I know this is going to sound odd, but emacs feels out of place on a Mac.
That does sound odd.
Put your cursor in almost any editable text field in your Mac -- the address bar in Safari, any text widgets in a Safari web page, the composition window in Apple Mail, etc -- and try a few Emacs keystrokes.
Huzzah! The Emacs keystrokes work! The beginning & end of a line are [ctrl]+[A] and [ctrl]+[E]; delete-right is [ctrl]+[D], delete-right is [ctrl]+[H]; etc.
Basically any application written in Cocoa -- not the Finder, but most of Apple's other core applications, and a lot of the post-OS9 third party stuff as well -- will get Emacs keybindings by default. If you know Emacs, or learned Emacs keystrokes in another application that uses them (I learned them in Pine and the Bash shell, personally), then you can transfer that finger memory to huge chunks of OSX.
So... yeah. Emacs out of place on a Mac? Probably not...:-)
Caching? In my experience, most people end up turning it off, even dumb users
Respectfully then, your experience seems to be pretty limited.
Caching happens all over the place. Browsers cache. Department proxy servers cache; corporate network proxy servers cache; ISP gateway servers cache; load balancing gateway servers between the web server and the site's uplink cache.
The point really isn't worth debating: client side validation, when done properly and well, can have a huge positive impact. Just look at Google -- both Gmail and the beta Google Suggest interface are examples of how properly done client side validation both enhances the user experience and greatly reduces the amount of traffic going back and forth between the end-client and the web server. Yes, a site can get by perfectly fine without such techniques, but a really good site knows that they're worth using.
for example, once you're done with PHP+MySQL, try Zope+PostgreSQL
...of course, PHP is a scripting/markup language and Zope is a content management framework (that has its own storage mechanism, and so doesn't need a database -- or a web server for that matter), so the comparison doesn't really work there.
But the point is a fair one: don't just learn PHP -- follow up with Perl, and not just Perl, but Perl's mini-languages for site management: Template Toolkit, Mason (which is much like PHP), HTML::Template, etc. And follow up with Python, though as far as I know it isn't used as much outside of Zope, and others like JSP (exposure to Java is worthwhile), ASP (to try the Microsoft set of tools), etc.
Things like form validate is WRONG - the backend should do that, not the client
Welllll, sort of. Yes, the back end should validate all input data, just as any program should validate input data. You always have to validate on the back end; there is no getting around this.
On the other hand, a well-written form validator on the client side can have several benefits, including better user feedback in the form of immediate rejection of invalid input (rather than making them wait for the round trip to the server and back just to learn the same thing), and a reduction in load on the server as a lot of validation happens on the client before being uploaded to the server to be checked again. Yes, you still have to check, because there's all kinds of ways around it -- not least being to simply turn off Javascript in the browser -- and there's always a chance that your client-side validator isn't being as strict as it should be. But a well written validator on the client can be well worth the effort to develop as part of polishing off an otherwise complete system.
The last thing free software proponents need is to associate themselves with a failed economic ideology that has resulted in tens of millions of unnecessary deaths worldwide
I've visited the Free Software Foundation offices in Downtown Crossing in Boston. Among the other usual office tchotchkes were pictures of Che Guevara, with all the usual revolutionary slogans. No one there seemed to have any problem with this in the slightest.
Not that the FSF necessarily speaks for everyone, but you're suggesting that [capitalized] Free Software has no association with such things, but that's truly debatable.
Of course, true, pure communism isn't the same thing in theory as totalitarian states like the USSR were in practice, any more than true, pure capitalism in theory has only a distant relationship to what countries like the USA are in practice. A mature and thoughtful adult can recognize the good ideas in both ideologies while still abhorring the atrocities carried out by some of the countries that identify themselves with these labels but don't actually follow them.
Ahh, I see. So it's not your fault then, and we have another datum point to suggest that the editors are indeed being willfully obtuse with the house editorial style. How nice...
Then I hope you also avoid United/United Express/Ted at O'Hare/Denver, Continental at Newark/Houston, Northwest in Detriot, USAirways in Cincinnati, American at O'Hare/Dallas... etc. etc. Every airline, not just Delta, uses hubs, and ground stops at any of these airports will cause significant delays. That's just the reality of air travel these days; if you're really worried, book non-stop travel (and pay up to 10x more).
