"...college genres), and a cheaper price online. "
You just don't get it do you. I PREFER to wander around a physical shop(sometimes with friends) looking at some physical goods, to sitting on my own in a room with a PC and a modem. If you can't understand why then theres no point in continuing this discussion and if that is the case then I feel a bit sorry for you.
Something a lot of the rich techno geeks on this forum forget is that not everyone has a PC (I'm speaking generally , not just about Korea), never mind broadband. Just because YOU can download a whole album in 5 minutes onto your top of range PC then download it into the iPod mummy and daddy bought for your birthday doesn't mean everyone has that option. For some people a cheap CD ghetto blaster is as good as it gets and I know some people who still listen to tapes.
So how about some people move out of this bleedin edge mindset and realise that not everyone on this planet is part of the wired generation.
"The value will be in watching a skilled set of musicians perform together. "
Err no. The bands I listen to hardly ever come to my country. Am I supposed to book a flight to go see them in the few hours I get free in an evening? Or am I suppose to spend 4 hours over my dial up link to download their album so depreving them of money and me tying up my phone line?
Sorry pal , I'd sooner pay the $20 for a CD (and unless you're some tight fisted student $20 is NOT a lot of money) and listen to it in the comfort of my home when I want.
I don't know about you but I *LIKE* going around a music store and browsing. Whats the alternative , driving for an hour to the warehouse and climbing over the shelves? Not everyone likes mailorder and lets face it , online retail is nothing more than an electronic sears catalogue that my granny used to buy her knickers from 3 decades ago. I *LIKE* shops , and for some geek like you to say they add no value shows how out of touch you are with a large percentage of humanity.
The problem with most management isn't that they want to be seen to be doing something well, they simply want to be seen to be doing SOMETHING. So even if their predecessors set up a perfectly working system that can't be improved they'll go and bugger about with it anyway simply to justify their own position. If it makes it worse , well , theres plenty of excuses and people to blame in IT (except themselves of course)
"They were fortunately more far-sighted than yourself and we now have something useful to show for it."
And its people who think like you who we have to thank for the slow bloatware we suffer today. "Everyone else is using it , it must be good , baaa baaa baaa".
"I'm also beginning to wonder whether you've actually got a job, as saving a week's development time is often the difference between whether the project gets done or not. In the context of XMPP, this could be a major factor in adoption of the protocol-- bear in mind that's a week's development time saved for every implementation of the protocol. "
Funnily enough I do. I'm working on a telco project and strangely enough data throughput is the most (MOST!) important parameter of the whole thing. XML was considered and binned for exactly the reasons I gave. Considering the whole project has so far taken 3 years using up a week or 2s developement time to implement a packet tx/rx system was irrelevant. Seems to me like you've only ever worked on mickey mouse projects where 1 week is a significant proportion of the total time.
"You can't do that in a byte-delimited binary format without careful and specific pre-planning, the effort of which may be wasted if you're not sufficiently prescient. "
Wtf are you talking about? That rubbish. You've never worked with memory mapping data structures have you.
"If this weren't the case, we'd all be writing everything in C and doing pointer math on arrays"
Those of us who do real network programming as opposed to high level toy coding , do.
"you'd know human-readability is not a major reason to use it. "
Then what is? Because I can't think of any other good reasons.
"XML compresses amazingly well. "
Thats a bit like saying you can make a go-kart go really fast if you try. Yeah great , but why not just buy a car in the first place then?
"Yes, but XML is a standard shell."
So what , its still just a shell! So you can download some parser to parse it. Oh well great, that saves a weeks development time. And slows down the whole product whenever its run. Hmm , great tradeoff. Not.
"Probably a good thing for a message-passing protocol, don't you think?"
No , theres nothing special about "messages" that means they all have to use a standard format. Why shoehorn everything into the same dumb standard? Horses for courses...
I realise I'll get modded down for this since anyone that questions some flavour-of-the-month tool suffers this , but Instant Messaging is just a poor reinvention of online talker systems which have been around for donkeys years and don't require any client more complex than telnet or shh to connect to which are standard and readibly available on all systems. This simple concept has been taken split into a proprietary client-server architecture which then requires people to download specific clients which may or may not be compatable with various services. Jesus , what a farce. And yet no one ever seems to notice this, they just blindly suck up all the spin from the various groups producing these things and think they're the greatest thing since sliced bread. Well they're not , they're bread that never mind not being sliced , hasn't even been baked properly!
