With reports of heat related issues and a heat sink that can get almost too hot to touch after marathon gaming sessions
If 'almost too hot to touch' is below the specs for the processor's operating temperature range...it doesn't matter how hot it feels to the user.
It never ceases to amaze me how people with no training will second-guess the basic competency of others with degrees in their field. Yes, the power supply gets too hot if placed on a rug...but that doesn't mean the xbox itself isn't designed properly. Probably just means that they didn't do a lot of testing in people's homes with the bricks on rugs and such; from what I understand, the problem is pretty rare even if you don't "cool" the brick.
I also love the egotistical "we drive 'em hard" implied in the "marathon gaming" bits- as if they're HARDCORE users who STRESS the xbox beyond its limits. I guarantee Microsoft had units running benchmarks/game demos for WEEKS at a time doing burn-in...
Can someone explain the fuss over "corporate" web logs?
I've always regarded them as nothing more than "friendlier press releases". Also, with only a few cosmetic changes, the usual "recent press releases" page bears a striking resemblence to "web logs"...
Walt is probably one of the most famous PC columnists around, because he's been a columnist for decades. I think most people find he's got his head screwed on right.
I don't know how you got off on the wild tangent about providing support services for home users- that's not what Mossberg is complaining about. He's complaining that the majority of users are getting insecure features that are useless to them. Much of why IE is so insecure is because Microsoft loaded up all this CRAP so enterprises could have a user click a link and get some widget installed onto their machine...or so that an enterprise could roll out a webapp that could be virtually unlimited in how it could mess with the client. Hell, half the time, stuff is set up specifically so the user CAN'T override it, because the IT department doesn't want the user to be able to avoid a virus scan, or somesuch.
Yank it all out, and at the very least TURN IT OFF BY DEFAULT. Let the boys with the enterprise management tools use said tools to build systems with the stuff installed + turned on.
Never trust a DVD writer review that doesn't take into account burn quality and media compatibility.
Ding, thank you. My Plextor external firewire DVD burner, which cost a rather pretty penny, claims to have all sorts of dodads to let it write to virtually everything, even lower quality media. "PowerRec" and some sort of angle adjustment widget, the whole 9 yards. 16x write and so on.
Imagine my surprise when:
It could burn DVD's at 16x but couldn't burn a CD-R, even the Memorex brand Plextor suggests/includes samples of...at speeds over 8x. And even at 8x, it gets 'hung up' quite a bit. No improvement with several other kinds of media, including HP and Sony...it hangs as soon as it starts writing the lead-in, re-seeking and stopping/starting, eventually returning a "media sense error."
It can't read disks anywhere near as fast as it can write them. It'll happily write a 16x DVD. Then when I go to read from it, it starts at what sounds like -almost- 16x, but quickly drops down (and no, I don't mean the usual small variations the drive makes compensating for angular velocity.)
Not exactly what I expected from the drive "techies" all seem to recommend, and the premium end of the market (I think the Sony external drive might have been more expensive, but didn't get as good reviews. How ironic.)
The firmware has been updated about 6-7 times, and each time I've obliged. Most of the time, there's some entry about improving "burn strategy" and "media compatibility", but it still can't burn CD's faster than the 4-5 year old drive in my server box.
HTML is very powerful, but we still can't guarantee that an article will look as nice on everyone else's monitor as it does on the publisher's.
It's not HTML's job to do so. That's the browser's job.
Digital fonts still have a VERY long way to go versus paper printed ones -- kerning and other newspaper processes are not as easy to perform in HTML.
Again, not the job of HTML. Job of the browser. "Kerning" is never adjusted except by font-defined rules; you probably meant tracking, which is increasing or decreasing letter spacing across the board. Tracking and "other newspaper processes" are somewhat specific to the needs (or constrains) of the paper/physical format. I've handled the layout+formatting for a 30 page newsletter, and I use tracking purely to make stuff fit. A 5-10 increase in tracking is almost completely imperceptable to the human eye on 10 pt text, but will help make an article perfectly "fill" its intended space.
I honestly don't see what the fuss is about. Perhaps the problem is that people persist in applying layout concepts for paper to the web, trying to dress up a webpage to look prettier, loosing sight of the fact that it's the content stupid, not the formatting?(emphasis added for irony;-). You can have the prettiest web layout for your newspaper, but if the writing sucks, your facts aren't accurate and your articles are biased- nobody's going to read your news website for very long.