Or fly Southwest, which doesn't use the hub-and-spoke system, and get a direct flight to anywhere they fly for 10x less. Or maybe not 10x less, but in any case cheaper than any of the bigger airlines they compete against. There are alternatives, provided you are travelling between cities Southwest or an airline like them (JetBlue, Song) goes to...
According to news stories I heard this weekend, there were two problems going on: the meltdown at Comair/Delta due to weather (and as known now, software), and a work stoppage among baggage handlers trying to negotiate a new contract. It sounds like you may be dealing with fallout from the baggage issue, which was purely a human matter, not a software one.
As much a troll as the parent might've been, he does make a valid point in that people's time is valuable.
I can't stand it when someone posts a URL to some mailing list, telling everyone to go and look at it, without telling us why we should care about it.
Thank you -- that's all I'm trying to say. I'm frustrated at how amateur most of the Slashdot editors are, but I honestly wasn't trying to be a troll about it.
A simple amendment to the statement they used would have been enough to clarify everything for everyone, and would put the link in the proper context for deciding if we want to read more about it.
Why has Slashdot never managed to get this right? They've certainly had enough time and enough complaints about it by now; I can only assume that they're being willfully sloppy. That's again not meant as a troll; it's disappointment in how Slashdot is less useful and credible than it should be simply because such journalistic basics aren't taken seriously here.
Potential trolls aside, Comair is a regional air carrier, based at the Greater Cinci airport, that was bought up by Delta, and turned into their secondary route provider. They handle both short and medium-range non-stop flights (i.e. Ohio to Atlanta or Orlando). So it's more closely-related than the code-sharing arrangement that some carriers have.
Thank you. So if the article just said something like...
Gogo Dodo writes "According to the Cincinnati Post, the Comair airline shutdown in the midwest last weekend was caused by an overflowed 16-bit counter. Perhaps Comair should have paid for the software upgrade to MaestroCrew." You heard it here first...
...then it would have been enough. That one amendment -- "airline shutdown in the midwest last weekend" -- would have been enough to make the article perfectly clear to anyone who wasn't up to date with the story so far.
Is this really so much to expect? I wasn't trolling, honest, I'm just increasingly frustrated with how addled the editorial review of articles is around here. They've had years to figure this stuff out, but it's just as bad now as it was when Slashdot got started. Are they ever going to start taking their jobs as editors seriously & professionally? (And this isn't meant to be a blanket complaint -- Pudge for one seems to be aware of these basics and tries to do right with his articles, but other editors consistently muck this up...)
Yeah, but that's my point -- the majority of Slashdot's summaries don't adequately explain what they're pointing to; covering Who / What / Where / When would do it, but one or more of these is almost always missing.
I, and most other people, don't have time to read every single article just to figure out what the Slashdot editor was posting about. Moreover, in a lot of cases -- not this one, but lots of others -- the befuddled herd of Slashdot visitors has trampled the site in question, so it's not even possible to look up the original article. Admittedly, that isn't the case here, but it's true more often than not.
All of this could be avoided easily if the Slashdot editorial staff were forced to sit through the first week of an introductory journalism class, where the grad student teaching the class on a professor's behalf will drill in the mantra of Who / What / Where / When until the students finally get it.
For those of us that weren't necessarily spending the holidays keeping up with Slashdot, or the news in general, would it be that bad to spell out what Comair is and what happened to them in the article summary? Would it?
Come on, basic 4th grade reporting rules should apply to Slashdot as well: every article summary should mention Who, What, Where, and When; bonus points for How and Why, though those usually take longer to explain and can be omitted from a 100 word summary. But can we at least cover the basics?
Nah, forget it, Slashdot's editors obviously have no interest in improving the editorial quality of the site...
What many people don't know is that Sun actually did this a while back. I have an ATX rack-mount server with a Sun AXi motherboard in it, and it acts exactly like a Sun machine -- because it is a Sun machine. I'd love to see Apple do this.
Really, at this point, is Sun a good example for anything anymore? I love Sun. I learned UNIX on Sparq pizza boxes. Solaris has a warm place in my heart. But come on, they've been on a downward spiral for years, and there's no signs to suggest that they're ever going to be able to pull themselves back together.
Apple may not be doing everything right, but their track record over the past few years is starkly different from Sun's. I think they're catching on to what examples not to follow in...
