The proverbial `right person', though, isn't someone who just gets something working the quickest. He or she is also the person who writes code that has fewest bugs, copes best with unforeseen circumstances, and is easiest to enhance, fix, adapt, &c. By other people.
Of course, you can write unmaintainable code in any language; but some scripting languages can make this much easier, which is why they're sometimes a poor choice. Since (IIRC) on average, something like three times as long is spent maintaining code as writing it, bashing something out quickly is often a false economy.
And of course Real Programmers care about the quality of their code. Don't we?!
That's fairly similar to what I'd tell myself, I guess - something along the lines of: "Have confidence in yourself. You're doing fine. It doesn't matter if no-one's interested, you're doing some really cool stuff."
It might not be profound, but I'm a little surprised so few answers are along similar lines.
BBC's dramatization of Lord of the Rings is very poor compared to the performance of Rob Inglis in his unabridged "reading" of those books.
I haven't heard the latter, but are we talking about the same BBC dramatisation? The 13-hour one with Ian Holm, Michael Hordern, Robert Stephens, John le Mesurier, Billy Nighy &c? The one that the cast and crew of the films used for reference when they didn't have the books?
Ah - someone else who uses `Electronic' to mean the same thing I do:)
How long is an MP3 frame, then? I see the problem, but if frames are very short, then it's not necesarily a major one.
As mentioned above, iTunes' `crossfade playback' feature with the crossfade time set to zero seems to to a grand job; maybe it's effectively crossfading between the last frame of one track and the first of another?
You're complaining about `doddle', right? (Process of elimination.) Okay, it means `something easily done or achieved'. It's a perfectly common* word round our way. Everyone happy now?
(* in both senses)
I tell you what: I'll start worrying about writing so that even the simplest Yank can understand me if you Yanks start writing so we can understand, all right?! (I wonder who will have to change the most there...)
[fx: wanders off muttering about who invented the bloody language in the first place...]
I didn't see any of those problems. The only change I did spot was that my Input Menu had been reset: normally I have only the British layout active, so I don't see it in the menu bar; after installing 10.2.4, the US one had also been activated. A doddle to put right, but rather worrying nonetheless.
Yeah, that's what I'm doing so far. But it's very annoying, especially when you end up with 70-minute files that you can't quickly seek within, and you lose the individual track names and other info too. You'd think that with all the technology that goes into audio compression and handheld players, someone would have considered this!
That's not a good solution either; although it avoids a harsh dropout, it's still different from the original CD, smearing transitions (especially if there's a continuous rhythm) and losing some of the sound.
I gather some MP3 players can use a `tracklist' to identify separate tracks within a single MP3 file; this might be one good solution, but until iTunes and the iPod support it, it's not one I can use:(
Alphabetical order means that your collection is too homogeneous! I've a similar number, and I have to split down by genre - everything from folk/rock to Renaissance and baroque classical to shows to psychedelia to electronic music, and lots more.
I've just got a big HD, so I'm currently ripping the lot in the hope of getting an iPod shortly. (I'm rather hoping it'll be upgraded in the near future.) My big question is: what do you do when there's continuous music across several tracks? I can't find any way to avoid a gap between MP3 tracks. (I've tried iTunes' `Stop Time' feature, but it always gives gaps.) This really spoils stuff like Tubular Bells III, Chilled Ibiza, Jean-Michel Jarre, live albums, &c.
Are the only alternatives really to suffer dropouts, or to combine them into one big track, losing track names and control?
I've never understood why people don't put "Press a key" instead. The intelligence-challenged can search out the `a' key, which will work, and the rest of us will know that all the others'll work too. Plus it's two characters shorter -- benefits all round!
Even if all under-18s should be prevented from seeing anything that someone considers `unsuitable' (and I don't think they should), current censorware isn't up to the job. It doesn't block all `unsuitable' sites, by a long way, and blocks other things, like health information.
I'm not a parent, but if/when I become one, I hope I'm not so afraid of my child(ren) learning things. You never know, they might even grow up with fewer of our hangups...
I know you didn't mean this too seriously, but there's a serious point here. Why do we want to characterise an entire corporation, with hundreds (thousands?) of staff, as a single entity? Can't our minds cope with the idea that all those different people might not be having exactly the same thoughts?
