Ahhh... SGI Irix... how I miss thee... truly ahead of it's time back in 1993... I mean the thing had a freaking web cam before there was a web to use it on!
Ditto...my very best code happens between 8AM and 12PM, the more noise the better... earbuds in... music banging... foot tapping... I can get on a hell of a roll... but if you interrupt me, god help me, I'll kill you. I don't want to talk to anybody before lunch. Besides, there's too much workplace "noise" after lunch to get a good 4 hour block of coding in.
Good post... good to hear he's in it for the right reasons and not the lobbyist perks. Hope he keeps the tech innovation in this country moving forward instead of mired in IP litigation.
When you post your sources, you practice security through peer review. The ones who do security through obscurity are the guys up in Redmond.
Also, don't kid yourself, IE8 fell on it's first attempt too. It just so happens that Miller got the first try in the contest and who could blame him for wanting the Mac hardware over the PC hardware.
Wow, what an utter crock of shit those stats are. I'd say that when I'm on the road (read: not in an office), easily 1/3 of laptops I see people using are Macs. I was on a university campus near here a few weeks ago and I'd say the Mac/PC laptop mix there favored Macs 2 to 1. There's no way, and I mean absolutely no way, that number is true for laptop users. In fact, I'd say, from the peeks I've gotten, that OS X outnumbers Vista 3 to 1. That may change since the Windows computers I see are mostly old junkers, with a rare nice Sony VAIO here and there. Having done some support work against Vista, I can understand why too. I think Vista means Popup Window in Latin. It is by far the most annoying end user OS ever, secure or not. I wish I saw more people running Linux, but laptop Linux sightings are still very rare in the wild.
I agree, there is a premium, but it's not signficant on the high end. I just spent $2700 on a 17" MacBook Pro. I think that's a lot of money. However, I bought it because it's thin, light, and has an 8 hour battery life. Could I have gotten a better spec'ed machine for that money? Almost certainly. Could I get a full work day without needing to plug in for a recharge in a package as thin and light as the MBP? No. So ignoring OS X, that Mac bests anything in it's price range for portability.
Ehhh... do some Python for a while, once you get used to indenting, move back over to COBOL.:-P
Funny enough, COBOL was the first comp-sci class I took in college. It's one of those things that make you wonder how in the hell did it gain such widespread adoption in the first place. I guess there really weren't many options when it first came out.
If all the ice in the world were to melt, and the odds of this happening are virtually 0, then we're looking at a 200+ft rise in ocean levels. However, the higher probability estimates are for a 24 inch rise by 2100.
Not a great source in itself but the references are not bad:
http://science.howstuffworks.com/question473.htm
I'm going to have to disagree with you there. XP was OK, poorly coded, but OK. Vista is absolutely terrible. It's slow, is primarily a back end for a popup window manager, and consumes an unreasonable amount of system resources just doing nothing. If Windows 7 is a viable XP replacement (ie. small resource footprint and strong performance), then great. I'd rather see MS go the UNIX route and do a BSD kernel with a Windows GUI, but I think it will be a cold day in Hades before that day comes.
Sh!t... I got one of those emails... it's been about a month of waiting now too. I was as careful as possible about not using anything on the no-no list, but there is content scrapped from an Apple iPhone "partner". I guess I know what the hold up is now.
Look, I love and use Linux, I think it's excellent. However, even though Linux can be used on the desktop, I can tell you right now that 90% of people out there have absolutely no idea that computers can have a different OS installed on them than what comes out of the box. Slashdot is certainly not a representation of the "average" PC user. I seriously believe that Apple is Linuxs' best hope for more widespread adoption. If OS X can fracture the market to the point that devs have a vested interest in avoiding platform specific code then that removes the excuse for Windows specific applications. The biggest problem right now is that there are very few GUI frameworks with critical mass that are common across platforms. Personally, I wish Apple would release their internal only Windows Cocoa framework, or even better, open source it so it can be readily ported. XCode & Cocoa is the nicest GUI framework I've worked with and it would be a no brainer to cross compile.
