I've got a remote control. To watch TV, I: A) Push a button to turn the receiver and TV on; B) Push a button to go into 'TV mode' C) Press 'Guide button' D) Press 'up/down' to go up/down pages; E) Press 'Enter' to pick a channel.
So that's somewhere between 4 (D is not required, potentially, if something interesting is already playing) and... 30, maybe, keystrokes if I have to go into the 'recorded shows' mode?
Then, during normal operation, I barely use the remote control, every once in a while maybe adjusting volume slightly or picking a different channel.
Now, write a decent-length response to an email on a RIM. How many keystrokes was that again?
The primary reason against that, I'd think is availability issues.
Until recently, I was under the impression that only two Epson models could do CD/DVD printing, and nobody else had printers that could do this. Turns out this is unique to the US -- because Canon, for example, has their entire Pixma product print to CD/DVD if you buy the non-US versions, but the US versions are hobbled.
My own solution to this is simple -- I'm getting a friend to bring me back a Pixma from Australia -- but most people just aren't going to have an easy time getting a printer in the US that can do this, I think (expecially if, like me, they hate Epson).
The two biggest hurdles I experienced when I got into management were:
A) The need to communicate your message in more than just the content of your actual face-to-face presentation, but also in the less tangible body language. In other words, there's a huge difference between coming over to someone's cube and, with a smile, saying "hey, I was talking to Joe Customer about his interaction with you this weekend [and he mentioned you totally kicked ass!]" and calling someone into your cube/office/meeting room and, without smiling, saying "thanks for coming. I just finished talking to Joe Customer about his interaction with you this weekend... and he mentioned you totally kicked ass." The former is a much more integrated, consistent emotional experience; the latter drives the employee nuts. This took me a while as someone who was fairly introverted -- I remember calling one of my guys because I was going to offer him a promotion. I asked him if I could call him (he was remote) at about 4:30pm on Friday because the schedule worked better, but obviously the end of a workweek can be a little... scary for conversations with your boss:). I started off with "so... you've been working here for about three months. How would you say you've done?" and then he went on for about 30 minutes about all the things he'd not done very well. He was expecting me to fire him. Ooops.
B)The absolute need to understand where your control ends and their autonomy begins. I had to deal with an incredibly difficult employee who made the most hair-brained, stupid, illogical decisions I could ever imagine. I was incredibly frustrated by this. At one point it got so bad that I was -- ironically -- in a management class for a week and he did something truly horrendous that had a bunch of people calling for his canning. I told him to not go into work until I came back, not respond to work emails, not do any work, not talk to anyone at work about any work things. The morning after, he dialed into a conference call. ARGH! I ended up having a conversation with another attendee that night over drinks and he told me the most important thing anyone's ever told me about relationships with people:
You don't control anyone other than yourself. You can't make anyone do good work, and you can't stop anyone from doing bad work. You can't make your managers make the right decisions and spend the money you think needs to be spent, and you can't make them NOT decide to standardize on IIS as a web platform. All you can do is clearly communicate -- and then enforce -- consequences. Do good work (and this is what good work is) and you will be rewarded. Do bad work (and this is what bad work is) and you will be... unrewarded.
These people who work for you will do exactly whatever the hell it is they want to do. You can't make them do what you want them to do. All you can do is lay out the consequences of pleasing -- or upsetting -- you, and then enforce them. But you've *GOT* to enforce the positive consequences also. You must Must MUST reward good behavior both in recognition (like going over to that employee's cubicle after you've heard from a customer that they went above and beyond last weekend) and in actual benefits. Partially, I was lucky -- the IT group I worked in at the time was pretty good at giving me the resources to say "Hey, that project you worked on over the last two months has sure made you sacrifice a lot. Here's $2000," but I also spent my own money. And here, maybe, comes the other minor point: It doesn't take a lot. Seriously. At some point, after we did really well, I gave every person in my group a $25 gift certificate to Amazon. $25!! What the hell can you get for $25, anyway ?! But they knew it was my money, and they knew it was because _I_ appreciated them and was grateful to them, and it was effective (because it was sincere).
And never, ever, ever forget that management is a service-oriented job. You're there to serve, and when you've got a good group of people working for you, you're there to serve them too.
My first post-college career was typing in registration cards for consumer software (I suspect there aren't any more people who do this in the US:) ). I wanted to squeeze every speed advantage I could find, because doing more cards made my job more secure and also allowed me to take longer breaks.
