This is what happens when people get together. In the good old days it was just you vs the machine. People + People = Crazy. I don't think people should be allowed to gather in packs more than 3. You ever see a pack of dogs? or vampires on True Blood? Nothing good ever comes of it.
I think Firefox is creating this situation by doing continuous release wrong... They correctly tried to follow the Chrome model, In order to keep up with a continuously changing world, also shorter release cycles are more efficient.
However, seems to me Firefox doesn't get it. They are still advertising large version # changes. Why do they allow you to download "Firefox 5" instead of just saying this is "Firefox" when you download you get the latest one. Period. With Chrome you have to dig to see a build #, and you will see the press talking Chrome 11, 12, 13. However, you never see Google pushing versions. This results in a situation where IT thinks they are still deploying in cycles instead of installing a constantly updated piece of software. How much time is wasted version branding?
The should also make it so Firefox can be constantly updated via patches, so that IT admins can apply on separate schedule, or behind firewalls.
I just spent most of my three day weekend cleaning up some "Antivirus Soft" http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/virus-removal/remove-antivirus-soft that took over my Windows 7 installation. My antivirus software didn't detect it, and I was in Chrome 5 just reading news sites when it took over. After hours of booting into safemode, and scanning every piece of media I had with 3 different antivirus software. I discovered I had 5 different trojans and 2 different keyloggers. This forced me to change 50+ passwords.
I don't consider myself an average user who easily falls for downloading malicious stuff. I have been in IT since 1994. I got everything cleaned up, but was left wondering how the hell this happened? So I finally gave up and I am done with windows forever. I have been dual booting for a while, but now I have decided to go all the way. I am doing this in spite that I don't think Linux is as nice on the desktop. Its just not worth it if I am going to do everything I can to be a secure user, and still get infected.
So I sympathize with Google on this one. Its so utterly frustrating, that I damn well want to swear off technology period. Una-bomber style.
My team is currently considering a "NoSQL" solution moving away from PostgreSQL, and the reason is: We desperately need Multimaster over the WAN that handles split brain situations gracefully. Its a tough problem and frankly no RDBMS handles it well. I suspect any group who has had to support multiple disperse locations has the same thought.
So this topic is currently being debated in my company. The question is when should one centralize or decentralize authentication/authorization? Seems to me that it depends on the system and what your trying to protect. At my company we currently have email systems, websites, computers, and other resources that all have separate authentication/authorization. The problem we are seeing is that maintenance of these systems has gotten out of hand, leading to users who have left the company still having access to some resources. Thus, decentralization has lead to security risks. This makes it hard to rotate passwords in a reasonable manor, also a security risk.
Seems to me however, on the internet this may be a bad idea. If my yahoo email is compromised, I like the security of not having my bank account also compromised. The single point of failure is a major security risk. That being said I have worked on a few bank websites and have several examples where a users account was compromised, and we couldn't find any compromise of our system. After lengthy discussions, it turns out some other site the user was using was compromised, and the user just happened to be using the same login and password with us. You can scream education all you want, but only having to remember one password is what users really want to do.
So I ask \., when do you centralize and when do you decentralize? There must be some set of rules here. Maybe decentralize when your protecting the system itself, but centralize when your protecting a single resource in a big system?
So its too late for FLAC, I sure wish I knew about that 6 years ago when I started my collection.
However, just for kicks I just tried dBPowerAMP as suggested. I converted 192kbs MP3 to Quality 6 OGG, which seems to be VBR.
I didn't have any new artifacts, and for the life of me I can't tell a difference. However, before I go crazy I will have a few more ears listen to see if I can tell the difference.
While I have some of your guys attention. I have been looking into creating a movie jukebox much like my mp3 jukebox. I have been doing a ton of research. My conclusion is the future will be h.264 with a.MP4 container. The only reason I haven't jumped in is that future seems a good year or two off. I can't find any really eazy software to do h.264. So my question for you guys is... do you think I am on the right track, and if so do you think I should wait a bit longer. I have 300+ dvds so this will be quite a undertaking. I want to make sure I get it right.
Thanks again if anyone is still up.
Thanks for the warning guys. Kind of sucks, to be perfectly honest I don't have all the cds anymore. I guess I am stuck with MP3 forever. I am not willing to go half and half with my collection. Oh well. Thanks again for the quick response.
