Seriously - did I get the magic copy of Vista that works just fine or something? 95% of the Vista-bashers I've seen are people who either:
1. Tried to in-place-upgrade XP to Vista, bringing along malware infections they didn't know they had and device drivers that are incompatible with Vista (since when have in-place windows upgrades _ever_ worked?), or
2. have way too little RAM (1GB or less) when you need at least 2GB to get "normal" performance out of Vista.
You have to get everyone in your organization to buy into the argument that documentation is important.
The way you do that is by pointing out that documentation makes everyone's job easier. Every employee can easily think of a task they slogged through the hard way that would have been easier with proper documentation. Every manager can easily think of a time an employee took 40 hours instead of 5 to do something because the employee had to teach themselves about someone else's area.
But documentation is still no substitute for people-power. Documentation just says how to do things, it doesn't actually do them. So all these fears about documentation lessening employee value are unfounded.
Well, Bill Gates is on the record (1995) for deriding other CEOs as having only "finite greed [nytimes.com]" and not being competitive enough by moving into new markets. Odd that he would call for "kinder capitalism." There's nothing odd about it, if you truly understand his viewpoint, which is this: capitalism is the most powerful force on Earth, but it can be either good or bad, depending on how you regulate it.
It is powerful because it is a game of "survival of the fittest". Greed gives rise to aggressive competition better than anything else. Competition in turn gives rise to the productivity and efficiencies that move mankind forward.
But capitalism's only inherent motivator is greed. It does not naturally place value on anything but money. So if you want it to value things like the environment, or helping the poor, you have to force it to value those things by regulating it. If you attach a monetary cost to those problems (and/or a monetary value to their solutions) then the incentive to make money and the incentive to do good become the same. (Al Gore's idea for a "carbon tax" is one such example.)
That's really all Bill is saying now. He's saying that it's not enough to rely on charity and good samaritans to accomplish good in the world, because that isn't enough to motivate most people. He's saying that we should make capitalism and greed work for (rather than against) doing good. It's nothing new, and it's been said by others, but it's great that one of the richest, highest-profile people in the world is now saying it too.
As for Bill's 1995 comments: capitalism only works if its participants compete as aggressively as they can. So every business person has a responsibility to compete aggressively. No one can accuse Bill Gates of failing to live up to that responsibility.
I can come up with 10 other possible causes... see, I'm a newsman too!
1. Large Wooden Badger a Possible Cause of BA038 Crash 2. Drunken Pilot a Possible Cause of BA038 Crash 3. Sharks With Freakin' Lasers a Possible Cause of BA038 Crash 4. Snakes On Plane a Possible Cause of BA038 Crash 5. Running Out of Fuel a Possible Cause of BA038 Crash 6. Fat Ass in Row 23 Seat B a Possible Cause of BA038 Crash 7. Vitamin D Deficiency a Possible Cause of BA038 Crash 8. Giant Mutant Space Goat a Possible Cause of BA038 Crash 9. Falling From High Altitude a Possible Cause of BA038 Crash 10. CmdrTaco a Possible Cause of BA038 Crash
Yes, but your situation doesn't invalidate my point.
My point is that technology follows sprawl, not the other way around. When enough people move out to new areas and start creating enough demand for the tech in those areas, then the tech infrastructure will finally get built. Until then, very few tech-minded people are going to choose to live in remote areas, and those that do (such as yourself) are going to have to pay extra and use workarounds.
You can't get cheap high-speed internet, reliable cellular service, or even reliable grounded electricity out in many smaller rural areas. Tech doesn't facilitate sprawl; sprawl facilitates tech.
The idea of putting Windows machines into sleep or hibernate mode sounds great in theory. It's too bad that most Windows devices and device drivers fail to "wake up" correctly from these modes.
Example: I have a Belkin UPS that requires a proprietary driver and applet for the "auto-shutdown when the power goes out" functionality. Unfortunately their driver crashes every time I wake the computer up from sleep mode. I actually went so far as to debug their driver for them, pinpoint the null pointer dereference and the crash stack, and provide a crash dump to Belkin's technical support... handed them the diagnosis on a silver platter... and of course they never looked into it or released a fix.
Another example: I have a new HP printer that (again) requires a proprietary driver and applet to get any reasonable functionality out of the printer. Every time the computer resumes from standby, their driver somehow hangs the entire print queue. You can keep printing documents, and they keep going into the queue, but the printer doesn't start (even though it is powered up and the printer details claim it is printing). It takes a hard reset of both the printer AND the PC to fix this.
And these examples aren't flukes. I would estimate, based on my own experience with a wide variety of WinXP/Vista PCs and devices, that at least 40% of devices and/or device drivers do not function correctly when put to sleep and woken up again. Either the drivers crash (or worse, cause your machine to BSOD), or the device mysteriously disappears and never comes back, or the device works but exhibits abnormal behavior.
