree with some posts on the lack of quality of Wrox books - but in this case, its definitely worth it. Good technical writing is worth its weight in gold. The only book I would prefer would be O'Reilly's Tomcat: The Definitive Guide, although according to Amazon.com, its not due out until March 2003.
> I've heard this excuse too many times from artists and musicians. It's not true.
I concur. I'm not saying this applies to Anonvmous Coward, but the kind of people who say that sort of thing are usually saying, "This sciencey/math/non-artsy stuff conflicts with my self-image as a lofty artist in tune with my muse, etc." As a graphic designer and musician turned programmer, I'm glad to know that someone shares my experience. The one great thing about your brain is that you can continually train it and teach it to approach things differently. Anyone who says, "I'm an X and could never be a Y," is artifically limiting themselves.
> Right brained people tend to work visually.
It's well known that 90% of everybody the human race works visually. Some people are more auditory and some more kinesthetic, but most are visual. Incidentally, the theory of right-brained versus left-brain thinking has recently been proven a fallacy by a neuroscientist named Jerre Levy. Its sad to think that career counselors across the nation are telling kids that since they are good at math, a rewarding career in accounting is inevitable.
Contrary to popular/. belief, good design does matter, and here's why: If you were a website owner and planning on generating traffic and gaining a good reputation, you would make sure you have two things - good content, and good design. When users go to sites by big companies they know will be around for a long time like IBM, Dell, Yahoo, etc., and see an attractive and professional layout, they begin to associate that with trust. No-one believes that these companies are being anything but completely honest on their websites. Compare that with teds-sweet-deals.com with crappy layout and an ugly page. It looks like a fly-by-night operation and it certainly doesn't look like Dell.com, so who are you going to trust?
That being said, I think users know the difference between an e-commerce site and a personal non-profit site, and there's lots more leeway in the latter case, which can actually backfire for companies that like to astroturf. An example of this is websites for Amanda Latona (a wannabe pop diva being groomed by the major labels for commercial success). A lot of the "fan" websites seem a little too slick to be real.
That's quite an argument you've got going there. Let's summarize:
the Hussein government is actively seeking weapons of mass destruction
Maybe... I'll give you this one for free, OK?
it becomes clear that a nation that has WMDs
Wait... you just went from actively seeking to actually owning weapons of mass destruction. Which is it? It would be a very bad thing to go to war on the basis of mere suspicion. I would support a war if I thought there was enough evidence, but I feel that Bush is treating us like children. "Saddam is a bad, bad man! He's a naughty, murderous tyrant and we have to get him, because he's bad, see?" Seriously, this is the best the White House can do, and its not convincing at all.
You win valuable prizes for the least insightful comment thus far. If Saddam did decide to do that, he would be dead in very short order. Most of the surrounding nations, Europe and the US would annihilate the country side. Saddam may be a jerk, but I don't think he's ready to throw his life away.
> AT&T and Cingular are TDMA although they're beginning a GSM rollout. (But it's "not there yet")
Errr... I just bought a Siemens S40 and signed on with Cingular the other day. As far as I can tell, this phone doesn't support any of the analog protocols at all, so I'm pretty sure Cingular's GSM service much further along that "not there yet."
Unfortunately, you are right - this band sucks. Aside from the fact that they sound exactly like every other boring nü-metal band that is a pestilence on our airwaves, the lyrics are just plain awful.
I have to say that the production is top-notch though, very professional. Its too bad the producer didn't have better material to work with.
> What this says is that SySMark is really poorly coded, not "optimized" to favour Intel silicon.
Ah, of course! When software that was essentially developed by Intel to measure the performance of its flagship processor when compared to its competitors magically favors Intel, its pure coincidence and probably the work of incompetent developers.
Come on, how naive do you think we are?
Regarding the Via C3 vs. Celeron 1.7 test: if you look at the front page, you'll notice that they ran this benchmark on systems with different configurations and even different operating systems, so it seems like its a "Wow, look at that!" thing rather than a real benchmark. I hope.
