I have two mythtv systems - one is disk-less (mini-itx), running minimyth, which netboots off my main one. It has no tuner card, it streams all content from the main box - and it skips commercials exactly the same as the main one.
I even have the same remote on both. The only difference between using them is the diskless system sometimes has a slight delay when you load the recordings list, or when you first start to play back a recording. I assume its also got a bit of delay changing channels, but I almost never watch live TV.
Agreed. Either it needs BPL or it needs Wi-Fi. Most people don't put an ethernet jack wherever they have a power connection, making this somewhat less than ideal for home automation purposes. I'd also like to see it have a relay to switch on and off a power outlet, but maybe that's just me.
Certainly somewhere in your house you have an ethernet jack near power.. this thing is a server, it doesn't matter WHERE it goes, so long as it is on the same network as anything it needs to connect to. The fact that it is called a "plug computer" and has a form factor that plugs in like a wall-wart is not the draw here - the draw is the low cost, low power consumption, and small footprint.
For home automation, it would be very cool to integrate this into an insteon interface. Then it can control other insteon/X10 devices over that network, and you can tell it to control that stuff by connecting to it over ethernet.
When people check data out though, it has to get stored somewhere. That somewhere might be a local disk, or a USB stick, etc. So those places need to be encrypted if you want to protect against lost/theft.
Your server can be sufficiently protected (physically and virtually) that it does not need the drives encrypted - encryption does not protect against over-the-wire attacks anyways. While it is probably unreasonable to protect EVERY pc from being stolen, it is not unreasonable to protect servers from being stolen - eg, an alarm that goes off way before anyone gets near the server room. 24/7 guards, if you can afford it, etc.
Varying conditions don't count as a scientific (and therefore valid) test, unless you control said conditions.
If the conditions are out of your control (eg, the internet), then your test's outcome doesn't matter, because you can't conclude anything.
In this case, he could have tried to minimize the varying conditions by having a very large sample size - eg, run the speed test at various times throughout the day, and do it every day for 3 months, and then compare the averages. Of course, using different hardware (besides the fact that they were differently configured, one may have been faulty, or had a different revision of a network chip or something) means yet another variable, which again was not properly controlled.
This article is not proving anything besides "at two random times, two different computers downloaded at different speeds on the same internet connection".
Having a standardized DC plug would be a good thing. There could be power bars and UPSes which provide it, and eventually household outlets could have DC sockets, alongside the 120V sockets.
USB would almost be a good choice, but unfortunately it only provides 5V, and 500 mA. Enough to power/charge some small devices, but not everything. PoweredUSB comes a step closer, but it is proprietary and the current is probably still too low to be useful for everything.
A connector/plug like Serial ATA power is probably getting closer to being a good general purpose connector, although the current is again still too low to be useful for things like computers or TVs. The nice thing about SATA power is it provides 3.3V, 5V, and 12V, which covers voltage requirements for most devices. You'd obviously use a cable more suited to the outside world than the typical cables used inside PC cases.
If this connector (or something similar) could be scaled up so it was bigger, and supported higher current ratings, it would probably be ideal.
In your house, alongside your AC breaker panel, you'd have a DC transformer and another breaker panel for it.
There's a whole ton of IPv4 address space that seems to be allocated to people that don't realistically need it. For example, HP, Apples. IBM, MIT, Ford, Digital, Halliburton, GE, Xerox and a bunch more all have/8's. AT&T has two/8's. Do these companies really need 16 million public IP addresses?
I know of many universities that have/16's, and really, same situation - do they really need 65k addresses? Labs, residence PCs, wifi laptops, are all assigned public IPs, and then behind a firewall so nothing is accepted inbound anyways. These systems could easily be assigned private addresses and stuck behind NAT.
Why don't we just tell them they have to justify use of all their IPs, and then in a year or two, subnet the crap out of their space and take over anything they're not using to serve internet-facing services? It would likely free up a few hundred million IPs, extending IPv4 space for a few more years.
On this line of thinking, any deep knowledge in a niche area can be very useful. It's usually rare to come across computer programmers who are also experts in , and as such, in the right place, they are in high demand.
Generally you'll find an expert in a given field, who needs some software to do a task, but has *NO* idea about how to write software, at all. Quite often, these people hire programmers who know basically nothing about the field, and the expert ends up designing the system and being the manager, and often the result is exactly what you'd expect to get when a non-developer designs a system.
