An interesting thing I've noticed is this shift in some places to installing shared libraries such as mfc42.dll to the program's installation directory, eliminating the need to touch C:\Windows at all and avoiding DLL hell at the expense of file space.
The big problem here is that if you have a vulnerability or bug in a shared library, you now have to wait for the vendors/maintainers of every package to upgrade everything. With shared libraries, you can just upgrade the library and all is well (obviously this would be a problem on windows..).
Personally, I like the way apt handles this. You can apt-get install firefox, and it downloads all the libraries and such it needs. If a library gets upgraded, every package using it gets upgraded. Of course, this doesn't solve the problem of breaking BC, but this is less of a problem in the OSS world, where certain companies change their API's with no notice to most people, breaking many (competing) apps that rely on something...
Do you honestly expect your backup provider to cover you in the event of a gamma ray burst in the stellar neighbourhood which vapourizes half the planet within 5 minutes? An extreme example to be sure, but 100% coverage is not realistic, nor is it financially desirable.
Interesting example..:)
The first thing I thought of was what happens when some idiot at the client company shuts off the backup program on their side? The backup company can't do anything about it - besides maybe notice the backup didn't take place and call them - even then, say it happens on a Friday.. they're likely not going to be backed up all weekend. Office burns down, and there's an old backup.. the backup company can't be held responsible for that.
writing messages to a DJ in a noisy club. I currently request songs by holding up my phone as close as possible, but that isn't always readable.
A lot of times, if you can't talk to the DJ, it's because they don't give a shit about what songs you want to hear;)
Granted, some clubs are setup in ways where you can't get near them, but there are also a lot of DJs that just don't take requests (I'm not quite sure why).
Look, placing GUI interfaces on lots of stuff is OK if it streamlines your operation of the device, but the phone companies and even automobile manufacturers are using lousy GUI interfaces to perform simple tasks.
Maybe it's just the programmer in me, but there are many MANY device that I look at and think "wow, I could design such a better interface for that..". Even on my phone, there's a few tiny things I'd like to change (defaults, the dictionary for T9 input, placement of some menu items) but can't. A lot of things are trivially menu options, but probably left out because it would make menus too long and complicated looking.
It would be nice if these developers used open source, and let people modify firmware on their phones or other devices. But I'll just go back to my day dreaming now..
The confusion arises when Mac/Windows people arrive and want to bring their habits with them. This is completely natural. However, there has been and will continue to be strong resistance (I'll lead it myself if needs be;) to abandoning those of us who think that highlight, middle click is vastly superior.
I'm getting used to the highlight, middle click method - it's very useful for terminals, espessially - but it's still inferiour. The biggest problem is that you can't select a chunk of text and then delete it and paste what's in the clipboard on top. There was another reply in this thread saying that there should be one more action beyond highlighting to copy - I totally agree.
The other method would be to drop that altogether and realize that the keys like ctrl+c, ctrl+v work well. It could even be a totally different method soas not to confuse ctrl+c with break (although, really, terminal is the only place this is affected, and terminals should implement a totally non-standard method - highlight to copy, middle click to paste - because they're non-standard compared to a GUI).
But trying to copy the familliarity of windows (and this goes beyond just copy/paste) but not implementing it 100% is just plain dumb. It makes convertees annoyed, since it appears 'broken'.
I somewhat agree that using the mouse only for copy/paste (as a fundamental operation) is a good thing (even though you were trolling;) ) but at the same time, not being able to do something as fundamental as select a block of text and delete it without erasing your buffer is silly. One of the nice things about a GUI for text editing is the fact that you can select a large block of text very quickly and delete it.
Of course, the vim people will argue that you can do something similar in vi -- but only lines, or multiple commands (delete to end of line, from beginning, etc) and you still have to count lines to do it. (btw, I love vim.. but editing in a GUI is more productive).
I think a strong argument that you could put forward would be that the current system of manually counting votes is the equivalent of 'open source'. Everyone knows what they do (count votes), and how they do it (by looking at each one and recording the number). I believe you can even watch them do it, if you'd like. Open source is pretty much the equivalent. You can see what the code is doing, and how it's doing it.
3) if it's that fscking expensive, maybe they're introducing too many regs... do without!
Supply and demand. Lawers are expensive because they're needed. If you stop writing laws because it's too expensive, someone will see an opening and offer to write laws for cheaper (since it's better than 0). In order to compete, the rest of the lawyers drop prices accordingly. Eventually, some start to bump them up as they get busier.. rinse and repeat.
Just realize you will be paying 50+ percent of your income to the Fed,
Income tax is based on different levels of income, and while it is fairly high, it's not 50%. You also have to consider other things, like when we get sick, it's paid for, instead of coming directly out of our salary.
will have subpar healthcare (but it is universal)
I'm not sure the health care is really any worse than in the US. At least you don't have to be rich to get health care.
since it is so difficult to fire and hire people
There are laws that protect people from being fired for no reason, if that's what you mean. It's not very hard to hire someone at all.
the Canadians LOVE red tape
As a Canadian, no we don't. Though our politicians sure do..
most people take there jobs WAAAAYY to seriously.
