lkaos wrote: So you have "sleeping issues" and think that these pills are going to solve it. Because you had them before and now you need them to be able to live your life normally. Um, that's an addiction pal:-)
Then this must be true too:
So you have "pain" and think that these pills are going to solve it. Because you had them before and now you need them to be able to live your life normally. Um, that's an addiction pal:-)
Sorry, but some people do have real sleep disorders (and real chronic, severe pain) and need this kind of drug. It sucks if you're in this position in the first place, but taking the drugs is better than being tired all day because you can't sleep, or being in pain all day due to a chronic condition. Ambien is rarely addictive (unlike the benzodiazepenes like Valium and Xanax), so it's a very good choice for cases like this. Its main downside is that it's still under patent and is quite expensive.
I'm on Ambien right now myself. It's not because of a sleep disorder (I do have sleep apnea, but that's unrelated). It's because I'm on another medication that's sort of "speedy", and the Ambien counteracts that side-effect. It's a bit scary to be taking one drug to counteract the side-effects of another, but I need the first drug and need to be able to sleep too. If I'm really tired at bedtime I don't take the the Ambien, but if I'm not tired I know it's probably because of the other drug and the Ambien fixes it. No big deal, aside from convincing my insurance company to pay for the stuff. They wanted me to take Klonopin, which is addictive.
So, next time you're hungry, don't think food is going to solve it. Work on that food addiction instead!:-)
-- Laura, tired of people throwing the word "addiction" around all the time.
Are the M4-5 releases stable enough for general development use?
Definitely. I've been using M4 for a month or so at work. It's more stable than 2.1.x was, and it has some cool new features. I've played with M5 a bit but haven't switched to it yet. There were some changes to the plugin API in M5, with a few more planned for M6, so it will be a little while before all of the plugins I like will work with 3.0 again. I'll probably try M6 after it comes out in mid-December, because I think some of the plugin developers are waiting for it so they only have to change their plugins once.
I expect retail software geared to the home user will continue to keep the tendancy of shipping flawed, because development often does not take place in a home environment.
In this case, the software is actually more vulnerable in a work environment, because it requires a compromised DHCP server on the local subnet. Most home users would probably notice if you plugged in another computer in their house. It's less likely to be noticed in a corporate environment, at least for long enough to compromise a few servers.
Besides, if it's possible for someone to sneak a compromised DHCP server on your network, you're basically screwed anyway.
it teaches you the best household objects you can use to kill people
My favorite along these lines is Kill Doctor Lucky from CheapAss Games. The goal is to, um, kill Doctor Lucky (and all the other players) on a clue-like board where there are various implements lying about.
>I mean, why couldn't they wait until they were a few miles offshore to go supersonic.
They do. The engines on the Concorde are just damn loud -- it's basically an overgrown fighter jet. F15's fly over my house a few times a week on their landing approach, and they're very loud even at low speeds. This kind of engine doesn't have the normal "whine" of a jet turbine. Instead it's a low-frequency roar that sounds like someone is ripping the sky apart. (There weren't nearly as many noise restrictions on commercial jets back in the days when the Concorde was built.)
> I'm one of those roaming Sun employees now and it actually seems to work quite well
How on earth do you get anything done? I'm very picky about my development environment. Everything has to be just so. The chair and desk have to be adjusted right, or my wrists and back hurt. The monitors (two big 20" LCDs:-) have to be in the right place. The preferences in Eclipse have to be set up to use all that screen real estate so I can see everything all at once. And so on. I wouldn't want to have to recreate all of that every morning. And I certainly wouldn't want to develop on a laptop. It's tolerable, barely, for short periods of time like airplane flights. But if I try to do it for very long it feels like programming underwater. The screen is just too small.
For the last 10 years or so I've had my own office or cube at various companies. Tomorrow I'm going in to work my first day in a new building where I'm going to share an office with two other people. They're nice folks, but I'm dreading it. I'm sure I won't get enough done because of the distractions.
For J2EE, try Eclipse plus the "MyEclipse Enterprise Workbench" plugins. They do a pretty good job of integrating lots of other open-source J2EE plugins into something that's easy to maintain. And at $30/year it's hard to beat.
Unfortunately, he's right. I use a Linux box at work, and it's much more of a hassle for normal "desktop" things than Windows is. Some examples:
Mozilla hangs a lot on Linux (on my box anyway)
I tried switching to Firebird + Evolution. But there's no obvious way to tell Evolution to use Firebird as the default web browser. Supposedly I can do this in the Gnome control panel (even though I'm running KDE!) but that doesn't work.
