This basically sums up where I'm at. I have Fiesty on a partition on my Tecra which I primarily use XP on. I don't boot into my Kubuntu partition because for the life of me I can't get wireless working on it. Wired works just fine, but I don't like to work wired. I've tried all combinations of settings in the UI, edited config files, run all sorts of networking shell commands recommended on howtoforge and other places, but it just doesn't want to work. I've talked to many others who just say "well wifi works just fine for me so it must be you". Well, maybe it is, I don't know, nor care. Wireless (and other things the parent posted) are little things that should come STOCK these days and people should not have to fiddle with. I don't care that my manufacturer isn't opening up the driver source, I really don't give a crap if I'm running proprietary drivers, I just want it to work. I never opened up my windows drivers'.c files and make sure they're written well and work up to somebody else's standards, but even still they work just fine out of the box. That's the 'easy' that Ubuntu needs to be at. They can have dozens of game clones and paint programs and whatnot, but until they get the basics ironed out (the "what my mom calls basic", not "what my kids with lots of free time and ambition call basic"), the base of users who go about installing the OS themselves is going to stay geeky and in a niche.
"Simple, human" to users has gone past not having to compile kernels and install device drivers. The masses demand much more than that work out of the box now.
Read the advisory and the discussion from last week. Microsoft was notified at the beginning of October and has only now gotten around to fixing it.
No, Microsoft was notified at the beginning of October and has only now gotten around to being so sure of their fixes that they're comfortable releasing the patches to tens of millions of computers. There's a big difference.
"These 'field effect displays,' or FEDs, will consume less energy than plasma or liquid crystal display (LCD) TVs, deliver a better picture and even cost less.".
If it consumes less energy and delivers a better picture, it will be a better product. Better products cost more. Even if they're simpler and less costly to make, they will be more expensive (until supply/demand/competition/other factors drive them the other way).
I just searched Google for Learn Cobol and only got 417k results. Not that popular a subject anymore I suppose.
I know it was intended as a joke (and even found it funny), but learning the COBOL language in a "learn COBOL in 24 hours" book and doing something useful with it on an AS/400 are entirely different things.
Some people don't read the articles, others don't even read the post.
Read this part once again and notice the "is a port of the" part then finish off with the "which requires a" part: The software is a port of the homebrew Xbox Media Center software which requires a Modded Xbox to run.
Ok, you guys are amazing. Let's put this into context. Microsoft comes out with this great tool called ActiveX. It allows all kinds of wonderful things to happen, especially rich content in emails. Uh-oh, someone finds out that this technology is a great way to F around with folks' email since it's so integrated in Outlook (just using Outlook as an example, won't even go there with Windows). Bad, M$, no bone. Nevermind the users who don't know to simply turn off active scripting, they're not the problem - it's Microsoft - since software manufacturers should understand that all users are dumb. Enter Google. All data that's currently on the PC is presented in a highly searchable manner, even to people who have no idea about privacy issues involving electronic data. Stupid users, you shouldn't put such data there, don't you know how every application you've ever used persists data? It's obviously not Google's fault you're so stupid.
Allow me to describe for you living-in-yo-mamas-basement geeks how 6 billion people operate:
The average user has no idea of the security implications of simply going to a public computer and using the facilities provided for them.
If they've ever bought a computer before, they did not buy it from a store with a sales rep that gave them a book listing out every privacy/security vulnerability in the OS installed on it, and if they did they didn't read it. They may have never even talked to anyone knowledgeable about it.
Average users don't have conversations with geeks, sitting around talking about why M$ fscking sucks today and how 3l337 they are or how they 0wn3d U or whatever the hell they say. Average users have conversations with other average users about sports and knitting.
It is doubtful the user has a college degree in computer science, engineering, or even went to a technical school.
Not every kiddie is a script kiddie. I would venture to say most kids who use a library aren't script kiddies - script kiddies have computers at home. If you don't believe me, go to any public library with computers in south Atlanta and ask if their parents own a computer.
In a perfect world, it would be awesome if everyone understood the problems with computer privacy, but we have to deal with all those fucking ignorant lusers who don't read slashdot every hour. If Google doesn't understand this, rest assured they will be hounded by privacy counsils until they learn.
With enough cameras installed around a city, and a little fancy tag recognition + OCR technology, I don't see what's to stop them from being able to do this now.