I don't know where you get this from?
Oh and don't forget the French, those whacky French speaking Canadians make the real French seem practically friendly.
I won't directly respond to this point.. but I will say something that you probably won't even relate.
Our media isn't QUITE as sensational as American media. I think people can make up their own minds on who they hate and why..
he could have just as well told them to leave him alone and they would have had to. He agreed to meet with them, so that's that.
Of course, doing this would raise further suspicion, and who knows what depths they'd go to trying to find out what you're up to (which would be hard information to find, if you weren't actually up to anything..).
"It has 18 multimedia keys squeezed into this tiny keyboard to make your surfing even easier." So are they hard to push? Is it easy to find the correct button and only push that one button?
They also didn't mention anything about not having standard cursor keys, insert/delete etc, or the function keys in a seperate row. Is that confusing? I usually find it is.
My laptop has all it's keys squeezed together, and the home/end/insert/delete/pgup/pgdown keys moved all around. It took me a while to get used to it, and now I'm pretty decent on it, but I'm still nowhere near as fast typing and editing on it as on a normal keyboard.
If solaris were available for free, i have a feeling many students would install it on their system, just to more easily use these apps if for nothing else.
Well, you can actually get Solaris for free already.
Spoken like somebody who's never installed Gentoo.:)
indeed.:)
I'm a lazy user, gentoo has just always looked like too much work, and therefor I have no interest. Maybe someday when I'm really bored and get annoyed with debian, I'll give it a go.
Gentoo's install is unbelievably frustrating? [...] Unless you're a setup.exe jockey, and/or you can't read, there is nothing hard about it. 75% of what is on the page is code snippets that can be copy and pasted right into an SSH session.
Uh, thank you for proving his point. No matter how you cut it, copying and pasting code snippets is a pain in the ass (well, not to mention it's fairly difficult to copy and paste to a system that doesn't work yet...). The first time I installed Debian (Woody), I selected "medium" as the question level to use, figuring that I'd like to maintain somewhat strict control over my system. After about the 20th dialog asking me some stupid assinine question, I just started pressing enter to pretty much all of them, accepting defaults, with the reasoning that it would be easier to fix what was broken once I found out it was broken, rather than sit and read through pages and pages of crap I don't really care about or that doesn't even apply to me (of course, you have to read it before figuring that part out).
How hard is it to make a script to do all those actions on that page? Not very.. Though granted, it is a bit more difficult to make a nice installer that recovers from errors and can handle strange situations -- but it's been done before. Debian's new installer for sarge is great. Set it to high question level, and you barely have to touch it and end up with a working system.
Enterprise speaking (or any business, for that matter), it's not worth the performance benefit of compiling cpu-specific code (vs generic 386 code or whatnot) if you have to spend a hell of a lot more hours setting it up. Those hours cost money - and moreso if it's taking away from billable time. On the other hand, hardware is cheap. If it costs more in time than it does to throw a faster CPU or more ram at it to get more speed in the system, then you've lost the benefit.
A solution using an AVR or PIC MCU would not only be cheaper. It would be much more reliable, as it would use less active components.
Obviously you skipped a good majority of my post, where I talked about how it is not cheaper, since you have to develop all this stuff on your own. Time = Money. Employees get paid, and any time people spend doing stuff in house is time that is not billable. On big production runs, where you're making hundreds or thousands of the same device, then yes, using PICs or AVRs would pay off. However, in small quantities, it's not worth it.
In contrast, the LOGO can be programmed with C only.
The LOGO is programmed in IEC 1131-3 function block (or a crappy version of ladder, though it really messes it up and I don't even think it meets the IEC 1131-3 standards). That is a high-level boolean logic-type system. In fact, it looks a lot like how the eBlocks work, except it's all software.
And you have several free options for simulators. I don't know if I should explain how important the possibility to simulate the behaviour of the device really is.
The LOGO, like most PLCs, also has simulators. It also has online debugging, where you can plug into a running LOGO and watch the logic working.
The fact that you're using a significantly less reliable and less testable solution for applications in the chemical industry could get you in trouble.
I don't know why you would assume this. A lot of sites we install this sort of equipment at has to be inspected and approved by engineers. And it gets approved, all the time.
I also pointed all this stuff out already, I don't know why you chose to ignore it. If you build an electronic device, it has to get approved by CE or Hydro or underwriters, depending on how you're using it and what it does. Using an already approved and designed device is a completely diferent story - sometimes it has to pass electrical inspection, but often that doesn't get done (as a business, we of course ensure we meet those standards so it could get approved).
You're trying to tell me that using a self-designed circuit, designing the program at a very low level, and assembling everything from the circuit board up is more reliable than using an already-built device, that just need to be programmed at a high level. Skipping the fact that hydro probably isn't going to approve it, and will require you to go to CE or underwriters (at a signifigant cost) and get them to approve it before they approve the installation.