> Having the largest supplier die at this moment could give ATI the boost it neaded to scream back on top
Back on top? When were they ever on top? I've never had a very good impression of the company. It always seemed like they only produced "budget" cards that had crappy video quality and low framerates, and I still remember fighting with one of their All-in-Wonder cards to get the drivers installed. The main wonder was that it worked at all. OK, so the Radeon is a decent card by all accounts, but its basically the first card to match the top contender in the 5 or 6 years that 3D cards were important. I wasn't much of a fan of Nvidia at first either, but they have since won me over with excellent products year after year. ATI haven't done that.
One reason is that a lot of music is only released on vinyl, and its really really hard to find it in mp3 form, mostly because its a bigger pain in the ass to convert from vinyl to mp3 compared to CD to mp3.
Another reason to have a DJ is that the good ones will find new tracks that are unheard of, fresh sounds. This is good for the club, because if word gets around that their resident DJ is spinning some hot UK garage or something, people will come to check it out. Not neccessarily because of trendiness, but more out of a desire to be exposed to new things. I'll admit that there's posers out there who stand around and nod their heads a bit, but really have no idea what they are listening to. Depends on the club you go to.
Vinyl sounds warmer and has more sonic range than CDs, and also its easier to beat-match on turntables than on CDs (IMO). If you are going hear a club where the DJ is advertised as playing hits of the 70s, 80s and 90s, the DJ is basically playing to the lowest common denominator, and you really might as well stay home.
I also think that some DJs, like Donald Glaude, can be really entertaining and engage the audience, although a good majority of them end up looking like complete knobs. One of the reasons that electronic music has not acheived the mainstream success is the lack of DJ personalities. That's a good thing, if you ask me. Its time we stop idolizing and mythologizing musicians, and if the people who can't enjoy music without that are dissuaded from the genre, its no great loss.
I think its because this is the age group they know will be most likely to support their conclusion, i.e. that downloaders don't buy music. Teenagers generally have limited cash, and will likely conserve money whenever they can. 10% is probably the maximum rate for any age group, so the overall population percentage is likely to be much lower.
> Jungle and Drum n Bass follow more of a shuffled "boom, click, boomclick" feel, almost like Hip Hop only faster
A note on the origins of Jungle: The reason Jungle has that name attached to it is because the originators often sampled from James Brown's "In the Jungle Groove", in particular, a track called "Funky Drummer." Also the famous amen break, from "Amen Brother" by the Winstons. Listening to the original records, I get a sense that the rhythm section is strongly jazz influenced, so it would be more accurate to say that dnb is influenced by Jazz via Funk and also Hardcore/Rave music of the early 90s. The influence of Hip Hop came about later with the addition of the MC. Its true that early Hip Hop and Jungle both sampled from the same/similar source material, but you will notice that the Amen break and the funky drummer breaks are all close to dnb tempo, so its not accurate to say that dnb is just hip hop speeded up.
Technically, dnb also has a 4/4 signature, but I'm sure what you mean is that it doesn't have a bass drum on every quarter note.
You could implement it so that you have to walk back to one or more respawn points in order to respawn, and in the mean time, you wouldn't be able to shoot. I suppose you could run around dead trying to knock people's guns out of their hands, until somebody got mad and turned off augmented reality and started chasing you down to beat you to a pulp in *actual* reality...
I'd like to see them implement rocket jumping too.:P
after nine months of intense effort the company[Microsoft] was unable to find any partner willing to commit itself to the program.
Microsoft tried this and it didn't work because no-one wanted it. Why is there an Ask Slashdot story asking people to come with ideas for a product that has been unilaterally rejected?
Here's my design idea: How would a truly secure public data repository store data? By not storing data! The whole point of a public data repository is to gather, track and sell marketing information. User convenience is a cover.
Slashdot Mirror
How is $0.10 a message (with Cingular) a free service? My carrier charges for both sent and received messages, although it's possible to buy your messages in bulk for a discount, i.e. 100 messages a month for $3.99, 200 for $5.99, etc.
