Above and beyond this article, if you can get your hands on the article on the Colombia tragedy which was published in Atlantic Monthly, do it. As always for Atlantic Monthly, easily the most intelligent commentary I've seen about the event, and a couple of closing sentences that will stay with me forever.
Apple, I'm still not convinced. I don't often go to physical stores any more, so I can't really tell how much smaller and cooler this new iPod is. The pictures just all look the same on Amazon. Further, I never heard a peep out of you about this being an alternative to Flash-based players, as opposed to being a little brother to your 15GB model. Maybe I was on another planet when your marketing guys said that to the world, but, nonetheless, you missed the chance for me to take out my wallet. Finally, the sticker shock is just too much. Why would I get off my ass to go check out an iPod that'll save me $50? Cool stopped being cool a long time ago for me, so that isn't a convincing argument for me any more.
It's all been said before, but I'm just one of perhaps many opportunities who were waiting for a $100 model, and simply forgot about it half a nanosecond after the price was announced.
I'm no expert in this specific area, but I remember a conversation from a few years back abour the 32-bit versus the 64-bit version of the Oracle database. The guy I was speaking with was pretty knowledgeable, so I'll take his word as truth for the sake of this post.
In his explanation, he said something of the order of "if you want speed, use the 32-bit version of the binaries, because otherwise the computer physically has to move twice as much data around for each operation it does." Only if you want the extra memory mapping capability of a 64-bit binary, he said, would you need to use the 64-bit version.
I suppose in summary, though, it depends on exactly what your binary does.
OK so I have to admit I don't understand the technology here any more. Back in the day, they say the Internet was built to withstand a nuclear assault. With phrases like "the Internet's most important computer," how can this be true?
If this building were destroyed by a nuclear weapon, what would be the impact on the Internet?
If I may, a brief reality-check for the morning, and a nod to those of us who are being shot at in Iraq today, or dying in a mining accident, or driving for 14 hours straight to meet the company's insane deadlines, or, in a million other ways that geeks with well-paid jobs generally don't understand, working shyte jobs today.
I'm not entirely clear how this would work out for customers, so a thought experiment. Say SCO successfully proves that the Linux thread scheduling code is a copyright violation. What does Red Hat do next? Sure, they could rewrite it, but would companies which are now running their flight booking apps, and (don't take me too literally here) their nuclear power station control programs on the Linux kernel be happy about this?
It would appear to me that the strength of Linux is its history and stability. Take that way, and trouble's a comin'?
I'm never convinced that adding more pages to a book is an "upgrade." If I could buy a book which was 1 page long, but which taught me damn well everything I needed to know about Python, I'd much, much rather buy that, purely from an opportunity cost perspective.
If there's anything I hate, it's these big, thick, 1000-page (or 500-odd page) books which tell me how to use the Help system in Appendix 42.
My company tried this as well, a long time ago. You know what happened? The executives sat at one end of the table and spoke to each other, while the plebians all sat at the other end of the table and spoke to themselves.
So I guess I'd question whether or not the whole event will turn out exactly as you're thinking it might in the first place.
Ex-f**king-actly.
I swear, you say anything even moderately antithetical to the assumptions sitting behind a post on this site, and all hell breaks loose.
"....or use Konstruct if you don't feel like calling configure by yourself."
I'm sorry, but isn't this the same issue people have been complaining about for years? I'm a computer scientist with 10 years of experience, and even I wouldn't know how to do this. Sure, I could figure it out, but it would take time. Even worse, my grandmother or my mother or my brother wouldn't even really have the first idea how to make this work. But Windows just works, they'll say, so why should I stop using it?
Anyway, if one wants to upgrade, shouldn't there be a button within KDE?:
"To install the new version of KDE, go to the Start Menu, click on "Upgrade" and you're done!"
I wonder if this will truly be the year of the Linux desktop if things are still this "geeky."
I guess the only real way to reason about this problem is look at the facts, which I myself have never seen. For example, how much revnue does the typical pop-up or pop-under ad campaign generate? How many click-throughs? How does this compare to the number of customers which they lose through frustration?
I've always thought of keeping a pad and pencil beside my phone, and write down on it every single company which trys to telemarket to me on a Saturday morning. But do I ever do it? No. I'm too lazy. I figure this is what the pop-under advertisers count on. Divide and conquer us, hope we never talk to each other and rise up as a consumer "union," and hope to god I never get around to writing down company names on that pad.