I've got news for you, most don't write them for Windows either. That's why Java, C, C++, PHP, Python, Flash, etc are so popular. In fact, there are relatively few enterprise apps written to platform specific APIs. I'd say well over 80% of Fortune 500 corporate enterprise class apps are written in platform agnostic languages / APIs. The age of platform specific enterprise applications came and went a while back.
Trying playing an HD video (read h264) under Windows in WMP and see how well that works. WMP is one of the few media players that's actually worse than QT.
I disagree, the iPhone was the first to offer a touch screen based UI, a solid internet browser, a usable mobile calendar, and a viable iPod replacement. Is it the end all be all of cell phones, no. However, what made the iPhone so good was the software stack more than the hardware stack. The iPhone software stack is still by far the best on the market. The hardware is just slightly above average, but I (personally) think Apple did this to create an upgrade path. For example. want GPS? Upgrade from V1 to V2. Next will be, want video? Upgrade from V2 to V3... etc.
I know you're kidding, but, seriously, tough crap for people who chose to write their sites in non-standard compliant code. They screwed up by making a piss poor choice and they deserve to go down with the ship they hitched their trailers to. They can go back to their local community colleges to get some different certificate and leave the interwebs to people who know what it is they're doing.
I think the DJs on satellite are the single most annoying thing about the service. I use it mainly for the info channels like CNBC, CNN, and sports, but I do occasionally tune into music. If I wanted people yapping inanely over songs, I'd listen to land based music. That's an easy head count reduction that would actually improve the service.
LDAP and more specifically Berkley DB have been doing things like that for a very very long time. The reality is that that model doesn't scale well. As archaic as RDBMSes are they are built to scale and be generic in how they store data. I've used BigTable via GoogleApps and it's limitations as compared to an RDBMS are readily apparent when you want to share common data between objects.
Seriously though... this might be the impetus to develop force shields a la Star Trek. It makes sense, when enough space junk builds up, deflector shields will be the only way to safely escape Earth orbit.
I like the premium economy concept. We're anything but rich, but I'm willing to fork out an extra $100 to not have my shoulders rubbing my neighbours. I'm not the the Hulk, but my shoulders are too wide for the hobbit sized seats on most econ flights. I'm more than willing to split the bill for removing 1 seat from a 6 seat row and gaining 4 glorious inches of shoulder room so I can avoid having to dislocate a shoulder to fit in my alloted air space.
Well... yes... MS invented and implemented it as an ActiveX control. However, MS wasn't the first to integrate it natively into JavaScript, that honor goes to Mozilla. MS only followed suit in IE 7.0. On that note, we were leveraging dynamic image loading in JavaScript to do ajaxy things in HTML long before XMLHTTP ever came around.
Yeah... I was thinking the same thing. Good bye to C and Assembler? Ahhh, they mean goodbye to any low level hardware I/O or custom drivers... nice. We already have a Phantom OS, it's called HTML / JavaScript... no files to persist, no access to hardware, no low level performance tuning, networking is built-in, everything is interpreted... how exactly is Phantom OS any different? OSes succeed when they offer GREATER flexibility, not when they insulate developers for low level APIs. Look at what can be done on an iPhone versus what is possible on a Mac. I think I'll stick with my "dinosaur" UNIX variant, with all the terrifying freedom and non-restrictions it provides, thank you very much.
You're wrong about being bigger:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europe#Political_geography
Europe, the continent, is larger than the US in terms of area -but- it does have twice the population at about 731M.
The being cleared up, the best broadband I've experienced in the USA was in Tampa, FL where FIOS is widely available. However, the other US cable and DSL connections I've used have been barely satisfactory compared to speeds I've seen in Europe and Canada.
Slashdot Mirror
Ahhh ... SGI Irix ... how I miss thee ... truly ahead of it's time back in 1993 ... I mean the thing had a freaking web cam before there was a web to use it on!