But you know, I'm not in that business now, and haven't been for a while -- and I think that's probably true for most slashdotters. For us, heavy typing is like the manual labor of our parents. Sure, I type all day, but I don't actually _type_ all day -- I think a bunch, I experiment, I figure things out. In the end, my keyboard isn't the limiting factor on my productivity, my brain is. I can easily type as fast as I can think, even using my ancient IBM QWERTY keyboard -- but honestly, that's not actually all that fast. How do you even measure code output? It sure as hell isn't in WPMs.
Because their userbase is: A) Enormous; and B) Very, very stupid.
What does this mean?
Look, my ISP -- whose co-owners I've got on speed-dial, and is incredibly clueful -- doesn't have a user spam problem, because pretty much only geeks use them (we pay a bunch extra for the privilege, too). AOL, on the other hand, has the saddest, most pathetic users in the world -- people who are the prime target for PC-p0wning software. Add to that the fact AOL is, like, pretty much the easiest ISP to sign up for. In other words, they're the biggest, fattest, juiciest spam target out there.
And yet, having looked at the 23,507 spam messages I've gotten over the last 303 days, do you know how many came from AOL?
Zero.
I know Carl (not personally, but I'm on some mailing lists with him). He's pretty damn smart. He has to be. Same thing about the rest of the anti-abuse folks at AOL. They're smart, and they're dedicated, and they're very, very, very good.
No. He doesn't. There's a reason why responsible ISPs (there's that word again) don't allow normal l0ser users to connect to port 25 outside their network.
The days of "Oh, here's your static IP and full internet access" are bhind us. I'm all for "if you demonstrate clue, you may have unfiltered unbound access; otherwise, no port 25 for you!"
Sun doesn't make all that many software products that aren't OS-type products. Off the top of my head, I can think of one big product they've made -- Java -- and they seemed to try to make it available on all platforms, though based on their rules (which hey, is true for any GPL-based software also. It's all about letting the people who created the software determine how it's released).
It is, however, a little offensive to publicly decry a company not releasing their product on your platform, especially when that platform hasn't yet actually shipped its first non-beta version. Seems a little petulant.
It's quite probable that a Pittsburgh judge _would_ be more conservative than a CA judge. The mistake the authorities might have made -- and it's a natural mistake you make here also -- is in thinking that 'conservative' is a label applied to people who have conservative social stances only, rather than people who also have conservative judicial stances.
It wasn't too long ago that 'conservatives' were the people who were loathe to add more laws and regulations that interfere with people's ability to do what they wanted, and were arguing we needed a very strong, clear harm to be present in an activity before it was legislated against. These days, the neocons and social conservatives (and Christian Fascists, frankly) have stolen the 'conservative' label and have started to label anyone who doesn't agree with their social policies as a liberal (with the obvious implications that liberals are the ones taking down this country, corrupting our youth, and providing hostelling services to travelling al Queda terrorists, of course).
It's perfectly within reason that a conservative person would find an anti-obscenity law ludicrous and offensive, and it's good that this one did.
1. The EFF might believe that the AppleInsider suit has less merit than this suit; 2. The EFF might believe that if the AI suit succeeds, the damage to our rights will be more significant than the damage to our rights if the TS suit succeeds; 3. The EFF might believe that the suits are substantially similar and are only out to establish a precedent, so it makes no sense to represent both defendants.
There's probably ample discussion of this in economics, but it seems pretty clear that some shortage scenarios result in people 'panicking' (perhaps too strong of a term) and really really trying to get whatever it is that's in shortage; I'm guessing there are people out there now who are thinking "OMG, WoW is closed! I've got to see if I can find a copy somewhere near me because I might not be able to get it later!"
And then, at some point, at significant enough shortages, people just sort of give up and don't care anymore. I'm guessing vendors would love to optimize their shortages to fit between these two points.
(Case in point: I wanted an iPod Shuffle, and called the Apple store a bunch of times, waiting for a shipment; they finally got one, but all of the Shuffles went to people who had pre-ordered; they were no longer accepting pre-orders, and told me to check in Friday. At that point, I got tired of the whole ordeal and decided not to get a Shuffle, at least any time in the near future. Not that Apple's hurting).