Most newspapers just list articles in sections, and do one-webpage-per-article. Fine by me, and I strongly suspect it's fine for the other billion or so people who read newspaper websites throughout the world. The good ones do inline images matching the article; the so-so ones do images in the same place in every article (ie top, bottom, or in a sidebar.) The worst ones just don't bother at all, unless the article is really important.
I honestly stopped reading the web log entry about a third of the way in because it was whiny and rambling.
bought by the NY Times (no, really)
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Peter Quinn Resigns
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· Score: 4, Informative
What's up with the Boston Globe?
In a move that didn't sit well with many Boston residents, The Globe was bought by the NY Times. Editorial standards, even just on a basic proof-reading level, seem to have gone nowhere but down ever since.
Really a shame, because the Globe's Spotlight Team was (and still is, to some degree) an excellent group; they do in-depth investigative journalism, perhaps comparable in some ways to PBS's Frontline.
Also, if you're in the Boston area and interested in commentary on news stories of the day, tune in @7for Greater Boston, with Emily Rooney on WGBH (Channel 2), with repeats on 44, I think. The "Beat The Press" Friday episode is especially good- a panel of journalists talk about the news media's behavior over the last week. John Carroll(sp?) is a master at amusing introductions. For their end of the year episode (Dec 23, 2005) he did a complete synopsys of the White House/CIA agent leak in the style of "Hollywood Squares", which was hysterical...and very effective. It's currently watchable in quicktime format....look on the left side of the homepage for the link.
and if you recommend Mcafee to your clients with their ActiveX crap, you're not making the informed decsions they pay you to make.
I didn't make the recommendation. I was hired after they were purchased (and I was hired to help with a major production environment roll-out, helping off-load some of the occasional office IT requests on the side), and my boss didn't wish to go with a free solution for antivirus. So IE stayed default, anti-spyware stuff was installed, and users received a strong request to use Firefox whenever possible with a brief explanation why. IE was removed from the toolbar/desktop/start menu.
I'm Director of IT at a good sized company and know what I'm talking about
You all usually think you do. Is that why you recommended uninstalling programs which are necessary to the proper functioning of the machine, and disabling antivirus protection? You're also rather fond of jumping to conclusions, as witnessed above when you assumed I recommended McAfee. I also liked the instant assumptions that I was incompetent. Do you treat your employees this way as well?
By the way, you might want to install the spelling extension for Firefox. You need it.
First thing anybody should do when setting up a Dell is run MSCONFIG, go to Startup, and disable all. Then, reboot, get rid of the annoying warning reminding of what you just did (thank you Windows!), and uninstall MCafee and every frigging Dell app you can find on there.
I'm a little more professional than that, thanks. My client would have been furious for having to pay for additional virus protection when they had bought it with the machines...or furious when all their machines ended up infected...or furious when none of the machines could dock...or from the reduced battery life because the ethernet interface wasn't powered down when not in use...etc. Shockingly, some of the dell-provided utils are useful.
Based on you attitude I'm going to guess you're about 17-18 and have no work-related IT experience and zero consulting experience. Believe it or not, but in the real world we can't just go "ZOMG WINDOWS SUXZORS, USE LINUX N00B!" It just doesn't work that way, and if you don't "get it", well...it's too complex for me to explain here.
I set up a bunch of new Dell laptops and set Firefox to be the default browser.
Much to my chagrin, McAfee (which is pre-installed) has a self-update is almost entirely ActiveX/javascript dependent. It loads about 10 pages in succession, which is rather strange. Even though it "fell down went boom" about 80% of the time in IE because McAfee's servers were continuously overloaded or down (thus resulting IE error pages which you can't continue from- you have to hit 'update' again and wait another 5-10 minutes.)
The incompetence in the decision to use complex ActiveX/javascript bouncing off 10 different pages and a couple webservers...just to check for effing definition updates...is astounding. Do they really not have anyone capable of writing a decent simple Windows 2k/XP program?
We're going from reading to writing the genetic code," he said in an interview.
We have a very bad track record when it comes to "our world" and "technology we invent".