It's not by accident that the phrase "reduce, reuse, recycle" puts the terms in that order: it's best to consume less, it's good to maximize the use of what we do use, and it helps to find a clean way to dispose of that which is no longer useful. So, yeah, sites like Freecycle sound like a great idea.
For people in the Boston area, a similar mailing list is Greater Boston Reuse (rules & details). It's a great way to find, or get rid of, things that you no longer want but might be useful to others...
I wonder if you could run a stable kernel and debug a new kernel at the same time. THAT would be great.
You mean User Mode Linux? We've just started using it at my company, and it allows people to have a complete Linux environment, from the kernel up, running within a process on a host system. There's no reason that you couldn't use this for testing experimental kernel builds if you wanted, or for running $distro_that_you_thought_might_be_interesting over $stable_but_boring_debian_that_you_dont_want_to_le ave, or whatever.
This is a really big deal for the newspaper industry.
Consider:
The main source of revenue for newspapers (and some magazines) are subscriptions (which generally cover only maybe 20% of the cost of publication), mass market advertisements, and classified ads. Of these, classified ads are by far the most profitable and desirable: [a] they are very cheap to operate (the customers provide and even pay for all the content), and [b] they are the one form of advertisement that people want to see.
Think about that: all other forms of advertising are a nuisance that people go out of their way to ignore (witness TiVo, banner ad blockers, the ritual shaking of new magazines over recycle bins to drop all the inserts, etc), but sometimes, when a person is ready to buy something -- particularly something big -- they'll buy a whole newspaper or magazine just to pore over the real estate listings, or the automotove listings, or the ads in a photography magazine or the old "Computer Shopper", etc.
Most of the time, people hate ads, but sometimes, we want them so badly that we're willing to pay for them. The newspaper industry has been using this tendency to subsidize their business model for over a century now. They know full well that Craigslist is a threat to that model.
Consider:
About a year ago, NPR ran a piece on Craigslist. In this piece, they talked about the site, and how profitable it is, and how they manage this by using job listings for the San Francisco area to subsidize all their operating expenses still leaving a lot left over as profit. For this piece, NPR interviewed Lisa DeSisto, general manager of the Boston Globe's website, Boston.com, by way of comparing Craigslist to more traditional publications. The reporter claimed that DeSisto sees Craigslist as creating a new market for people that want to sell small things but don't want to pay for a traditional ad; for the soundbite in the piece, she says that "anyone who brings buyers and sellers is a threat, so yes, we absolutely view them as a threat". An honest remark, but a bland one.
A few weeks after that piece ran, I saw DeSisto, and mentioned having heard her on the radio recently. "Oh, that Craigslist thing? Yeah, they are going to kick our asses."
Much more direct and honest, eh?
But it's not just Boston.com, or the newspapers in San Francisco that the current piece talks about -- it's every market that Craigslist or someone like them goes into. Newspaper revenues have been going steadily downward for 20 or 30 years, and they're scrambling to keep up with the drain. They've more or less made their peace with the web, as it's still basically what they were doing all along, and the fact that you're reading their ads and their articles on a screen instead of a sheet of paper isn't all that important to them. But sites like Craigslist suggest that things are going to be much harder for them than they may have realized five or ten years ago: these sites may be able to keep their audience, but their ability to monetize that audience with classified ads is evaporating, compounding the decades-long slump in revenues from subscriptions and not offset by other forms of advertisement. If there is a way out of this, it doesn't seem to be obvious to anybody yet...
Notes:
I used to work for Boston.com. Adjust salt intake accordingly.
Some of Douglas Adams's essays touched on these topics nicely, in particular, What Have We Got To Lose?:
"Over the last few years I've regularly been cornered by nervous publishers or broadcasters or journalists or film makers and asked about how I think computers will affect their various industries. For a long time most of them were desperately hoping for an answer that translated roughly into 'not very much'. ('People like the smell of
On the other hand, there's also a bandwidth limiting effect from this feature.
To make up an example, suppose someone were searching for, say, the director of the new Willy Wonka movie. The first thing they'd search for might be "Willy Wonka". This will return all kinds of hits, most of which will probably deal with the original movie with Gene Wilder, or even the older Roald Dahl book. With search string suggestions turned on, the user might realize that amending the search string to something more specific will bring them more quickly to the information they're looking for.