Being the person that bridges the gap is incredibly useful. Just make sure that the field is something you have an interest in anyways.
I've personally worked in a few fields like this. To give you an idea, I spent a few years building SCADA software for control systems. This meant I also spent time physically wiring up motors and sensors and such to I/O hardware, and setting up networks and then writing software to communicate with and control all this stuff.
I've also been involved with some open-source voip projects, so a lot of that programming involves talking to voip phones, which meant I had a desk full of hardware to play with, instead of just staring at a screen writing code. It may just be me, but I find a certain satisfaction when I can interact with code I've written using objects in the real world, and not just as interfaces with a screen and keyboard.
It boggles my mind how much time is collectively wasted these days. A 30 second phone call could accomplish what a few minutes each of typing spread out over several minutes does.
I'm 27, and I wouldn't say I hate to text, but I do have a limit. After about 3 messages (eg, someone texts me, I reply, and they reply back) I will just phone them, and accomplish whatever we are trying to in a minute or less.
I do really prefer texts to say, voicemail. It takes me WAY less time to get a text. Texts are also great for those messages that don't warrant a call - eg, "be there in 10".
I guess I probably could have read a bit more before responding:
* Smaller people can rotate/spin faster
* Lighter weight makes some maneuvers easier
* Bones are more flexible which can help
* Puberty, for women, adds..ahem.. new weight in new places and throws off balance
Not an advantage, but a safety issue:
* Younger bones are more likely to break, resulting in crippling injuries
Maybe they need weight classes for competition, like in boxing?
What is the correct western action? I actually think it's to embrace the idea that not sending children to the Olympics is a value we find important, and a rule we will adopt for ourselves [...] Of course, the consequence to both ethical actions is fewer gold medals.
I'm sorry.. why is not sending children equated to not winning gold?
Do 14-year-olds have superior gymnastics skills or some other advantage compared to someone older (and presumably stronger)? (I'm being serious asking this, I know nothing about gymnastics but it does seem backwards to me). Anyways, certainly this is not true for all Olympic sports.
I've been using it for a small e-commerce site, and it's by far the best online store I didn't write from scratch. From and end-user perspective, it's very easy to use.
What made me initially choose Ubercart over Drupal e-commerce is the checkout process. Two easy features that really can make or break the store: shipping estimate on the cart page (BEFORE entering any personal information besides postal code/country), and not presenting checkout as having to "sign up" for an account (even though the only difference is really entering a password or not).
Drupal is a great platform to build an online store on. First of all, an online store is generally going to be linked into a bunch of content that should be part of the content management system. Maybe you sell widgets, and you have a content page describing the widgets. Doing this all in Drupal makes it dirt simple to have a section on all your widget-related content pages that show all your current widgets products that are on sale/featured/etc. It also lets you link from the widgets products back to a page that talks about what widgets do.
Secondly, it makes products very powerful. Using CCK, you can customize product nodes to have extra fields. For example, if you have a variety of widgets you sell in various lengths, you can create a new "widget" product type, and add a length field to it. Now when someone creates a product, they have a defined place to enter in the length. This shows up consistently on the product page template. It can also show up in product lists, and you can even make search forms that let you search for a specific value.
And the best part is this is all relatively easy. There is certainly a bit of a learning curve to it, but it is worthwhile to learn, as it is a heck of a lot easier to do than writing it by scratch yourself (I'm saying this as a 9+ year professional developer). It's also more flexible in some ways -- for example, if you also need a "width" field on that product, you can just add one with the GUI and then add a tiny bit of code to the product template (if you customized the template).
Could not the "wiz kid" with a few freash ideas garner much more attention in such an envirnoment.
In a manager-heavy company, this is not what happens. If you do happen to come up with a new whiz-bang idea, you pitch it to your manager. He/she pitches it to their manager, and probably takes the credit. And so on up the chain.
If you try to go around the chain, then it really depends on the people involved. A higher-up manager may recognize your efforts and it may pay off. If your manager finds out, they may be pissed off and in the worst case, terminate your employment, or cause enough shit that their manager has to decide it's either your manager, or you.. guess who is probably easier to fire.
