It wasn't nearly as exciting as the Post-Homecoming Game Zombie Revelry in the Streets that happened yesterday evening. Zombies lurching down State Street may be kind of cute, but it can't compete with the awesome power of thousands of zombies in red shirts shambling aimlessly around the city, consuming unholy quantities of some unknown urine-colored substance (possibly the sustenance needed to keep them alive since all the brains in town had locked themselves in and shuttered their windows for the weekend?), driving like spastic blind chimpanzees at incredible speed all over town, urinating on the sidewalk, and so on. It turned particularly exciting around 10:00PM - about four hours into the event - when many of the males began fighting outside bars, presumably over alpha status.
Probably, and mostly due to ignorance. Most Americans seem to have no clue what we did to the people of Nicaragua in order to topple the Sandanista party. All they know is that the Sandanistas were socialist, the current government (claims to be) capitalist, and that socialism is evil and repressive and capitalism is the way God intended humans to live. They know nothing of the inhumane tactics we taught the Contras to use. They know nothing about how repressive the banana republic we set up in place of Nicaragua's government is. They know what the TV told them, which wasn't much.
Kind of frightening to me that people will pay too much attention to any TV news source nowadays. It may have been Fox News who won the right to lie for newscasters, but every other major network and TV news outlet filed supporting briefs in that case.
I doubt we'll get many more channels. At least where I live, the TV band is pretty empty. Nearly 70 channels, and there's somebody broadcasting on maybe seven of them. I'll admit, I'm no expert on the TV industry, but it looks to me like the limiting factor on the number of stations in a given area is market forces, not bandwidth.
This is necessary to hold the country together. Imagine the economic turmoil that would result if millions upon millions of people were to decide that $50 is too much to pay to continue watching TV and dump their boxes instead? All those souls, no longer absorbing advertisements? The reduction in impulse buying could throw us into another depression!
Does that car stereo faceplate really need to go everywhere with you? Why not keep it in your glove compartment or your trunk?
Same for the iPod - do you _really_ need to take it everywhere? It's a music player, not a binkie.
The Bluetooth headset can definitely stay in the car. That or just leave it on your ear rather than trying to find pocket space. If you're going to try to walk around like a wannabe Borg, you might as well look the part.
You do _not_ need to bring the mouse everywhere. $5 says your computer has a touchpad or one of those nipple things.
Not saying you have to get rid of all of this stuff, just saying it sounds like you're carrying around more crap than you actually need.
Anyway, if you are going to carry that much weight, I would strongly push you toward getting a small padded case for your laptop and then throw it into a backpack designed for backpacking. Most of the laptop and courier bags out there weren't designed with your body in mind. I switched to an innerframe day pack from REI for days when I'm schlepping myself around the city on my feet or my bike, and my back and shoulders have thanked me a thousand times over.
It is an interesting example of how a lot of people seem to look at computers. They aren't seen as machines just like any other machine, ones where failure is usually due to design flaw or some other problem which can be mitigated or solved with better engineering. They're seen as these incomprehensible devices that dictate our lives according to whim. It seems like every security failure or crash or anything is always marked up as a "glitch" or some other Act of God in the media - everything from crappy security to viruses to data loss due to hard drive crashes.
Yes, it appears your point was that the number of 64-bit platform Flash player users is approaching zero percent.
You're still thinking vanishing, not vanishingly. A vanishing small amount is a group that is small and decreasing. I'm not stupid, I know that 64-bit is a growing percentage ov the market.
A vanishingly small percentage is a percentage that is so low as to be negligible. Really, who out there has gone 64-bit? Well, people who use x86-64 CPUs and are running 64-bit linux, which is probably a larger number of those than the ones who are running 64-bit Windows. And people running OS X on G5 desktops.
Keep in mind that for 32-bit flash to be an issue, you also have to be using a 64-bit web browser. Or at least I assume so - I'm using a 32-bit web browser on my 64-bit (CPU and OS) computer, and I haven't had a problem with Flash. Haven't tried a 64-bit web browser - I just don't see the point.