Until manufacturers start placing priority on the sleep/resume functionality of their products and drivers, consumers won't be able to use those modes, and so they will just keep leaving their desktops on all the time.
Think happy thoughts, and sprinkle some pixie dust over your IT infrastructure, and all your problems will be solved.
But whatever, you do, don't fire your incompetent outsourcing partner or actually invest in beefing up your IT resources. Both of those paths are DOOMED, DOOOOOOMED, I say!
I hate it when people butcher common sayings and phrases. Didn't you even think long enough to realize that the way you were writing it made no grammatical or conceptual sense?
Don't feel too bad though... there was a guy I used to work with who always said, "for all intensive purposes" (instead of "for all intents and purposes"). That was ten times worse than what you just did.
There are a bunch of issue-specific things I could do, but then someone else could still come along after me with a money-backed agenda and undo all the good work.
So what I would do is fix the system itself. I would ammend the Constitution itself to enact a permanent, irreversible, absolute separation between money and the political process, such that disproportionate representation based on wealth (and corporate control over our government) would never be an issue in this country again. I would change the system such that anyone ethical and smart, from any background, can run for any office (including President) effectively without having to already be rich or famous and without having to take bribes from big companies and special interest groups.
Once that was done, I would use the media to regularly expose the unethical behavior and bigotry of other elected officials still in office, until I was confident that the public was truly aware of what rotten people they were and that those people would get voted out in the next election.
Then I could easily spend the rest of my term undoing all the damage that has been done by rich special interests (religious groups, corporations, industry conglomerates) over the last few decades. I would require health insurance companies to provide the same coverage at the same price to everyone, and prohibit them from rejecting anyone. I would get us out of Iraq and instead send small squads of trained assasins on secret missions to find and take out any known terrorists. I would abolish all forms of race-based or gender-based affirmative action and instead institute programs that helped people based on merit and financial circumstances. I would throw out the income tax system and switch to a flat federal sales tax. I would abolish the DMCA, restore fair-use rights, and outlaw any future technological implementation that infringes upon them. I would shrink copyright and patent terms to more reasonable short periods that serve the public good. I would enact new laws governing businesses, the first of which would be that the highest-paid employee could not make more than 20x as much (including all forms of compensation, such as bonuses and stock options) as the lowest-paid employee in the same business.
Basically it has a smart parser/indexer and it builds and maintains an internal database.
Once that is done, it lets you easily jump around the codebase (jump to any class/function/variable definition/prototype), find all references to something (not just simple textual searches but actual qualified conceptual references), etc. I would never work on any sizable C++/C# project without it.
The UI is a bit unorthodox but once you learn to customize it to your liking it's extremely efficient and drastically speeds both learning and coding.
Or better yet, a USB key - an key that lets you start your computer. No key, no start. Faster than a CD, no moving parts, etc. Me likes. Until you lose your USB key...
It's more moral to support the free exchange of information and content, and the consumer's right to do whatever they want with something they own, than it is to let greedy powermongers have all the control.
Then you'll have poor people (who can't afford the digital tuner boxes) making fake bomb threats all the time justso they'll have something to watch on their analog TV.
This web site was only meant to pacify the citizenry, by making them feel heard. It's no different than here in the USA when you write your Senator or e-mail a company's technical support address: it's not like anyone really cares what you have to say, or will actually read it or do anything about it.
If anything, the corrupt Chinese government officials were just going to use the information to decide which citizens to throw in prison next.
If a hard drive dies in your Mac, you have to ship the machine to Apple and have them replace it? You can't just order a new drive off NewEgg or buy one down at Fry's and put it in yourself?
If that's truly the case, I'll stick with the dumpy boring guy in the ugly brown suit, thank you very much.
An internet service (web site, chat room, etc) cannot possibly be expected to accurately determine anything about an internet user. Even credit card verification doesn't work, since any kid can borrow their parents' credit card and any identity thief can supply someone else's stolen credit card information.
I hate seeing any kind of law that burdens internet services with having to "verify" anything. Instead, what I want to see are laws that throw irresponsible parents and conservative holier-than-thou types in prison for dragging the rest of society down.
Your 13-year-old daughter was raped when she met up in real life with a 40 year old man from MySpace? Then you should be thrown in prison for not making yourself aware of what your daughter was doing online and for failing to teach your daughter to be smarter than that.
Your 14 year old son was looking at porn? So what? Neither YOU nor anyone you knew ever looked at porn when YOU were 14? And every man who snuck looks at boobies and crotches when he was a teen has grown up to be some kind of dysfunctional degenerate psychopath? Hardly. Get off your conservative high horse.