Far as I'm concerned, "God" doesn't enter into it. I don't think we've developed nearly enough of an understanding about our world or microbiology...to even think about this. Our planet is a pretty complex machine, and we're stuck with it for the moment (and to all the escapists, no, I don't want to hear about your colonization ideas. Let's feed, clothe, and shelter our fellow humans before we send the most elite off to establish a "perfect" world...otherwise Earth becomes the home of the poor and disadvantaged.)
Call me crazy, but this sounds even worse than the whole nanomachine "grey goo" problem. "Grey goo" scenarios mostly revolved around incompetence (ie, we know how to design a perfect nanobot but someone skips "step number 54", or keys in an extra zero.) Here, we've got not only incompetence but also "we're not really sure how this all works." Oh, and to top it all off? The little buggers could just spontaneously mutate all on their own, because biology isn't a perfect machine. Lovely!
Mozilla announced an advertisment contest for the Firefox web browser, according to Information Week
Um...why?
Good products don't need advertisements. Bad products- or products indistinguishable from their competitors- need advertisements. When you have a lot of technically clued-in people encouraging friends, family and coworkers to use Firefox...and a market share that is going up...why do they need more?
I just don't get it. Open source isn't about taking over the world, but yet a lot of people seem to think that way. Guys (and gals)...that's exactly what got us in trouble with Microsoft.
Choice and diversity is GOOD, shockingly. What you should be doing is pointing coworkers to lots of different browsers and encouraging open standards support (ie, don't support browsers that have fussy behavior web designers must account for and/or don't support open standards.)
Choice and diversity encourage innovation, and assure users needs are met best. Here's a little parallel- I worked for an advertising agency that was owned by a holding company. The holding company is one of 3-4 of its kind, and together they own a massive percentage of the advertising firms out there. Yet the holding company frequently encourages multiple companies it owns to present proposals to the same client. Why? Better chance at getting one of -their- companies in the door is one reason, but another is that with 4 companies from "The XYZ Group"...well, the client has more selection, there might be a better fit between client and firm, and the client is liable to be happier with whoever they DO pick.
By the way- corporate needs aside, of course...do NOT ram Firefox, or anything else, down a user's throat. They'll quite likely resent it, look for excuses for it to fail or not meet their needs, etc. Where you can, be GENTLE and try to have it be their decision- not yours.
and it's completely useless on OS X because...
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Blender 2.40 Released
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· Score: 3, Informative
...none of the menus work in 10.4.3!* Looks like we'll have to wait for 10.4.4 to be released by Apple, as developer previews of 10.4.4 apparently resolve the issue.
While some people would point the finger at Apple, I find it highly curious that Blender broke so severely (if you read the thread, lots of other things don't work) and far as I know, nothing else did...
Yes, I verified the bug- on my 17" Powerbook (with an NVidia card) none of the menus or popup listboxes appear. If you have a machine with 10.4.3 and an nvidia card, don't bother...yet.
Is that there is a decline in men enrolling in Women's Studies degrees.
"A D in Women's Studies?"
"It wasn't about what I thought it would be."
(The American President.)
Seriously, I can think of nothing more dead-end than a career in "Women's Studies". I've met a couple of women who have majored in such feel-good careers (my personal favorite was the one whose major was "women and sustainability") and are rather pissed with themsleves for doing so. They're usually working secretarial/data entry/retail jobs, and very disenfranchised.
For one thing, ripping an entire CD collection in a row is a great way to ruin your CD drive. Those things have moving parts and they heat up real fast, especially in laptops. I even ruined my desktop's CD drive this way.
This is the stupidest thing I've read on slashdot in a long, long time. Your CD drive "burnt" out because you used it too much? Why have I never heard of anyone else having this problem? Ever? Why has it that in 8 years of IT work, I've never had a user break their CD drive, period?
For another thing, the ripping company only has to rip one copy of each CD and then they store it on a server.
Okay. So why do you have to pay so much for them to go "oh, yup, he's got that CD"? And if they're not actually converting YOUR cd, sounds like false advertising to me.
What is the significance of the 500 parts per million figure in the article? What is the rest of the gas made up of? As a reminder, normal air is 20% oxygen, or 200,000 parts per million.
No more significance than rumors of (insert male celeb)-iffer's breakup, or Jane Whosis on As the World Turns getting a positive on her latest test results, meaning she has to go back into the hospital and lie in bed for a couple episodes.