Does anyone know of a mass converter for MP3 -> OGG?
I am a windows user and the only one I can find is oggasm which is only for linux.
Also all my mp3s are 192kbs, what is the quality equivalent for OGG. Some people are saying 128kbs, however that seems low to me.
Thanks for any help.
Sun to drop want and standardize on what eclipse is doing.
Eclipse is in fact standardizing the community, just in ways sun doesn't like. So much so that Sun can't just put out a new standard and everyone is going to follow it.
Their is only one reason for a email like that, they have lost power and are begging for it back.
I have gotten myself off of caffine a few times. Each time with exactly the headaches your describing.
My hypothisis is that the headaches are caused by dehydration that caffine masks. I have noticed that if I drink a big glass of water every hour for the first two days of withdraw the headaches don't come.
Just a side note, things I noticed when I get off caffine. First, I am way less irritable. I was known to be short tempored, this virtually stopped when I stopped drinking caffine. Second, I don't think you go into REM sleep when your on heavy caffine. My dreams are not as vivid. As soon as I get off caffine, my dreams become very vivid, so much so I can get up in the morning and write them down. Lack of REM sleep would also explain why you feel so much more rested after going off caffine.
I work for a major company which is now trying to outsource my J2EE programming position to Brazil.
Its almost too funny watching it go so wrong.
Our group has for years fought with the business group over software requirement specs. What we end up building almost always diverges from what they had in there minds. Yes we create software requirement specs with mock up and all that. Yet most of these are in business speak, and can be interpreted in many different ways.
Now they are attempting to outsource to a CMM level 3 development group. The thing is the Brazilians require the software requirement specs to be in precise use cases covering every function that can possibly take place. In fact they will not even start working on a project until this document has been created and signed off on by everyone and their mother.
What has instead happened is the business has no idea how to create software engineering specs. They can't effectively communicate this through the middle management hell that is spread out over 3 countries. The Brazilians effectively sat on their asses for 3 months, and documented the fact that they did. Once they finally wrote something it didn't integrate correctly with all the systems that we have in place in the USA, because there was nothing spelling out the fact in the specs. Now the project is late and everyone is pissed.
Somehow this is better than paying me extra to know the systems, to interpret what business really wants (and sometimes get it wrong), and get things out on time.
In short I am not afraid, in fact I am looking forward to the time the come back to me needing help and I ask for a big fat raise!
To all the Microsoft Conspirators...
I thought Microsoft and IBM just signed a huge Xbox 2 chip deal?
Maybe I am too idealistic and the proper way to act is to sue your business partners. Maybe thats why I don't own a big company:)
Thanks for the back up.:)
To be fair to OO, I have reused other peoples objects more in the last year than I have ever in my programming career.
Almost all of it comes from the Apache group. Commons, Log4j, Struts. I love those guys!
I will agree that these computers will be usefull at running high computational simple algorithms.
However, I completely disagree with the comparision to early processors. The 30 million line of code limit is a realitively new software engineering problem. To be honest I don't even see how that is possible. I am on a ~1 million line project, and its already complete chaos. I am sure we could up the count by instituting a strict process but even that can only take us so far.
I was pretty excited to try iTunes for windows. I thought finally the record industry is getting it. Then I downloaded and tried it. I was going to get the new Outkast (Speakerboxxx/The Love Below). However it costs $19.95! Ummm, did I miss something here? No inventory, no shipping, just bandwidth fees and it costs $5 more than it would for me to go down to Best Buy and get it? Bittorrent here I come.
Seems to me Nvidia has a crap card and they have been covering it up for a while now.
1. Bad Future Mark results
Nvidia: We stopped participating a while ago, thats a ATI benchmark.
2. Poor Tomb Raider Performance.
Nvidia: Who cares.
3. Poor HL2 Performance.
Nvidia: You should of used our 50.xx drivers that don't render fog, and aren't out yet.
Someone posted this picture. I think it says it all...
http://myweb.cableone.net/jrose/Jeremy/HL2.jpg
Apoptosis
I am a contractor at Dell and our jobs are being outsourced right now. I thought I would share some of the discussions going around the office...
1. The Brazilian Contractor's that our replacing us make $5 a hour. There is no way in hell we can ever compete with that.