> the underlying reasons Mac interfaces (Classic and OS X) work so well I started using OS X when I started my new job, and I swear I had an open mind, but nonetheless, it can be quite frustrating to use. For example, there's two ways of minimizing windows. You can hit the yellow minimize button in the upper right corner, or you can hit command-H to hide the window. The only difference is that minimizing the window by clicking the button makes it appear in the dock. Functionally, both of these make the window vanish, which is what you want. But to get it back, you need to do two completely different things to get it back. Since I sometimes minimize with the keyboard and sometimes with the mouse, I now have to remember how I minimized a window, and I'm looking in the dock for my window, and its not there. This does not Just Work. More on the dock: When you are using IE these days, popup windows are inevitable. In Windows (and Windows-like GUIs), you can quickly and easily get rid of them by rapidly rightclicking on them in the taskbar, and clicking close. Two mouseclicks is all that you need. No such luck in OS X. Yes, yes, 'Use Mozilla!', but the fact remains that its harder to remove unwanted windows. iTunes: Sometimes, you listen to a radio station that for some reason, fails. What is that reason? iTunes won't tell you. It just doesn't work. Now, perhaps it makes sense to hide this information from the beginning user, instead presenting a uniform "This isn't working!" error message, but for a slightly more sophisticated user, its helpful to know why the stream failed. Could it not resolve the DNS address? If so, maybe the DNS servers haven't propagated yet, so I should try again in a few hours. No service is available? Maybe they are down for maintenance and I should check their website, or maybe they are down for good. Too many users? I will try again in a half an hour. So again, the much lauded OS X interface fails to impress me. Granted, iTunes is not the OS interface, but the same design philosophy is at work, and I'm not terribly impressed.
> Sure, suits don't care about the elegance of YOUR crap--but you don't care about [theirs].
Characterizing it like that is a blatant attempt to make the suit-geek dichotomy go away, and its not working. For one thing, everyone understands money, geeks included. When a suit is concerned with the bottom-line, we can at least understand where he's coming from. The converse is (often) not even remotely true. In the extreme, suits understand money, and money alone. Geeks, on the other hand, hold the position that while money is important, in some circumstances, elegance trumps money. So while geeks understand both the ephemeral "elegance" AND the more obvious bottom line, suits usually only understand money.
Therein lies the problem. If anything, the Geek is more dedicated to the bottom line than the Suit, because a more elegant solution is a part of or even the foundation of a sound business model, especially in the long run. However, a Suit who typically has little or no understanding of the domain, or the humility to take the advice of those who do often cuts technological corners (like hiring MSCEs) with deleterious effects on the bottom line. A geek suggesting the use of free open-source software will get modded down in the board room because "Everyone uses Microsoft." The reason for the stereotype of the Pointy Haired Boss is because it is unfortunately common. Not the pointy hair part, the inept technological aptitude part.
There is no book of David. Bathsheba was married to another man (Uriah), and she wasn't a prostitute. David saw her bathing one day, and had her summoned to the palace and slept with her. She became pregnant, and so David called up Uriah from the battle field on some pretext, hoping that when he sent Uriah home, he would sleep with Bathsheba and everyone would assume the baby was his. This didn't work, because Uriah was an honorable fellow and couldn't bring himself to go home and enjoy the all the comforts of home while his men were suffering on the battlefield, so he slept out on the street. David needed to cover his tracks, so he sent a message back to Joab (a general in the army) saying, "Place Uriah in the front line of the fiercest battle and withdraw from him, so that he may be struck down and die." So Uriah died, and David took Bathsheba to be one of his wives. God was not happy, and sent the prophet Nathan to inform David of this. David repented, and wrote Psalm 51.
The End.
> should there not be stories out when MS releases new versions
Er, no. Look at the top of the page. It says Slashdot. Slashdot is about open source. This story isn't supposed to be an announcement. If you jumped on the 1.2 release and installed it, chances are you already know about both the problem and the fact that there is a new release.