As people always point out to me, if they actually make more money than they lose doing this, then they'll never, ever stop trying to do it. They'll always find ways to get around the technology, and, knowing, Microsoft, they'll always leave a year-long window open for those advertising mechanisms to work.
What would be tremendously interesting would be some sort of "bulletin board" where Governments could publish their requirements for software now and in the future. Then, civic-minded people could go and build it Open-Source.
I wonder if this would work. In general, for those guys in charge of Open-Source projects out there, did you build your software based on personal interest, or some real-world requirement you'd heard about or experienced?
I'm sorry but I'm just sick of George Lucas raping my fond childhood memories of the first 3 Star Wars movies, and my wallet. Isn't it enough that he's created 2 incredibly bad movies in a row?
I have to say, as much as I love Star Wars, I will have to seriously think about even going to see Episode 3. I'm not terribly hopeful. 3 more movies just doesn't fill me with any joy any more. From a worldwide love to a worldwide joke. Now -that's- a screwup.
I'm trying to get my head around whether this would serve as a storage device for everyday use? It's been along time since I was actively interested in hard drive transfer rates, so I'm not quite sure how the transfer rate across the interfaces stacks up to an internal hard drive?
This is easily the most salient point in the whole discussion so far. Companies like Oracle and HP always suffer from the movement of intellectual capital to other companies. In Indian, we're training them, giving them experience, and then they are moving to other companies. The basic flaw here is a misunderstanding by these companies about their intellectual property assets, and their core strategic advantages.
In my view this is the critical issue. Wages are only a certain percentage of the cost of a company. When Oracle has to compete against an Indian company which has its equal in intellectual capital, but half of its labor costs, then its dead. But then, isn't that like all American companies - improve the books in the short term without considering the long term?
I've been working on a little theory of my own of late that there are actually no "best practices." Perhaps I'm crazy, but it seems to me that you only really "need" three things in software development - a) A measurement process, b) A process improvement process and c) a documented process, whatever it might be. Then, you can start out cooking chickens instead of doing software development, but the combination of the three will always drive you in the right direction, and you'll just keep on getting better and better.
Given that, you can then take books like this and try and integrate them into your process. One of the things that's always missing in these books is how they will impact your measurements. Reduce development time by 50% huh? Well, show me the money! In my view, things then enter the realm of Design of Experiments. How do I think I can best reduce measurement x? Well, here's this book, let's try this out and see how it affects x.
No "best practices," only "better" practices. Better and better every month. Perhaps I'm crazy.
OK so help me out here. Pardon the pun, but how on earth do they figure out that the earth is in the exact same position as it was a 'year' ago? Do they use the background of stars, or some other mechanism? How can they reduce the error in such a measurement so that they can be sure that a second has been 'lost'?
Linking it with communism - give it a rest! What a joke. The more you look, the more you see, hey?
Doesn't that make it a collective?
on
Wikipedia Needs $20K
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I guess, at the end of the day, this is the fundamental problem with "open source." Although I know there a lot of different interpretations to the phrase "open source," one of the ways that I've always understood it is that it truly is "free" as in beer. If you try and build something that requires money, but don't get any money back for your service, well, you can screw with the laws of physics as much as you like, but at the end of the day they're gonna screw you back.
Anyway, at the end of the day, if a community of people needs a service, and they themselves support that service, isn't that, by long-standing definition, a collective? Wouldn't it be more profitable for Wiki to call a spade a spade, call itself a collective, and get on with raising money from its community and providing them with the service?
OK so maybe I'll get flamed, maybe I'll get trolled, but somebody has to ask.....
...two days before Christmas, is this really the most important question we can ask? How about "I'd like to solve world hunger, can anybody give me some suggestions on how to do that," or "I'd like my penis to be longer and thicker, has anybody received any helpful emails lately about how that might be done?"
I have to say I find this post a little naive. The universally unique identifier you worry about whenever you make a credit transaction is, er, called a credit card number. If you're in the SF bay area, and you have one of those automated toll thingys for whenever you cross a bridge, and you pay it via credit card, well, there are marketers out there who can add 1 and 1. In so many other ways - change channels, log on to a website - people are watching.
You don't need Larry to propose a unique number for you to be tracked everywhere.
And I'm absolutely cool with that, but I think it at least needs to be said. Without that, who knows?