And even if they were, they might still do some things we think of as `good', and others we call `bad'. Corporations, like people, are complex things. Humans tend to think by simplifying, categorising, and labelling, but we must realise we're doing it, and avoid it when it loses too much information. The world is a complex place.
As Anonymous Coward said above, Apple has done many good things, and some bad ones. That's all there is to it. Predictive value? Well, I predict that in future they'll do some more good things and a few more bad things. Wow, huh?
(As it happens, I like a lot of the things Apple are currently doing, and I like their kit enough to own some. I'd like to see their stuff become more popular. But I've no illusions; I wouldn't like to see them have 90%+ share, just as I wouldn't like to see anyone have that sort of share. M$ may have an unusually immoral corporate ethos, but I doubt any company in their current position would be entirely altruistic for long. Power corrupts, and all that.)
(Er, sorry, this post has turned out inappropriately serious for this place! Feel free to insert hackneyed one-mouse-button-sniping, lame puns, and unrelated whinges as appropriate...)
This does not bode well for manned space exploration
Hey, where's your pioneer spirit?!
Seriously, while any loss of life is tragic, space is a risky place. Everyone who works in the business knows that, and the astronauts this time knew the risks they were taking.
So far we've been very lucky, with little loss of life. This has probably caused us to be blasé about the risk, and to forget about the danger. One effect of this disaster will be to concentrate people's attention on the risks.
This may not be such a bad thing, though. In the developed world, we don't like risk; we tend to assume that we deserve good luck and easy lives, and our first reaction to anything else is often to look for someone to sue. (Case in point: for forty years both east and west lived with their feared and hated enemies training nuclear weapons upon them, and we all lived with it. These days we can't even stand the simple possibility that a tiny enemy might have any such weapons.) Whether we like it or not, life is risky; space exploration is simply the sharp end of this.
Space exploration is vitally important, if for no other reason than (at the risk of getting all Gene Roddenberry) it's the last frontier; the last place where people go into the unknown, where people go in order to take risks. The day the human race decides to stay in its comfortable homes and not reach further is the day it starts to decline.
But we're not just talking about large CRTs or LCDs attached to desktop computers. For example: I do a lot of reading from the screen of my pocket computer (Psion 5mx). It has many advantages over dead trees, as well as some disadvantages: you can pack an entire library in your pocket, never lose bookmarks, convert from US to UK spelling, and search; but don't drop it in the bath! One of the unexpected advantages is that I can read in the dark (using the backlight), e.g. in bed. I don't find it any more tiring on the eyes than dead trees, and once I get into a story I'm only subliminally aware of the medium anyway.
And of course there are many other possibilities for reading ebooks, some of which won't make it to market for years.
Of course, ebooks aren't for everyone, and I doubt they'll ever entirely replace dead tree editions. But don't dismiss them just because they're not right for you now.
SPARC is open in that anyone can download the specification and implement it... what is not open is Sun's own implementation of that SPARC specification.
If it were a complete specification, then surely the OpenBSD wouldn't need to know anything of the implementation? Which, presumably, means that the specification isn't complete?
I can quite understand Sun not wanting folks to know the implementation details. But if they're needed to write for it, then it's not an open platform. Whatever they say.
MD is not a good example. The MD format is licensed; Sharp, for example, make some very good MD kit, and there are many makes of blank MDs.
One of the reasons MD hasn't caught on in the USA is that it was hastily pitched against DCC, and while everyone was waiting to see which would win, CDR and MP3 players sneaked in and stole some of the market. DCC has just about died a death, while MD is actually quite popular here in Europe and especially in Japan. Not so much for buying prerecorded music, but MD hifis, car units, and MD blanks are available everywhere, and many folks use them. They're ideal for carrying music about, for cars, for recording concerts, &c.
MD also wins over CD-audio in some areas: smaller, more robust (no need for cases), stores text info/titles, editable (merge/split/move/delete tracks), 161-minute mono mode, much more skip-resistant...
And to answer other comments; while the quality of early MD compressors was lousy, recent compressors (ATRAC 5) have a sound that's effectively indistinguishable from CD. (I believe the raw bitrate is about 280kpbs, and that ATRAC 5 compression beats MP3 bit-for-bit by quite a lot.)