Err, I _really_ dig the Mac Mini, and I'm _not_ one of the "Oh come on, for that price I can get a bitchin' x86 box!" because it's not about the performance specs, but I should note that my last Dell cost me $299 (after a $100 rebate), and for that price I got a real (lame) graphics card and a 2.8GHz P4-HT. Oh, and *four* DIMM slots:)
Oh, certainly. I was dealing with SQL database structures to deal with this a few years back when I had to figure out how to make it so I could put my (non-porn:) ) DVD and literature in multiple categories. I could have done the same here, but then I'd have needed to put a decent interface on it, and... frankly, the reason I run a Windows laptop is that I'm lazy and don't want to have to deal with this. Picasa's pretty much the only tool that has made it easy to do this sort of stuff. There might have been others, mind you, but I couldn't find them.
My desktop has the larger archive, but the work laptop is the computer I always have with me, so I carry a... representative sample? Is that a good term? with me.
Actually, I love Picasa exactly because of what it has that you don't think it has. See, it _is_ possible to categorize pictures in multiple categories. You can't put them in multiple albums, but when you highlight a media file (not just a picture -- read below) and hit ctrl-K, you get a list of keywords you can associate with it, and then easily search for all media files with the same keywords later.
This was actually the feature that sold me on Picasa. See, my problem was that at last count, my laptop had about 25Gb of porn on it, in a whole bunch of video files. I wanted to be able to categorize my porn in ways that would allow me to slice-and-dice my collection -- show me all gay porn, say, or all het porn, or all porn that involves swallowing, etc. I had taken an awkward first step by putting the media files into folders, but that ran into that whole "hard to have a media file in more than one folder" (on Windows, where symlinks/hardlinks are not really all that useful) problem. So great, but what happens when I want to see all videos where Gwen Summers swallows? Hard to do.
Picasa solves this problem elegantly and beautifully for me. I'm very happy with it.
[Sigh. Since this is Slashdot and everyone thinks you're kidding if you talk seriously about porn, I should note I'm entirely serious. In fact, before I found Picasa I attempted to submit an 'Ask Slashdot' about how other people categorize their porn collection, but it got rejected as a troll]
The problem is that XML is just so damned attractive.
I speak as one of the damned -- one of the first major tasks I undertook at my current position was to write an extensible testing framework. One of the requirements I wanted to adhere to was that the users of this framework should not need to know how to program in our preferred language (Python). XML seemed like an obvious solution -- hey, just write an XML file, feed it to my framework, and Good Things Will Happen[tm]! XML's an obvious choice since it's so easy to parse it (well, given the right language built-in stuff, which Python has) and you can make it be really nicely structured and stuff, right? RIGHT?
The framework, overall, has been a great success. Originally, I wrote it just for my project, but it's been flexible enough that other projects are using it. But a few weeks ago, I had a conversation with the other QA people here -- all of whom are fluent programmers (and likely wouldn't have been hired otherwise) and I believe the sentence most representative of that conversation was "So... if I hate writing XML, and you hate writing XML, and everyone else seems to hate writing XML, why the hell did we write this to take XML input?" Add to that obvious issue the fact that we were looking at XML and starting to write A PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE in it. How do we do loops? How do we do variable assignments (Look, ma, I came up with <globalvariable> and <localvariable>!)? HELLO, XML IS NOT A PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE. Not to mention Guido's already come up with some nice-looking language syntax. Perhaps we should just use his ideas.
Umm.
Thankfully, as it is, you can use the framework, mostly, without knowing having to use XML (you can just import the classes and play with them directly), but as soon as I get around to it, I'm going to refactor the bejeezus out of it and make XML entirely optional (I don't want to drop the XML stuff -- it can be just a thin layer of translation, and I've got a bunch of test cases already that I don't want to have to rewrite).
I think I shall classify this as "That mistake I made once, but never again"
And then of course there's the Coupling (British relationship comedy -- think Friends, but smarter and funny) version -- 'One swallow does not a relationship make.'
Well, the ReplayTV experience would seem to suggest that it's not all doom and gloom.
RTV went through about two cycles of going bankrupt and being sold; at no time did any of their owners make any noise about ditching the current owners -- in fact, they tried to make sure current owners knew that they weren't going to be abandoned.
I wouldn't worry about it all that much (and not just because I use a better DVR than Tivo -- the aforementioned RTV:) ).