In some respects, I think the editors at Slashdot need to understand their power a little better. This is a popular site, and a lot of people read the articles here. With that popularity - even though Slashdot might not be considered "official" media - comes a certain level of responsibility. I believe that part of that responsibility is demanding that submitters, when there is the possibility of a conflict of interest, disclaim that conflict of interest. Yes, they may be lying, but that ball is in their court.
I've said it once, and I'll say it again. Who are you, reviewer? Are you connected to the author or the publisher? Do you have any financial interest in this review?
At least try to provide a disclaimer. Otherwise, an excellent review of a technical book published on probably the largest technical web site on the internet. Smells like fish, tastes like fish to me.
So I pretty much got called an idiot the other day for saying that it pisses me off that Apple won't let me re-download music from their servers if I ever happen to lose the music that I've bought. Back it up, they said. If you're stupid enough to not back it up, then you deserve to lose your music, they said.
So what happens with a piece of kit like this? If I lose my stereo, or buy a new one, do I have to buy my music again? How on earth is this different from the situation with Windows XP nowadays, where I have to beg and scrape with Microsoft to let me use the software I bought and paid for if I buy a new PC?
I've said it once, and I'll say it again. Digital media companies are trying to have their cake and eat it too. What's funny to me is that they will end up getting exactly what they want from digital music, and won't lose a thing in the long run from P2P. What is it? Iron-fisted control over our music. You have a new device? Pay us again to listen to your music on it. You lost your music? Too bad, you're the idiot, even though it would cost us next to nothing to let you download it again.
Moron. Have you ever been stopped by the security guards at a Target, who, if they were actually doing their job, would have seen you just check out your stuff?
You just don't get it, do you? The music industry is moving towards a model whereby you will have to authorize each and every device on which you want to play music. Microsoft is already building software which is moving towards this. Even today, if I want to install Windows XP on two machines, I can't do it. Sharing between devices is going to become part of history. Today, you can take a CD to any device that will play it. The RIAA is taking that away, slowly but surely, and giving you nothing in return. If they want me to authorize every device, then I want something back. What I want is rights to that music forever. It costs practically nothing for me to download the music again. As you probably might have noticed, a CD costs money to burn, package and ship to the store. Or perhaps you didn't notice that.
Fools like you are lambs to their slaughter. It's a shame that history doesn't remember quite so well the idiots as it does the heroes.
Slashdot Mirror
Above and beyond this article, if you can get your hands on the article on the Colombia tragedy which was published in Atlantic Monthly, do it. As always for Atlantic Monthly, easily the most intelligent commentary I've seen about the event, and a couple of closing sentences that will stay with me forever.
It's all been said before, but I'm just one of perhaps many opportunities who were waiting for a $100 model, and simply forgot about it half a nanosecond after the price was announced.
In his explanation, he said something of the order of "if you want speed, use the 32-bit version of the binaries, because otherwise the computer physically has to move twice as much data around for each operation it does." Only if you want the extra memory mapping capability of a 64-bit binary, he said, would you need to use the 64-bit version.
I suppose in summary, though, it depends on exactly what your binary does.
If this building were destroyed by a nuclear weapon, what would be the impact on the Internet?
If I may, a brief reality-check for the morning, and a nod to those of us who are being shot at in Iraq today, or dying in a mining accident, or driving for 14 hours straight to meet the company's insane deadlines, or, in a million other ways that geeks with well-paid jobs generally don't understand, working shyte jobs today.
It would appear to me that the strength of Linux is its history and stability. Take that way, and trouble's a comin'?
If there's anything I hate, it's these big, thick, 1000-page (or 500-odd page) books which tell me how to use the Help system in Appendix 42.
So, I'm always wary.
So I guess I'd question whether or not the whole event will turn out exactly as you're thinking it might in the first place.
Ex-f**king-actly. I swear, you say anything even moderately antithetical to the assumptions sitting behind a post on this site, and all hell breaks loose.
I'm sorry, but isn't this the same issue people have been complaining about for years? I'm a computer scientist with 10 years of experience, and even I wouldn't know how to do this. Sure, I could figure it out, but it would take time. Even worse, my grandmother or my mother or my brother wouldn't even really have the first idea how to make this work. But Windows just works, they'll say, so why should I stop using it?
Anyway, if one wants to upgrade, shouldn't there be a button within KDE?:
"To install the new version of KDE, go to the Start Menu, click on "Upgrade" and you're done!"