To generalize, there's no global place where applications can get system setting information. Everything seems to be a "KDE app" or a "Gnome app", and they use different preferences, different printing systems, different font settings, and so on. What a disaster!
Clicking on PowerPoint files in Mozilla doesn't open them in OpenOffice. I have to save the file to a folder, then browse to it with KDE's file manager and double-click it. There's probably a way to make this work, but in my default install of OpenOffice and Mozilla it doesn't.
Linux applications are just plain uglier than most Windows apps, though the new antialiased XFT font stuff helps a lot. And to be fair there are plenty of amateurish, ugly apps for Windows too.
Half the !@#% apps on the system have fonts that start with K. Again, I don't care which window system or toolkit or whatever it was written for. I just want an app that works, looks decent, and has a name I can pronounce.:-)
I'm a software engineer with tons of experience (and I was a Unix admin back in the 4.3BSD days, which dates me). I could figure this stuff out. But I shouldn't have to, because I'm using the machine to try to (gasp!) get work done. Linux is a great server environment, but it's just not ready for the desktop yet. Like the man said, maybe in a few years.
Nonsense. There are perfectly plausible explanations of how various types of flagella evolved, and some single-celled critters that are alive today have structures that are at various points along the proposed evolutionary path. "Irreducible?" I don't think so.
As someone else pointed out, this patent isn't about software updates; it's about preferences and other user settings. You have to read the patent's "Claims" section to know what it covers. They're the only part that really matters.
The scary part of this patent isn't the user settings stuff, it's this claim:
25. A method for asset management using the World Wide Web, comprising:
accessing the World Wide Web through a series of computer-related hardware devices connected to a network;
transferring information regarding each computer-related hardware device in said series of computer-related hardware devices to a remote storage medium;
compiling information related to said series of computer-related hardware devices derived from said information residing on said remote storage medium; and
preparing and disseminating reports compiled from said information.
This seems to cover cases where every computer on a network (say in a corporate IT environment) uploads a bit of information about itself to a server, and then someone prepares a report based on that information. But there must be prior art on this one. And it would be pretty easy to get around this claim anyway -- just poll the machines for information rather than having them upload it to a central server.
> Yeah I know about the corporate licensing, but as an individual user it doesn't make fiscal sense for me to purchase it. Yes, from past work experiences I have thier SA licenses in documents, but I'm trying to be legit as possible and I won't use them
As long as you have a legal license for XP Pro, I don't think it makes sense to worry much about installing a copy of XP Corporate that isn't "legit". Maybe you'd be violating the exact letter of the law, but you'd be complying with the spirit. I do this: I have two copies of XP Pro sitting on the bookshelf unopened, but I installed the corporate version so I wouldn't have to mess with activation every time I touched my hardware. I don't feel at all guilty.
> How does tellme.com fit in here as a company run by geeks?
I agree, mostly. TellMe hasn't really invented any great new technologies that I'm aware of. But they seem to have done a very good job of integration. The Nuance speech engine they use wasn't really ready for prime time, but TellMe managed to build a production-quality system out of it. There's a lot of value in being able to just make things work. That allows TellMe to build the enterprise appliations that seem to bring in most of their money.
They were also among the first in their industry to realize that the consumer-oriented advertising model wasn't going to work and to start going after the enterprise market. They then did a good job of selling into that market, which can be hard to do when you're a startup without much of a track record. The competitor I worked for didn't start switching markets until a year or two later, unfortunately. Now there's maybe an order of magnitude difference in their sizes and maybe their prospects. Though with an initial investment of the size that TellMe had, it's hard to see how they'll ever pay of the VCs and AT&T and make much money for everyone else.
> They got over 200 million in capital
FWIW, the rumor in the industry is that much of that $200 million wasn't cash. A lot of the investment from AT&T was apparently "minutes" and other resources on AT&T's networks, which is still valuable if you're in that business but not quite the same thing.
>even if IBM did do something wrong, they could never, ever be forced to talk about it.
This has been said before, but since your post is way up here at the top of the view, I'll say it again: No. The US constitution protects against self-incrimination in criminal cases. This is a civil case. During the "discovery" phase of a civil case, each party is required to give all requested (and relevant) information to the other, even if the information makes them look bad.
How well does IE work under VMWare? One of the only reasons I have a Windows box is for testing web apps with IE. If I could do that with VMWare and IE, I could dispense with the extra machine.
Actually, the other "killer app" on my windows box right now is PalmPilot synchronization with a calendar app that won't sync on Linux. Has anyone gotten Palm Desktop and HotSync to work under VMWare?
> Why are there no more "OrangePC" options for the Mac?