It just seems like a crazy argument to me. One side, all the electronics work, to be sure it's good for the application, you just have to check the software and the wiring. On the other side, you have to check the electronics (design and physical assembly), the software, and the wiring. And yet, because you saved that $98 on the cost of only the logic bit, its cheaper and a better solution?
They cost about 300 bucks and have less functionality than a $2 AVR or PIC. The only difference is that instead of programming them in C or Assembler, you have a fancy graphical, overly simplistic "programming language".
Obviously you've never worked in the real world. While yes, you could do a lot of this with a PIC, it also means you have a lot more work to do.. design and build a circuit board, put it in an enclosure, get it approved by hydro for installation.
You also have to write a program in a low-level language, which means you introduce the possibility of a lot more bugs, and it will take longer to program. It also wouldn't be field-configurable (the LOGOs can actually be programmed using the built in display, though it's difficult to do anything besides very simple applications - more useful, is the ability to adjust paramters: time values, etc).
The LOGOs cost around $100USD wholesale. So while you'd save $98 there, you also have to account for the circuit board, other electronics (resistors, time crystals, terminal blocks,..), employee time to build them, red tape of getting it approved for installation, and testing. Likely it would cost you quite a bit more, unless you're doing a huge run of the exact same thing. Typically we use these in similar installs, ocasionally having to change the program slightly to suit the exact requirements.
Of course, we also use them in one-off installs, where it's cheaper than putting in a couple of mechanical timers and a relay. Those ones use a custom application, that takes a field tech about 10 minutes to write and load before going onsite.
if you want your hour to actually be an hour.. and be even remotely close to an hour, usually it's going to mean cutting songs while vocals are still going
Well, that I can understand. But why the need to be so 'on the hour'? What's wrong within 2-3 minutes? If you're doing all live content, I don't see how this is a such a big deal, as long as your format lets you get away with it (ie, put yourself across as a laid-back station).
block 1 plays 3 times today.. block 2 plays 3 times tomorrow, etc.
This is something else I've noticed on that repetative pop station I mentioned. They often play the same order of songs. I guess that's exactly what it is, programming blocks.
I don't really know what the answer to this is, besides maybe allow the programmer more time to program:)
a local station manager told me he can get away with about 8-10 days of the same block before his listeners get hip.
I guess it depends on who the listener base is, I get 'hip' to this fairly quickly..
This reminds me very much of programming a cheap (quasi-)PLC (programmable logic controller) we use at work often: a Siemens LOGO (pdf link). Basically, it's a device that has a bunch of inputs (8 digital, or 6 digital / 2 analog), and some outputs (4 digital), and contains a bunch of logic gates, comparators, and timers. You can make fairly sophisticated control systems using these.
We use them, for example, to control chemical injection systems. They have overrides based on filters backwashing, timers to dose to keep the pumps if they haven't run for a while, timers to prevent them running too long, etc. It's pretty endless what you can do, and these are only the lowest level of entry into the world of automation and PLCs.
Take the eBlock logic and timer modules, make them all software, and you have a LOGO. You still need the sensors and controls/outputs, but you can make some fairly complex programs involving hundreds of blocks, without the size of using hundreds of blocks.
The eblocks are a neat idea for educational purposes, but I'd see people quickly moving up to small PLCs (like the LOGO). They also definately don't have any use in industrial applications, though I don't know if that was the intent or not.
a lot of times, stations use what are called "sweepers" to transition between unlike music.
rock song -- sweeper -- rnb song
I notice though that a lot of stations do this (here, at least) even for mixable music. It's almost just like they're too lazy to actually put effort into mixing, so they just play the sweeper to do the work (or maybe it's automated?)
The other thing I've found increasingly bad, recently, is the tendency to cut off the end of songs. During the end of a song, sometimes before it's even starting to fade out, they seem to do a cold cut very early, often in the middle of vocals. It sounds very bad, and it's just one of the things that makes me get annoyed at radio even more.
It's really at the point that I listen to CDs 99+% of the time in my car. We have one semi-decent rock station, which I listen to in the morning (good morning show), but during the day it mostly plays older stuff (70's 80's) on a repeating schedule (ie, you'll hear the same songs in rotation for a few weeks at a time.. like they do for new songs, except these aren't).
There's one pop/hiphop station, but it plays a lot of bad music (seriously, some songs it plays, I have no idea where they come from.. I've never heard them before, and I never hear them played anywhere else. Definately not stuff that would ever get on the charts), and is pretty much the poster child for how to repeat the #1 song 15 times a day (no joke).
There's a couple stations that have just converted to country - one was my favourite station, which played only 90s+ rock/alternative, and had a very cool format. Country is my least-favourite type of music, so I don't listen to those at all:)
So maybe it's just where I live, but seriously, radio is going downhill.
I reccommend Firefox to every single person I know.
Me too. And so far, everyone that's switched has loved it - including completely non-technical users.
You can go into the Preferences menu and have it ask you if you want to accept a cookie. I deny cookies unless I know I'm going to need them to log in, like to slashdot. Like this, I've been free for a long time.