So really, how many people are we talking about, here? It can't be more than 1% of the general market. That's a vanishingly small percentage in my book.
(And please, if you're going to post two dictionary definitions, take the time to read them.)
My college used a web-based calendar program by Brown Bear Software. It was pretty bare-bones as far as aesthetics, but wasn't lacking in features, and played fairly well with stuff like Outlook in that it supporeted import and export - no automatic synchronization, of course.
It has a pretty good system for modifying others' calendars, setting up meetings, stuff like that.
Flash player users pay $0 per copy to Macromedia. Last I checked, the Flash player is neither adware nor spyware-encumbered, so they aren't making any money there, either.
Flash player users on 64-bit platforms are a vanishingly small percentage of Flash player users.
If Flash is not 64-bit clean, then it will probably be reasonably expensive for Macromedia to clean it up.
What can Macromedia expect for a return on this investment? Well, zero times 0.005 is still zero.
Red Hat has always charged for the core of their business, which was providing fully-supported Linux systems to business-class customers. I'm not sure dropping the free-as-in-beer version of their OS really counts as the beginning of their charging customers for service.
OK, so we can come up with a bunch of reasons why the Dreamcast failed, but Sega's first-release flops also include the Saturn, and while the Genesis got a huge head-start on the 16-bit market, the SNES still ended up becoming the dominant system for that generation.
I'm not saying, "The 360 is doomed to failure because it's coming out first and the Dreamcast came out first and it failed so it's all, like, obvious, you know?" I'm saying I'm sick of everyone talking about this mythical first-to-market advantage, and we have this great example of a company that did release some good systems that had launch libraries that were as good as any of the others in their respective generations. One would expect that, if there were such a great advantage to coming out first, that Sega would have done just a teensy bit better in the market.
If anything, I think it's actually a disadvantage, because you have this period of time when you're sitting out there, and while you are twice as powerful as any other system on the market, you're also over twice as expensive as any of the other systems, and everyone but the hardcore gamers is subconsciously developing this idea of your system being the expensive one. Imagine the mindshare that console number two can get by showing up a few months later and squeezing in at a measly $30 under your price point.
I wouldn't say it's hard to generate special characters on a standard keyboard - AppleScript uses them, and it's just hitting key combinations like "option =" and "option enter." The real issue for me wasn't that stuff, it's that it's a bunch of crap that I have to type in which isn't on the keyboard. != or are easy, I know what they mean, and I know how to type them. A real mathematical "not-equals" symbol is non-obvious and figuring out how to type it requires consulting the manual.
Apple's solution is probably the best at the moment, but it's still lame because AppleScript's commands for these symbols are not the same as the ones that are used by the OS. Also, it's not going to be easy to implement on PCs unless the PC world decides to add an option key as well.
With present computing technology, the latency involved in running anything through software will be way too high to implement a noise cancellation scheme.
I love how the linux community seems to have decided that the only proper way to handle Fear, Uncertanity, and Doubt is to respond to it with Rashness, Overconfidence, and Credulity.
No, having multiple distros isn't a crippling problem, but there are downsides to counterpoint its advantages. And many of those downsides could be considered fragmentation. Let's face it, if my Gentoo install can't easily install binary packages designed for Red Hat, that's a huge division between the two distros - fragmentation. If I can't sit down to fix a friend's Linux box without searching through the documentation for his distribution because I'm not familiar with the configuration and init scripts on his system, that's a division between the two - fragmentation. If it takes my Mom (who I set up with a box running Ubuntu and XFCE) quite a while to figure out the interface to my computer (Gentoo with Windowmaker), that's a division between the two - fragmentation.