From Google's point of view, the cost is a bunch of tiny lookups to a precached table of search strings which probably lives in RAM on their servers. The benefit is a reduced number -- ideally, a drastically reduced number -- of expensive hits on their database to return search results.
The question then is that, if there is a reduction in full-page hits -- and I think this is inevitable -- then will that reduction be greater than the overhead that this functionality requires?
I don't know the answer, and neither does anyone else (yet), but my hunch is that Google is betting in the long run that this is going to be a net reduction in traffic for them, not a net increase. It wouldn't surprise me at all if things work out that way.
Are you seriously suggesting that this well organized, informative, educational Flash application is "Worse" than all the flashing, beeping Flash ads you run across on the Intraweb?
Absolutely.
All those flashing, beeping annoying Flash widgets have one essential thing in common: they're implementning functionality that basic HTML cannot trivially provide. They may make your eyes bleed, sure, but they at least have a reason to be in Flash.
This, on the other hand, is basically just a Powerpoint slideshow saved in an ever-so-slightly less obnoxious format. Slideshows are great for when you're trying to sell something, but most people don't really like being sold to. It sure gets my hackles up.
There's no reason at all that this otherwise well-organized, informative, educational material couldn't have been presented more simply and portably as straight HTML. Moreover, I (for one) much prefer to have long documents presented all in one file so that I can simply scroll down, or better still, print it out if reading it off a monitor is going to be painful -- which, in the case of something as long as this, it's going to be. At least that way I'm not getting eyestrain from staring at the monitor for so long, and I can have a sense of how much progress I've made (I've read five pages -- are there two left, or twenty?).
The Flash in this article was gratuitous and user-hostile. They wasted the time coming up with versions for two different resolutions, but if they had been a bit more clever, they would have had one Flash version -- it can scale, you don't need a "big displays" version -- and one straight-html version for the people who actually give a damn about web usability and chafe against flagrant violations of it.
But while I'm dreaming, does anyone have a straight-html version of this article? I'd like to read it on the commute home, but can't take this one with me...
For American professions that require them, a CV is basically a portfolio containing everything you have done with your academic and professional lives -- hence the latin term, Curriculum vitae, which roughly translates as "an overview of a lifetime".
For such people, a resume is a summary of highlights -- positions and titles held, academic background, notable achievements, etc -- while a CV will get into tangible details: writing samples for an author, printouts of sites for a web designer, big glossy prints for a photographer, published papers for an academic, samples of code for a programmer, etc. Whatever is relevant for the line of work, but done in as much detail as is reasonably possible.
In Europe, on the other hand, everyone seems to use CVs instead of Resumes, but their CVs seem to be much shorter than American ones, while also still longer than American resumes. I've heard of people saying their CVs run perhaps 4-10 pages in length, which would be unacceptably long for most American companies as a resume, but would be terse for a portfolio styled American CV.
So, as with a lot of other things, what a CV is depends in part on where the person who wants to see it is coming from, or going...:-)
You're right that proper quoting should have succinct quoting and no extraneous text, but I think you're cutting a bit too much out. A format like this is typical in well formed mail:
On Wed, Dec 08, 2004 at 04:07:37PM -0500, Chris Devers wrote:
> [stuff being quoted, trimmed appropriately]
[response]
> [more quoting]
[more response]
[succinct signature]
You only get one extra header line, and the material in it -- the date, time, and author -- is all relevant if you want to go back and look up the original message for fuller context.
The goal in all of this is to be courteous to the recipient of the mail, to not let extraneous material get in the way of your message, and to make it easy for the reader to both understand your message as well as be able to place it in a larger context if necessary. Or to put it another way, it's all just being polite to the reader.
Top-quoting, or Jeopardy quoting as it is more colorfully termed [think it through], is a profound insult to the reader and an arrogant demand on their time & patience. Sometimes it's just impossible to avoid -- Outlook makes proper quoting challenging, and Lotus Notes makes it outright impossible, so if work forces such malware on you then you're damned to begin with -- but reasonable people with any choice at all about the software they're running should never impose themselves on the reader that way.
You can split hairs about points of style (e.g. I think leaving the date in is important while you don't), but the general line of thinking in favor of proper bottom-quoting is on pretty sound territory in terms of both logic and courtesy.
As do thousands of other people, many of whom are not illiterate slobs.
So, if it came down to you, or a similarly talented programmer who also happened to be able to express himself as an adult, which one do you think is going to get the job?