Er, because those cards cost a few hundred bucks, and these days you can buy a whole PC for that much? (Though admittedly it would be nice not to have to mess with a KVM switch.)
> The best way to stop the pop-ups requires the user to readjust some internal Windows settings
No, the best way to stop the pop-ups is to use a real firewall and don't trust Windows to be secure. I don't even trust software-based firewalls like ZoneAlarm, because they run on individual machines and seem too easy to compromise. I run Windows at home (for Photoshop mostly), but I never even saw the RPC and SQL worms because those ports just aren't accessible from the outside through my firewall (a 4-year-old Netgear that keeps on working).
>So.....how in the hell is Saddam Hussein less treacherous than George W. Bush
Saddam may be evil, but to be a weasel you have to be sneaky and try to disguise how evil you are. Saddam never seemed to make much of an effort at sneakiness. He occasionally pretended to be a nice guy, but it was clear he was just going through the motions because that's what evil dictators do. He knew he was evil, and he knew we knew. The people who pretended to believe him, though, were weasels.
Bush, on the other hand, is sneaky, but in a dumb sort of way. "Weapons of mass destruction? We never said there were weapons of mass destruction!":-) The difference is that Bush and his minions seem to take it all seriously and expect us to believe it. Weasels.
Much as I hate to admit it I've got to agree, if only for the simple reason that the MS maps are nice and big on my screen. The little tiny maps on MapQuest, even at the "Big Map" size, are very annoying. The MS ones are maybe 50% larger in each dimension. Yahoo is somewhere in between. None of them remembers what size maps I like, and MS and MapQuest don't even remember my navigational preferences. That would seem like a no-brainer.
For planning real trips, I use the "Street Atlas" software (by DeLorme, I think). It does a great job of planning routes, even on long interstate trips with multiple stops.
A friend of mine once had to reboot his hot tub. He noticed that the air jets in the tub were running constantly, then realized that the tub was way too hot beause the heater wasn't shutting off. Apparently its computer was smart enough to turn on the jets because that cools down the water, but it had gotten stuck in a state where it couldn't just turn off the heater. None of the controls worked. He had to pull the plug, let it rest for a while, and then plug it back in. Problem solved!
If you're not involved in a legal action involving the patent, probably not much. However, posts about prior art can be handy for people involved in legal action (or threatened action) on the patent. At a small company where I once worked, we'd occasionally get threatening letters from people claiming to have patents on some fundamental (and usually obvious) piece of technology in our industry. Even worse, sometimes our customers would get threatening letters and then tell us they were going to stop using our product unless we "settled the patent issues." (SCO didn't invent this kind of tactic, unfortunately.)
When this happened, web posts about prior art, plus online copies describing the prior art in detail, were very handy. One of our engineers could usually use a search engine and dig up enough prior art to make the patent look fairly ridiculous. Then our lawyer could write a polite but nasty letter to the patent holder (cc'ing our customer) pointing out the ridiculousness and refusing to pay any license fees. This usually made our customer happy and often shut up the patent holder too.
I agree -- these are great. We have plain old Papermate PhDs at work, and the big, ribbed, rubber grip is very comfortable. I decided to buy some for myself and found the PhD Multi version with a black pen, mechanical pencil, and PDA stylus. I got it at Target, and it was around $7 or $8.
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Planet of the Apes?
So you have "sleeping issues" and think that these pills are going to solve it. Because you had them before and now you need them to be able to live your life normally. Um, that's an addiction pal
Then this must be true too: :-)
So you have "pain" and think that these pills are going to solve it. Because you had them before and now you need them to be able to live your life normally. Um, that's an addiction pal
Sorry, but some people do have real sleep disorders (and real chronic, severe pain) and need this kind of drug. It sucks if you're in this position in the first place, but taking the drugs is better than being tired all day because you can't sleep, or being in pain all day due to a chronic condition. Ambien is rarely addictive (unlike the benzodiazepenes like Valium and Xanax), so it's a very good choice for cases like this. Its main downside is that it's still under patent and is quite expensive.
I'm on Ambien right now myself. It's not because of a sleep disorder (I do have sleep apnea, but that's unrelated). It's because I'm on another medication that's sort of "speedy", and the Ambien counteracts that side-effect. It's a bit scary to be taking one drug to counteract the side-effects of another, but I need the first drug and need to be able to sleep too. If I'm really tired at bedtime I don't take the the Ambien, but if I'm not tired I know it's probably because of the other drug and the Ambien fixes it. No big deal, aside from convincing my insurance company to pay for the stuff. They wanted me to take Klonopin, which is addictive.