Politics.
I don't know what city you live in, but it certainly wouldn't fly in mine. If it were some government-ordained test, possibly for security/"terrorist-or-criminal-face-recognition" reasons whathaveyou, it would probably go through without a hitch (short of a lot of fussing by plenty of privacy groups). I could be wrong, but I haven't heard of any city that ClearChannel owns enough of to install video cameras on streets, highways, or interstates for advertising demographic reasons. It would take a lot of political pressure to get something like that through.
Online music sales exploded in 2003. I don't believe those numbers are being included in the "CD sales" figures. If that's true, then there's nothing surprising about CD sales being down. Few people will buy an entire album's tracks online and then also buy the CD.
It also means that it's possible that music sales have actually gone up, just the medium has changed, and unless all mediums are counted then the numbers will be naturally biased.
Some people like to have hobbies. Some people consider building things on their own to be fun. Otherwise, places like Home Depot or Hobby Lobby or Radio Shack would go out of business. There are always easier/cheaper/faster solutions to everything, but where's the fun in that?
Remove the right files and the right registry keys, and I assure you that you can get rid of IE. You may have to find another file browser, internet browser, and desktop, but IE is removable. I've never tried it to back this statement up, but IE is an application just like everything else. MS has just made it damn difficult to remove because of tight coupling with other applications.
And for this same reason, DCOM is also not part of Windows. It's an add-on. There are no kernel mode drivers for it, and Windows will work just happy without it. You're confusing tightly-coupled applications with OS features. Do you consider X11 part of Linux? How about sendmail? HTTP daemons?
While I agree that it's all put together on the facade to the end user, and MS is really responsible for it in that fashion, the parent poster is right.
I was a big Metallica fan for many years until their softening of their music, and their Napster stance didn't help much either. Although I'm not that fond of their latest CD, their idea of bundling a DVD with their CD is absolutely brilliant. It might be a bit more expensive for an indie to do, but there are cheap ways around it (home video recording, finding the cheapest DVD-Rs you can get your hands on). If you're OK with passing the extra costs on to the consumer (which you implied you are), they may be alright with the extra dollar or whatever if it actually has value added.
If the CD you're distributing is a data CD (since it's an MP3 CD), you can also consider including some video files or other data content instead of distributing a DVD-R.
taxes, benefits, 401(k) match (heh, remember those?), building upkeep, chicken giblets for the cafeteria, etc. etc. etc.
To add to this, there are LOTS of other expenses companies pay for each and every employee.
Add to that a few thousand in fica.
They each have a workstation of some sort, as well as IT people to maintain it
They probably expense a few books/training courses/etc a year.
The average weight of a person is higher at SGI, too. Think of what that does to elevator maintenance.;)
Don't forget about janitorial services for 400 employees, that adds up. I've worked for several companies under 20 employees and have a rough idea of what we paid, this is over 20 times that.
Just because you don't bring home 100k/year (loser), don't think your employer doesn't pay well over that for you.
If you want to run your business legitimately, don't listen to these fools telling you to not do anything. If you're not going to have many clients at your house (and probably not) then you should meet most residential zoning regulations.
However, you will need a business license which you'll need to specify the address of your business (physical address, not a PO). Because of that and the fact you're in your home, you may need a home occupation permit (you do in my county). That doesn't cost anything extra (and even if it does, it's still cheaper than an office lease).
Your mileage may vary, but the steps to making your home business legit are short and easy. You'll be doing yourself a major disservice if you don't get a business license/permit if your city/county requires it.
You can have every technical coding skill any tech employer could possibly look for, be able to design and code for and administer a clustered SQL database, have the best creative ideas for web site graphical design, be able to estimate to the precise minute time required for a development contract, have a doctorate in this, that, and the other, be able to fly a space shuttle, design bridges, whatever.. a recruiter still is going to say you're not good enough.
fucking bloodsucking bastards..
If all of the browsers implemented the "standards" the same way, there would obviously be no problem, but that of course is not the case.
In a business standpoint, implementing web pages is a costly thing to do. And in this economy, costly is a "bad thing".
Coming from a failed dot-com, I constantly think of things that we could have done to save the company. Not that there is any one simple solution (other than selling our services two years earlier and retiring before the bust), I strongly believe had we dropped Netscape support from the beginning we would have had a heap of cash that could have at least let us survive a few months longer.