Ditto ...my very best code happens between 8AM and 12PM, the more noise the better ... earbuds in ... music banging ... foot tapping ... I can get on a hell of a roll ... but if you interrupt me, god help me, I'll kill you. I don't want to talk to anybody before lunch. Besides, there's too much workplace "noise" after lunch to get a good 4 hour block of coding in.
Good post ... good to hear he's in it for the right reasons and not the lobbyist perks. Hope he keeps the tech innovation in this country moving forward instead of mired in IP litigation.
Umm ... no ... it is not security through obscurity. If you want to be obscure, you don't post your source code on the internet like this:
http://developer.apple.com/opensource/index.html
When you post your sources, you practice security through peer review. The ones who do security through obscurity are the guys up in Redmond.
Also, don't kid yourself, IE8 fell on it's first attempt too. It just so happens that Miller got the first try in the contest and who could blame him for wanting the Mac hardware over the PC hardware.
Wow, what an utter crock of shit those stats are. I'd say that when I'm on the road (read: not in an office), easily 1/3 of laptops I see people using are Macs. I was on a university campus near here a few weeks ago and I'd say the Mac/PC laptop mix there favored Macs 2 to 1. There's no way, and I mean absolutely no way, that number is true for laptop users. In fact, I'd say, from the peeks I've gotten, that OS X outnumbers Vista 3 to 1. That may change since the Windows computers I see are mostly old junkers, with a rare nice Sony VAIO here and there. Having done some support work against Vista, I can understand why too. I think Vista means Popup Window in Latin. It is by far the most annoying end user OS ever, secure or not. I wish I saw more people running Linux, but laptop Linux sightings are still very rare in the wild.
I agree, there is a premium, but it's not signficant on the high end. I just spent $2700 on a 17" MacBook Pro. I think that's a lot of money. However, I bought it because it's thin, light, and has an 8 hour battery life. Could I have gotten a better spec'ed machine for that money? Almost certainly. Could I get a full work day without needing to plug in for a recharge in a package as thin and light as the MBP? No. So ignoring OS X, that Mac bests anything in it's price range for portability.
Ehhh ... do some Python for a while, once you get used to indenting, move back over to COBOL. :-P
Funny enough, COBOL was the first comp-sci class I took in college. It's one of those things that make you wonder how in the hell did it gain such widespread adoption in the first place. I guess there really weren't many options when it first came out.
Oh really?!? Please post a link to the Sliverlight video file format specification. Here is the one for Flash:
...
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flv/
Go ahead, surprise me
If all the ice in the world were to melt, and the odds of this happening are virtually 0, then we're looking at a 200+ft rise in ocean levels. However, the higher probability estimates are for a 24 inch rise by 2100. Not a great source in itself but the references are not bad: http://science.howstuffworks.com/question473.htm
Imagine what the tech landscape would be like if MS had stuck with Xenix ... what a totally bizarro world moment!
I'm pretty sure it's called to an Langue d'Oc ... it's pretty interesting stuff if you're into that sort of thing.
I'm going to have to disagree with you there. XP was OK, poorly coded, but OK. Vista is absolutely terrible. It's slow, is primarily a back end for a popup window manager, and consumes an unreasonable amount of system resources just doing nothing. If Windows 7 is a viable XP replacement (ie. small resource footprint and strong performance), then great. I'd rather see MS go the UNIX route and do a BSD kernel with a Windows GUI, but I think it will be a cold day in Hades before that day comes.
Sh!t ... I got one of those emails ... it's been about a month of waiting now too. I was as careful as possible about not using anything on the no-no list, but there is content scrapped from an Apple iPhone "partner". I guess I know what the hold up is now.
Look, I love and use Linux, I think it's excellent. However, even though Linux can be used on the desktop, I can tell you right now that 90% of people out there have absolutely no idea that computers can have a different OS installed on them than what comes out of the box. Slashdot is certainly not a representation of the "average" PC user. I seriously believe that Apple is Linuxs' best hope for more widespread adoption. If OS X can fracture the market to the point that devs have a vested interest in avoiding platform specific code then that removes the excuse for Windows specific applications. The biggest problem right now is that there are very few GUI frameworks with critical mass that are common across platforms. Personally, I wish Apple would release their internal only Windows Cocoa framework, or even better, open source it so it can be readily ported. XCode & Cocoa is the nicest GUI framework I've worked with and it would be a no brainer to cross compile.