You write code today, but you may be pushing a broom tomorrow.
If I end up bringing the car, then Zurich is a 45 minute drive and Bern is maybe an hour or so; by train, I'm told that Zurich is an hour, but Bern I'm not sure about -- maybe 70 minutes. By American standards, these would be longish but not unheard of commute times; I don't know how the Swiss would look at them. I have no problem with commuting that far as long as it doesn't prove to be prohibitively expensive over time...
According to this page, as the car will be just beyond 6 months old by the time we move over, there won't be a customs duty or VAT on it. So that leaves shipping (roughly 2000 USD ?), plus expensive gas / petrol, plus fees similar to what they would be in the USA -- registration, inspections, insurance, taxes, etc. Most of these will probably be in the same range they'd be in the USA, so the main new expense is the shipping cost -- and if we lose more than $2000 by selling it (which seems probable), then keeping it may prove to be "cheaper" in the end.
But still, something turns my stomach about moving to a new continent and bringing a whole damned car over with me. That just seems so "ugly American" or something...:-/ Oh well.
Slashdot Mirror
That does sound odd.
Put your cursor in almost any editable text field in your Mac -- the address bar in Safari, any text widgets in a Safari web page, the composition window in Apple Mail, etc -- and try a few Emacs keystrokes.
Huzzah! The Emacs keystrokes work! The beginning & end of a line are [ctrl]+[A] and [ctrl]+[E]; delete-right is [ctrl]+[D], delete-right is [ctrl]+[H]; etc.
Basically any application written in Cocoa -- not the Finder, but most of Apple's other core applications, and a lot of the post-OS9 third party stuff as well -- will get Emacs keybindings by default. If you know Emacs, or learned Emacs keystrokes in another application that uses them (I learned them in Pine and the Bash shell, personally), then you can transfer that finger memory to huge chunks of OSX.
So... yeah. Emacs out of place on a Mac? Probably not... :-)
Respectfully then, your experience seems to be pretty limited.
Caching happens all over the place. Browsers cache. Department proxy servers cache; corporate network proxy servers cache; ISP gateway servers cache; load balancing gateway servers between the web server and the site's uplink cache.
The point really isn't worth debating: client side validation, when done properly and well, can have a huge positive impact. Just look at Google -- both Gmail and the beta Google Suggest interface are examples of how properly done client side validation both enhances the user experience and greatly reduces the amount of traffic going back and forth between the end-client and the web server. Yes, a site can get by perfectly fine without such techniques, but a really good site knows that they're worth using.
...of course, PHP is a scripting/markup language and Zope is a content management framework (that has its own storage mechanism, and so doesn't need a database -- or a web server for that matter), so the comparison doesn't really work there.
But the point is a fair one: don't just learn PHP -- follow up with Perl, and not just Perl, but Perl's mini-languages for site management: Template Toolkit, Mason (which is much like PHP), HTML::Template, etc. And follow up with Python, though as far as I know it isn't used as much outside of Zope, and others like JSP (exposure to Java is worthwhile), ASP (to try the Microsoft set of tools), etc.
Welllll, sort of. Yes, the back end should validate all input data, just as any program should validate input data. You always have to validate on the back end; there is no getting around this.
On the other hand, a well-written form validator on the client side can have several benefits, including better user feedback in the form of immediate rejection of invalid input (rather than making them wait for the round trip to the server and back just to learn the same thing), and a reduction in load on the server as a lot of validation happens on the client before being uploaded to the server to be checked again. Yes, you still have to check, because there's all kinds of ways around it -- not least being to simply turn off Javascript in the browser -- and there's always a chance that your client-side validator isn't being as strict as it should be. But a well written validator on the client can be well worth the effort to develop as part of polishing off an otherwise complete system.
The other advice is all solid though.
I've visited the Free Software Foundation offices in Downtown Crossing in Boston. Among the other usual office tchotchkes were pictures of Che Guevara, with all the usual revolutionary slogans. No one there seemed to have any problem with this in the slightest.
Not that the FSF necessarily speaks for everyone, but you're suggesting that [capitalized] Free Software has no association with such things, but that's truly debatable.