You know, this is something that is a kind of strange thing. I'm more annoyed by the message coming up asking if I'd like to accept the cookie or not than I am just having a cookie get stored. It's not like it's useful for anything. They can't pop-up advertising. They can't have it interact with spyware on my computer (since there isn't any). They don't actually know anything about me, other than the sites I visit they have tracking on. They can use it to display ads on the web page that are more tailored to me.
They can't link that information up with my real name, unless they gather it from a site somewhere. And I'm not going to be entering my real name or address or other details on random websites. So who cares? They can collect all the stats on this random person (me) they want, and sit there and do nothing with them. In fact, they're probably collecting stats on all 3 of me, from my home pc, laptop, and work pc.
Yeah, that is my tinfoil hat in the crumpled ball in the corner.
Radio programmers mark certain slow-paced songs as "do not play in the morning drive" because nobody wants to be put back to sleep while driving to work.
I ocasionally work as a DJ, and this reminds me of something similar I was taught. I don't think radios do this as much - or at least, it's maybe not noticable from being interrupted with commercials and station id's - but it's something I do all the time listening to music at home.
Basically, play music in sets. You play a slow or downish song, and slowly build up into more energy over say 3-8 songs, and then drop back down again, basically going in waves. If you're going to jump genres, use connecting songs to switch (ie, going from rock to hiphop, you might play a fairly hard-rock song (at the top of the wave), move to something in the middle, play something of a rock-hiphop cross (Kazzer - When it rains it pours, off the top of my head), then play slow hiphop, and move up.
It makes the music 'flow', and, to me at least, makes a nicer listening experience.
I also don't really use random, but I pick semi-randomly from my collection and order them as I go. Something this article doesn't really point out is that while random CAN make interesting and good song orders, it can also (and IMO, more often) make bad selections, and play songs that don't sound good together. Maybe this is more important when you listen with crossfading (as I usually do), but it still bothers me anyways.
I found after 1st year university, I watched way less television. I didn't have one in my room (the people who did could only get maybe 1 channel with rabbit ears - no cable). The only way to watch was to go to the TV room on the floor, and we really didn't do that much.
After I moved back home, I just didn't watch that much TV anymore, because I was used to not watching.
Of course, my watching of movies went up dramatically, but what can you do.
Well if you want to download several install CDs, try to hunt down drivers, and edit a bunch of.CONF files, yeah you could do that.
The last time I installed linux, I did it with one CD, no hunting of drivers (since all my hardware is compatible - I buy it that way) and maybe a tiny bit over 5 minutes time interacting, with a total install that took maybe 1 hour (I have no idea really as I wasn't paying attention). That was using a net-install Debian CD, in case you're wondering, where it downloads the latest versions of whatever it needs.
The last time I installed Windows, it took 2 CDs (Windows and Motherboard drivers - and that driver CD was only one CD because the motherboard had onboard lan/video/sound). About 30 minutes interactive time (many small 1-2 minute waits, just to click next and then wait some more), and probably about 45-60 minutes total.
Then I spent about an hour, mostly interactive time, running windows update to apply service packs, wait to reboot, etc. I also spent a lot of time downloading and installing all the necessary programs to get a usable system - PDF reader, Firefox, Thunderbird, Winzip, Winamp.
I think the installation of linux has been beating windows for a long time now. Obviously if you have non-supported or bleeding edge hardware, it's going to be more difficult. Sure, most things come with windows drivers now, as hardware manufacturers see the marketshare and know they have to write drivers. It wasn't always that way, there was a time when you had to be careful to get Windows-supported hardware.
Once the linux marketshare increases, there will be more and more hardware that comes with native linux drivers. Eventually it will get to a point where that is standard, and you don't have to think about it anymore, like it is with windows now.
But to think that installing a modern linux distribution is complicated is just being ignorant.
It appears the argument is that but for the distribution of the patch, there woudn't have been an exploit. I don't know how often that is true, if ever. But it does appear worth investigation.
Maybe for closed-source software, but in the case of open-source, the hackers could just as easily follow bugtraq or the project's mailing list, see the discussion of creating the patch, and develop an exploit from there, before the patch is deployed.
Wasting their space to make a point about privacy is like spamming a mailing list becasue you don't like the admin's rules - trying to force your viewpoint on a community that has agreed to live by a set of rules that you don't agree with.
Either do I. In fact, the first thing that comes to mind is that the domains that start actually showing up in email will become random. This introduces a bit of additional cost to the spammer, but if that's the only way to survive, they'll do it.
They could also use IPs, but this would become even more of a pain for them since it's harder to get IPs. If you start doing blocking for the random domain names by resolving the IP, and banning based on that, you're going to get into pretty much the same situation as the RBL's get in now: blocking legitimate sites, that happen to be on the same subnet/server as a spammers site (think co-location and ISP hosting).
Another way to defeat this method would be to hack web servers, and put on files that redirect to the desired site. This has a lot of implications - legal and technical - but again gets into the same situation as before where blacklisting the site in the email would blacklist legitimate sites.
Interesting idea, but definately not the silver bullet.