So, next time you're hungry, don't think food is going to solve it. Work on that food addiction instead! :-)
-- Laura, tired of people throwing the word "addiction" around all the time.
Definitely. I've been using M4 for a month or so at work. It's more stable than 2.1.x was, and it has some cool new features. I've played with M5 a bit but haven't switched to it yet. There were some changes to the plugin API in M5, with a few more planned for M6, so it will be a little while before all of the plugins I like will work with 3.0 again. I'll probably try M6 after it comes out in mid-December, because I think some of the plugin developers are waiting for it so they only have to change their plugins once.
In this case, the software is actually more vulnerable in a work environment, because it requires a compromised DHCP server on the local subnet. Most home users would probably notice if you plugged in another computer in their house. It's less likely to be noticed in a corporate environment, at least for long enough to compromise a few servers.
Besides, if it's possible for someone to sneak a compromised DHCP server on your network, you're basically screwed anyway.
My favorite along these lines is Kill Doctor Lucky from CheapAss Games. The goal is to, um, kill Doctor Lucky (and all the other players) on a clue-like board where there are various implements lying about.
They do. The engines on the Concorde are just damn loud -- it's basically an overgrown fighter jet. F15's fly over my house a few times a week on their landing approach, and they're very loud even at low speeds. This kind of engine doesn't have the normal "whine" of a jet turbine. Instead it's a low-frequency roar that sounds like someone is ripping the sky apart. (There weren't nearly as many noise restrictions on commercial jets back in the days when the Concorde was built.)
How on earth do you get anything done? I'm very picky about my development environment. Everything has to be just so. The chair and desk have to be adjusted right, or my wrists and back hurt. The monitors (two big 20" LCDs :-) have to be in the right place. The preferences in Eclipse have to be set up to use all that screen real estate so I can see everything all at once. And so on. I wouldn't want to have to recreate all of that every morning. And I certainly wouldn't want to develop on a laptop. It's tolerable, barely, for short periods of time like airplane flights. But if I try to do it for very long it feels like programming underwater. The screen is just too small.
For the last 10 years or so I've had my own office or cube at various companies. Tomorrow I'm going in to work my first day in a new building where I'm going to share an office with two other people. They're nice folks, but I'm dreading it. I'm sure I won't get enough done because of the distractions.
For J2EE, try Eclipse plus the "MyEclipse Enterprise Workbench" plugins. They do a pretty good job of integrating lots of other open-source J2EE plugins into something that's easy to maintain. And at $30/year it's hard to beat.
- Mozilla hangs a lot on Linux (on my box anyway)
- I tried switching to Firebird + Evolution. But there's no obvious way to tell Evolution to use Firebird as the default web browser. Supposedly I can do this in the Gnome control panel (even though I'm running KDE!) but that doesn't work.
- To generalize, there's no global place where applications can get system setting information. Everything seems to be a "KDE app" or a "Gnome app", and they use different preferences, different printing systems, different font settings, and so on. What a disaster!
- Clicking on PowerPoint files in Mozilla doesn't open them in OpenOffice. I have to save the file to a folder, then browse to it with KDE's file manager and double-click it. There's probably a way to make this work, but in my default install of OpenOffice and Mozilla it doesn't.
- Linux applications are just plain uglier than most Windows apps, though the new antialiased XFT font stuff helps a lot. And to be fair there are plenty of amateurish, ugly apps for Windows too.
- Half the !@#% apps on the system have fonts that start with K. Again, I don't care which window system or toolkit or whatever it was written for. I just want an app that works, looks decent, and has a name I can pronounce.
:-)
I'm a software engineer with tons of experience (and I was a Unix admin back in the 4.3BSD days, which dates me). I could figure this stuff out. But I shouldn't have to, because I'm using the machine to try to (gasp!) get work done. Linux is a great server environment, but it's just not ready for the desktop yet. Like the man said, maybe in a few years.(-1 Offtopic :-)
The scary part of this patent isn't the user settings stuff, it's this claim:
This seems to cover cases where every computer on a network (say in a corporate IT environment) uploads a bit of information about itself to a server, and then someone prepares a report based on that information. But there must be prior art on this one. And it would be pretty easy to get around this claim anyway -- just poll the machines for information rather than having them upload it to a central server.Mmm..... Organic molecules.....
As long as you have a legal license for XP Pro, I don't think it makes sense to worry much about installing a copy of XP Corporate that isn't "legit". Maybe you'd be violating the exact letter of the law, but you'd be complying with the spirit. I do this: I have two copies of XP Pro sitting on the bookshelf unopened, but I installed the corporate version so I wouldn't have to mess with activation every time I touched my hardware. I don't feel at all guilty.