Slashdot Mirror
1. Tried to in-place-upgrade XP to Vista, bringing along malware infections they didn't know they had and device drivers that are incompatible with Vista (since when have in-place windows upgrades _ever_ worked?), or
2. have way too little RAM (1GB or less) when you need at least 2GB to get "normal" performance out of Vista.
You have to get everyone in your organization to buy into the argument that documentation is important.
The way you do that is by pointing out that documentation makes everyone's job easier. Every employee can easily think of a task they slogged through the hard way that would have been easier with proper documentation. Every manager can easily think of a time an employee took 40 hours instead of 5 to do something because the employee had to teach themselves about someone else's area.
But documentation is still no substitute for people-power. Documentation just says how to do things, it doesn't actually do them. So all these fears about documentation lessening employee value are unfounded.
It is powerful because it is a game of "survival of the fittest". Greed gives rise to aggressive competition better than anything else. Competition in turn gives rise to the productivity and efficiencies that move mankind forward.
But capitalism's only inherent motivator is greed. It does not naturally place value on anything but money. So if you want it to value things like the environment, or helping the poor, you have to force it to value those things by regulating it. If you attach a monetary cost to those problems (and/or a monetary value to their solutions) then the incentive to make money and the incentive to do good become the same. (Al Gore's idea for a "carbon tax" is one such example.)
That's really all Bill is saying now. He's saying that it's not enough to rely on charity and good samaritans to accomplish good in the world, because that isn't enough to motivate most people. He's saying that we should make capitalism and greed work for (rather than against) doing good. It's nothing new, and it's been said by others, but it's great that one of the richest, highest-profile people in the world is now saying it too.
As for Bill's 1995 comments: capitalism only works if its participants compete as aggressively as they can. So every business person has a responsibility to compete aggressively. No one can accuse Bill Gates of failing to live up to that responsibility.
Yes, but your building also has to be properly wired for it internally, and most older buildings are not.
Failed Avionics a Possible Cause of BA038 Crash
I can come up with 10 other possible causes... see, I'm a newsman too!
1. Large Wooden Badger a Possible Cause of BA038 Crash
2. Drunken Pilot a Possible Cause of BA038 Crash
3. Sharks With Freakin' Lasers a Possible Cause of BA038 Crash
4. Snakes On Plane a Possible Cause of BA038 Crash
5. Running Out of Fuel a Possible Cause of BA038 Crash
6. Fat Ass in Row 23 Seat B a Possible Cause of BA038 Crash
7. Vitamin D Deficiency a Possible Cause of BA038 Crash
8. Giant Mutant Space Goat a Possible Cause of BA038 Crash
9. Falling From High Altitude a Possible Cause of BA038 Crash
10. CmdrTaco a Possible Cause of BA038 Crash
(I feel a poll coming on...)
Yes, but your situation doesn't invalidate my point.
My point is that technology follows sprawl, not the other way around. When enough people move out to new areas and start creating enough demand for the tech in those areas, then the tech infrastructure will finally get built. Until then, very few tech-minded people are going to choose to live in remote areas, and those that do (such as yourself) are going to have to pay extra and use workarounds.
It would have been better if Jack Thompson had been the one in the SUV who got saved by the gamer... THAT would have been sweet.
You can't get cheap high-speed internet, reliable cellular service, or even reliable grounded electricity out in many smaller rural areas. Tech doesn't facilitate sprawl; sprawl facilitates tech.
The idea of putting Windows machines into sleep or hibernate mode sounds great in theory. It's too bad that most Windows devices and device drivers fail to "wake up" correctly from these modes.
Example: I have a Belkin UPS that requires a proprietary driver and applet for the "auto-shutdown when the power goes out" functionality. Unfortunately their driver crashes every time I wake the computer up from sleep mode. I actually went so far as to debug their driver for them, pinpoint the null pointer dereference and the crash stack, and provide a crash dump to Belkin's technical support... handed them the diagnosis on a silver platter... and of course they never looked into it or released a fix.
Another example: I have a new HP printer that (again) requires a proprietary driver and applet to get any reasonable functionality out of the printer. Every time the computer resumes from standby, their driver somehow hangs the entire print queue. You can keep printing documents, and they keep going into the queue, but the printer doesn't start (even though it is powered up and the printer details claim it is printing). It takes a hard reset of both the printer AND the PC to fix this.
And these examples aren't flukes. I would estimate, based on my own experience with a wide variety of WinXP/Vista PCs and devices, that at least 40% of devices and/or device drivers do not function correctly when put to sleep and woken up again. Either the drivers crash (or worse, cause your machine to BSOD), or the device mysteriously disappears and never comes back, or the device works but exhibits abnormal behavior.
Until manufacturers start placing priority on the sleep/resume functionality of their products and drivers, consumers won't be able to use those modes, and so they will just keep leaving their desktops on all the time.