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An interesting thing I've noticed is this shift in some places to installing shared libraries such as mfc42.dll to the program's installation directory, eliminating the need to touch C:\Windows at all and avoiding DLL hell at the expense of file space.
The big problem here is that if you have a vulnerability or bug in a shared library, you now have to wait for the vendors/maintainers of every package to upgrade everything. With shared libraries, you can just upgrade the library and all is well (obviously this would be a problem on windows..).
Personally, I like the way apt handles this. You can apt-get install firefox, and it downloads all the libraries and such it needs. If a library gets upgraded, every package using it gets upgraded. Of course, this doesn't solve the problem of breaking BC, but this is less of a problem in the OSS world, where certain companies change their API's with no notice to most people, breaking many (competing) apps that rely on something...
Do you honestly expect your backup provider to cover you in the event of a gamma ray burst in the stellar neighbourhood which vapourizes half the planet within 5 minutes? An extreme example to be sure, but 100% coverage is not realistic, nor is it financially desirable.
.. :)
Interesting example
The first thing I thought of was what happens when some idiot at the client company shuts off the backup program on their side? The backup company can't do anything about it - besides maybe notice the backup didn't take place and call them - even then, say it happens on a Friday.. they're likely not going to be backed up all weekend. Office burns down, and there's an old backup.. the backup company can't be held responsible for that.
writing messages to a DJ in a noisy club. I currently request songs by holding up my phone as close as possible, but that isn't always readable.
;)
A lot of times, if you can't talk to the DJ, it's because they don't give a shit about what songs you want to hear
Granted, some clubs are setup in ways where you can't get near them, but there are also a lot of DJs that just don't take requests (I'm not quite sure why).
Look, placing GUI interfaces on lots of stuff is OK if it streamlines your operation of the device, but the phone companies and even automobile manufacturers are using lousy GUI interfaces to perform simple tasks.
Maybe it's just the programmer in me, but there are many MANY device that I look at and think "wow, I could design such a better interface for that..". Even on my phone, there's a few tiny things I'd like to change (defaults, the dictionary for T9 input, placement of some menu items) but can't. A lot of things are trivially menu options, but probably left out because it would make menus too long and complicated looking.
It would be nice if these developers used open source, and let people modify firmware on their phones or other devices. But I'll just go back to my day dreaming now..
The confusion arises when Mac/Windows people arrive and want to bring their habits with them. This is completely natural. However, there has been and will continue to be strong resistance (I'll lead it myself if needs be ;) to abandoning those of us who think that highlight, middle click is vastly superior.
;) ) but at the same time, not being able to do something as fundamental as select a block of text and delete it without erasing your buffer is silly. One of the nice things about a GUI for text editing is the fact that you can select a large block of text very quickly and delete it.
I'm getting used to the highlight, middle click method - it's very useful for terminals, espessially - but it's still inferiour. The biggest problem is that you can't select a chunk of text and then delete it and paste what's in the clipboard on top. There was another reply in this thread saying that there should be one more action beyond highlighting to copy - I totally agree.
The other method would be to drop that altogether and realize that the keys like ctrl+c, ctrl+v work well. It could even be a totally different method soas not to confuse ctrl+c with break (although, really, terminal is the only place this is affected, and terminals should implement a totally non-standard method - highlight to copy, middle click to paste - because they're non-standard compared to a GUI).
But trying to copy the familliarity of windows (and this goes beyond just copy/paste) but not implementing it 100% is just plain dumb. It makes convertees annoyed, since it appears 'broken'.
I somewhat agree that using the mouse only for copy/paste (as a fundamental operation) is a good thing (even though you were trolling
Of course, the vim people will argue that you can do something similar in vi -- but only lines, or multiple commands (delete to end of line, from beginning, etc) and you still have to count lines to do it. (btw, I love vim.. but editing in a GUI is more productive).
I think a strong argument that you could put forward would be that the current system of manually counting votes is the equivalent of 'open source'. Everyone knows what they do (count votes), and how they do it (by looking at each one and recording the number). I believe you can even watch them do it, if you'd like. Open source is pretty much the equivalent. You can see what the code is doing, and how it's doing it.
3) if it's that fscking expensive, maybe they're introducing too many regs... do without!
Supply and demand. Lawers are expensive because they're needed. If you stop writing laws because it's too expensive, someone will see an opening and offer to write laws for cheaper (since it's better than 0). In order to compete, the rest of the lawyers drop prices accordingly. Eventually, some start to bump them up as they get busier.. rinse and repeat.
Just realize you will be paying 50+ percent of your income to the Fed,
Income tax is based on different levels of income, and while it is fairly high, it's not 50%. You also have to consider other things, like when we get sick, it's paid for, instead of coming directly out of our salary.
will have subpar healthcare (but it is universal)
I'm not sure the health care is really any worse than in the US. At least you don't have to be rich to get health care.
since it is so difficult to fire and hire people
There are laws that protect people from being fired for no reason, if that's what you mean. It's not very hard to hire someone at all.
the Canadians LOVE red tape
As a Canadian, no we don't. Though our politicians sure do..
most people take there jobs WAAAAYY to seriously.