Now, I like having my choice of window managers and package tools and stuff like that, but I'm not so convinced that my way is the One True Way that I'm not willing to accept the idea that so many choices might be a downside in the eyes of other people. And I'm not so presumtuous as to claim that anyone who ways, "I don't like this" is just spreading FUD.
Along with different package management systems, different sets of installed libraries, libraries being installed in different locations, drastically different init scripts, different print spoolers, different sound daemons, different widget toolkits.
If by "same core OS" you mean "same basic kernel, and usually the same libc" then you'd be right. If you're referring to all of the other things that make a modern operating system, well, the differences start to matter. Especially if you're trying to support multiple distros or maintain binary releases for multiple distros.
Seriously. Don't develop apps for work in your spare time. Just don't.
You may think of it as a fun side project, but your boss will invariably think of it as overtime. Nowadays, it doesn't make a damn bit of difference if you did it from home, either. Everyone brings work home with them all the time, so if you try to argue that it wasn't something you did for work because you did all the programming at home, your boss is either going to laugh at you because you've done plenty of work at home for him in the past, or, if he's clueful, he's going to laugh even harder because he knows that installing this software on the company servers is not something you can do from home.
Now I'm all for putting limits on what work can ask you to do on your personal time, so the boss shouldn't expect you to start working mandatory overtime to complete this app, but if he wants to shuffle some duties around and make development of this your primary responsibility, well, tough luck, but you were asking for it.
If these companies are just selling a product and needn't concern themselves with how it will be used once it leaves their hands, we should be consistent and apply the same thought process to our handling of your local pharmacy's policies on selling opiates or your local gun dealer's policies on selling guns.
Slashdot Mirror
It wasn't nearly as exciting as the Post-Homecoming Game Zombie Revelry in the Streets that happened yesterday evening. Zombies lurching down State Street may be kind of cute, but it can't compete with the awesome power of thousands of zombies in red shirts shambling aimlessly around the city, consuming unholy quantities of some unknown urine-colored substance (possibly the sustenance needed to keep them alive since all the brains in town had locked themselves in and shuttered their windows for the weekend?), driving like spastic blind chimpanzees at incredible speed all over town, urinating on the sidewalk, and so on. It turned particularly exciting around 10:00PM - about four hours into the event - when many of the males began fighting outside bars, presumably over alpha status.
Probably, and mostly due to ignorance. Most Americans seem to have no clue what we did to the people of Nicaragua in order to topple the Sandanista party. All they know is that the Sandanistas were socialist, the current government (claims to be) capitalist, and that socialism is evil and repressive and capitalism is the way God intended humans to live. They know nothing of the inhumane tactics we taught the Contras to use. They know nothing about how repressive the banana republic we set up in place of Nicaragua's government is. They know what the TV told them, which wasn't much.
Kind of frightening to me that people will pay too much attention to any TV news source nowadays. It may have been Fox News who won the right to lie for newscasters, but every other major network and TV news outlet filed supporting briefs in that case.
I doubt we'll get many more channels. At least where I live, the TV band is pretty empty. Nearly 70 channels, and there's somebody broadcasting on maybe seven of them. I'll admit, I'm no expert on the TV industry, but it looks to me like the limiting factor on the number of stations in a given area is market forces, not bandwidth.
This is necessary to hold the country together. Imagine the economic turmoil that would result if millions upon millions of people were to decide that $50 is too much to pay to continue watching TV and dump their boxes instead? All those souls, no longer absorbing advertisements? The reduction in impulse buying could throw us into another depression!
Does that car stereo faceplate really need to go everywhere with you? Why not keep it in your glove compartment or your trunk?
Same for the iPod - do you _really_ need to take it everywhere? It's a music player, not a binkie.
The Bluetooth headset can definitely stay in the car. That or just leave it on your ear rather than trying to find pocket space. If you're going to try to walk around like a wannabe Borg, you might as well look the part.
You do _not_ need to bring the mouse everywhere. $5 says your computer has a touchpad or one of those nipple things.