I've got news for you, most don't write them for Windows either. That's why Java, C, C++, PHP, Python, Flash, etc are so popular. In fact, there are relatively few enterprise apps written to platform specific APIs. I'd say well over 80% of Fortune 500 corporate enterprise class apps are written in platform agnostic languages / APIs. The age of platform specific enterprise applications came and went a while back.
Trying playing an HD video (read h264) under Windows in WMP and see how well that works. WMP is one of the few media players that's actually worse than QT.
I disagree, the iPhone was the first to offer a touch screen based UI, a solid internet browser, a usable mobile calendar, and a viable iPod replacement. Is it the end all be all of cell phones, no. However, what made the iPhone so good was the software stack more than the hardware stack. The iPhone software stack is still by far the best on the market. The hardware is just slightly above average, but I (personally) think Apple did this to create an upgrade path. For example. want GPS? Upgrade from V1 to V2. Next will be, want video? Upgrade from V2 to V3 ... etc.
I know you're kidding, but, seriously, tough crap for people who chose to write their sites in non-standard compliant code. They screwed up by making a piss poor choice and they deserve to go down with the ship they hitched their trailers to. They can go back to their local community colleges to get some different certificate and leave the interwebs to people who know what it is they're doing.
I think the DJs on satellite are the single most annoying thing about the service. I use it mainly for the info channels like CNBC, CNN, and sports, but I do occasionally tune into music. If I wanted people yapping inanely over songs, I'd listen to land based music. That's an easy head count reduction that would actually improve the service.
LDAP and more specifically Berkley DB have been doing things like that for a very very long time. The reality is that that model doesn't scale well. As archaic as RDBMSes are they are built to scale and be generic in how they store data. I've used BigTable via GoogleApps and it's limitations as compared to an RDBMS are readily apparent when you want to share common data between objects.
Seriously though ... this might be the impetus to develop force shields a la Star Trek. It makes sense, when enough space junk builds up, deflector shields will be the only way to safely escape Earth orbit.
I like the premium economy concept. We're anything but rich, but I'm willing to fork out an extra $100 to not have my shoulders rubbing my neighbours. I'm not the the Hulk, but my shoulders are too wide for the hobbit sized seats on most econ flights. I'm more than willing to split the bill for removing 1 seat from a 6 seat row and gaining 4 glorious inches of shoulder room so I can avoid having to dislocate a shoulder to fit in my alloted air space.
Well ... yes ... MS invented and implemented it as an ActiveX control. However, MS wasn't the first to integrate it natively into JavaScript, that honor goes to Mozilla. MS only followed suit in IE 7.0. On that note, we were leveraging dynamic image loading in JavaScript to do ajaxy things in HTML long before XMLHTTP ever came around.
Yeah ... I was thinking the same thing. Good bye to C and Assembler? Ahhh, they mean goodbye to any low level hardware I/O or custom drivers ... nice. We already have a Phantom OS, it's called HTML / JavaScript ... no files to persist, no access to hardware, no low level performance tuning, networking is built-in, everything is interpreted ... how exactly is Phantom OS any different? OSes succeed when they offer GREATER flexibility, not when they insulate developers for low level APIs. Look at what can be done on an iPhone versus what is possible on a Mac. I think I'll stick with my "dinosaur" UNIX variant, with all the terrifying freedom and non-restrictions it provides, thank you very much.
You're wrong about being bigger: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europe#Political_geography Europe, the continent, is larger than the US in terms of area -but- it does have twice the population at about 731M. The being cleared up, the best broadband I've experienced in the USA was in Tampa, FL where FIOS is widely available. However, the other US cable and DSL connections I've used have been barely satisfactory compared to speeds I've seen in Europe and Canada.