I don't know where you get this from?
Oh and don't forget the French, those whacky French speaking Canadians make the real French seem practically friendly.
I won't directly respond to this point.. but I will say something that you probably won't even relate.
Our media isn't QUITE as sensational as American media. I think people can make up their own minds on who they hate and why..
he could have just as well told them to leave him alone and they would have had to. He agreed to meet with them, so that's that.
Of course, doing this would raise further suspicion, and who knows what depths they'd go to trying to find out what you're up to (which would be hard information to find, if you weren't actually up to anything..).
"It has 18 multimedia keys squeezed into this tiny keyboard to make your surfing even easier." So are they hard to push? Is it easy to find the correct button and only push that one button?
They also didn't mention anything about not having standard cursor keys, insert/delete etc, or the function keys in a seperate row. Is that confusing? I usually find it is.
My laptop has all it's keys squeezed together, and the home/end/insert/delete/pgup/pgdown keys moved all around. It took me a while to get used to it, and now I'm pretty decent on it, but I'm still nowhere near as fast typing and editing on it as on a normal keyboard.
If solaris were available for free, i have a feeling many students would install it on their system, just to more easily use these apps if for nothing else.
Well, you can actually get Solaris for free already.
Spoken like somebody who's never installed Gentoo. :)
:)
indeed.
I'm a lazy user, gentoo has just always looked like too much work, and therefor I have no interest. Maybe someday when I'm really bored and get annoyed with debian, I'll give it a go.
Gentoo's install is unbelievably frustrating? [...] Unless you're a setup.exe jockey, and/or you can't read, there is nothing hard about it. 75% of what is on the page is code snippets that can be copy and pasted right into an SSH session.
Uh, thank you for proving his point. No matter how you cut it, copying and pasting code snippets is a pain in the ass (well, not to mention it's fairly difficult to copy and paste to a system that doesn't work yet...). The first time I installed Debian (Woody), I selected "medium" as the question level to use, figuring that I'd like to maintain somewhat strict control over my system. After about the 20th dialog asking me some stupid assinine question, I just started pressing enter to pretty much all of them, accepting defaults, with the reasoning that it would be easier to fix what was broken once I found out it was broken, rather than sit and read through pages and pages of crap I don't really care about or that doesn't even apply to me (of course, you have to read it before figuring that part out).
How hard is it to make a script to do all those actions on that page? Not very.. Though granted, it is a bit more difficult to make a nice installer that recovers from errors and can handle strange situations -- but it's been done before. Debian's new installer for sarge is great. Set it to high question level, and you barely have to touch it and end up with a working system.
Enterprise speaking (or any business, for that matter), it's not worth the performance benefit of compiling cpu-specific code (vs generic 386 code or whatnot) if you have to spend a hell of a lot more hours setting it up. Those hours cost money - and moreso if it's taking away from billable time. On the other hand, hardware is cheap. If it costs more in time than it does to throw a faster CPU or more ram at it to get more speed in the system, then you've lost the benefit.
A solution using an AVR or PIC MCU would not only be cheaper. It would be much more reliable, as it would use less active components.
Obviously you skipped a good majority of my post, where I talked about how it is not cheaper, since you have to develop all this stuff on your own. Time = Money. Employees get paid, and any time people spend doing stuff in house is time that is not billable. On big production runs, where you're making hundreds or thousands of the same device, then yes, using PICs or AVRs would pay off. However, in small quantities, it's not worth it.
In contrast, the LOGO can be programmed with C only.
The LOGO is programmed in IEC 1131-3 function block (or a crappy version of ladder, though it really messes it up and I don't even think it meets the IEC 1131-3 standards). That is a high-level boolean logic-type system. In fact, it looks a lot like how the eBlocks work, except it's all software.
And you have several free options for simulators. I don't know if I should explain how important the possibility to simulate the behaviour of the device really is.
The LOGO, like most PLCs, also has simulators. It also has online debugging, where you can plug into a running LOGO and watch the logic working.
The fact that you're using a significantly less reliable and less testable solution for applications in the chemical industry could get you in trouble.
I don't know why you would assume this. A lot of sites we install this sort of equipment at has to be inspected and approved by engineers. And it gets approved, all the time.
I also pointed all this stuff out already, I don't know why you chose to ignore it. If you build an electronic device, it has to get approved by CE or Hydro or underwriters, depending on how you're using it and what it does. Using an already approved and designed device is a completely diferent story - sometimes it has to pass electrical inspection, but often that doesn't get done (as a business, we of course ensure we meet those standards so it could get approved).
You're trying to tell me that using a self-designed circuit, designing the program at a very low level, and assembling everything from the circuit board up is more reliable than using an already-built device, that just need to be programmed at a high level. Skipping the fact that hydro probably isn't going to approve it, and will require you to go to CE or underwriters (at a signifigant cost) and get them to approve it before they approve the installation.
It just seems like a crazy argument to me. One side, all the electronics work, to be sure it's good for the application, you just have to check the software and the wiring. On the other side, you have to check the electronics (design and physical assembly), the software, and the wiring. And yet, because you saved that $98 on the cost of only the logic bit, its cheaper and a better solution?