I don't know which alternate universe you are living, but in my world, Tomcat's documentation is awful - in fact, my frustrations with the docs led me to buy this very book. Server.xml is a very complicated configuration document and web.xml can be, so this book is great to have a handy reference for that part alone. Unlike a lot of people, I don't consider HOWTOs to be all that useful. The scope tends to be extremely limited and they often don't bother to reference other documents that you are expected to be familiar with in order to follow the instructions.
I agree with some posts on the lack of quality of Wrox books - but in this case, its definitely worth it. Good technical writing is worth its weight in gold. The only book I would prefer would be O'Reilly's Tomcat: The Definitive Guide, although according to Amazon.com, its not due out until March 2003.
I concur. I'm not saying this applies to Anonvmous Coward, but the kind of people who say that sort of thing are usually saying, "This sciencey/math/non-artsy stuff conflicts with my self-image as a lofty artist in tune with my muse, etc." As a graphic designer and musician turned programmer, I'm glad to know that someone shares my experience. The one great thing about your brain is that you can continually train it and teach it to approach things differently. Anyone who says, "I'm an X and could never be a Y," is artifically limiting themselves.
> Right brained people tend to work visually.
It's well known that 90% of everybody the human race works visually. Some people are more auditory and some more kinesthetic, but most are visual. Incidentally, the theory of right-brained versus left-brain thinking has recently been proven a fallacy by a neuroscientist named Jerre Levy. Its sad to think that career counselors across the nation are telling kids that since they are good at math, a rewarding career in accounting is inevitable.
Contrary to popular /. belief, good design does matter, and here's why: If you were a website owner and planning on generating traffic and gaining a good reputation, you would make sure you have two things - good content, and good design. When users go to sites by big companies they know will be around for a long time like IBM, Dell, Yahoo, etc., and see an attractive and professional layout, they begin to associate that with trust. No-one believes that these companies are being anything but completely honest on their websites. Compare that with teds-sweet-deals.com with crappy layout and an ugly page. It looks like a fly-by-night operation and it certainly doesn't look like Dell.com, so who are you going to trust?
That being said, I think users know the difference between an e-commerce site and a personal non-profit site, and there's lots more leeway in the latter case, which can actually backfire for companies that like to astroturf. An example of this is websites for Amanda Latona (a wannabe pop diva being groomed by the major labels for commercial success). A lot of the "fan" websites seem a little too slick to be real.
Err... I just got Cingular. 600 peak + 3000 night/weekend, and free long distance.
That's quite an argument you've got going there. Let's summarize:
the Hussein government is actively seeking weapons of mass destruction
Maybe... I'll give you this one for free, OK?
it becomes clear that a nation that has WMDs
Wait... you just went from actively seeking to actually owning weapons of mass destruction. Which is it? It would be a very bad thing to go to war on the basis of mere suspicion. I would support a war if I thought there was enough evidence, but I feel that Bush is treating us like children. "Saddam is a bad, bad man! He's a naughty, murderous tyrant and we have to get him, because he's bad, see?" Seriously, this is the best the White House can do, and its not convincing at all.
You win valuable prizes for the least insightful comment thus far. If Saddam did decide to do that, he would be dead in very short order. Most of the surrounding nations, Europe and the US would annihilate the country side. Saddam may be a jerk, but I don't think he's ready to throw his life away.
> AT&T and Cingular are TDMA although they're beginning a GSM rollout. (But it's "not there yet") Errr... I just bought a Siemens S40 and signed on with Cingular the other day. As far as I can tell, this phone doesn't support any of the analog protocols at all, so I'm pretty sure Cingular's GSM service much further along that "not there yet."
Unfortunately, you are right - this band sucks. Aside from the fact that they sound exactly like every other boring nü-metal band that is a pestilence on our airwaves, the lyrics are just plain awful.
I have to say that the production is top-notch though, very professional. Its too bad the producer didn't have better material to work with.