This obviously depends on our particular application, which was Windows-based (*nix-folks not even in the picture) combined with a browser feature. We spent a ton of time, resources, and VC dollars implementing and testing, reimplementing, retesting, etc all of our web stuff on like 8 different versions of 3 different browsers, when the only customers we were targeting were IE 5.0+ users. Made no sense. Anybody using another OS and/or browser would have never been our customer in the first place.
This doesn't apply to everything on the web, but web-sites should gear themselves towards their target customers. General sites should probably implement the least common denominator. Microsoft's MSDN site probably only needs to implement the IE 5+, it's highly doubtful anyone else would be viewing it.
I have two big nausiating problems with STL (both of which are overcome by its pros).
First of all, STL is not some proprietary set of binaries given to you to run to make your life easier in a black-box scenario. You're given the complete source for every bit of it. Yet for this reason, at some point in your development career, you'll feel like something in your code is written perfectly fine and that it "the STL" that has the bug. And then you step into the source while debugging. And then you curse everyone who ever had any part of coming up with this bunch of fscking nonsense. Then you completely give up, go grab a Dr Pepper, start over and skip over those STL calls instead of stepping into them and realize it was indeed your bug. I've heard various reasons in the past about why STL implementors release code that looks like an obfuscated-C contest winner (i've even heard that was the reason before), but I still don't buy any of it. There's no way they wrote it that way originally (so why did they change it), are they scared of whitespace (why?) and comments (did they ever read McConnell or Macguire?).
Second beef with STL is that although it *should* be standardized by all implementers, just like everything else that *says* it is, it is not. The STL implementation that comes with MSVC++ (a hacked up version of Dinkumware's I believe) has several subtle differences from all other implementations. And this is true for several compilers that come stock with STL. Don't immediately expect to port STL-based code from one compiler to another. Our company has to switch between two different implementations to compile between MSVC for a Win32-based build and MS Embedded C++ for a WinCE-based build. Sad but true.
That's my beef.
Slashdot Mirror
This basically sums up where I'm at. I have Fiesty on a partition on my Tecra which I primarily use XP on. I don't boot into my Kubuntu partition because for the life of me I can't get wireless working on it. Wired works just fine, but I don't like to work wired. I've tried all combinations of settings in the UI, edited config files, run all sorts of networking shell commands recommended on howtoforge and other places, but it just doesn't want to work. I've talked to many others who just say "well wifi works just fine for me so it must be you". Well, maybe it is, I don't know, nor care. Wireless (and other things the parent posted) are little things that should come STOCK these days and people should not have to fiddle with. I don't care that my manufacturer isn't opening up the driver source, I really don't give a crap if I'm running proprietary drivers, I just want it to work. I never opened up my windows drivers' .c files and make sure they're written well and work up to somebody else's standards, but even still they work just fine out of the box. That's the 'easy' that Ubuntu needs to be at. They can have dozens of game clones and paint programs and whatnot, but until they get the basics ironed out (the "what my mom calls basic", not "what my kids with lots of free time and ambition call basic"), the base of users who go about installing the OS themselves is going to stay geeky and in a niche.
"Simple, human" to users has gone past not having to compile kernels and install device drivers. The masses demand much more than that work out of the box now.
See, that's where Windows goes wrong. People like their crashes configurable.
Yep, it can be done using standard X10 (and some creative coding), as long as you're happy with roughly 7 bytes or so per second.
Read the advisory and the discussion from last week. Microsoft was notified at the beginning of October and has only now gotten around to fixing it.
No, Microsoft was notified at the beginning of October and has only now gotten around to being so sure of their fixes that they're comfortable releasing the patches to tens of millions of computers. There's a big difference.
"These 'field effect displays,' or FEDs, will consume less energy than plasma or liquid crystal display (LCD) TVs, deliver a better picture and even cost less.".
If it consumes less energy and delivers a better picture, it will be a better product. Better products cost more. Even if they're simpler and less costly to make, they will be more expensive (until supply/demand/competition/other factors drive them the other way).
Laws of economics my friend :/
I know it was intended as a joke (and even found it funny), but learning the COBOL language in a "learn COBOL in 24 hours" book and doing something useful with it on an AS/400 are entirely different things.
Some people don't read the articles, others don't even read the post.