2. People keep saying "compete", but its only about price. We are way more educated and skilled than our replacements. For example one Brazilian listed "Internet" as a skill on his resume. Boy he knows the Internet lets snatch this guy up!
3. Why is it only IT jobs can be outsourced? I would like to see middle management outsourced. Of course we will never see that.
4. Why was it such a big deal to be on site as a contractor a few years ago, and now it's ok to have IT on a separate continent. I will take a pay cut if I could work from home. Not $5 a hour though.
5. When I was getting my CS degree it was hard, and I knew a lot of smart people who dropped out. I just can't believe they can go into these countries and just higher a 100 cheap programmers. I personally think they are lying about their education.
6. Every big project I have worked on required good communication between developers. I just don't see how the US business team, is going to get across their Specs to the Brazilian developers, who will then hand it off to the Russian QA team. Sounds like the recipe for a quality product to me.
In short ya I am bitter, because I don't think there is anything I can do to "improve" myself to compete with dirt cheap unskilled labor.
I currently work for Dell doing J2EE, and two years ago I worked for IBM doing the same.
IBM would do right by java. In fact I would say they already are. During the 1.3 days no one I knew used the SUN JDK. It was far too buggy and unstable compaired to the IBM 1.3 JDK.
I have also been told several times that SUN's 1.4 has major basis on IBM 1.3. (I have never confirmed this, in fact if anyone has a history leason about the topic I would love to hear it).
Also in my opinion the best IDE is Eclipse. Also pretty much from IBM. I would love to see Swing depricated and replaced with SWT.
Finally my J2EE experience was way better at IBM. The just have people there that understand the technology way better than Dell.
Speaking of Dell. The day Dell controls Java is they day I learn C#. Dell's IT department would completely destroy Java as we know it. Worst IT shop I have ever seen. I fear the day they are in control of something so complicated as a whole language.
Slashdot Mirror
This is what happens when people get together. In the good old days it was just you vs the machine. People + People = Crazy. I don't think people should be allowed to gather in packs more than 3. You ever see a pack of dogs? or vampires on True Blood? Nothing good ever comes of it.
I think Firefox is creating this situation by doing continuous release wrong... They correctly tried to follow the Chrome model, In order to keep up with a continuously changing world, also shorter release cycles are more efficient. However, seems to me Firefox doesn't get it. They are still advertising large version # changes. Why do they allow you to download "Firefox 5" instead of just saying this is "Firefox" when you download you get the latest one. Period. With Chrome you have to dig to see a build #, and you will see the press talking Chrome 11, 12, 13. However, you never see Google pushing versions. This results in a situation where IT thinks they are still deploying in cycles instead of installing a constantly updated piece of software. How much time is wasted version branding? The should also make it so Firefox can be constantly updated via patches, so that IT admins can apply on separate schedule, or behind firewalls.
I have been keeping a backup of all stone tablets in my shed for years. Soon to be free on craigslist now that my archive mechanism is out of date.
I just spent most of my three day weekend cleaning up some "Antivirus Soft" http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/virus-removal/remove-antivirus-soft that took over my Windows 7 installation. My antivirus software didn't detect it, and I was in Chrome 5 just reading news sites when it took over. After hours of booting into safemode, and scanning every piece of media I had with 3 different antivirus software. I discovered I had 5 different trojans and 2 different keyloggers. This forced me to change 50+ passwords. I don't consider myself an average user who easily falls for downloading malicious stuff. I have been in IT since 1994. I got everything cleaned up, but was left wondering how the hell this happened? So I finally gave up and I am done with windows forever. I have been dual booting for a while, but now I have decided to go all the way. I am doing this in spite that I don't think Linux is as nice on the desktop. Its just not worth it if I am going to do everything I can to be a secure user, and still get infected. So I sympathize with Google on this one. Its so utterly frustrating, that I damn well want to swear off technology period. Una-bomber style.
My team is currently considering a "NoSQL" solution moving away from PostgreSQL, and the reason is: We desperately need Multimaster over the WAN that handles split brain situations gracefully. Its a tough problem and frankly no RDBMS handles it well. I suspect any group who has had to support multiple disperse locations has the same thought.
so like when the new dancing proteins come out I will have the best internet handle.