It's still an argument against proprietary formats, of course; if Sony had opened up the format more, especially w.r.t. data MDs (which were made deliberately incompatible and hugely expensive), then it might have become more popular much more quickly...
Yeah, 'sfunny. But think about it: if all software developments were as simple, as well-understood, and as fixed as making toast, then we'd all be out of jobs! It's because projects cover uncharted territory, are complex, try to do so much, and users keep wanting cool new stuff, that we need so much software machinery.
Anyway, given that God is infinite, and that the universe is also infinite... would you like a toasted tea-cake?
I often wonder how I can get a 2 disc DVD... for less than I can buy a current Top 20 artist.
Because the movie's already been paid for. Once you count domestic cinema takings, worldwide cinema takings, and DVD/video rentals, the much larger cost of the movie has been (or at least, should have been) covered. It's a different business model.
I'm not saying that CD prices are only large enough to cover their costs... but there's no incentive to lower prices once those costs have been covered. That's the real problem.
Also, bear in mind that folks will listen to CDs time after time after time; most won't watch DVDs anywhere near as many times, so the market simply won't sustatin higher prices. (Though why it sustains high CD prices, I really don't understand...)
...just don't work. We've seen that with attempted copy prevention on CDs, we've seen it with attempts to fight spam, we've seen it with speed cameras, and a hundred other eexamplse.
These technological solutions are blunt instruments; they prevent some valid (legal and/or moral) use, and they don't prevent some invalid use. Regardless of the morality of applying such blanket solutions, they simply don't solve the problem, even though they may help to mask the symptoms in some cases.
The problem of inappropriate mobile phone use is little different from that of people speaking to each other loudly, playing digital watch tunes, or any other disruptive activity. As many others here have said, the problem isn't the phone; it's the user who allows the phone to sound and/or takes a call at such a time. It's entirely possible to set most phones so that the ring tone starts silently and slowly increases in volume; combined with a vibrating alert, I usually answer my phone (or reject the call) before anyone else was aware it was ringing. If only most other users applied similar consideration, I doubt options like this would be considered for a moment.
The bottom line is that you can't force people to be considerate/moral/caring, neither with technology nor with the law. People must want to behave like that.
For a long while, `standards compliant' effectively meant `works in IE'. (And Windows IE at that.)
More recently, `standards compliant' effectively meant `works in IE and Mozilla/Netscape'. While this is a lot better, it's still not perfect; Mozilla has quirks, and some web developers simply code separately for each (as the need for `Gecko' in Safari's user agent string showed).
With a third major browser, many more developers might actually think about coding to the standards, rather than to three different browsers. Safari's far from perfect (various CSS and JS bugs, not enough control over cookies and images, limited bookmark import and export, &c &c), but simply because it has different bugs from IE and Mozilla, I hope it'll encourage both browser authors and web developers to think more of standards.
Gecko has lost little by not being chosen; the web may gain much. Which is good for everyone.
Who doesn't get spam because I've never used my real email address on a site?
I always use a site-specific email address, so I can tell that (with one exception) none of the sites I've given my email address to have resulted in spam -- practically all the spam I receive must be from a few very old Usenet posts, or a couple of appearances on web pages (long since removed).
Of course, we should be concerned about the number of web sites that have our details. But blaming them for lots of spam may be unfair.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, you can write unmaintainable code in any language; but some scripting languages can make this much easier, which is why they're sometimes a poor choice. Since (IIRC) on average, something like three times as long is spent maintaining code as writing it, bashing something out quickly is often a false economy.
And of course Real Programmers care about the quality of their code. Don't we?!
It might not be profound, but I'm a little surprised so few answers are along similar lines.
I haven't heard the latter, but are we talking about the same BBC dramatisation? The 13-hour one with Ian Holm, Michael Hordern, Robert Stephens, John le Mesurier, Billy Nighy &c? The one that the cast and crew of the films used for reference when they didn't have the books?
Ah - someone else who uses `Electronic' to mean the same thing I do :)
How long is an MP3 frame, then? I see the problem, but if frames are very short, then it's not necesarily a major one.
As mentioned above, iTunes' `crossfade playback' feature with the crossfade time set to zero seems to to a grand job; maybe it's effectively crossfading between the last frame of one track and the first of another?