Of course, true, pure communism isn't the same thing in theory as totalitarian states like the USSR were in practice, any more than true, pure capitalism in theory has only a distant relationship to what countries like the USA are in practice. A mature and thoughtful adult can recognize the good ideas in both ideologies while still abhorring the atrocities carried out by some of the countries that identify themselves with these labels but don't actually follow them.
Would that be because Chewie was standing on a chewy birthday cake in the screen grab?
Ahh, I see. So it's not your fault then, and we have another datum point to suggest that the editors are indeed being willfully obtuse with the house editorial style. How nice...
Or fly Southwest, which doesn't use the hub-and-spoke system, and get a direct flight to anywhere they fly for 10x less. Or maybe not 10x less, but in any case cheaper than any of the bigger airlines they compete against. There are alternatives, provided you are travelling between cities Southwest or an airline like them (JetBlue, Song) goes to...
According to news stories I heard this weekend, there were two problems going on: the meltdown at Comair/Delta due to weather (and as known now, software), and a work stoppage among baggage handlers trying to negotiate a new contract. It sounds like you may be dealing with fallout from the baggage issue, which was purely a human matter, not a software one.
Thank you -- that's all I'm trying to say. I'm frustrated at how amateur most of the Slashdot editors are, but I honestly wasn't trying to be a troll about it.
A simple amendment to the statement they used would have been enough to clarify everything for everyone, and would put the link in the proper context for deciding if we want to read more about it.
Why has Slashdot never managed to get this right? They've certainly had enough time and enough complaints about it by now; I can only assume that they're being willfully sloppy. That's again not meant as a troll; it's disappointment in how Slashdot is less useful and credible than it should be simply because such journalistic basics aren't taken seriously here.
Thank you. So if the article just said something like...
...then it would have been enough. That one amendment -- "airline shutdown in the midwest last weekend" -- would have been enough to make the article perfectly clear to anyone who wasn't up to date with the story so far.
Is this really so much to expect? I wasn't trolling, honest, I'm just increasingly frustrated with how addled the editorial review of articles is around here. They've had years to figure this stuff out, but it's just as bad now as it was when Slashdot got started. Are they ever going to start taking their jobs as editors seriously & professionally? (And this isn't meant to be a blanket complaint -- Pudge for one seems to be aware of these basics and tries to do right with his articles, but other editors consistently muck this up...)
Yeah, but that's my point -- the majority of Slashdot's summaries don't adequately explain what they're pointing to; covering Who / What / Where / When would do it, but one or more of these is almost always missing.
I, and most other people, don't have time to read every single article just to figure out what the Slashdot editor was posting about. Moreover, in a lot of cases -- not this one, but lots of others -- the befuddled herd of Slashdot visitors has trampled the site in question, so it's not even possible to look up the original article. Admittedly, that isn't the case here, but it's true more often than not.
All of this could be avoided easily if the Slashdot editorial staff were forced to sit through the first week of an introductory journalism class, where the grad student teaching the class on a professor's behalf will drill in the mantra of Who / What / Where / When until the students finally get it.
For those of us that weren't necessarily spending the holidays keeping up with Slashdot, or the news in general, would it be that bad to spell out what Comair is and what happened to them in the article summary? Would it?
Come on, basic 4th grade reporting rules should apply to Slashdot as well: every article summary should mention Who, What, Where, and When; bonus points for How and Why, though those usually take longer to explain and can be omitted from a 100 word summary. But can we at least cover the basics?
Nah, forget it, Slashdot's editors obviously have no interest in improving the editorial quality of the site...
And by golly it pulled Sun out of the hole!
Really, at this point, is Sun a good example for anything anymore? I love Sun. I learned UNIX on Sparq pizza boxes. Solaris has a warm place in my heart. But come on, they've been on a downward spiral for years, and there's no signs to suggest that they're ever going to be able to pull themselves back together.
Apple may not be doing everything right, but their track record over the past few years is starkly different from Sun's. I think they're catching on to what examples not to follow in...
It's not by accident that the phrase "reduce, reuse, recycle" puts the terms in that order: it's best to consume less, it's good to maximize the use of what we do use, and it helps to find a clean way to dispose of that which is no longer useful. So, yeah, sites like Freecycle sound like a great idea.
For people in the Boston area, a similar mailing list is Greater Boston Reuse (rules & details). It's a great way to find, or get rid of, things that you no longer want but might be useful to others...