They cost about 300 bucks and have less functionality than a $2 AVR or PIC. The only difference is that instead of programming them in C or Assembler, you have a fancy graphical, overly simplistic "programming language".
.. design and build a circuit board, put it in an enclosure, get it approved by hydro for installation.
..), employee time to build them, red tape of getting it approved for installation, and testing. Likely it would cost you quite a bit more, unless you're doing a huge run of the exact same thing. Typically we use these in similar installs, ocasionally having to change the program slightly to suit the exact requirements.
Obviously you've never worked in the real world. While yes, you could do a lot of this with a PIC, it also means you have a lot more work to do
You also have to write a program in a low-level language, which means you introduce the possibility of a lot more bugs, and it will take longer to program. It also wouldn't be field-configurable (the LOGOs can actually be programmed using the built in display, though it's difficult to do anything besides very simple applications - more useful, is the ability to adjust paramters: time values, etc).
The LOGOs cost around $100USD wholesale. So while you'd save $98 there, you also have to account for the circuit board, other electronics (resistors, time crystals, terminal blocks,
Of course, we also use them in one-off installs, where it's cheaper than putting in a couple of mechanical timers and a relay. Those ones use a custom application, that takes a field tech about 10 minutes to write and load before going onsite.
if you want your hour to actually be an hour.. and be even remotely close to an hour, usually it's going to mean cutting songs while vocals are still going
:)
..
Well, that I can understand. But why the need to be so 'on the hour'? What's wrong within 2-3 minutes? If you're doing all live content, I don't see how this is a such a big deal, as long as your format lets you get away with it (ie, put yourself across as a laid-back station).
block 1 plays 3 times today.. block 2 plays 3 times tomorrow, etc.
This is something else I've noticed on that repetative pop station I mentioned. They often play the same order of songs. I guess that's exactly what it is, programming blocks.
I don't really know what the answer to this is, besides maybe allow the programmer more time to program
a local station manager told me he can get away with about 8-10 days of the same block before his listeners get hip.
I guess it depends on who the listener base is, I get 'hip' to this fairly quickly
This reminds me very much of programming a cheap (quasi-)PLC (programmable logic controller) we use at work often: a Siemens LOGO (pdf link). Basically, it's a device that has a bunch of inputs (8 digital, or 6 digital / 2 analog), and some outputs (4 digital), and contains a bunch of logic gates, comparators, and timers. You can make fairly sophisticated control systems using these.
We use them, for example, to control chemical injection systems. They have overrides based on filters backwashing, timers to dose to keep the pumps if they haven't run for a while, timers to prevent them running too long, etc. It's pretty endless what you can do, and these are only the lowest level of entry into the world of automation and PLCs.
Take the eBlock logic and timer modules, make them all software, and you have a LOGO. You still need the sensors and controls/outputs, but you can make some fairly complex programs involving hundreds of blocks, without the size of using hundreds of blocks.
The eblocks are a neat idea for educational purposes, but I'd see people quickly moving up to small PLCs (like the LOGO). They also definately don't have any use in industrial applications, though I don't know if that was the intent or not.
a lot of times, stations use what are called "sweepers" to transition between unlike music.
.. I've never heard them before, and I never hear them played anywhere else. Definately not stuff that would ever get on the charts), and is pretty much the poster child for how to repeat the #1 song 15 times a day (no joke).
:)
rock song -- sweeper -- rnb song
I notice though that a lot of stations do this (here, at least) even for mixable music. It's almost just like they're too lazy to actually put effort into mixing, so they just play the sweeper to do the work (or maybe it's automated?)
The other thing I've found increasingly bad, recently, is the tendency to cut off the end of songs. During the end of a song, sometimes before it's even starting to fade out, they seem to do a cold cut very early, often in the middle of vocals. It sounds very bad, and it's just one of the things that makes me get annoyed at radio even more.
It's really at the point that I listen to CDs 99+% of the time in my car. We have one semi-decent rock station, which I listen to in the morning (good morning show), but during the day it mostly plays older stuff (70's 80's) on a repeating schedule (ie, you'll hear the same songs in rotation for a few weeks at a time.. like they do for new songs, except these aren't).
There's one pop/hiphop station, but it plays a lot of bad music (seriously, some songs it plays, I have no idea where they come from
There's a couple stations that have just converted to country - one was my favourite station, which played only 90s+ rock/alternative, and had a very cool format. Country is my least-favourite type of music, so I don't listen to those at all
So maybe it's just where I live, but seriously, radio is going downhill.
I reccommend Firefox to every single person I know.
Me too. And so far, everyone that's switched has loved it - including completely non-technical users.
You can go into the Preferences menu and have it ask you if you want to accept a cookie. I deny cookies unless I know I'm going to need them to log in, like to slashdot. Like this, I've been free for a long time.