So this topic is currently being debated in my company. The question is when should one centralize or decentralize authentication/authorization? Seems to me that it depends on the system and what your trying to protect. At my company we currently have email systems, websites, computers, and other resources that all have separate authentication/authorization. The problem we are seeing is that maintenance of these systems has gotten out of hand, leading to users who have left the company still having access to some resources. Thus, decentralization has lead to security risks. This makes it hard to rotate passwords in a reasonable manor, also a security risk. Seems to me however, on the internet this may be a bad idea. If my yahoo email is compromised, I like the security of not having my bank account also compromised. The single point of failure is a major security risk. That being said I have worked on a few bank websites and have several examples where a users account was compromised, and we couldn't find any compromise of our system. After lengthy discussions, it turns out some other site the user was using was compromised, and the user just happened to be using the same login and password with us. You can scream education all you want, but only having to remember one password is what users really want to do. So I ask \., when do you centralize and when do you decentralize? There must be some set of rules here. Maybe decentralize when your protecting the system itself, but centralize when your protecting a single resource in a big system?
Does anyone know why yahoo IM hasn't worked all day?
So its too late for FLAC, I sure wish I knew about that 6 years ago when I started my collection. However, just for kicks I just tried dBPowerAMP as suggested. I converted 192kbs MP3 to Quality 6 OGG, which seems to be VBR. I didn't have any new artifacts, and for the life of me I can't tell a difference. However, before I go crazy I will have a few more ears listen to see if I can tell the difference. While I have some of your guys attention. I have been looking into creating a movie jukebox much like my mp3 jukebox. I have been doing a ton of research. My conclusion is the future will be h.264 with a .MP4 container. The only reason I haven't jumped in is that future seems a good year or two off. I can't find any really eazy software to do h.264. So my question for you guys is... do you think I am on the right track, and if so do you think I should wait a bit longer. I have 300+ dvds so this will be quite a undertaking. I want to make sure I get it right.
Thanks again if anyone is still up.
Thanks for the warning guys. Kind of sucks, to be perfectly honest I don't have all the cds anymore. I guess I am stuck with MP3 forever. I am not willing to go half and half with my collection. Oh well. Thanks again for the quick response.
Does anyone know of a mass converter for MP3 -> OGG? I am a windows user and the only one I can find is oggasm which is only for linux. Also all my mp3s are 192kbs, what is the quality equivalent for OGG. Some people are saying 128kbs, however that seems low to me. Thanks for any help.
Just moved J2EE webapp from windows to linux. Really nothing to it ;)
Apoptosis
Sun to drop want and standardize on what eclipse is doing. Eclipse is in fact standardizing the community, just in ways sun doesn't like. So much so that Sun can't just put out a new standard and everyone is going to follow it. Their is only one reason for a email like that, they have lost power and are begging for it back.
I have gotten myself off of caffine a few times. Each time with exactly the headaches your describing.
My hypothisis is that the headaches are caused by dehydration that caffine masks. I have noticed that if I drink a big glass of water every hour for the first two days of withdraw the headaches don't come.
Just a side note, things I noticed when I get off caffine. First, I am way less irritable. I was known to be short tempored, this virtually stopped when I stopped drinking caffine. Second, I don't think you go into REM sleep when your on heavy caffine. My dreams are not as vivid. As soon as I get off caffine, my dreams become very vivid, so much so I can get up in the morning and write them down. Lack of REM sleep would also explain why you feel so much more rested after going off caffine.
I work for a major company which is now trying to outsource my J2EE programming position to Brazil.
Its almost too funny watching it go so wrong.
Our group has for years fought with the business group over software requirement specs. What we end up building almost always diverges from what they had in there minds. Yes we create software requirement specs with mock up and all that. Yet most of these are in business speak, and can be interpreted in many different ways.
Now they are attempting to outsource to a CMM level 3 development group. The thing is the Brazilians require the software requirement specs to be in precise use cases covering every function that can possibly take place. In fact they will not even start working on a project until this document has been created and signed off on by everyone and their mother.
What has instead happened is the business has no idea how to create software engineering specs. They can't effectively communicate this through the middle management hell that is spread out over 3 countries. The Brazilians effectively sat on their asses for 3 months, and documented the fact that they did. Once they finally wrote something it didn't integrate correctly with all the systems that we have in place in the USA, because there was nothing spelling out the fact in the specs. Now the project is late and everyone is pissed.