Seriously, someone strips a screw on some control panel, and it warrants a press release because NASA's general idea of "any press mention is a good press mention" these days, for budgetary reasons.
They really tamed things down in regards to blood and especially so in the sacrafice of Aslan.
With regards to blood, yes, there wasn't much to be seen. However, the scene was immensely drawn out, and kids are just as frightened by imagery as they are blood+gore...
I thought the effects were pretty incredible.
In that I didn't stop enjoying the movie to think, "that's an interesting effect", yes.
However, the Google X'ers at that site actually seemed fairly level headed. Honestly, for the most part their descriptions make the place sound like a pretty nice place to work!
Again, what evidence do we have that they are who they say they are? Or that anything they're saying is true?
The website shares what went wrong, what went right, and all of the funny happenings in between.
No ScuttleMonkey- it's what a bunch (more specifically: TWO. "Doug" and Ron") of ex-employees think went wrong, think went right. I've seen ex-employee websites/mailing lists and been on them. They're petty, rarely accurate (I saw wild claims made I knew were false) and so on.
I am no fan of Google, but why is anyone giving ANY credence to what two guys have to say? I see nothing to verify they are who they say they are.
Because when one of these comes crashing through the window, the bad guys are just going to say: "Huh, I wonder what that was. Oh well." And then leave it alone. Right.
Here's the scenario I envisioned.
SWAT guy 1 *lobs ball*
*crash*
SWAT guy 2: "Hmm, let's see, I see what looks like the barrel..."
*BAM*
"Nevermind."
And living at the front of the velvet rope line means the big bloggers are frequently pitched and wooed.
Companies place at the front of the line whoever talks about their product or service in the most flattering ways. "Web loggers" are well known for floofy, heavily biased stuff- and they don't have all that training in nasty things like ethics that get in the way of corporate agendas. Further, I'd guess the percentage that report to an editor to be in the realm of less than 1%, and I'd guess that 90% of that 1% are "mainstream" journalists working for "mainstream" media.
I find it absolutely no surprise they're placed in front of journalists.
And no, "web loggers" are NOT journalists. Journalists CAN have a "web log"- there's a very important distinction there. "Web loggers" love to complain about "traditional" or "mainstream" media and often compare themselves to "mainstream" media figures nobody takes seriously, in an attempt to legitimatize themselves. The extent to which they willfully discredit a profession is absolutely atrocious. When was the last time you hear someone complain about "mainstream" mechanical engineers, for example? There is a reason we educate people in professional fields and place stock in those educations. They're not infallable, but far as I can tell- they're a lot more reliable and trustworthy than the "web logging" community as a whole. For example, I've found numerous instances of "web log" entries linked to by slashdot which have had circumstantial ties to the subject of the entry- usually some company's product. Another linked posting was by a guy who was closely tied to an "online marketing expert." I think there is quite a bit of astroturf in the "web log" arena- much more so than in "mainstream" media, I'd bet.
IMHO, journalists are people who go to school and study it, train under the wing of a mentor, and report to an editor. Bloggers are "some Joe with a webpage."
The radio industry could find itself at the kids' table in the media banquet hall, as new technology threatens the business
Could? Try "already have". Every time I get in the car, I listen to the radio for exactly as long as it takes for the radio to load the cassette adapter for the iPod. Funny that usually the 2-3 seconds of radio I hear each time are...either a DJ, or a commercial. I got an mp3 player for christmas back in '99 primarily because I was tired of spending most of my commute listening to commercials, if I wasn't listening to NPR news.; the iPod finally made it practical. So cry me a river for the radio industry which is NOW realizing a market correction that started at least 2-3 years ago.
XM/Sirius is complete garbage; a relative has Sirius in his car, and it drops out all the time; tree cover, bridges, tall buildings. The audio quality is atrocious; the casette adapter for my iPod may eat low and high frequencies...but even a 128kbit mp3 through the casette adapter sounds better than Sirius. Plus it doesn't address any issues except the commercials- it's still crap other people want you to listen to, and not crap you want to listen to:-)
About the only thing worthwhile on radio right now is NPR; the news is superb, and the stuff during the weekends is usually pretty good too (I'm a fan of the old-school radio quiz shows.)
Not bad, but when do we get the ability to make confguration changes with restarting Apache?