WHy the hell do they use an XML based protocol? XML is when something has to be human readable and unless its for the benefit of some line tapping hacker who the hell is going to read IM packets? Not only is XML bloated and so sucks up bandwidth (important if you're still on dial up) but its slow to parse and generally ugly. "But its for developers!" someone shouts. I'm sorry? Just how dumb a developer do you have to be to not be able to grok some efficient binary protocol? "But its a standard" someone else shouts. No it isn't. XML is a shell , you can fill it with any old shit and just because something else is "XML based" doesn't mean it will understand it. Using XML for IM is a clear case of jumping on the bandwagon for no reason other than the sheep mentality coming to the fore.
... using multiple step angles of a slope to set a value sounds to me suspiciously like they're heading in the direction of analogue recording which rather defeats the whole point of using pits as binary ones and zeros. Sure , using an analogue system you could head towards infinite data density but with increase in apparent storage so is there an increase in error rate. Fine for a music CD where the odd corrupt bit of data doesn't matter , perhaps more of a problem for DVDs but not a killer , but DEFINATELY a problem for data CDs/DVDs. I can't see this method catching on, its just too open to read errors , and as for writing data using a RW system (as opposed to pressing) , oh man....
Its a reasonable comparison but not 100% accurate. Sure with a phone you don't meet the person but you do hear their voice , with all the intonation etc that goes with it. With the internet you don't even get that , its one stepped further removed from real contact than the phone is. So while people who spend a lot of time on the phone instead having of face to face contact may have some issues , people who spend a lot of time on the net for the same reason have a LOT of issues. IMO anyway.
Not sure if you're trying to make a wry comparison , but going without internet access hardly constitutes going without human contact. In fact in a lot of circumstances it leads to it! When I say human contact I mean face to face , trying stuff into an IM or email client IMO is not human contact. Anyway , I suspect if these people weren't addicted to the internet they'd be addicted to something else whether it be drink, drugs, adrenaline sports , whatever...
Back in 1974 us Brits could buy a TV with effectively what was a built in wireless colour video terminal (something every geek should appreciate). Yet only in the last few years have big noises been made about wireless terminals in other arenas such as POS. Just goes to show that sometimes theres no such thing as a new idea!
"not part of the picture" sounds like out of band to me. Or what would you consider out of band, something on a different channel altogether? Stop nit picking.
"Why would you say Slackware isn't really the first choice as a desktop system? "
Simply because its tricky to set up for your average user. Slackware gives you little hand holding and someone whos used to putting in even a redhat CD and just cliking a few buttons with be thrown by Slakcware. I'm not say thats bad (I myself prefer knowing whats happening in the install) but for someone who just wants to use office apps its a bit daunting.
To be fair , slackware isn't really the first choice as a desktop system but it is among the first choices for a backend server (I use it for such myself). With that in mind I'm not sure how to configure printers via a GUI is all that much use for most slackware users. I personally would be far more interested to see how to do it via the command line so you can configure the things via a dial up at 3 in the morning when things have gone pear shaped at work. Anyway , no doubt other people will have other opinions:)
The thing is free whatever the motivation behind it. If you don't like it then don't use it so stop whining. What did you expect , them to say "Here , have our full database system for free, no restrictions! We've planted a money tree in our garden, we don't need sales anymore!".
Wake up to the realities of commercial life , its what keeps the worlds economy running.
The networks told the writer (strazinsky?) that there wouldn't be a 5th series so he hurried to get his story arc shoe horned into the 4th series which in my opinion made the last few episodes so bad as to be funny - "Get the hell outta our universe!". Umm yeah. Then the network comes back and says "hey , you can have a 5th series after all. So what does he do? Does he tell them to get stuffed , theres nothing left to do , just leave the story complete even though its been spoilt? Or does he smell money and do a 5th series which meanders around going nowhere and just treading water , paying the actors wages? Well we all know the answer to that. B5 was good but it could have been great. Pity.
Slashdot Mirror
"...college genres), and a cheaper price online. "
You just don't get it do you. I PREFER to wander around a physical shop(sometimes with friends) looking at some physical goods, to sitting on my own in a room with a PC and a modem. If you can't understand why then theres no point in continuing this discussion and if that is the case then I feel a bit sorry for you.