Back in the great days of the.com boom, people were building their colo facilities to insane (in a beautiful way) standards. I remember touring Exodus and Above.net (I don't know who you're referring to, though I only ever heard of above.net adopting flywheels) and being just very amused at the cool stuff they were putting in place.
I recently (~8 months back) did some contract work for a small company whose servers were based in some colo facility in San Francisco. One of the first things I noticed was a damn heavy UPS at the bottom of their rack. Weird, I thought -- why not rely on the colo's battery system?
Because they don't have one.
Mind you, this was also the colo that had a cardkey system that had long ago stopped being usable, so when you needed access you used a Radio Shack $29.99 wireless intercom system and someone would come to open the door, and when you checked in they carefully wrote your name on a little nametag.
I think standards have slipped, significantly. In some respects, this is likely a good thing -- it means you have more options now, because you can choose either the super duper "we hook up to two countries' power grids, have eight flywheels and a direct feed from microwaves in orbit" or the "err, here's your cabinet. We'll give you decent power until we don't" options.
So... how much are all these people paying LiveJournal again? Couldn't they request some sort of partial refund of their monthly fee?
It's not that Google's bad -- it's that there's active conflict between Google, trying to give you the best matches, and some people who are trying to either show their webpage at the top of the page listings or tweak pagerank to improve their ad dollars. In other words, it's the conflict between Google and the Google gamers.
Thankfully, this problem will be almost entirely absent on an intranet site (unless your Marketing people go crazy and decide they want their PDF about "the new standards in PC" to appear higher on the list than IT's "the new PC standard" document:) ).
The most obvious problem with site: searches on Google is that they sort of require Google to have access to your documents. Oh, and they don't stop your competitors from doing the same search:).
This thing is intended for internal use, for your intranet, for more sensitive documents.
It's kind of amusing, given the plethora of "well, duh, I'd get a Mac Mini" comments, to speculate what the response would have been like two days ago or, more importantly, what the people involved with this product were saying yesterday when Jobs unveiled it. Poor schmucks.
Slashdot Mirror
Frequency of use.
... 30, maybe, keystrokes if I have to go into the 'recorded shows' mode?
I've got a remote control. To watch TV, I:
A) Push a button to turn the receiver and TV on;
B) Push a button to go into 'TV mode'
C) Press 'Guide button'
D) Press 'up/down' to go up/down pages;
E) Press 'Enter' to pick a channel.
So that's somewhere between 4 (D is not required, potentially, if something interesting is already playing) and
Then, during normal operation, I barely use the remote control, every once in a while maybe adjusting volume slightly or picking a different channel.
Now, write a decent-length response to an email on a RIM. How many keystrokes was that again?
The primary reason against that, I'd think is availability issues.
Until recently, I was under the impression that only two Epson models could do CD/DVD printing, and nobody else had printers that could do this. Turns out this is unique to the US -- because Canon, for example, has their entire Pixma product print to CD/DVD if you buy the non-US versions, but the US versions are hobbled.
My own solution to this is simple -- I'm getting a friend to bring me back a Pixma from Australia -- but most people just aren't going to have an easy time getting a printer in the US that can do this, I think (expecially if, like me, they hate Epson).
The two biggest hurdles I experienced when I got into management were:
... and he mentioned you totally kicked ass." The former is a much more integrated, consistent emotional experience; the latter drives the employee nuts. This took me a while as someone who was fairly introverted -- I remember calling one of my guys because I was going to offer him a promotion. I asked him if I could call him (he was remote) at about 4:30pm on Friday because the schedule worked better, but obviously the end of a workweek can be a little ... scary for conversations with your boss :). I started off with "so ... you've been working here for about three months. How would you say you've done?" and then he went on for about 30 minutes about all the things he'd not done very well. He was expecting me to fire him. Ooops.
... unrewarded.
