A couple of months ago, I setup a new laptop for dual booting Windows and Ubuntu. (Ubuntu is my primary environment, but I need Windows around for testing). After installing Ubuntu Gutsy, the following "just worked":
- Wireless networking
- Wired networking
- Native screen resolution / acceleration*
- Bluetooth
- Printer Detection on the LAN (TCP / IP)
- Compression / Decompression support for a wide array of formats
- Playback of virtually any multimedia type
When I installed Windows, I got none of this out of the box, aside from a crappy zip tool. Also, it's great fun to have to go to another computer, download drivers to a thumb drive, and copy them over, just to get the ethernet card to work (with a reboot, of course).
Now, there's a ton of other great software for Linux that I use all the time but didn't mention, because the point is that there are basic things that "just work" with a Linux installation and don't work without experiencing some pain in Windows.
While the original discussion was about the "usability" of Windows vs. Linux, part of that usability these days consists of the "usability" of a newly rebuilt a system; let's face it, a majority of those dreaded calls that we get from friends / family (you know, the ones that start with "Well, I double-clicked Screensaver.exe") end with either rebuilding their system from scratch or spec'ing out a new one and transferring their stuff over to it. The clear winner right now is Ubuntu (and probably many other distros).
* required a simple dialog to download and install nvidia driver
Sworn testimony by her, the "Geek Squad", and an ex boyfriend, indicate that the hard drive was replaced at least a month before the notice from the RIAA had arrived, for reasons of system instability. And as far as being "1337", I think she would have picked a better lawyer or, at the very least, picked the collective brain of/. for ideas.
... as soon as the judge backtracked this morning and ruled that "making available" was adequate evidence to demonstrate a violation of the copyright holder's rights. From Ars:
"Instruction no. 14 proved to be a sticking point, as Thomas' counsel Brian Toder told Ars tonight that the judge's proposed instruction indicated that the plaintiffs must show that an actual transfer took place in order for there to be a finding of infringement. "
Later, the judge reversed his opinion, at which point I knew this was over, but was at least still hopeful that the damages would be somewhat reasonable.
According to the coverage at Ars, it was pretty clear that the RIAA had found the right person; they had used this same account name for an email address that a witness had verified was hers. The only remaining question in my mind was how well the making available argument would hold up before a jury. Unfortunately, it appeared as though the defense didn't focus any attention on this critical part of the prosecution's argument (until the 11th hour when the judge was deciding what instructions to give the jury for deliberations). Had the defense been pounding the drum of "making available is not provable infringement" instead of "let me show you how fast you can rip a CD", then this jury (and perhaps even the judge with respect to the jury instructions) may have been compelled to decide differently.
In any event, it is what it is. The RIAA set their desired precedent, but for me there are still a couple of lingering questions:
1. Is this really a good thing for the RIAA? I mean, we've heard about the lawsuit threats against dead people, grandmas, and kids, but now there is an actual verdict in a jury trial that pins a $220K judgment against a single mother. I have this feeling that this case is going to make much greater waves in the main stream media then the no-go lawsuit threats (dismissed with/without prejudice) or the tens of thousands of settlement cases. Because of this I also think there is a huge potential for blowback on a large scale, not just in the geek circles.
2. Does the judge have any discretion to lower the damages? It seems as though he's given the defense every opportunity to succeed, from the "this courtroom is not your soap box" comments to the RIAA, to initially requiring evidence of a file transfer actually taking place in the jury instructions. If he does have discretion, I would be surprised if he didn't use it.
All in all, this is a sad situation. Single mother, probably with little to no idea what she was doing, targeted by the RIAA, then levied with enough fines to ruin her life. The RIAA, a lawsuit happy organization continuing to rob artists, consumers, and own our government, are having a champagne toast tonight thanks to their victory in court today. Enjoy your victory, and as far as "setting a precedent," you should be careful what you wish for.
Thanks for the story, I have another one which is probably just one more of many other similar stories out there.