Now, this is all idle speculation, but really, if you are looking to 'shine', go do it in the startup or open-source world. In both places you can be directly recognized for your efforts, and that is more likely to lead to either a high-up position and/or lots of stock options (startup), or be the gateway into a great position or even the beginnings of your own startup (open-source), if that is what you want.
Speaking only about the $10 vs $100 certificate - when was the last time you actually looked and checked that a site you were visiting had a "high security" SSL certificate, as opposed to just a certificate that issued no warnings?
Granted, EV certificates at least display the green address bar in current browsers, but it won't be long until all certificates are EV and that it is just as useless as SSL is for identity verification.
I remember applying for an SSL certificate many years ago (1999-ish) and it was a big deal.. had to fax copies of the business license, personal driver's license, etc. to get it approved. Now, you can get a certificate for $10-15, and the whole process takes 5-10 minutes. Eventually CA's will compete on price, and compete on "ease of getting through the process" (eg, less verification), and the whole EV SSL thing will degrade into the $10-15 market you see now for regular SSL.
Who has rights to it? The person on.com? What if it's a squatter, while there is a.org that has a more legitimate claim to the name (but no legal recourse to take over.com)?
You forgot to add that they will do the entire design in Photoshop and then just slice up the image into a giant table. The page will be huge and inaccessable.
This is where someone good at HTML/CSS comes in. The catch is that they have to realize they suck at graphic design, and not try to do any changes - just take the photoshop stuff, and turn it into proper HTML/CSS and chop up the images appropriately.
I sort of see this area as a gradient, that goes from "programmer" to "web developer" to "web designer" to "graphic designer".
At one end, you have programmers that don't understand web technology, who make pages that require explicitly clicking on a "Submit" button instead of being able to press enter in a search box, do POSTs where a POST should not be required, stupid use of URL parameters, sensitive data in cookies, etc. On the other far end, you have graphic designers who don't understand the web at all, and you end up with something ranging from a print brochure migrated to the web, to a site designed entirely in flash for no good reason other than "the transition effects are cool".
Towards the middle, you have programmers that understand web technology, but can't design worth a crap. You can identify these people as the ones that back up their claims that they know how to design websites by saying they know HTML and Photoshop. When they design a site, you get an ugly, but functional site.
You also have the web designers, who came from a graphic design background but maybe understand some HTML. Some of them are the types you just take the nicely-designed-in Photoshop page from and turn it into HTML/CSS, and others know how to do that properly on their own. In my experience most of these people don't try to program at all, but if they do it's the sort of thing that ends up on the dailywtf.
I've also met a couple of people that are very good at both web design and development. Both came from the graphic design side and then learned how to program. I think these people are few and far between, though - even though I'm sure there's a great many people that claim to be here.
I haven't tried 6 yet, but 5.5.1 is certainly one of the slowest programs I've used in recent memory. It often takes a few seconds to switch between documents. If I'm using the code helper popups, I'm constantly waiting several seconds for them to load. Possibly the slowest part is the red underline for syntax errors - you forget a bracket or something, then a few lines later it highlights it, so you go back and fix it. It remains highlighted for another 30 seconds, then finally turns off.
On the same machine, Visual Studio is blazingly fast, and it has all the same interface features. I realize it's not written in Java, but all the Java guys ever say about Java's speed is "it runs just as fast as native code; here watch this algorithm that runs the same speed".
They can turn it up more. If you go to 100% on your volume, a song recorded 'loud', averaging at say -9 dB is going to see much louder on your stereo than a song averaging at -16 dB. (You can only go up to 0dB, at which point the audio is clipping).
The other reason (now), is that everyone else is doing it. If you don't do it, then your record sounds bad compared to everything else.
I used to by Albums for the Songs. Unfortunately not every song is good. Not every song captures the mood as well as the best one, nor do they capture the same mood. Why am I buying these again? I totally agree, and would extend this by saying I am sometimes in the mood to listen to a certain style/mood of music.. for example, when I'm just relaxing getting ready to go to bed, I might want to listen to a bunch of slower/quieter songs, and not the album that goes through a whole range of styles.
* "The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote.... Our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth place of decimals." -- Albert A. Michelson, German-born American physicist, 1894.
* "There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now; All that remains is more and more precise measurement." -- Lord Kelvin, speaking to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1900.