I would personally settle for a configuration file format which isn't confusing, poorly organized, and often times not parsed correctly (ie, apache doesn't do what the docs imply). See Why I Hate the Apache Webserver, which was a presentation at ApacheCon Europe.
Apparently everything the author pointed out was promptly forgotten or ignored.
Last time I posted about this, someone accused me of advocating "dumbing down" or stripping functionality out of Apache to make it easier for idiots to configure. That's NOT the point at all, and "easy to configure" does not mean "dumbed down" or "stripped down". Postfix, for example, is just as powerful as sendmail but miles easier to configure.
PCs don't always make a lot of sense, especially if you need 40'000 of them:-) [snip]especially Sun's Sun Ray technology
Thin clients make even less sense, especially for that large an installation. They need far more network resources and if anything network-related goes down, the employee is left twiddling their thumbs. If you pay your employees $15/hour (I seriously hope you pay them more than that), 1 minute of downtime for 40,000 people costs you +$15k. 3 minutes downtime, and you just paid for someone to help handle the "complexities" of managing "real" computers.
The thin client model sucks because it turns random failures into massive failures- and nobody at Sun has had to be in the IT department when EVERYBODY'S computer stops "working". The phones catch on fire.
Any and all cost savings are most likely eaten up by the leap in service level requirements, not to mention the need to push application data around the network. The assumption by Sun is that your network has nothing else running on it and can handle throwing around java binaries around. Last time I checked, most of the data on corporate networks is stuff like print jobs, email/Outlook, file transfer, and web.
Slashdot Mirror
If 'almost too hot to touch' is below the specs for the processor's operating temperature range...it doesn't matter how hot it feels to the user.
It never ceases to amaze me how people with no training will second-guess the basic competency of others with degrees in their field. Yes, the power supply gets too hot if placed on a rug...but that doesn't mean the xbox itself isn't designed properly. Probably just means that they didn't do a lot of testing in people's homes with the bricks on rugs and such; from what I understand, the problem is pretty rare even if you don't "cool" the brick.
I also love the egotistical "we drive 'em hard" implied in the "marathon gaming" bits- as if they're HARDCORE users who STRESS the xbox beyond its limits. I guarantee Microsoft had units running benchmarks/game demos for WEEKS at a time doing burn-in...
I've always regarded them as nothing more than "friendlier press releases". Also, with only a few cosmetic changes, the usual "recent press releases" page bears a striking resemblence to "web logs"...
Walt is probably one of the most famous PC columnists around, because he's been a columnist for decades. I think most people find he's got his head screwed on right.
I don't know how you got off on the wild tangent about providing support services for home users- that's not what Mossberg is complaining about. He's complaining that the majority of users are getting insecure features that are useless to them. Much of why IE is so insecure is because Microsoft loaded up all this CRAP so enterprises could have a user click a link and get some widget installed onto their machine...or so that an enterprise could roll out a webapp that could be virtually unlimited in how it could mess with the client. Hell, half the time, stuff is set up specifically so the user CAN'T override it, because the IT department doesn't want the user to be able to avoid a virus scan, or somesuch.
Yank it all out, and at the very least TURN IT OFF BY DEFAULT. Let the boys with the enterprise management tools use said tools to build systems with the stuff installed + turned on.
Ding, thank you. My Plextor external firewire DVD burner, which cost a rather pretty penny, claims to have all sorts of dodads to let it write to virtually everything, even lower quality media. "PowerRec" and some sort of angle adjustment widget, the whole 9 yards. 16x write and so on.
Imagine my surprise when:
Not exactly what I expected from the drive "techies" all seem to recommend, and the premium end of the market (I think the Sony external drive might have been more expensive, but didn't get as good reviews. How ironic.)
The firmware has been updated about 6-7 times, and each time I've obliged. Most of the time, there's some entry about improving "burn strategy" and "media compatibility", but it still can't burn CD's faster than the 4-5 year old drive in my server box.
It's not HTML's job to do so. That's the browser's job.
Digital fonts still have a VERY long way to go versus paper printed ones -- kerning and other newspaper processes are not as easy to perform in HTML.
Again, not the job of HTML. Job of the browser. "Kerning" is never adjusted except by font-defined rules; you probably meant tracking, which is increasing or decreasing letter spacing across the board. Tracking and "other newspaper processes" are somewhat specific to the needs (or constrains) of the paper/physical format. I've handled the layout+formatting for a 30 page newsletter, and I use tracking purely to make stuff fit. A 5-10 increase in tracking is almost completely imperceptable to the human eye on 10 pt text, but will help make an article perfectly "fill" its intended space.