Somehow this is better than paying me extra to know the systems, to interpret what business really wants (and sometimes get it wrong), and get things out on time.
In short I am not afraid, in fact I am looking forward to the time the come back to me needing help and I ask for a big fat raise!
To all the Microsoft Conspirators... I thought Microsoft and IBM just signed a huge Xbox 2 chip deal? Maybe I am too idealistic and the proper way to act is to sue your business partners. Maybe thats why I don't own a big company :)
Thanks for the back up. :)
To be fair to OO, I have reused other peoples objects more in the last year than I have ever in my programming career.
Almost all of it comes from the Apache group. Commons, Log4j, Struts. I love those guys!
I will agree that these computers will be usefull at running high computational simple algorithms. However, I completely disagree with the comparision to early processors. The 30 million line of code limit is a realitively new software engineering problem. To be honest I don't even see how that is possible. I am on a ~1 million line project, and its already complete chaos. I am sure we could up the count by instituting a strict process but even that can only take us so far.
We are already hitting the limits of how much code can work together without being riddled by bugs. I think we need a advance in programming first.
I was pretty excited to try iTunes for windows. I thought finally the record industry is getting it. Then I downloaded and tried it. I was going to get the new Outkast (Speakerboxxx/The Love Below). However it costs $19.95! Ummm, did I miss something here? No inventory, no shipping, just bandwidth fees and it costs $5 more than it would for me to go down to Best Buy and get it? Bittorrent here I come.
Seems to me Nvidia has a crap card and they have been covering it up for a while now. 1. Bad Future Mark results Nvidia: We stopped participating a while ago, thats a ATI benchmark. 2. Poor Tomb Raider Performance. Nvidia: Who cares. 3. Poor HL2 Performance. Nvidia: You should of used our 50.xx drivers that don't render fog, and aren't out yet. Someone posted this picture. I think it says it all... http://myweb.cableone.net/jrose/Jeremy/HL2.jpg Apoptosis
I am a contractor at Dell and our jobs are being outsourced right now. I thought I would share some of the discussions going around the office...
1. The Brazilian Contractor's that our replacing us make $5 a hour. There is no way in hell we can ever compete with that.
2. People keep saying "compete", but its only about price. We are way more educated and skilled than our replacements. For example one Brazilian listed "Internet" as a skill on his resume. Boy he knows the Internet lets snatch this guy up!
3. Why is it only IT jobs can be outsourced? I would like to see middle management outsourced. Of course we will never see that.
4. Why was it such a big deal to be on site as a contractor a few years ago, and now it's ok to have IT on a separate continent. I will take a pay cut if I could work from home. Not $5 a hour though.
5. When I was getting my CS degree it was hard, and I knew a lot of smart people who dropped out. I just can't believe they can go into these countries and just higher a 100 cheap programmers. I personally think they are lying about their education.
6. Every big project I have worked on required good communication between developers. I just don't see how the US business team, is going to get across their Specs to the Brazilian developers, who will then hand it off to the Russian QA team. Sounds like the recipe for a quality product to me.
In short ya I am bitter, because I don't think there is anything I can do to "improve" myself to compete with dirt cheap unskilled labor.
Apoptosis
Why no matter how hard I try my fonts never look as good as everyone elses screenshoots of linux? I swear it shouldn't be this hard! Apoptosis
sue their customers, that should fix their reputation.
I currently work for Dell doing J2EE, and two years ago I worked for IBM doing the same.
IBM would do right by java. In fact I would say they already are. During the 1.3 days no one I knew used the SUN JDK. It was far too buggy and unstable compaired to the IBM 1.3 JDK.
I have also been told several times that SUN's 1.4 has major basis on IBM 1.3. (I have never confirmed this, in fact if anyone has a history leason about the topic I would love to hear it).
Also in my opinion the best IDE is Eclipse. Also pretty much from IBM. I would love to see Swing depricated and replaced with SWT.
Finally my J2EE experience was way better at IBM. The just have people there that understand the technology way better than Dell.
Speaking of Dell. The day Dell controls Java is they day I learn C#. Dell's IT department would completely destroy Java as we know it. Worst IT shop I have ever seen. I fear the day they are in control of something so complicated as a whole language.
Apoptosis