Not saying you have to get rid of all of this stuff, just saying it sounds like you're carrying around more crap than you actually need.
Anyway, if you are going to carry that much weight, I would strongly push you toward getting a small padded case for your laptop and then throw it into a backpack designed for backpacking. Most of the laptop and courier bags out there weren't designed with your body in mind. I switched to an innerframe day pack from REI for days when I'm schlepping myself around the city on my feet or my bike, and my back and shoulders have thanked me a thousand times over.
Q. Is patent violation harming the pharmaceutical industry?
A. Yes. Instead of raking billions and billions of dollars, the drug companies are only making billions of dollars.
(All due respect to Matt Groening.)
It is an interesting example of how a lot of people seem to look at computers. They aren't seen as machines just like any other machine, ones where failure is usually due to design flaw or some other problem which can be mitigated or solved with better engineering. They're seen as these incomprehensible devices that dictate our lives according to whim. It seems like every security failure or crash or anything is always marked up as a "glitch" or some other Act of God in the media - everything from crappy security to viruses to data loss due to hard drive crashes.
Yes, it appears your point was that the number of 64-bit platform Flash player users is approaching zero percent.
You're still thinking vanishing, not vanishingly. A vanishing small amount is a group that is small and decreasing. I'm not stupid, I know that 64-bit is a growing percentage ov the market.
A vanishingly small percentage is a percentage that is so low as to be negligible. Really, who out there has gone 64-bit? Well, people who use x86-64 CPUs and are running 64-bit linux, which is probably a larger number of those than the ones who are running 64-bit Windows. And people running OS X on G5 desktops.
Keep in mind that for 32-bit flash to be an issue, you also have to be using a 64-bit web browser. Or at least I assume so - I'm using a 32-bit web browser on my 64-bit (CPU and OS) computer, and I haven't had a problem with Flash. Haven't tried a 64-bit web browser - I just don't see the point.
So really, how many people are we talking about, here? It can't be more than 1% of the general market. That's a vanishingly small percentage in my book.
(And please, if you're going to post two dictionary definitions, take the time to read them.)
Adverbs modify adjectives as well. The grammar was correct.
I'm sorry, did you have a point?
Yes, and you just clarified it nicely. Thanks.
My college used a web-based calendar program by Brown Bear Software. It was pretty bare-bones as far as aesthetics, but wasn't lacking in features, and played fairly well with stuff like Outlook in that it supporeted import and export - no automatic synchronization, of course.
It has a pretty good system for modifying others' calendars, setting up meetings, stuff like that.
1. Vanishingly and vanishing do not mean the same thing.
2. It takes more than a 64-bit CPU to make a 64-bit platform.
Flash player users pay $0 per copy to Macromedia. Last I checked, the Flash player is neither adware nor spyware-encumbered, so they aren't making any money there, either.
Flash player users on 64-bit platforms are a vanishingly small percentage of Flash player users.
If Flash is not 64-bit clean, then it will probably be reasonably expensive for Macromedia to clean it up.
What can Macromedia expect for a return on this investment? Well, zero times 0.005 is still zero.
Red Hat has always charged for the core of their business, which was providing fully-supported Linux systems to business-class customers. I'm not sure dropping the free-as-in-beer version of their OS really counts as the beginning of their charging customers for service.
OK, so we can come up with a bunch of reasons why the Dreamcast failed, but Sega's first-release flops also include the Saturn, and while the Genesis got a huge head-start on the 16-bit market, the SNES still ended up becoming the dominant system for that generation.
I'm not saying, "The 360 is doomed to failure because it's coming out first and the Dreamcast came out first and it failed so it's all, like, obvious, you know?" I'm saying I'm sick of everyone talking about this mythical first-to-market advantage, and we have this great example of a company that did release some good systems that had launch libraries that were as good as any of the others in their respective generations. One would expect that, if there were such a great advantage to coming out first, that Sega would have done just a teensy bit better in the market.