I honestly don't see what the fuss is about. Perhaps the problem is that people persist in applying layout concepts for paper to the web, trying to dress up a webpage to look prettier, loosing sight of the fact that it's the content stupid, not the formatting?(emphasis added for irony ;-). You can have the prettiest web layout for your newspaper, but if the writing sucks, your facts aren't accurate and your articles are biased- nobody's going to read your news website for very long.
Most newspapers just list articles in sections, and do one-webpage-per-article. Fine by me, and I strongly suspect it's fine for the other billion or so people who read newspaper websites throughout the world. The good ones do inline images matching the article; the so-so ones do images in the same place in every article (ie top, bottom, or in a sidebar.) The worst ones just don't bother at all, unless the article is really important.
I honestly stopped reading the web log entry about a third of the way in because it was whiny and rambling.
In a move that didn't sit well with many Boston residents, The Globe was bought by the NY Times. Editorial standards, even just on a basic proof-reading level, seem to have gone nowhere but down ever since.
Really a shame, because the Globe's Spotlight Team was (and still is, to some degree) an excellent group; they do in-depth investigative journalism, perhaps comparable in some ways to PBS's Frontline.
Also, if you're in the Boston area and interested in commentary on news stories of the day, tune in @7for Greater Boston, with Emily Rooney on WGBH (Channel 2), with repeats on 44, I think. The "Beat The Press" Friday episode is especially good- a panel of journalists talk about the news media's behavior over the last week. John Carroll(sp?) is a master at amusing introductions. For their end of the year episode (Dec 23, 2005) he did a complete synopsys of the White House/CIA agent leak in the style of "Hollywood Squares", which was hysterical...and very effective. It's currently watchable in quicktime format....look on the left side of the homepage for the link.
I didn't make the recommendation. I was hired after they were purchased (and I was hired to help with a major production environment roll-out, helping off-load some of the occasional office IT requests on the side), and my boss didn't wish to go with a free solution for antivirus. So IE stayed default, anti-spyware stuff was installed, and users received a strong request to use Firefox whenever possible with a brief explanation why. IE was removed from the toolbar/desktop/start menu.
I'm Director of IT at a good sized company and know what I'm talking about
You all usually think you do. Is that why you recommended uninstalling programs which are necessary to the proper functioning of the machine, and disabling antivirus protection? You're also rather fond of jumping to conclusions, as witnessed above when you assumed I recommended McAfee. I also liked the instant assumptions that I was incompetent. Do you treat your employees this way as well?
By the way, you might want to install the spelling extension for Firefox. You need it.
I'm a little more professional than that, thanks. My client would have been furious for having to pay for additional virus protection when they had bought it with the machines...or furious when all their machines ended up infected...or furious when none of the machines could dock...or from the reduced battery life because the ethernet interface wasn't powered down when not in use...etc. Shockingly, some of the dell-provided utils are useful.
Based on you attitude I'm going to guess you're about 17-18 and have no work-related IT experience and zero consulting experience. Believe it or not, but in the real world we can't just go "ZOMG WINDOWS SUXZORS, USE LINUX N00B!" It just doesn't work that way, and if you don't "get it", well...it's too complex for me to explain here.
I set up a bunch of new Dell laptops and set Firefox to be the default browser.
Much to my chagrin, McAfee (which is pre-installed) has a self-update is almost entirely ActiveX/javascript dependent. It loads about 10 pages in succession, which is rather strange. Even though it "fell down went boom" about 80% of the time in IE because McAfee's servers were continuously overloaded or down (thus resulting IE error pages which you can't continue from- you have to hit 'update' again and wait another 5-10 minutes.)
The incompetence in the decision to use complex ActiveX/javascript bouncing off 10 different pages and a couple webservers...just to check for effing definition updates...is astounding. Do they really not have anyone capable of writing a decent simple Windows 2k/XP program?
We have a very bad track record when it comes to "our world" and "technology we invent".