Ah, of course! When software that was essentially developed by Intel to measure the performance of its flagship processor when compared to its competitors magically favors Intel, its pure coincidence and probably the work of incompetent developers.
Come on, how naive do you think we are?
Regarding the Via C3 vs. Celeron 1.7 test: if you look at the front page, you'll notice that they ran this benchmark on systems with different configurations and even different operating systems, so it seems like its a "Wow, look at that!" thing rather than a real benchmark. I hope.
Back on top? When were they ever on top? I've never had a very good impression of the company. It always seemed like they only produced "budget" cards that had crappy video quality and low framerates, and I still remember fighting with one of their All-in-Wonder cards to get the drivers installed. The main wonder was that it worked at all. OK, so the Radeon is a decent card by all accounts, but its basically the first card to match the top contender in the 5 or 6 years that 3D cards were important. I wasn't much of a fan of Nvidia at first either, but they have since won me over with excellent products year after year. ATI haven't done that.
One reason is that a lot of music is only released on vinyl, and its really really hard to find it in mp3 form, mostly because its a bigger pain in the ass to convert from vinyl to mp3 compared to CD to mp3.
Another reason to have a DJ is that the good ones will find new tracks that are unheard of, fresh sounds. This is good for the club, because if word gets around that their resident DJ is spinning some hot UK garage or something, people will come to check it out. Not neccessarily because of trendiness, but more out of a desire to be exposed to new things. I'll admit that there's posers out there who stand around and nod their heads a bit, but really have no idea what they are listening to. Depends on the club you go to.
Vinyl sounds warmer and has more sonic range than CDs, and also its easier to beat-match on turntables than on CDs (IMO).
If you are going hear a club where the DJ is advertised as playing hits of the 70s, 80s and 90s, the DJ is basically playing to the lowest common denominator, and you really might as well stay home.
I also think that some DJs, like Donald Glaude, can be really entertaining and engage the audience, although a good majority of them end up looking like complete knobs. One of the reasons that electronic music has not acheived the mainstream success is the lack of DJ personalities. That's a good thing, if you ask me. Its time we stop idolizing and mythologizing musicians, and if the people who can't enjoy music without that are dissuaded from the genre, its no great loss.
I think its because this is the age group they know will be most likely to support their conclusion, i.e. that downloaders don't buy music. Teenagers generally have limited cash, and will likely conserve money whenever they can. 10% is probably the maximum rate for any age group, so the overall population percentage is likely to be much lower.
> Jungle and Drum n Bass follow more of a shuffled "boom, click, boomclick" feel, almost like Hip Hop only faster
A note on the origins of Jungle: The reason Jungle has that name attached to it is because the originators often sampled from James Brown's "In the Jungle Groove", in particular, a track called "Funky Drummer." Also the famous amen break, from "Amen Brother" by the Winstons. Listening to the original records, I get a sense that the rhythm section is strongly jazz influenced, so it would be more accurate to say that dnb is influenced by Jazz via Funk and also Hardcore/Rave music of the early 90s. The influence of Hip Hop came about later with the addition of the MC. Its true that early Hip Hop and Jungle both sampled from the same/similar source material, but you will notice that the Amen break and the funky drummer breaks are all close to dnb tempo, so its not accurate to say that dnb is just hip hop speeded up.
Technically, dnb also has a 4/4 signature, but I'm sure what you mean is that it doesn't have a bass drum on every quarter note.
Better talk to these guys then.
But the good news is that they are championing the oft-overlooked Christmas music genre. In May, for some reason.
I'd like to see them implement rocket jumping too. :P
Or better: The Sum of the Square of All Fears
Microsoft tried this and it didn't work because no-one wanted it. Why is there an Ask Slashdot story asking people to come with ideas for a product that has been unilaterally rejected?
Here's my design idea: How would a truly secure public data repository store data? By not storing data! The whole point of a public data repository is to gather, track and sell marketing information. User convenience is a cover.
That, or catch up on some much needed sleep.
the longer you stay at the school, the more taxpayer $$ is spent on you
Yeah, but they'll make it up on volume.