Read this part once again and notice the "is a port of the" part then finish off with the "which requires a" part:
The software is a port of the homebrew Xbox Media Center software which requires a Modded Xbox to run.
Ok, you guys are amazing. Let's put this into context. Microsoft comes out with this great tool called ActiveX. It allows all kinds of wonderful things to happen, especially rich content in emails. Uh-oh, someone finds out that this technology is a great way to F around with folks' email since it's so integrated in Outlook (just using Outlook as an example, won't even go there with Windows). Bad, M$, no bone. Nevermind the users who don't know to simply turn off active scripting, they're not the problem - it's Microsoft - since software manufacturers should understand that all users are dumb. Enter Google. All data that's currently on the PC is presented in a highly searchable manner, even to people who have no idea about privacy issues involving electronic data. Stupid users, you shouldn't put such data there, don't you know how every application you've ever used persists data? It's obviously not Google's fault you're so stupid.
Allow me to describe for you living-in-yo-mamas-basement geeks how 6 billion people operate:
The average user has no idea of the security implications of simply going to a public computer and using the facilities provided for them.
If they've ever bought a computer before, they did not buy it from a store with a sales rep that gave them a book listing out every privacy/security vulnerability in the OS installed on it, and if they did they didn't read it. They may have never even talked to anyone knowledgeable about it.
Average users don't have conversations with geeks, sitting around talking about why M$ fscking sucks today and how 3l337 they are or how they 0wn3d U or whatever the hell they say. Average users have conversations with other average users about sports and knitting.
It is doubtful the user has a college degree in computer science, engineering, or even went to a technical school.
Not every kiddie is a script kiddie. I would venture to say most kids who use a library aren't script kiddies - script kiddies have computers at home. If you don't believe me, go to any public library with computers in south Atlanta and ask if their parents own a computer.
In a perfect world, it would be awesome if everyone understood the problems with computer privacy, but we have to deal with all those fucking ignorant lusers who don't read slashdot every hour. If Google doesn't understand this, rest assured they will be hounded by privacy counsils until they learn.
Ok, off do to some google credit card searches ;)
Would something like this suffice? http://www.itsmarta.com/
An Affleck movie can't flop unless it also stars J.Ho as well.
It should do well.
With enough cameras installed around a city, and a little fancy tag recognition + OCR technology, I don't see what's to stop them from being able to do this now.
Politics.
I don't know what city you live in, but it certainly wouldn't fly in mine. If it were some government-ordained test, possibly for security/"terrorist-or-criminal-face-recognition" reasons whathaveyou, it would probably go through without a hitch (short of a lot of fussing by plenty of privacy groups). I could be wrong, but I haven't heard of any city that ClearChannel owns enough of to install video cameras on streets, highways, or interstates for advertising demographic reasons. It would take a lot of political pressure to get something like that through.
Another note of speculation.
Online music sales exploded in 2003. I don't believe those numbers are being included in the "CD sales" figures. If that's true, then there's nothing surprising about CD sales being down. Few people will buy an entire album's tracks online and then also buy the CD.
It also means that it's possible that music sales have actually gone up, just the medium has changed, and unless all mediums are counted then the numbers will be naturally biased.
Some people like to have hobbies. Some people consider building things on their own to be fun. Otherwise, places like Home Depot or Hobby Lobby or Radio Shack would go out of business. There are always easier/cheaper/faster solutions to everything, but where's the fun in that?
If you're going to compare an entire continent's WiFi growth to a single country's....
In related news, it's been found that the United States' WiFi growth will be much larger than that of Rhode Island's.
I'm glad we didn't have wi-fi when I was in high school. We needed every brain cell still living.
Not being a Microsoft zealot, but when did the Washington Post get to be the expert on OS design and security architecture?
Remove the right files and the right registry keys, and I assure you that you can get rid of IE. You may have to find another file browser, internet browser, and desktop, but IE is removable. I've never tried it to back this statement up, but IE is an application just like everything else. MS has just made it damn difficult to remove because of tight coupling with other applications.
And for this same reason, DCOM is also not part of Windows. It's an add-on. There are no kernel mode drivers for it, and Windows will work just happy without it. You're confusing tightly-coupled applications with OS features. Do you consider X11 part of Linux? How about sendmail? HTTP daemons?
While I agree that it's all put together on the facade to the end user, and MS is really responsible for it in that fashion, the parent poster is right.