* "We are probably nearing the limit of all we can know about astronomy." -- Simon Newcomb, Canadian-born American astronomer, 1888.
I have a feeling that in 100 years, that list will be much longer, and our children will be laughing at it as we do today.
I happily USE open source stuff because it generally means I never have to PAY the poor souls who spent lifetimes developing all the free and open source software I use for fun and profit. I'm happy to see other people work for me for free, but I can't say I'd ever try it the other way around. It's interesting to see you're actually missing the big picture here. Have you ever filed a bug report (or talked on forums about a possible bug, etc)? Have you suggested features? Have you posted any documentation? Have you ever helped other users with software?
All of these things are contributing back, and ultimately making the software better. Generally the people writing open source software are also using that same software, and they are most certainly benefiting from other users doing testing, finding bugs, coming up with feature ideas.
The local cable company where I live is a great example of this. If you call as a residential customer with a problem, you wait on hold for several minutes, and then it's: reboot your PC, reboot your modem, "we don't support routers", check your network settings... Even if you tell them the "Sync" light is off indicating there is no upstream link. They seem to have a culture of assuming their network is infallible and the problem is always the customer (and Ok, it's residential ISP support - I can understand most problems probably ARE the customer, but they also have to realize that some of their customers are, for example, programmers and network technicians who, strangely enough, have internet at home).
Calling as a corporate customer, every time I've called they answer immediately (there's a different number for business vs residential). All I have to say is eg, "the sync light is off, I have no connectivity", they go on hold for a minute and come back saying "ok, there's an outage in your area, technicians are working on it now, they expect it to be repaired in an hour". The fact that our office router is a linux system doesn't bother them at all. I imagine if I were to tell them that as a residential customer, they would simply say "oh, it must be linux then, try installing windows" or something like that (it's the easy way out).
(Note, I don't use this company at home, I use another local reseller - same service, but their tech people are much nicer to deal with)
You pull out your gun and see 15 other people with guns. Who do you shoot? I don't shoot anyone for holding a gun. I only shoot if I see someone shooting unarmed students. Do you trust that everyone else has that same mentality?
What happens if you see someone with a gun shoot someone else with a gun, then turn and point their gun at another guy with a gun? Is that person the original shooter, or did they just kill the original shooter? Should you shoot that person to protect everyone else in case they are the original shooter? What happens if you're the person they point their gun at next, do you shoot them because they just shot someone else and now they're about to shoot you? Or do you lay down your gun because they're just confused because you still have your gun out after they shot the original shooter?
Oh yes, and did I mention, you have approximately 1/2 a second to evaluate and answer the above questions.
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I have two mythtv systems - one is disk-less (mini-itx), running minimyth, which netboots off my main one. It has no tuner card, it streams all content from the main box - and it skips commercials exactly the same as the main one.
I even have the same remote on both. The only difference between using them is the diskless system sometimes has a slight delay when you load the recordings list, or when you first start to play back a recording. I assume its also got a bit of delay changing channels, but I almost never watch live TV.
Certainly somewhere in your house you have an ethernet jack near power.. this thing is a server, it doesn't matter WHERE it goes, so long as it is on the same network as anything it needs to connect to. The fact that it is called a "plug computer" and has a form factor that plugs in like a wall-wart is not the draw here - the draw is the low cost, low power consumption, and small footprint.
For home automation, it would be very cool to integrate this into an insteon interface. Then it can control other insteon/X10 devices over that network, and you can tell it to control that stuff by connecting to it over ethernet.
When people check data out though, it has to get stored somewhere. That somewhere might be a local disk, or a USB stick, etc. So those places need to be encrypted if you want to protect against lost/theft.
Your server can be sufficiently protected (physically and virtually) that it does not need the drives encrypted - encryption does not protect against over-the-wire attacks anyways. While it is probably unreasonable to protect EVERY pc from being stolen, it is not unreasonable to protect servers from being stolen - eg, an alarm that goes off way before anyone gets near the server room. 24/7 guards, if you can afford it, etc.
Varying conditions don't count as a scientific (and therefore valid) test, unless you control said conditions.
If the conditions are out of your control (eg, the internet), then your test's outcome doesn't matter, because you can't conclude anything.