If anything, I think it's actually a disadvantage, because you have this period of time when you're sitting out there, and while you are twice as powerful as any other system on the market, you're also over twice as expensive as any of the other systems, and everyone but the hardcore gamers is subconsciously developing this idea of your system being the expensive one. Imagine the mindshare that console number two can get by showing up a few months later and squeezing in at a measly $30 under your price point.
I wouldn't say it's hard to generate special characters on a standard keyboard - AppleScript uses them, and it's just hitting key combinations like "option =" and "option enter." The real issue for me wasn't that stuff, it's that it's a bunch of crap that I have to type in which isn't on the keyboard. != or are easy, I know what they mean, and I know how to type them. A real mathematical "not-equals" symbol is non-obvious and figuring out how to type it requires consulting the manual.
Apple's solution is probably the best at the moment, but it's still lame because AppleScript's commands for these symbols are not the same as the ones that are used by the OS. Also, it's not going to be easy to implement on PCs unless the PC world decides to add an option key as well.
With present computing technology, the latency involved in running anything through software will be way too high to implement a noise cancellation scheme.
One word: Sega
I love how the linux community seems to have decided that the only proper way to handle Fear, Uncertanity, and Doubt is to respond to it with Rashness, Overconfidence, and Credulity.
No, having multiple distros isn't a crippling problem, but there are downsides to counterpoint its advantages. And many of those downsides could be considered fragmentation. Let's face it, if my Gentoo install can't easily install binary packages designed for Red Hat, that's a huge division between the two distros - fragmentation. If I can't sit down to fix a friend's Linux box without searching through the documentation for his distribution because I'm not familiar with the configuration and init scripts on his system, that's a division between the two - fragmentation. If it takes my Mom (who I set up with a box running Ubuntu and XFCE) quite a while to figure out the interface to my computer (Gentoo with Windowmaker), that's a division between the two - fragmentation.
Now, I like having my choice of window managers and package tools and stuff like that, but I'm not so convinced that my way is the One True Way that I'm not willing to accept the idea that so many choices might be a downside in the eyes of other people. And I'm not so presumtuous as to claim that anyone who ways, "I don't like this" is just spreading FUD.
Along with different package management systems, different sets of installed libraries, libraries being installed in different locations, drastically different init scripts, different print spoolers, different sound daemons, different widget toolkits.
If by "same core OS" you mean "same basic kernel, and usually the same libc" then you'd be right. If you're referring to all of the other things that make a modern operating system, well, the differences start to matter. Especially if you're trying to support multiple distros or maintain binary releases for multiple distros.
There are probably other problems in the world to worry about other than fungus in pillows.
You're right.
FUNGUS IN MATTRESSES! OH MY GOD, WE'RE GOING TO DIE! AAAAAAAAA!
Seriously. Don't develop apps for work in your spare time. Just don't.
You may think of it as a fun side project, but your boss will invariably think of it as overtime. Nowadays, it doesn't make a damn bit of difference if you did it from home, either. Everyone brings work home with them all the time, so if you try to argue that it wasn't something you did for work because you did all the programming at home, your boss is either going to laugh at you because you've done plenty of work at home for him in the past, or, if he's clueful, he's going to laugh even harder because he knows that installing this software on the company servers is not something you can do from home.
Now I'm all for putting limits on what work can ask you to do on your personal time, so the boss shouldn't expect you to start working mandatory overtime to complete this app, but if he wants to shuffle some duties around and make development of this your primary responsibility, well, tough luck, but you were asking for it.
If these companies are just selling a product and needn't concern themselves with how it will be used once it leaves their hands, we should be consistent and apply the same thought process to our handling of your local pharmacy's policies on selling opiates or your local gun dealer's policies on selling guns.
That's an image from the original Blue Marble.
b le/BlueMarble_2002.html
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/BlueMar
Seriously. I would be glad to plug an extra 512MB of PC133 SDRAM into my computer.