Researchers Work To Perfect Computerized Lip Reading
Isn't this useless until someone first invents computerized lips?
Think happy thoughts, and sprinkle some pixie dust over your IT infrastructure, and all your problems will be solved.
But whatever, you do, don't fire your incompetent outsourcing partner or actually invest in beefing up your IT resources. Both of those paths are DOOMED, DOOOOOOMED, I say!
1. Build giant fact-accumulating AI database.
2. Commit suicide.
3. (Profit????)
whole hardily
You mean whole-heartedly.
I hate it when people butcher common sayings and phrases. Didn't you even think long enough to realize that the way you were writing it made no grammatical or conceptual sense?
Don't feel too bad though... there was a guy I used to work with who always said, "for all intensive purposes" (instead of "for all intents and purposes"). That was ten times worse than what you just did.
There are a bunch of issue-specific things I could do, but then someone else could still come along after me with a money-backed agenda and undo all the good work.
So what I would do is fix the system itself. I would ammend the Constitution itself to enact a permanent, irreversible, absolute separation between money and the political process, such that disproportionate representation based on wealth (and corporate control over our government) would never be an issue in this country again. I would change the system such that anyone ethical and smart, from any background, can run for any office (including President) effectively without having to already be rich or famous and without having to take bribes from big companies and special interest groups.
Once that was done, I would use the media to regularly expose the unethical behavior and bigotry of other elected officials still in office, until I was confident that the public was truly aware of what rotten people they were and that those people would get voted out in the next election.
Then I could easily spend the rest of my term undoing all the damage that has been done by rich special interests (religious groups, corporations, industry conglomerates) over the last few decades. I would require health insurance companies to provide the same coverage at the same price to everyone, and prohibit them from rejecting anyone. I would get us out of Iraq and instead send small squads of trained assasins on secret missions to find and take out any known terrorists. I would abolish all forms of race-based or gender-based affirmative action and instead institute programs that helped people based on merit and financial circumstances. I would throw out the income tax system and switch to a flat federal sales tax. I would abolish the DMCA, restore fair-use rights, and outlaw any future technological implementation that infringes upon them. I would shrink copyright and patent terms to more reasonable short periods that serve the public good. I would enact new laws governing businesses, the first of which would be that the highest-paid employee could not make more than 20x as much (including all forms of compensation, such as bonuses and stock options) as the lowest-paid employee in the same business.
See http://www.sourceinsight.com./ It's not free, but it's great.
Basically it has a smart parser/indexer and it builds and maintains an internal database.
Once that is done, it lets you easily jump around the codebase (jump to any class/function/variable definition/prototype), find all references to something (not just simple textual searches but actual qualified conceptual references), etc. I would never work on any sizable C++/C# project without it.
The UI is a bit unorthodox but once you learn to customize it to your liking it's extremely efficient and drastically speeds both learning and coding.
Why does it matter if the drug works on two blind people?
It's more moral to support the free exchange of information and content, and the consumer's right to do whatever they want with something they own, than it is to let greedy powermongers have all the control.
Now I'm just waiting for the obnoxious analog snobs to start blathering on about how analog TV broadcasts just look "warmer".
Then you'll have poor people (who can't afford the digital tuner boxes) making fake bomb threats all the time justso they'll have something to watch on their analog TV.
This web site was only meant to pacify the citizenry, by making them feel heard. It's no different than here in the USA when you write your Senator or e-mail a company's technical support address: it's not like anyone really cares what you have to say, or will actually read it or do anything about it.
If anything, the corrupt Chinese government officials were just going to use the information to decide which citizens to throw in prison next.
If a hard drive dies in your Mac, you have to ship the machine to Apple and have them replace it? You can't just order a new drive off NewEgg or buy one down at Fry's and put it in yourself?
If that's truly the case, I'll stick with the dumpy boring guy in the ugly brown suit, thank you very much.
An internet service (web site, chat room, etc) cannot possibly be expected to accurately determine anything about an internet user. Even credit card verification doesn't work, since any kid can borrow their parents' credit card and any identity thief can supply someone else's stolen credit card information.
I hate seeing any kind of law that burdens internet services with having to "verify" anything. Instead, what I want to see are laws that throw irresponsible parents and conservative holier-than-thou types in prison for dragging the rest of society down.
Your 13-year-old daughter was raped when she met up in real life with a 40 year old man from MySpace? Then you should be thrown in prison for not making yourself aware of what your daughter was doing online and for failing to teach your daughter to be smarter than that.
Your 14 year old son was looking at porn? So what? Neither YOU nor anyone you knew ever looked at porn when YOU were 14? And every man who snuck looks at boobies and crotches when he was a teen has grown up to be some kind of dysfunctional degenerate psychopath? Hardly. Get off your conservative high horse.