You mean User Mode Linux? We've just started using it at my company, and it allows people to have a complete Linux environment, from the kernel up, running within a process on a host system. There's no reason that you couldn't use this for testing experimental kernel builds if you wanted, or for running $distro_that_you_thought_might_be_interesting over $stable_but_boring_debian_that_you_dont_want_to_le ave, or whatever.
"The future is now." :-)
This is a really big deal for the newspaper industry.
Consider:
The main source of revenue for newspapers (and some magazines) are subscriptions (which generally cover only maybe 20% of the cost of publication), mass market advertisements, and classified ads. Of these, classified ads are by far the most profitable and desirable: [a] they are very cheap to operate (the customers provide and even pay for all the content), and [b] they are the one form of advertisement that people want to see.
Think about that: all other forms of advertising are a nuisance that people go out of their way to ignore (witness TiVo, banner ad blockers, the ritual shaking of new magazines over recycle bins to drop all the inserts, etc), but sometimes, when a person is ready to buy something -- particularly something big -- they'll buy a whole newspaper or magazine just to pore over the real estate listings, or the automotove listings, or the ads in a photography magazine or the old "Computer Shopper", etc.
Most of the time, people hate ads, but sometimes, we want them so badly that we're willing to pay for them. The newspaper industry has been using this tendency to subsidize their business model for over a century now. They know full well that Craigslist is a threat to that model.
Consider:
About a year ago, NPR ran a piece on Craigslist. In this piece, they talked about the site, and how profitable it is, and how they manage this by using job listings for the San Francisco area to subsidize all their operating expenses still leaving a lot left over as profit. For this piece, NPR interviewed Lisa DeSisto, general manager of the Boston Globe's website, Boston.com, by way of comparing Craigslist to more traditional publications. The reporter claimed that DeSisto sees Craigslist as creating a new market for people that want to sell small things but don't want to pay for a traditional ad; for the soundbite in the piece, she says that "anyone who brings buyers and sellers is a threat, so yes, we absolutely view them as a threat". An honest remark, but a bland one.
A few weeks after that piece ran, I saw DeSisto, and mentioned having heard her on the radio recently. "Oh, that Craigslist thing? Yeah, they are going to kick our asses."
Much more direct and honest, eh?
But it's not just Boston.com, or the newspapers in San Francisco that the current piece talks about -- it's every market that Craigslist or someone like them goes into. Newspaper revenues have been going steadily downward for 20 or 30 years, and they're scrambling to keep up with the drain. They've more or less made their peace with the web, as it's still basically what they were doing all along, and the fact that you're reading their ads and their articles on a screen instead of a sheet of paper isn't all that important to them. But sites like Craigslist suggest that things are going to be much harder for them than they may have realized five or ten years ago: these sites may be able to keep their audience, but their ability to monetize that audience with classified ads is evaporating, compounding the decades-long slump in revenues from subscriptions and not offset by other forms of advertisement. If there is a way out of this, it doesn't seem to be obvious to anybody yet...
Notes:
Another item in MessageLabs' favor: Matt Sargeant, one of the original authors of SpamAssassin, works for them writing spam filters.
On the other hand, there's also a bandwidth limiting effect from this feature.
To make up an example, suppose someone were searching for, say, the director of the new Willy Wonka movie. The first thing they'd search for might be "Willy Wonka". This will return all kinds of hits, most of which will probably deal with the original movie with Gene Wilder, or even the older Roald Dahl book. With search string suggestions turned on, the user might realize that amending the search string to something more specific will bring them more quickly to the information they're looking for.
From Google's point of view, the cost is a bunch of tiny lookups to a precached table of search strings which probably lives in RAM on their servers. The benefit is a reduced number -- ideally, a drastically reduced number -- of expensive hits on their database to return search results.
The question then is that, if there is a reduction in full-page hits -- and I think this is inevitable -- then will that reduction be greater than the overhead that this functionality requires?
I don't know the answer, and neither does anyone else (yet), but my hunch is that Google is betting in the long run that this is going to be a net reduction in traffic for them, not a net increase. It wouldn't surprise me at all if things work out that way.
Absolutely.
All those flashing, beeping annoying Flash widgets have one essential thing in common: they're implementning functionality that basic HTML cannot trivially provide. They may make your eyes bleed, sure, but they at least have a reason to be in Flash.