Anyone know if it works on the iPod too?
You're complaining about `doddle', right? (Process of elimination.) Okay, it means `something easily done or achieved'. It's a perfectly common* word round our way. Everyone happy now?
(* in both senses)
I tell you what: I'll start worrying about writing so that even the simplest Yank can understand me if you Yanks start writing so we can understand, all right?! (I wonder who will have to change the most there...)
[fx: wanders off muttering about who invented the bloody language in the first place...]
I didn't see any of those problems. The only change I did spot was that my Input Menu had been reset: normally I have only the British layout active, so I don't see it in the menu bar; after installing 10.2.4, the US one had also been activated. A doddle to put right, but rather worrying nonetheless.
Yeah, that's what I'm doing so far. But it's very annoying, especially when you end up with 70-minute files that you can't quickly seek within, and you lose the individual track names and other info too. You'd think that with all the technology that goes into audio compression and handheld players, someone would have considered this!
I gather some MP3 players can use a `tracklist' to identify separate tracks within a single MP3 file; this might be one good solution, but until iTunes and the iPod support it, it's not one I can use :(
I've just got a big HD, so I'm currently ripping the lot in the hope of getting an iPod shortly. (I'm rather hoping it'll be upgraded in the near future.) My big question is: what do you do when there's continuous music across several tracks? I can't find any way to avoid a gap between MP3 tracks. (I've tried iTunes' `Stop Time' feature, but it always gives gaps.) This really spoils stuff like Tubular Bells III, Chilled Ibiza, Jean-Michel Jarre, live albums, &c.
Are the only alternatives really to suffer dropouts, or to combine them into one big track, losing track names and control?
I've never understood why people don't put "Press a key" instead. The intelligence-challenged can search out the `a' key, which will work, and the rest of us will know that all the others'll work too. Plus it's two characters shorter -- benefits all round!
I'm not a parent, but if/when I become one, I hope I'm not so afraid of my child(ren) learning things. You never know, they might even grow up with fewer of our hangups...
...the GPL is ruled valid, but Castle is ruled not to be in breach of it (e.g. by some jiggery-pokery with the `derived works' wording)?
And even if they were, they might still do some things we think of as `good', and others we call `bad'. Corporations, like people, are complex things. Humans tend to think by simplifying, categorising, and labelling, but we must realise we're doing it, and avoid it when it loses too much information. The world is a complex place.
As Anonymous Coward said above, Apple has done many good things, and some bad ones. That's all there is to it. Predictive value? Well, I predict that in future they'll do some more good things and a few more bad things. Wow, huh?
(As it happens, I like a lot of the things Apple are currently doing, and I like their kit enough to own some. I'd like to see their stuff become more popular. But I've no illusions; I wouldn't like to see them have 90%+ share, just as I wouldn't like to see anyone have that sort of share. M$ may have an unusually immoral corporate ethos, but I doubt any company in their current position would be entirely altruistic for long. Power corrupts, and all that.)
(Er, sorry, this post has turned out inappropriately serious for this place! Feel free to insert hackneyed one-mouse-button-sniping, lame puns, and unrelated whinges as appropriate...)
Well, at least one was directly caused by the cold weather, so it's not that much of a coincidence...
Hey, where's your pioneer spirit?!
Seriously, while any loss of life is tragic, space is a risky place. Everyone who works in the business knows that, and the astronauts this time knew the risks they were taking.
So far we've been very lucky, with little loss of life. This has probably caused us to be blasé about the risk, and to forget about the danger. One effect of this disaster will be to concentrate people's attention on the risks.
This may not be such a bad thing, though. In the developed world, we don't like risk; we tend to assume that we deserve good luck and easy lives, and our first reaction to anything else is often to look for someone to sue. (Case in point: for forty years both east and west lived with their feared and hated enemies training nuclear weapons upon them, and we all lived with it. These days we can't even stand the simple possibility that a tiny enemy might have any such weapons.) Whether we like it or not, life is risky; space exploration is simply the sharp end of this.
Space exploration is vitally important, if for no other reason than (at the risk of getting all Gene Roddenberry) it's the last frontier; the last place where people go into the unknown, where people go in order to take risks. The day the human race decides to stay in its comfortable homes and not reach further is the day it starts to decline.