Far as I'm concerned, "God" doesn't enter into it. I don't think we've developed nearly enough of an understanding about our world or microbiology...to even think about this. Our planet is a pretty complex machine, and we're stuck with it for the moment (and to all the escapists, no, I don't want to hear about your colonization ideas. Let's feed, clothe, and shelter our fellow humans before we send the most elite off to establish a "perfect" world...otherwise Earth becomes the home of the poor and disadvantaged.)
Call me crazy, but this sounds even worse than the whole nanomachine "grey goo" problem. "Grey goo" scenarios mostly revolved around incompetence (ie, we know how to design a perfect nanobot but someone skips "step number 54", or keys in an extra zero.) Here, we've got not only incompetence but also "we're not really sure how this all works." Oh, and to top it all off? The little buggers could just spontaneously mutate all on their own, because biology isn't a perfect machine. Lovely!
Um...why?
Good products don't need advertisements. Bad products- or products indistinguishable from their competitors- need advertisements. When you have a lot of technically clued-in people encouraging friends, family and coworkers to use Firefox...and a market share that is going up...why do they need more?
I just don't get it. Open source isn't about taking over the world, but yet a lot of people seem to think that way. Guys (and gals)...that's exactly what got us in trouble with Microsoft.
Choice and diversity is GOOD, shockingly. What you should be doing is pointing coworkers to lots of different browsers and encouraging open standards support (ie, don't support browsers that have fussy behavior web designers must account for and/or don't support open standards.)
Choice and diversity encourage innovation, and assure users needs are met best. Here's a little parallel- I worked for an advertising agency that was owned by a holding company. The holding company is one of 3-4 of its kind, and together they own a massive percentage of the advertising firms out there. Yet the holding company frequently encourages multiple companies it owns to present proposals to the same client. Why? Better chance at getting one of -their- companies in the door is one reason, but another is that with 4 companies from "The XYZ Group"...well, the client has more selection, there might be a better fit between client and firm, and the client is liable to be happier with whoever they DO pick.
By the way- corporate needs aside, of course...do NOT ram Firefox, or anything else, down a user's throat. They'll quite likely resent it, look for excuses for it to fail or not meet their needs, etc. Where you can, be GENTLE and try to have it be their decision- not yours.
While some people would point the finger at Apple, I find it highly curious that Blender broke so severely (if you read the thread, lots of other things don't work) and far as I know, nothing else did...
Yes, I verified the bug- on my 17" Powerbook (with an NVidia card) none of the menus or popup listboxes appear. If you have a machine with 10.4.3 and an nvidia card, don't bother...yet.
"A D in Women's Studies?"
"It wasn't about what I thought it would be."
(The American President.)
Seriously, I can think of nothing more dead-end than a career in "Women's Studies". I've met a couple of women who have majored in such feel-good careers (my personal favorite was the one whose major was "women and sustainability") and are rather pissed with themsleves for doing so. They're usually working secretarial/data entry/retail jobs, and very disenfranchised.
God forbid someone should step into the marketplace besides google...
This is the stupidest thing I've read on slashdot in a long, long time. Your CD drive "burnt" out because you used it too much? Why have I never heard of anyone else having this problem? Ever? Why has it that in 8 years of IT work, I've never had a user break their CD drive, period?
For another thing, the ripping company only has to rip one copy of each CD and then they store it on a server.
Okay. So why do you have to pay so much for them to go "oh, yup, he's got that CD"? And if they're not actually converting YOUR cd, sounds like false advertising to me.
No more significance than rumors of (insert male celeb)-iffer's breakup, or Jane Whosis on As the World Turns getting a positive on her latest test results, meaning she has to go back into the hospital and lie in bed for a couple episodes.
Seriously, someone strips a screw on some control panel, and it warrants a press release because NASA's general idea of "any press mention is a good press mention" these days, for budgetary reasons.
If you skip down to the section on motherboards, they show that SLI isn't even remotely worth it.
With regards to blood, yes, there wasn't much to be seen. However, the scene was immensely drawn out, and kids are just as frightened by imagery as they are blood+gore...
I thought the effects were pretty incredible.
In that I didn't stop enjoying the movie to think, "that's an interesting effect", yes.
Again, what evidence do we have that they are who they say they are? Or that anything they're saying is true?
No ScuttleMonkey- it's what a bunch (more specifically: TWO. "Doug" and Ron") of ex-employees think went wrong, think went right. I've seen ex-employee websites/mailing lists and been on them. They're petty, rarely accurate (I saw wild claims made I knew were false) and so on.