Something a lot of the rich techno geeks on this forum forget is that not everyone has a PC (I'm speaking generally , not just about Korea), never mind broadband. Just because YOU can download a whole album in 5 minutes onto your top of range PC then download it into the iPod mummy and daddy bought for your birthday doesn't mean everyone has that option. For some people a cheap CD ghetto blaster is as good as it gets and I know some people who still listen to tapes.
So how about some people move out of this bleedin edge mindset and realise that not everyone on this planet is part of the wired generation.
"The value will be in watching a skilled set of musicians perform together. "
Err no. The bands I listen to hardly ever come to my country. Am I supposed to book a flight to go see them in the few hours I get free in an evening? Or am I suppose to spend 4 hours over my dial up link to download their album so depreving them of money and me tying up my phone line?
Sorry pal , I'd sooner pay the $20 for a CD (and unless you're some tight fisted student $20 is NOT a lot of money) and listen to it in the comfort of my home when I want.
I don't know about you but I *LIKE* going around a music store and browsing. Whats the alternative , driving for an hour to the warehouse and climbing over the shelves? Not everyone likes mailorder and lets face it , online retail is nothing more than an electronic sears catalogue that my granny used to buy her knickers from 3 decades ago. I *LIKE* shops , and for some geek like you to say they add no value shows how out of touch you are with a large percentage of humanity.
Is he back on full time linux development now?
:)
"Alax Cox gave a talk"
Was it in Welsh?
The problem with most management isn't that they want to be seen to be doing something well, they simply want to be seen to be doing SOMETHING. So even if their predecessors set up a perfectly working system that can't be improved they'll go and bugger about with it anyway simply to justify their own position. If it makes it worse , well , theres plenty of excuses and people to blame in IT (except themselves of course)
"They were fortunately more far-sighted than yourself and we now have something useful to show for it."
And its people who think like you who we have to thank for the slow bloatware we suffer today. "Everyone else is using it , it must be good , baaa baaa baaa".
"I'm also beginning to wonder whether you've actually got a job, as saving a week's development time is often the difference between whether the project gets done or not. In the context of XMPP, this could be a major factor in adoption of the protocol-- bear in mind that's a week's development time saved for every implementation of the protocol. "
Funnily enough I do. I'm working on a telco project and strangely enough data throughput is the most (MOST!) important parameter of the whole thing. XML was considered and binned for exactly the reasons I gave. Considering the whole project has so far taken 3 years using up a week or 2s developement time to implement a packet tx/rx system was irrelevant. Seems to me like you've only ever worked on mickey mouse projects where 1 week is a significant proportion of the total time.
"You can't do that in a byte-delimited binary format without careful and specific pre-planning, the effort of which may be wasted if you're not sufficiently prescient. "
Wtf are you talking about? That rubbish. You've never worked with memory mapping data structures have you.
"If this weren't the case, we'd all be writing everything in C and doing pointer math on arrays"
Those of us who do real network programming as opposed to high level toy coding , do.
"you'd know human-readability is not a major reason to use it. "
Then what is? Because I can't think of any other good reasons.
"XML compresses amazingly well. "
Thats a bit like saying you can make a go-kart go really fast if you try. Yeah great , but why not just buy a car in the first place then?
"Yes, but XML is a standard shell."
So what , its still just a shell! So you can download some parser to parse it. Oh well great, that saves a weeks development time. And slows down the whole product whenever its run. Hmm , great tradeoff. Not.
"Probably a good thing for a message-passing protocol, don't you think?"
No , theres nothing special about "messages" that means they all have to use a standard format. Why shoehorn everything into the same dumb standard? Horses for courses...
Actually I wasn't trolling. But thanks for proving my initial point anyway. Theres always one of you around.
I realise I'll get modded down for this since anyone that questions some flavour-of-the-month tool suffers this , but Instant Messaging is just a poor reinvention of online talker systems which have been around for donkeys years and don't require any client more complex than telnet or shh to connect to which are standard and readibly available on all systems. This simple concept has been taken split into a proprietary client-server architecture which then requires people to download specific clients which may or may not be compatable with various services. Jesus , what a farce. And yet no one ever seems to notice this, they just blindly suck up all the spin from the various groups producing these things and think they're the greatest thing since sliced bread. Well they're not , they're bread that never mind not being sliced , hasn't even been baked properly!