A) The need to communicate your message in more than just the content of your actual face-to-face presentation, but also in the less tangible body language. In other words, there's a huge difference between coming over to someone's cube and, with a smile, saying "hey, I was talking to Joe Customer about his interaction with you this weekend [and he mentioned you totally kicked ass!]" and calling someone into your cube/office/meeting room and, without smiling, saying "thanks for coming. I just finished talking to Joe Customer about his interaction with you this weekend
B)The absolute need to understand where your control ends and their autonomy begins. I had to deal with an incredibly difficult employee who made the most hair-brained, stupid, illogical decisions I could ever imagine. I was incredibly frustrated by this. At one point it got so bad that I was -- ironically -- in a management class for a week and he did something truly horrendous that had a bunch of people calling for his canning. I told him to not go into work until I came back, not respond to work emails, not do any work, not talk to anyone at work about any work things. The morning after, he dialed into a conference call. ARGH! I ended up having a conversation with another attendee that night over drinks and he told me the most important thing anyone's ever told me about relationships with people:
You don't control anyone other than yourself. You can't make anyone do good work, and you can't stop anyone from doing bad work. You can't make your managers make the right decisions and spend the money you think needs to be spent, and you can't make them NOT decide to standardize on IIS as a web platform. All you can do is clearly communicate -- and then enforce -- consequences. Do good work (and this is what good work is) and you will be rewarded. Do bad work (and this is what bad work is) and you will be
These people who work for you will do exactly whatever the hell it is they want to do. You can't make them do what you want them to do. All you can do is lay out the consequences of pleasing -- or upsetting -- you, and then enforce them. But you've *GOT* to enforce the positive consequences also. You must Must MUST reward good behavior both in recognition (like going over to that employee's cubicle after you've heard from a customer that they went above and beyond last weekend) and in actual benefits. Partially, I was lucky -- the IT group I worked in at the time was pretty good at giving me the resources to say "Hey, that project you worked on over the last two months has sure made you sacrifice a lot. Here's $2000," but I also spent my own money. And here, maybe, comes the other minor point: It doesn't take a lot. Seriously. At some point, after we did really well, I gave every person in my group a $25 gift certificate to Amazon. $25!! What the hell can you get for $25, anyway ?! But they knew it was my money, and they knew it was because _I_ appreciated them and was grateful to them, and it was effective (because it was sincere).
And never, ever, ever forget that management is a service-oriented job. You're there to serve, and when you've got a good group of people working for you, you're there to serve them too.
My first post-college career was typing in registration cards for consumer software (I suspect there aren't any more people who do this in the US :) ). I wanted to squeeze every speed advantage I could find, because doing more cards made my job more secure and also allowed me to take longer breaks.
But you know, I'm not in that business now, and haven't been for a while -- and I think that's probably true for most slashdotters. For us, heavy typing is like the manual labor of our parents. Sure, I type all day, but I don't actually _type_ all day -- I think a bunch, I experiment, I figure things out. In the end, my keyboard isn't the limiting factor on my productivity, my brain is. I can easily type as fast as I can think, even using my ancient IBM QWERTY keyboard -- but honestly, that's not actually all that fast. How do you even measure code output? It sure as hell isn't in WPMs.
Why take advice from AOL?
Because their userbase is:
A) Enormous; and
B) Very, very stupid.
What does this mean?
Look, my ISP -- whose co-owners I've got on speed-dial, and is incredibly clueful -- doesn't have a user spam problem, because pretty much only geeks use them (we pay a bunch extra for the privilege, too). AOL, on the other hand, has the saddest, most pathetic users in the world -- people who are the prime target for PC-p0wning software. Add to that the fact AOL is, like, pretty much the easiest ISP to sign up for. In other words, they're the biggest, fattest, juiciest spam target out there.
And yet, having looked at the 23,507 spam messages I've gotten over the last 303 days, do you know how many came from AOL?
Zero.
I know Carl (not personally, but I'm on some mailing lists with him). He's pretty damn smart. He has to be. Same thing about the rest of the anti-abuse folks at AOL. They're smart, and they're dedicated, and they're very, very, very good.
No. He doesn't. There's a reason why responsible ISPs (there's that word again) don't allow normal l0ser users to connect to port 25 outside their network.
The days of "Oh, here's your static IP and full internet access" are bhind us. I'm all for "if you demonstrate clue, you may have unfiltered unbound access; otherwise, no port 25 for you!"
(also: Port 587 is your friend).
Was that necessary?
Sun doesn't make all that many software products that aren't OS-type products. Off the top of my head, I can think of one big product they've made -- Java -- and they seemed to try to make it available on all platforms, though based on their rules (which hey, is true for any GPL-based software also. It's all about letting the people who created the software determine how it's released).
It is, however, a little offensive to publicly decry a company not releasing their product on your platform, especially when that platform hasn't yet actually shipped its first non-beta version. Seems a little petulant.