And of course there are many other possibilities for reading ebooks, some of which won't make it to market for years.
Of course, ebooks aren't for everyone, and I doubt they'll ever entirely replace dead tree editions. But don't dismiss them just because they're not right for you now.
If it were a complete specification, then surely the OpenBSD wouldn't need to know anything of the implementation? Which, presumably, means that the specification isn't complete?
I can quite understand Sun not wanting folks to know the implementation details. But if they're needed to write for it, then it's not an open platform. Whatever they say.
One of the reasons MD hasn't caught on in the USA is that it was hastily pitched against DCC, and while everyone was waiting to see which would win, CDR and MP3 players sneaked in and stole some of the market. DCC has just about died a death, while MD is actually quite popular here in Europe and especially in Japan. Not so much for buying prerecorded music, but MD hifis, car units, and MD blanks are available everywhere, and many folks use them. They're ideal for carrying music about, for cars, for recording concerts, &c.
MD also wins over CD-audio in some areas: smaller, more robust (no need for cases), stores text info/titles, editable (merge/split/move/delete tracks), 161-minute mono mode, much more skip-resistant...
And to answer other comments; while the quality of early MD compressors was lousy, recent compressors (ATRAC 5) have a sound that's effectively indistinguishable from CD. (I believe the raw bitrate is about 280kpbs, and that ATRAC 5 compression beats MP3 bit-for-bit by quite a lot.)
It's still an argument against proprietary formats, of course; if Sony had opened up the format more, especially w.r.t. data MDs (which were made deliberately incompatible and hugely expensive), then it might have become more popular much more quickly...
Voodoo Lady, mmmmmm... and I don't mean maybe!
Anyway, given that God is infinite, and that the universe is also infinite... would you like a toasted tea-cake?
Because the movie's already been paid for. Once you count domestic cinema takings, worldwide cinema takings, and DVD/video rentals, the much larger cost of the movie has been (or at least, should have been) covered. It's a different business model.
I'm not saying that CD prices are only large enough to cover their costs... but there's no incentive to lower prices once those costs have been covered. That's the real problem.
Also, bear in mind that folks will listen to CDs time after time after time; most won't watch DVDs anywhere near as many times, so the market simply won't sustatin higher prices. (Though why it sustains high CD prices, I really don't understand...)
These technological solutions are blunt instruments; they prevent some valid (legal and/or moral) use, and they don't prevent some invalid use. Regardless of the morality of applying such blanket solutions, they simply don't solve the problem, even though they may help to mask the symptoms in some cases.
The problem of inappropriate mobile phone use is little different from that of people speaking to each other loudly, playing digital watch tunes, or any other disruptive activity. As many others here have said, the problem isn't the phone; it's the user who allows the phone to sound and/or takes a call at such a time. It's entirely possible to set most phones so that the ring tone starts silently and slowly increases in volume; combined with a vibrating alert, I usually answer my phone (or reject the call) before anyone else was aware it was ringing. If only most other users applied similar consideration, I doubt options like this would be considered for a moment.
The bottom line is that you can't force people to be considerate/moral/caring, neither with technology nor with the law. People must want to behave like that.
Here endeth the lesson.
For a long while, `standards compliant' effectively meant `works in IE'. (And Windows IE at that.)
More recently, `standards compliant' effectively meant `works in IE and Mozilla/Netscape'. While this is a lot better, it's still not perfect; Mozilla has quirks, and some web developers simply code separately for each (as the need for `Gecko' in Safari's user agent string showed).
With a third major browser, many more developers might actually think about coding to the standards, rather than to three different browsers. Safari's far from perfect (various CSS and JS bugs, not enough control over cookies and images, limited bookmark import and export, &c &c), but simply because it has different bugs from IE and Mozilla, I hope it'll encourage both browser authors and web developers to think more of standards.
Gecko has lost little by not being chosen; the web may gain much. Which is good for everyone.
I always use a site-specific email address, so I can tell that (with one exception) none of the sites I've given my email address to have resulted in spam -- practically all the spam I receive must be from a few very old Usenet posts, or a couple of appearances on web pages (long since removed).
Of course, we should be concerned about the number of web sites that have our details. But blaming them for lots of spam may be unfair.