Go ahead , mod me down Mr 12 year old moderator.
WHy the hell do they use an XML based protocol? XML is when something has to be human readable and unless its for the benefit of some line tapping hacker who the hell is going to read IM packets? Not only is XML bloated and so sucks up bandwidth (important if you're still on dial up) but its slow to parse and generally ugly. "But its for developers!" someone shouts. I'm sorry? Just how dumb a developer do you have to be to not be able to grok some efficient binary protocol? "But its a standard" someone else shouts. No it isn't. XML is a shell , you can fill it with any old shit and just because something else is "XML based" doesn't mean it will understand it. Using XML for IM is a clear case of jumping on the bandwagon for no reason other than the sheep mentality coming to the fore.
... using multiple step angles of a slope to set a value sounds to me suspiciously like they're heading in the direction of analogue recording which rather defeats the whole point of using pits as binary ones and zeros. Sure , using an analogue system you could head towards infinite data density but with increase in apparent storage so is there an increase in error rate. Fine for a music CD where the odd corrupt bit of data doesn't matter , perhaps more of a problem for DVDs but not a killer , but DEFINATELY a problem for data CDs/DVDs. I can't see this method catching on, its just too open to read errors , and as for writing data using a RW system (as opposed to pressing) , oh man....
Its a reasonable comparison but not 100% accurate. Sure with a phone you don't meet the person but you do hear their voice , with all the intonation etc that goes with it. With the internet you don't even get that , its one stepped further removed from real contact than the phone is. So while people who spend a lot of time on the phone instead having of face to face contact may have some issues , people who spend a lot of time on the net for the same reason have a LOT of issues. IMO anyway.
So if they're "real" friends why don't you ask them for their phone number or better yet , get on a train/bus/car and go visit them! Jeez..
Not sure if you're trying to make a wry comparison , but going without internet access hardly constitutes going without human contact. In fact in a lot of circumstances it leads to it! When I say human contact I mean face to face , trying stuff into an IM or email client IMO is not human contact. Anyway , I suspect if these people weren't addicted to the internet they'd be addicted to something else whether it be drink, drugs, adrenaline sports , whatever...
Back in 1974 us Brits could buy a TV with
effectively what was a built in wireless colour video terminal (something every geek should appreciate). Yet only in the last few years have big noises been made about wireless terminals in other arenas such as POS. Just goes to show that sometimes theres no such thing as a new idea!
"not part of the picture" sounds like out of band to me. Or what would you consider out of band, something on a different channel altogether? Stop nit picking.
"Why would you say Slackware isn't really the first choice as a desktop system? "
Simply because its tricky to set up for your average user. Slackware gives you little hand holding and someone whos used to putting in even a redhat CD and just cliking a few buttons with be thrown by Slakcware. I'm not say thats bad (I myself prefer knowing whats happening in the install) but for someone who just wants to use office apps its a bit daunting.
To be fair , slackware isn't really the first choice as a desktop system but it is among the first choices for a backend server (I use it for such myself). With that in mind I'm not sure how to configure printers via a GUI is all that much use for most slackware users. I personally would be far more interested to see how to do it via the command line so you can configure the things via a dial up at 3 in the morning when things have gone pear shaped at work. Anyway , no doubt other people will have other opinions :)
And people wonder why sperm counts have been dropping recently. Nuff said! :)
Unless the receiver is on that top of that mountain then being able to see its peak from 65 miles away is not going to do you much good is it?
I was under the impression that Patrick had sorted all this out or did I mishear?
The thing is free whatever the motivation behind it. If you don't like it then don't use it so stop whining. What did you expect , them to say "Here , have our full database system for free, no restrictions! We've planted a money tree in our garden, we don't need sales anymore!".
Wake up to the realities of commercial life , its what keeps the worlds economy running.
The networks told the writer (strazinsky?) that there wouldn't be a 5th series so he hurried to get his story arc shoe horned into the 4th series which in my opinion made the last few episodes so bad as to be funny - "Get the hell outta our universe!". Umm yeah. Then the network comes back and says "hey , you can have a 5th series after all. So what does he do? Does he tell them to get stuffed , theres nothing left to do , just leave the story complete even though its been spoilt? Or does he smell money and do a 5th series which meanders around going nowhere and just treading water , paying the actors wages? Well we all know the answer to that. B5 was good but it could have been great. Pity.