You know, this is something that is a kind of strange thing. I'm more annoyed by the message coming up asking if I'd like to accept the cookie or not than I am just having a cookie get stored. It's not like it's useful for anything. They can't pop-up advertising. They can't have it interact with spyware on my computer (since there isn't any). They don't actually know anything about me, other than the sites I visit they have tracking on. They can use it to display ads on the web page that are more tailored to me.
They can't link that information up with my real name, unless they gather it from a site somewhere. And I'm not going to be entering my real name or address or other details on random websites. So who cares? They can collect all the stats on this random person (me) they want, and sit there and do nothing with them. In fact, they're probably collecting stats on all 3 of me, from my home pc, laptop, and work pc.
Yeah, that is my tinfoil hat in the crumpled ball in the corner.
Radio programmers mark certain slow-paced songs as "do not play in the morning drive" because nobody wants to be put back to sleep while driving to work.
I ocasionally work as a DJ, and this reminds me of something similar I was taught. I don't think radios do this as much - or at least, it's maybe not noticable from being interrupted with commercials and station id's - but it's something I do all the time listening to music at home.
Basically, play music in sets. You play a slow or downish song, and slowly build up into more energy over say 3-8 songs, and then drop back down again, basically going in waves. If you're going to jump genres, use connecting songs to switch (ie, going from rock to hiphop, you might play a fairly hard-rock song (at the top of the wave), move to something in the middle, play something of a rock-hiphop cross (Kazzer - When it rains it pours, off the top of my head), then play slow hiphop, and move up.
It makes the music 'flow', and, to me at least, makes a nicer listening experience.
I also don't really use random, but I pick semi-randomly from my collection and order them as I go. Something this article doesn't really point out is that while random CAN make interesting and good song orders, it can also (and IMO, more often) make bad selections, and play songs that don't sound good together. Maybe this is more important when you listen with crossfading (as I usually do), but it still bothers me anyways.
I found after 1st year university, I watched way less television. I didn't have one in my room (the people who did could only get maybe 1 channel with rabbit ears - no cable). The only way to watch was to go to the TV room on the floor, and we really didn't do that much.
After I moved back home, I just didn't watch that much TV anymore, because I was used to not watching.
Of course, my watching of movies went up dramatically, but what can you do.
Well if you want to download several install CDs, try to hunt down drivers, and edit a bunch of .CONF files, yeah you could do that.
The last time I installed linux, I did it with one CD, no hunting of drivers (since all my hardware is compatible - I buy it that way) and maybe a tiny bit over 5 minutes time interacting, with a total install that took maybe 1 hour (I have no idea really as I wasn't paying attention). That was using a net-install Debian CD, in case you're wondering, where it downloads the latest versions of whatever it needs.
The last time I installed Windows, it took 2 CDs (Windows and Motherboard drivers - and that driver CD was only one CD because the motherboard had onboard lan/video/sound). About 30 minutes interactive time (many small 1-2 minute waits, just to click next and then wait some more), and probably about 45-60 minutes total.
Then I spent about an hour, mostly interactive time, running windows update to apply service packs, wait to reboot, etc. I also spent a lot of time downloading and installing all the necessary programs to get a usable system - PDF reader, Firefox, Thunderbird, Winzip, Winamp.
I think the installation of linux has been beating windows for a long time now. Obviously if you have non-supported or bleeding edge hardware, it's going to be more difficult. Sure, most things come with windows drivers now, as hardware manufacturers see the marketshare and know they have to write drivers. It wasn't always that way, there was a time when you had to be careful to get Windows-supported hardware.
Once the linux marketshare increases, there will be more and more hardware that comes with native linux drivers. Eventually it will get to a point where that is standard, and you don't have to think about it anymore, like it is with windows now.
But to think that installing a modern linux distribution is complicated is just being ignorant.
It appears the argument is that but for the distribution of the patch, there woudn't have been an exploit. I don't know how often that is true, if ever. But it does appear worth investigation.
Maybe for closed-source software, but in the case of open-source, the hackers could just as easily follow bugtraq or the project's mailing list, see the discussion of creating the patch, and develop an exploit from there, before the patch is deployed.
Wasting their space to make a point about privacy is like spamming a mailing list becasue you don't like the admin's rules - trying to force your viewpoint on a community that has agreed to live by a set of rules that you don't agree with.
:)
Except worse, because no one will ever notice.
I don't see this as the be-all, end-all for spam
Either do I. In fact, the first thing that comes to mind is that the domains that start actually showing up in email will become random. This introduces a bit of additional cost to the spammer, but if that's the only way to survive, they'll do it.
They could also use IPs, but this would become even more of a pain for them since it's harder to get IPs. If you start doing blocking for the random domain names by resolving the IP, and banning based on that, you're going to get into pretty much the same situation as the RBL's get in now: blocking legitimate sites, that happen to be on the same subnet/server as a spammers site (think co-location and ISP hosting).
Another way to defeat this method would be to hack web servers, and put on files that redirect to the desired site. This has a lot of implications - legal and technical - but again gets into the same situation as before where blacklisting the site in the email would blacklist legitimate sites.
Interesting idea, but definately not the silver bullet.