I would consider some kind of bonus material.
I was a big Metallica fan for many years until their softening of their music, and their Napster stance didn't help much either. Although I'm not that fond of their latest CD, their idea of bundling a DVD with their CD is absolutely brilliant. It might be a bit more expensive for an indie to do, but there are cheap ways around it (home video recording, finding the cheapest DVD-Rs you can get your hands on). If you're OK with passing the extra costs on to the consumer (which you implied you are), they may be alright with the extra dollar or whatever if it actually has value added.
If the CD you're distributing is a data CD (since it's an MP3 CD), you can also consider including some video files or other data content instead of distributing a DVD-R.
taxes, benefits, 401(k) match (heh, remember those?), building upkeep, chicken giblets for the cafeteria, etc. etc. etc.
To add to this, there are LOTS of other expenses companies pay for each and every employee.
Add to that a few thousand in fica.
They each have a workstation of some sort, as well as IT people to maintain it
They probably expense a few books/training courses/etc a year.The average weight of a person is higher at SGI, too. Think of what that does to elevator maintenance. ;)
Don't forget about janitorial services for 400 employees, that adds up. I've worked for several companies under 20 employees and have a rough idea of what we paid, this is over 20 times that.
Just because you don't bring home 100k/year (loser), don't think your employer doesn't pay well over that for you.
However, you will need a business license which you'll need to specify the address of your business (physical address, not a PO). Because of that and the fact you're in your home, you may need a home occupation permit (you do in my county). That doesn't cost anything extra (and even if it does, it's still cheaper than an office lease).
Your mileage may vary, but the steps to making your home business legit are short and easy. You'll be doing yourself a major disservice if you don't get a business license/permit if your city/county requires it.
You can have every technical coding skill any tech employer could possibly look for, be able to design and code for and administer a clustered SQL database, have the best creative ideas for web site graphical design, be able to estimate to the precise minute time required for a development contract, have a doctorate in this, that, and the other, be able to fly a space shuttle, design bridges, whatever.. a recruiter still is going to say you're not good enough. fucking bloodsucking bastards..
In a business standpoint, implementing web pages is a costly thing to do. And in this economy, costly is a "bad thing".
Coming from a failed dot-com, I constantly think of things that we could have done to save the company. Not that there is any one simple solution (other than selling our services two years earlier and retiring before the bust), I strongly believe had we dropped Netscape support from the beginning we would have had a heap of cash that could have at least let us survive a few months longer.
This obviously depends on our particular application, which was Windows-based (*nix-folks not even in the picture) combined with a browser feature. We spent a ton of time, resources, and VC dollars implementing and testing, reimplementing, retesting, etc all of our web stuff on like 8 different versions of 3 different browsers, when the only customers we were targeting were IE 5.0+ users. Made no sense. Anybody using another OS and/or browser would have never been our customer in the first place.
This doesn't apply to everything on the web, but web-sites should gear themselves towards their target customers. General sites should probably implement the least common denominator. Microsoft's MSDN site probably only needs to implement the IE 5+, it's highly doubtful anyone else would be viewing it.
First of all, STL is not some proprietary set of binaries given to you to run to make your life easier in a black-box scenario. You're given the complete source for every bit of it. Yet for this reason, at some point in your development career, you'll feel like something in your code is written perfectly fine and that it "the STL" that has the bug. And then you step into the source while debugging. And then you curse everyone who ever had any part of coming up with this bunch of fscking nonsense. Then you completely give up, go grab a Dr Pepper, start over and skip over those STL calls instead of stepping into them and realize it was indeed your bug. I've heard various reasons in the past about why STL implementors release code that looks like an obfuscated-C contest winner (i've even heard that was the reason before), but I still don't buy any of it. There's no way they wrote it that way originally (so why did they change it), are they scared of whitespace (why?) and comments (did they ever read McConnell or Macguire?).
Second beef with STL is that although it *should* be standardized by all implementers, just like everything else that *says* it is, it is not. The STL implementation that comes with MSVC++ (a hacked up version of Dinkumware's I believe) has several subtle differences from all other implementations. And this is true for several compilers that come stock with STL. Don't immediately expect to port STL-based code from one compiler to another. Our company has to switch between two different implementations to compile between MSVC for a Win32-based build and MS Embedded C++ for a WinCE-based build. Sad but true. That's my beef.