It's quite probable that a Pittsburgh judge _would_ be more conservative than a CA judge. The mistake the authorities might have made -- and it's a natural mistake you make here also -- is in thinking that 'conservative' is a label applied to people who have conservative social stances only, rather than people who also have conservative judicial stances.
It wasn't too long ago that 'conservatives' were the people who were loathe to add more laws and regulations that interfere with people's ability to do what they wanted, and were arguing we needed a very strong, clear harm to be present in an activity before it was legislated against. These days, the neocons and social conservatives (and Christian Fascists, frankly) have stolen the 'conservative' label and have started to label anyone who doesn't agree with their social policies as a liberal (with the obvious implications that liberals are the ones taking down this country, corrupting our youth, and providing hostelling services to travelling al Queda terrorists, of course).
It's perfectly within reason that a conservative person would find an anti-obscenity law ludicrous and offensive, and it's good that this one did.
Yes! And they should name it
The Passion Of the Beowulf.
Three possible reasons come to mind:
1. The EFF might believe that the AppleInsider suit has less merit than this suit;
2. The EFF might believe that if the AI suit succeeds, the damage to our rights will be more significant than the damage to our rights if the TS suit succeeds;
3. The EFF might believe that the suits are substantially similar and are only out to establish a precedent, so it makes no sense to represent both defendants.
I wonder how this will affect the demand for WoW.
There's probably ample discussion of this in economics, but it seems pretty clear that some shortage scenarios result in people 'panicking' (perhaps too strong of a term) and really really trying to get whatever it is that's in shortage; I'm guessing there are people out there now who are thinking "OMG, WoW is closed! I've got to see if I can find a copy somewhere near me because I might not be able to get it later!"
And then, at some point, at significant enough shortages, people just sort of give up and don't care anymore. I'm guessing vendors would love to optimize their shortages to fit between these two points.
(Case in point: I wanted an iPod Shuffle, and called the Apple store a bunch of times, waiting for a shipment; they finally got one, but all of the Shuffles went to people who had pre-ordered; they were no longer accepting pre-orders, and told me to check in Friday. At that point, I got tired of the whole ordeal and decided not to get a Shuffle, at least any time in the near future. Not that Apple's hurting).
Err, I _really_ dig the Mac Mini, and I'm _not_ one of the "Oh come on, for that price I can get a bitchin' x86 box!" because it's not about the performance specs, but I should note that my last Dell cost me $299 (after a $100 rebate), and for that price I got a real (lame) graphics card and a 2.8GHz P4-HT. Oh, and *four* DIMM slots :)
Oh, certainly. I was dealing with SQL database structures to deal with this a few years back when I had to figure out how to make it so I could put my (non-porn :) ) DVD and literature in multiple categories. I could have done the same here, but then I'd have needed to put a decent interface on it, and ... frankly, the reason I run a Windows laptop is that I'm lazy and don't want to have to deal with this. Picasa's pretty much the only tool that has made it easy to do this sort of stuff. There might have been others, mind you, but I couldn't find them.
My desktop has the larger archive, but the work laptop is the computer I always have with me, so I carry a ... representative sample? Is that a good term? with me.
Actually, I love Picasa exactly because of what it has that you don't think it has. See, it _is_ possible to categorize pictures in multiple categories. You can't put them in multiple albums, but when you highlight a media file (not just a picture -- read below) and hit ctrl-K, you get a list of keywords you can associate with it, and then easily search for all media files with the same keywords later.
This was actually the feature that sold me on Picasa. See, my problem was that at last count, my laptop had about 25Gb of porn on it, in a whole bunch of video files. I wanted to be able to categorize my porn in ways that would allow me to slice-and-dice my collection -- show me all gay porn, say, or all het porn, or all porn that involves swallowing, etc. I had taken an awkward first step by putting the media files into folders, but that ran into that whole "hard to have a media file in more than one folder" (on Windows, where symlinks/hardlinks are not really all that useful) problem. So great, but what happens when I want to see all videos where Gwen Summers swallows? Hard to do.
Picasa solves this problem elegantly and beautifully for me. I'm very happy with it.
[Sigh. Since this is Slashdot and everyone thinks you're kidding if you talk seriously about porn, I should note I'm entirely serious. In fact, before I found Picasa I attempted to submit an 'Ask Slashdot' about how other people categorize their porn collection, but it got rejected as a troll]
The problem is that XML is just so damned attractive.