In this case, he could have tried to minimize the varying conditions by having a very large sample size - eg, run the speed test at various times throughout the day, and do it every day for 3 months, and then compare the averages. Of course, using different hardware (besides the fact that they were differently configured, one may have been faulty, or had a different revision of a network chip or something) means yet another variable, which again was not properly controlled.
This article is not proving anything besides "at two random times, two different computers downloaded at different speeds on the same internet connection".
Having a standardized DC plug would be a good thing. There could be power bars and UPSes which provide it, and eventually household outlets could have DC sockets, alongside the 120V sockets.
USB would almost be a good choice, but unfortunately it only provides 5V, and 500 mA. Enough to power/charge some small devices, but not everything. PoweredUSB comes a step closer, but it is proprietary and the current is probably still too low to be useful for everything.
A connector/plug like Serial ATA power is probably getting closer to being a good general purpose connector, although the current is again still too low to be useful for things like computers or TVs. The nice thing about SATA power is it provides 3.3V, 5V, and 12V, which covers voltage requirements for most devices. You'd obviously use a cable more suited to the outside world than the typical cables used inside PC cases.
If this connector (or something similar) could be scaled up so it was bigger, and supported higher current ratings, it would probably be ideal.
In your house, alongside your AC breaker panel, you'd have a DC transformer and another breaker panel for it.
There's a whole ton of IPv4 address space that seems to be allocated to people that don't realistically need it. For example, HP, Apples. IBM, MIT, Ford, Digital, Halliburton, GE, Xerox and a bunch more all have /8's. AT&T has two /8's. Do these companies really need 16 million public IP addresses?
I know of many universities that have /16's, and really, same situation - do they really need 65k addresses? Labs, residence PCs, wifi laptops, are all assigned public IPs, and then behind a firewall so nothing is accepted inbound anyways. These systems could easily be assigned private addresses and stuck behind NAT.
Why don't we just tell them they have to justify use of all their IPs, and then in a year or two, subnet the crap out of their space and take over anything they're not using to serve internet-facing services? It would likely free up a few hundred million IPs, extending IPv4 space for a few more years.
On this line of thinking, any deep knowledge in a niche area can be very useful. It's usually rare to come across computer programmers who are also experts in , and as such, in the right place, they are in high demand.
Generally you'll find an expert in a given field, who needs some software to do a task, but has *NO* idea about how to write software, at all. Quite often, these people hire programmers who know basically nothing about the field, and the expert ends up designing the system and being the manager, and often the result is exactly what you'd expect to get when a non-developer designs a system.
Being the person that bridges the gap is incredibly useful. Just make sure that the field is something you have an interest in anyways.
I've personally worked in a few fields like this. To give you an idea, I spent a few years building SCADA software for control systems. This meant I also spent time physically wiring up motors and sensors and such to I/O hardware, and setting up networks and then writing software to communicate with and control all this stuff.
I've also been involved with some open-source voip projects, so a lot of that programming involves talking to voip phones, which meant I had a desk full of hardware to play with, instead of just staring at a screen writing code. It may just be me, but I find a certain satisfaction when I can interact with code I've written using objects in the real world, and not just as interfaces with a screen and keyboard.
Funny, I was about to post this same message.
It boggles my mind how much time is collectively wasted these days. A 30 second phone call could accomplish what a few minutes each of typing spread out over several minutes does.
I'm 27, and I wouldn't say I hate to text, but I do have a limit. After about 3 messages (eg, someone texts me, I reply, and they reply back) I will just phone them, and accomplish whatever we are trying to in a minute or less.
I do really prefer texts to say, voicemail. It takes me WAY less time to get a text. Texts are also great for those messages that don't warrant a call - eg, "be there in 10".
Think so? Watch the video linked here:
http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/NEZeWb0ZS-w/article.pl
I guess I probably could have read a bit more before responding:
* Smaller people can rotate/spin faster ..ahem.. new weight in new places and throws off balance
* Lighter weight makes some maneuvers easier
* Bones are more flexible which can help
* Puberty, for women, adds
Not an advantage, but a safety issue:
* Younger bones are more likely to break, resulting in crippling injuries
Maybe they need weight classes for competition, like in boxing?
What is the correct western action? I actually think it's to embrace the idea that not sending children to the Olympics is a value we find important, and a rule we will adopt for ourselves [...] Of course, the consequence to both ethical actions is fewer gold medals.