I wonder if this will truly be the year of the Linux desktop if things are still this "geeky."
I've always thought of keeping a pad and pencil beside my phone, and write down on it every single company which trys to telemarket to me on a Saturday morning. But do I ever do it? No. I'm too lazy. I figure this is what the pop-under advertisers count on. Divide and conquer us, hope we never talk to each other and rise up as a consumer "union," and hope to god I never get around to writing down company names on that pad.
As people always point out to me, if they actually make more money than they lose doing this, then they'll never, ever stop trying to do it. They'll always find ways to get around the technology, and, knowing, Microsoft, they'll always leave a year-long window open for those advertising mechanisms to work.
But then, I'm preaching to the choir.
I wonder if this would work. In general, for those guys in charge of Open-Source projects out there, did you build your software based on personal interest, or some real-world requirement you'd heard about or experienced?
Or perhaps something like this already exists?
I have to say, as much as I love Star Wars, I will have to seriously think about even going to see Episode 3. I'm not terribly hopeful. 3 more movies just doesn't fill me with any joy any more. From a worldwide love to a worldwide joke. Now -that's- a screwup.
For example, could one play games off it?
In my view this is the critical issue. Wages are only a certain percentage of the cost of a company. When Oracle has to compete against an Indian company which has its equal in intellectual capital, but half of its labor costs, then its dead. But then, isn't that like all American companies - improve the books in the short term without considering the long term?
Given that, you can then take books like this and try and integrate them into your process. One of the things that's always missing in these books is how they will impact your measurements. Reduce development time by 50% huh? Well, show me the money! In my view, things then enter the realm of Design of Experiments. How do I think I can best reduce measurement x? Well, here's this book, let's try this out and see how it affects x.
No "best practices," only "better" practices. Better and better every month. Perhaps I'm crazy.
OK so help me out here. Pardon the pun, but how on earth do they figure out that the earth is in the exact same position as it was a 'year' ago? Do they use the background of stars, or some other mechanism? How can they reduce the error in such a measurement so that they can be sure that a second has been 'lost'?
Linking it with communism - give it a rest! What a joke. The more you look, the more you see, hey?
Anyway, at the end of the day, if a community of people needs a service, and they themselves support that service, isn't that, by long-standing definition, a collective? Wouldn't it be more profitable for Wiki to call a spade a spade, call itself a collective, and get on with raising money from its community and providing them with the service?
You don't need Larry to propose a unique number for you to be tracked everywhere.
In some respects, I think the editors at Slashdot need to understand their power a little better. This is a popular site, and a lot of people read the articles here. With that popularity - even though Slashdot might not be considered "official" media - comes a certain level of responsibility. I believe that part of that responsibility is demanding that submitters, when there is the possibility of a conflict of interest, disclaim that conflict of interest. Yes, they may be lying, but that ball is in their court.
At least try to provide a disclaimer. Otherwise, an excellent review of a technical book published on probably the largest technical web site on the internet. Smells like fish, tastes like fish to me.
My 2c.
So what happens with a piece of kit like this? If I lose my stereo, or buy a new one, do I have to buy my music again? How on earth is this different from the situation with Windows XP nowadays, where I have to beg and scrape with Microsoft to let me use the software I bought and paid for if I buy a new PC?
I've said it once, and I'll say it again. Digital media companies are trying to have their cake and eat it too. What's funny to me is that they will end up getting exactly what they want from digital music, and won't lose a thing in the long run from P2P. What is it? Iron-fisted control over our music. You have a new device? Pay us again to listen to your music on it. You lost your music? Too bad, you're the idiot, even though it would cost us next to nothing to let you download it again.
Bah!
You just don't get it, do you? The music industry is moving towards a model whereby you will have to authorize each and every device on which you want to play music. Microsoft is already building software which is moving towards this. Even today, if I want to install Windows XP on two machines, I can't do it. Sharing between devices is going to become part of history. Today, you can take a CD to any device that will play it. The RIAA is taking that away, slowly but surely, and giving you nothing in return. If they want me to authorize every device, then I want something back. What I want is rights to that music forever. It costs practically nothing for me to download the music again. As you probably might have noticed, a CD costs money to burn, package and ship to the store. Or perhaps you didn't notice that.
Fools like you are lambs to their slaughter. It's a shame that history doesn't remember quite so well the idiots as it does the heroes.