... if I hate writing XML, and you hate writing XML, and everyone else seems to hate writing XML, why the hell did we write this to take XML input?" Add to that obvious issue the fact that we were looking at XML and starting to write A PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE in it. How do we do loops? How do we do variable assignments (Look, ma, I came up with <globalvariable> and <localvariable>!)? HELLO, XML IS NOT A PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE. Not to mention Guido's already come up with some nice-looking language syntax. Perhaps we should just use his ideas.
I speak as one of the damned -- one of the first major tasks I undertook at my current position was to write an extensible testing framework. One of the requirements I wanted to adhere to was that the users of this framework should not need to know how to program in our preferred language (Python). XML seemed like an obvious solution -- hey, just write an XML file, feed it to my framework, and Good Things Will Happen[tm]! XML's an obvious choice since it's so easy to parse it (well, given the right language built-in stuff, which Python has) and you can make it be really nicely structured and stuff, right? RIGHT?
The framework, overall, has been a great success. Originally, I wrote it just for my project, but it's been flexible enough that other projects are using it. But a few weeks ago, I had a conversation with the other QA people here -- all of whom are fluent programmers (and likely wouldn't have been hired otherwise) and I believe the sentence most representative of that conversation was "So
Umm.
Thankfully, as it is, you can use the framework, mostly, without knowing having to use XML (you can just import the classes and play with them directly), but as soon as I get around to it, I'm going to refactor the bejeezus out of it and make XML entirely optional (I don't want to drop the XML stuff -- it can be just a thin layer of translation, and I've got a bunch of test cases already that I don't want to have to rewrite).
I think I shall classify this as "That mistake I made once, but never again"
They have.
It's called porn.
And then of course there's the Coupling (British relationship comedy -- think Friends, but smarter and funny) version -- 'One swallow does not a relationship make.'
Thankfully, that would be the army. The Air Force does not have a significant offensive ground component.
:)
On the other hand, they do have nukes
Why do you think we're encouraging an obesity epidemic in our kids?
Well, the ReplayTV experience would seem to suggest that it's not all doom and gloom.
:) ).
RTV went through about two cycles of going bankrupt and being sold; at no time did any of their owners make any noise about ditching the current owners -- in fact, they tried to make sure current owners knew that they weren't going to be abandoned.
I wouldn't worry about it all that much (and not just because I use a better DVR than Tivo -- the aforementioned RTV
Back in the great days of the .com boom, people were building their colo facilities to insane (in a beautiful way) standards. I remember touring Exodus and Above.net (I don't know who you're referring to, though I only ever heard of above.net adopting flywheels) and being just very amused at the cool stuff they were putting in place.
... how much are all these people paying LiveJournal again? Couldn't they request some sort of partial refund of their monthly fee?
I recently (~8 months back) did some contract work for a small company whose servers were based in some colo facility in San Francisco. One of the first things I noticed was a damn heavy UPS at the bottom of their rack. Weird, I thought -- why not rely on the colo's battery system?
Because they don't have one.
Mind you, this was also the colo that had a cardkey system that had long ago stopped being usable, so when you needed access you used a Radio Shack $29.99 wireless intercom system and someone would come to open the door, and when you checked in they carefully wrote your name on a little nametag.
I think standards have slipped, significantly. In some respects, this is likely a good thing -- it means you have more options now, because you can choose either the super duper "we hook up to two countries' power grids, have eight flywheels and a direct feed from microwaves in orbit" or the "err, here's your cabinet. We'll give you decent power until we don't" options.
So
Oh, wait...
It's not that Google's bad -- it's that there's active conflict between Google, trying to give you the best matches, and some people who are trying to either show their webpage at the top of the page listings or tweak pagerank to improve their ad dollars. In other words, it's the conflict between Google and the Google gamers.
:) ).
Thankfully, this problem will be almost entirely absent on an intranet site (unless your Marketing people go crazy and decide they want their PDF about "the new standards in PC" to appear higher on the list than IT's "the new PC standard" document
The most obvious problem with site: searches on Google is that they sort of require Google to have access to your documents. Oh, and they don't stop your competitors from doing the same search :).
This thing is intended for internal use, for your intranet, for more sensitive documents.
It's kind of amusing, given the plethora of "well, duh, I'd get a Mac Mini" comments, to speculate what the response would have been like two days ago or, more importantly, what the people involved with this product were saying yesterday when Jobs unveiled it. Poor schmucks.