I'm sorry.. why is not sending children equated to not winning gold?
Do 14-year-olds have superior gymnastics skills or some other advantage compared to someone older (and presumably stronger)? (I'm being serious asking this, I know nothing about gymnastics but it does seem backwards to me). Anyways, certainly this is not true for all Olympic sports.
I've been using it for a small e-commerce site, and it's by far the best online store I didn't write from scratch. From and end-user perspective, it's very easy to use.
What made me initially choose Ubercart over Drupal e-commerce is the checkout process. Two easy features that really can make or break the store: shipping estimate on the cart page (BEFORE entering any personal information besides postal code/country), and not presenting checkout as having to "sign up" for an account (even though the only difference is really entering a password or not).
Drupal is a great platform to build an online store on. First of all, an online store is generally going to be linked into a bunch of content that should be part of the content management system. Maybe you sell widgets, and you have a content page describing the widgets. Doing this all in Drupal makes it dirt simple to have a section on all your widget-related content pages that show all your current widgets products that are on sale/featured/etc. It also lets you link from the widgets products back to a page that talks about what widgets do.
Secondly, it makes products very powerful. Using CCK, you can customize product nodes to have extra fields. For example, if you have a variety of widgets you sell in various lengths, you can create a new "widget" product type, and add a length field to it. Now when someone creates a product, they have a defined place to enter in the length. This shows up consistently on the product page template. It can also show up in product lists, and you can even make search forms that let you search for a specific value.
And the best part is this is all relatively easy. There is certainly a bit of a learning curve to it, but it is worthwhile to learn, as it is a heck of a lot easier to do than writing it by scratch yourself (I'm saying this as a 9+ year professional developer). It's also more flexible in some ways -- for example, if you also need a "width" field on that product, you can just add one with the GUI and then add a tiny bit of code to the product template (if you customized the template).
Could not the "wiz kid" with a few freash ideas garner much more attention in such an envirnoment.
In a manager-heavy company, this is not what happens. If you do happen to come up with a new whiz-bang idea, you pitch it to your manager. He/she pitches it to their manager, and probably takes the credit. And so on up the chain.
If you try to go around the chain, then it really depends on the people involved. A higher-up manager may recognize your efforts and it may pay off. If your manager finds out, they may be pissed off and in the worst case, terminate your employment, or cause enough shit that their manager has to decide it's either your manager, or you.. guess who is probably easier to fire.
Now, this is all idle speculation, but really, if you are looking to 'shine', go do it in the startup or open-source world. In both places you can be directly recognized for your efforts, and that is more likely to lead to either a high-up position and/or lots of stock options (startup), or be the gateway into a great position or even the beginnings of your own startup (open-source), if that is what you want.
Is your department one of the ones that also doesn't resolve (or host http on) domain.edu, instead forcing people to use www.domain.edu?
Speaking only about the $10 vs $100 certificate - when was the last time you actually looked and checked that a site you were visiting had a "high security" SSL certificate, as opposed to just a certificate that issued no warnings?
Granted, EV certificates at least display the green address bar in current browsers, but it won't be long until all certificates are EV and that it is just as useless as SSL is for identity verification.
I remember applying for an SSL certificate many years ago (1999-ish) and it was a big deal.. had to fax copies of the business license, personal driver's license, etc. to get it approved. Now, you can get a certificate for $10-15, and the whole process takes 5-10 minutes. Eventually CA's will compete on price, and compete on "ease of getting through the process" (eg, less verification), and the whole EV SSL thing will degrade into the $10-15 market you see now for regular SSL.
Who has rights to it? The person on .com? What if it's a squatter, while there is a .org that has a more legitimate claim to the name (but no legal recourse to take over .com)?
This is where someone good at HTML/CSS comes in. The catch is that they have to realize they suck at graphic design, and not try to do any changes - just take the photoshop stuff, and turn it into proper HTML/CSS and chop up the images appropriately.
I sort of see this area as a gradient, that goes from "programmer" to "web developer" to "web designer" to "graphic designer".
At one end, you have programmers that don't understand web technology, who make pages that require explicitly clicking on a "Submit" button instead of being able to press enter in a search box, do POSTs where a POST should not be required, stupid use of URL parameters, sensitive data in cookies, etc. On the other far end, you have graphic designers who don't understand the web at all, and you end up with something ranging from a print brochure migrated to the web, to a site designed entirely in flash for no good reason other than "the transition effects are cool".