This, on the other hand, is basically just a Powerpoint slideshow saved in an ever-so-slightly less obnoxious format. Slideshows are great for when you're trying to sell something, but most people don't really like being sold to. It sure gets my hackles up.
There's no reason at all that this otherwise well-organized, informative, educational material couldn't have been presented more simply and portably as straight HTML. Moreover, I (for one) much prefer to have long documents presented all in one file so that I can simply scroll down, or better still, print it out if reading it off a monitor is going to be painful -- which, in the case of something as long as this, it's going to be. At least that way I'm not getting eyestrain from staring at the monitor for so long, and I can have a sense of how much progress I've made (I've read five pages -- are there two left, or twenty?).
The Flash in this article was gratuitous and user-hostile. They wasted the time coming up with versions for two different resolutions, but if they had been a bit more clever, they would have had one Flash version -- it can scale, you don't need a "big displays" version -- and one straight-html version for the people who actually give a damn about web usability and chafe against flagrant violations of it.
But while I'm dreaming, does anyone have a straight-html version of this article? I'd like to read it on the commute home, but can't take this one with me...
For American professions that require them, a CV is basically a portfolio containing everything you have done with your academic and professional lives -- hence the latin term, Curriculum vitae, which roughly translates as "an overview of a lifetime".
For such people, a resume is a summary of highlights -- positions and titles held, academic background, notable achievements, etc -- while a CV will get into tangible details: writing samples for an author, printouts of sites for a web designer, big glossy prints for a photographer, published papers for an academic, samples of code for a programmer, etc. Whatever is relevant for the line of work, but done in as much detail as is reasonably possible.
In Europe, on the other hand, everyone seems to use CVs instead of Resumes, but their CVs seem to be much shorter than American ones, while also still longer than American resumes. I've heard of people saying their CVs run perhaps 4-10 pages in length, which would be unacceptably long for most American companies as a resume, but would be terse for a portfolio styled American CV.
So, as with a lot of other things, what a CV is depends in part on where the person who wants to see it is coming from, or going... :-)
You're right that proper quoting should have succinct quoting and no extraneous text, but I think you're cutting a bit too much out. A format like this is typical in well formed mail:
You only get one extra header line, and the material in it -- the date, time, and author -- is all relevant if you want to go back and look up the original message for fuller context.
The goal in all of this is to be courteous to the recipient of the mail, to not let extraneous material get in the way of your message, and to make it easy for the reader to both understand your message as well as be able to place it in a larger context if necessary. Or to put it another way, it's all just being polite to the reader.
Top-quoting, or Jeopardy quoting as it is more colorfully termed [think it through], is a profound insult to the reader and an arrogant demand on their time & patience. Sometimes it's just impossible to avoid -- Outlook makes proper quoting challenging, and Lotus Notes makes it outright impossible, so if work forces such malware on you then you're damned to begin with -- but reasonable people with any choice at all about the software they're running should never impose themselves on the reader that way.
You can split hairs about points of style (e.g. I think leaving the date in is important while you don't), but the general line of thinking in favor of proper bottom-quoting is on pretty sound territory in terms of both logic and courtesy.
Jeopardy quoting -- don't do it!
As do thousands of other people, many of whom are not illiterate slobs.
So, if it came down to you, or a similarly talented programmer who also happened to be able to express himself as an adult, which one do you think is going to get the job?
You write code today, but you may be pushing a broom tomorrow.
Thanks for the tips! :-)
If I end up bringing the car, then Zurich is a 45 minute drive and Bern is maybe an hour or so; by train, I'm told that Zurich is an hour, but Bern I'm not sure about -- maybe 70 minutes. By American standards, these would be longish but not unheard of commute times; I don't know how the Swiss would look at them. I have no problem with commuting that far as long as it doesn't prove to be prohibitively expensive over time...
According to this page, as the car will be just beyond 6 months old by the time we move over, there won't be a customs duty or VAT on it. So that leaves shipping (roughly 2000 USD ?), plus expensive gas / petrol, plus fees similar to what they would be in the USA -- registration, inspections, insurance, taxes, etc. Most of these will probably be in the same range they'd be in the USA, so the main new expense is the shipping cost -- and if we lose more than $2000 by selling it (which seems probable), then keeping it may prove to be "cheaper" in the end.
But still, something turns my stomach about moving to a new continent and bringing a whole damned car over with me. That just seems so "ugly American" or something... :-/ Oh well.