I agree, mostly. TellMe hasn't really invented any great new technologies that I'm aware of. But they seem to have done a very good job of integration. The Nuance speech engine they use wasn't really ready for prime time, but TellMe managed to build a production-quality system out of it. There's a lot of value in being able to just make things work. That allows TellMe to build the enterprise appliations that seem to bring in most of their money.
They were also among the first in their industry to realize that the consumer-oriented advertising model wasn't going to work and to start going after the enterprise market. They then did a good job of selling into that market, which can be hard to do when you're a startup without much of a track record. The competitor I worked for didn't start switching markets until a year or two later, unfortunately. Now there's maybe an order of magnitude difference in their sizes and maybe their prospects. Though with an initial investment of the size that TellMe had, it's hard to see how they'll ever pay of the VCs and AT&T and make much money for everyone else.
> They got over 200 million in capital
FWIW, the rumor in the industry is that much of that $200 million wasn't cash. A lot of the investment from AT&T was apparently "minutes" and other resources on AT&T's networks, which is still valuable if you're in that business but not quite the same thing.
This has been said before, but since your post is way up here at the top of the view, I'll say it again: No. The US constitution protects against self-incrimination in criminal cases. This is a civil case. During the "discovery" phase of a civil case, each party is required to give all requested (and relevant) information to the other, even if the information makes them look bad.
Actually, the other "killer app" on my windows box right now is PalmPilot synchronization with a calendar app that won't sync on Linux. Has anyone gotten Palm Desktop and HotSync to work under VMWare?
Er, because those cards cost a few hundred bucks, and these days you can buy a whole PC for that much? (Though admittedly it would be nice not to have to mess with a KVM switch.)
No, the best way to stop the pop-ups is to use a real firewall and don't trust Windows to be secure. I don't even trust software-based firewalls like ZoneAlarm, because they run on individual machines and seem too easy to compromise. I run Windows at home (for Photoshop mostly), but I never even saw the RPC and SQL worms because those ports just aren't accessible from the outside through my firewall (a 4-year-old Netgear that keeps on working).
Saddam may be evil, but to be a weasel you have to be sneaky and try to disguise how evil you are. Saddam never seemed to make much of an effort at sneakiness. He occasionally pretended to be a nice guy, but it was clear he was just going through the motions because that's what evil dictators do. He knew he was evil, and he knew we knew. The people who pretended to believe him, though, were weasels.
Bush, on the other hand, is sneaky, but in a dumb sort of way. "Weapons of mass destruction? We never said there were weapons of mass destruction!" :-) The difference is that Bush and his minions seem to take it all seriously and expect us to believe it. Weasels.
For planning real trips, I use the "Street Atlas" software (by DeLorme, I think). It does a great job of planning routes, even on long interstate trips with multiple stops.
Hmm. A year ago the education price was USD $299. "Steal" is right, though not in the sense you meant.
A friend of mine once had to reboot his hot tub. He noticed that the air jets in the tub were running constantly, then realized that the tub was way too hot beause the heater wasn't shutting off. Apparently its computer was smart enough to turn on the jets because that cools down the water, but it had gotten stuck in a state where it couldn't just turn off the heater. None of the controls worked. He had to pull the plug, let it rest for a while, and then plug it back in. Problem solved!
Oregon is the same way. After all, it might be dangerous for you to pump your own gas. It's definitely a job for a trained professional.
Ok, I lied. It's the Full Employment Act for gas station attendants. How could you vote against that?
If you're not involved in a legal action involving the patent, probably not much. However, posts about prior art can be handy for people involved in legal action (or threatened action) on the patent. At a small company where I once worked, we'd occasionally get threatening letters from people claiming to have patents on some fundamental (and usually obvious) piece of technology in our industry. Even worse, sometimes our customers would get threatening letters and then tell us they were going to stop using our product unless we "settled the patent issues." (SCO didn't invent this kind of tactic, unfortunately.)
When this happened, web posts about prior art, plus online copies describing the prior art in detail, were very handy. One of our engineers could usually use a search engine and dig up enough prior art to make the patent look fairly ridiculous. Then our lawyer could write a polite but nasty letter to the patent holder (cc'ing our customer) pointing out the ridiculousness and refusing to pay any license fees. This usually made our customer happy and often shut up the patent holder too.
I agree -- these are great. We have plain old Papermate PhDs at work, and the big, ribbed, rubber grip is very comfortable. I decided to buy some for myself and found the PhD Multi version with a black pen, mechanical pencil, and PDA stylus. I got it at Target, and it was around $7 or $8.