Towards the middle, you have programmers that understand web technology, but can't design worth a crap. You can identify these people as the ones that back up their claims that they know how to design websites by saying they know HTML and Photoshop. When they design a site, you get an ugly, but functional site.
You also have the web designers, who came from a graphic design background but maybe understand some HTML. Some of them are the types you just take the nicely-designed-in Photoshop page from and turn it into HTML/CSS, and others know how to do that properly on their own. In my experience most of these people don't try to program at all, but if they do it's the sort of thing that ends up on the dailywtf.
I've also met a couple of people that are very good at both web design and development. Both came from the graphic design side and then learned how to program. I think these people are few and far between, though - even though I'm sure there's a great many people that claim to be here.
I haven't tried 6 yet, but 5.5.1 is certainly one of the slowest programs I've used in recent memory. It often takes a few seconds to switch between documents. If I'm using the code helper popups, I'm constantly waiting several seconds for them to load. Possibly the slowest part is the red underline for syntax errors - you forget a bracket or something, then a few lines later it highlights it, so you go back and fix it. It remains highlighted for another 30 seconds, then finally turns off.
On the same machine, Visual Studio is blazingly fast, and it has all the same interface features. I realize it's not written in Java, but all the Java guys ever say about Java's speed is "it runs just as fast as native code; here watch this algorithm that runs the same speed".
Two reasons:
They can turn it up more. If you go to 100% on your volume, a song recorded 'loud', averaging at say -9 dB is going to see much louder on your stereo than a song averaging at -16 dB. (You can only go up to 0dB, at which point the audio is clipping).
The other reason (now), is that everyone else is doing it. If you don't do it, then your record sounds bad compared to everything else.
Someone else posted this in another thread, but it's relevant: http://www.answers.com/topic/failed-predictions
* "The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote.... Our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth place of decimals." -- Albert A. Michelson, German-born American physicist, 1894.
* "There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now; All that remains is more and more precise measurement." -- Lord Kelvin, speaking to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1900.
* "We are probably nearing the limit of all we can know about astronomy." -- Simon Newcomb, Canadian-born American astronomer, 1888.
I have a feeling that in 100 years, that list will be much longer, and our children will be laughing at it as we do today.
All of these things are contributing back, and ultimately making the software better. Generally the people writing open source software are also using that same software, and they are most certainly benefiting from other users doing testing, finding bugs, coming up with feature ideas.
I know! Firefox doesn't even run ActiveX controls, and those awesome search bars that give you free stuff don't even install into it!
The local cable company where I live is a great example of this. If you call as a residential customer with a problem, you wait on hold for several minutes, and then it's: reboot your PC, reboot your modem, "we don't support routers", check your network settings... Even if you tell them the "Sync" light is off indicating there is no upstream link. They seem to have a culture of assuming their network is infallible and the problem is always the customer (and Ok, it's residential ISP support - I can understand most problems probably ARE the customer, but they also have to realize that some of their customers are, for example, programmers and network technicians who, strangely enough, have internet at home).
Calling as a corporate customer, every time I've called they answer immediately (there's a different number for business vs residential). All I have to say is eg, "the sync light is off, I have no connectivity", they go on hold for a minute and come back saying "ok, there's an outage in your area, technicians are working on it now, they expect it to be repaired in an hour". The fact that our office router is a linux system doesn't bother them at all. I imagine if I were to tell them that as a residential customer, they would simply say "oh, it must be linux then, try installing windows" or something like that (it's the easy way out).
(Note, I don't use this company at home, I use another local reseller - same service, but their tech people are much nicer to deal with)
What happens if you see someone with a gun shoot someone else with a gun, then turn and point their gun at another guy with a gun? Is that person the original shooter, or did they just kill the original shooter? Should you shoot that person to protect everyone else in case they are the original shooter? What happens if you're the person they point their gun at next, do you shoot them because they just shot someone else and now they're about to shoot you? Or do you lay down your gun because they're just confused because you still have your gun out after they shot the original shooter?
Oh yes, and did I mention, you have approximately 1/2 a second to evaluate and answer the above questions.