I am no fan of Google, but why is anyone giving ANY credence to what two guys have to say? I see nothing to verify they are who they say they are.
Here's the scenario I envisioned.
SWAT guy 1 *lobs ball*
*crash*
SWAT guy 2: "Hmm, let's see, I see what looks like the barrel..."
*BAM*
"Nevermind."
Companies place at the front of the line whoever talks about their product or service in the most flattering ways. "Web loggers" are well known for floofy, heavily biased stuff- and they don't have all that training in nasty things like ethics that get in the way of corporate agendas. Further, I'd guess the percentage that report to an editor to be in the realm of less than 1%, and I'd guess that 90% of that 1% are "mainstream" journalists working for "mainstream" media.
I find it absolutely no surprise they're placed in front of journalists.
And no, "web loggers" are NOT journalists. Journalists CAN have a "web log"- there's a very important distinction there. "Web loggers" love to complain about "traditional" or "mainstream" media and often compare themselves to "mainstream" media figures nobody takes seriously, in an attempt to legitimatize themselves. The extent to which they willfully discredit a profession is absolutely atrocious. When was the last time you hear someone complain about "mainstream" mechanical engineers, for example? There is a reason we educate people in professional fields and place stock in those educations. They're not infallable, but far as I can tell- they're a lot more reliable and trustworthy than the "web logging" community as a whole. For example, I've found numerous instances of "web log" entries linked to by slashdot which have had circumstantial ties to the subject of the entry- usually some company's product. Another linked posting was by a guy who was closely tied to an "online marketing expert." I think there is quite a bit of astroturf in the "web log" arena- much more so than in "mainstream" media, I'd bet.
IMHO, journalists are people who go to school and study it, train under the wing of a mentor, and report to an editor. Bloggers are "some Joe with a webpage."
Could? Try "already have". Every time I get in the car, I listen to the radio for exactly as long as it takes for the radio to load the cassette adapter for the iPod. Funny that usually the 2-3 seconds of radio I hear each time are...either a DJ, or a commercial. I got an mp3 player for christmas back in '99 primarily because I was tired of spending most of my commute listening to commercials, if I wasn't listening to NPR news.; the iPod finally made it practical. So cry me a river for the radio industry which is NOW realizing a market correction that started at least 2-3 years ago.
XM/Sirius is complete garbage; a relative has Sirius in his car, and it drops out all the time; tree cover, bridges, tall buildings. The audio quality is atrocious; the casette adapter for my iPod may eat low and high frequencies...but even a 128kbit mp3 through the casette adapter sounds better than Sirius. Plus it doesn't address any issues except the commercials- it's still crap other people want you to listen to, and not crap you want to listen to :-)
About the only thing worthwhile on radio right now is NPR; the news is superb, and the stuff during the weekends is usually pretty good too (I'm a fan of the old-school radio quiz shows.)
I would personally settle for a configuration file format which isn't confusing, poorly organized, and often times not parsed correctly (ie, apache doesn't do what the docs imply). See Why I Hate the Apache Webserver, which was a presentation at ApacheCon Europe.
Apparently everything the author pointed out was promptly forgotten or ignored.
Last time I posted about this, someone accused me of advocating "dumbing down" or stripping functionality out of Apache to make it easier for idiots to configure. That's NOT the point at all, and "easy to configure" does not mean "dumbed down" or "stripped down". Postfix, for example, is just as powerful as sendmail but miles easier to configure.
Thin clients make even less sense, especially for that large an installation. They need far more network resources and if anything network-related goes down, the employee is left twiddling their thumbs. If you pay your employees $15/hour (I seriously hope you pay them more than that), 1 minute of downtime for 40,000 people costs you +$15k. 3 minutes downtime, and you just paid for someone to help handle the "complexities" of managing "real" computers.
The thin client model sucks because it turns random failures into massive failures- and nobody at Sun has had to be in the IT department when EVERYBODY'S computer stops "working". The phones catch on fire.
Any and all cost savings are most likely eaten up by the leap in service level requirements, not to mention the need to push application data around the network. The assumption by Sun is that your network has nothing else running on it and can handle throwing around java binaries around. Last time I checked, most of the data on corporate networks is stuff like print jobs, email/Outlook, file transfer, and web.