I have a friend that was in the same situation; he knew nothing about computers, only needed to access email, surf the web, and edit Office documents. One day the hard drive on his laptop crashed, badly (boot partition got corrupted). Despite a lot of recovery attempts, it finally appeared that the disk was physically corrupted. Luckily for him, I had an old laptop laying around that I had replaced with a new one just a few months earlier. I offer to let him have the hard drive from it as a replacement if he'll let me run an experiment by installing Ubuntu for him to use since he has virtually no technical knowledge. He was actually a little curious, saying "you know, I've heard about this Linux stuff, go ahead and we'll give it a try." After all, in typical Dell fashion, he didn't have his XP installation media anyway.
Well, I got Dapper installed, but my display was locked in at 800x600, which I found out on the forums* was due to:
1) A required BIOS update
2) An edit to xorg.conf (Surprise!)
Upon correcting these issues, we were in business. One thing was for sure though - his 128 MB of RAM wasn't going to cut it (although the Celeron 1.2 Ghz was doing fine). So I plunked down $30 for a 256MB chip for him and the thing was super snappy, including wireless.
I would ask him every so often how everything was going, and he would say that everything was great. After about 2 months I asked him, "Ok, so what do you really think about it?" and he replied, "well, it's kind of like shopping at Aldi's [a local discount market] - everything's kind of generic, but it's got everything you need". Then I laughed. Hard.
So he's still using it to this day, and it's been at least 9 months now. Just the other day he was showing me that he had changed the desktop wallpaper to a funny picture of Borat:-)
The experience definitely taught me to never underestimate the usability of a Linux system for a user with little to no technical knowledge (although having a geek friend helps).
* Without the friendly and informative atmosphere of the forums, ubuntu would not be anywhere near the product that it is today. Good job guys. If only other internet forums could follow your example:-)
Oracle is a company that appears to be driven by talented technical folks with blinders on. I'm only a techie, so I could be completely wrong here, but how many times has Oracle tried to reinvent the wheel rather than buy companies with the capabilities they were looking for? There are too many to list here, but after browsing their site (over the course of several years, which you'll have to do if you ever want to use their database product), they have invested a lot into things that they should have acquired.
They targeted the Java development crowd, but failed to do anything that appealed to a typical Java development shop. For instance, they have some kind of ORM tool, but JBoss bought Hibernate, which has now become nearly standard, as much of it is backed by/included with EJB 3. Adobe bought JRun from Alaire which, at the time, Oracle had the cash to purchase. Instead, as far as I know, Oracle chooses not to provide their own Servlet container. Furthermore, they probably could've bought BEA at some point, but chose not to. Arguably this could have made them be what it appears they're trying to become - an end to end solution for application development.
Couple that with the fact that they are getting hit hard by MySQL, PostgresSQL, and SQL Server, and you have a solid case as to why Oracle is on their way down.
A friend and I were talking about this just the other day. The conclusion we came to was that sure, Oracle was great and innovative back when we were still using 486 processors, but now they are irrelevant for 90% of the market, if not more, due to increased availability of fast hardware. Oh, and their database is in large part a huge pain in the ass that cannot be uninstalled. As mentioned before, much of it is unnecessary for 90% of applications out there. Actually, the only people I see using/advocating it are people with the same mentality of "People never got fired for choosing Microsoft", or people that are a "DBA" in Oracle, which is equally absurd.
"Thanks to TV and the movies, the average person actually thinks CPR is a fairly successful procedure - they get (sometimes violently) angry when you tell them the actual success rate."
Couldn't agree more, and to add to that I think TV shoes and movies do an even greater disservice - anytime someone is unconscious in a scene, they immediately go for the chest compressions, often without even checking the vital signs first (pulse and breaths), and the victim magically gains conciousness. I think that this goes beyond misinformation and has potential to actually risk lives; in reality, if you're doing chest compressions (or just breaths for that matter), the victim is most often not going to regain conciousness very quickly, if at all. If it's only breaths that are required (they have a pulse), then there may be a chance, but by no means should one expect a victim to magically come to conciousness within minutes, let alone before emergency personel arrive, like the televison and movies would have you believe.
In contrast to what should be done, even if done slightly incorrectly (but correct enough to keep someone alive until emergency workers arrive), Hollywood would lead the average untrained person to believe that in most cases, simply pounding on someone's chest should do the trick within seconds, regardless of what their vital signs may be.
Hopefully you can score one using one of these.
Availability link for CompUSA (Enter Zip) and Target (Change zip code in URL). Also, the bundles have been coming in and out of stock at Wal-Mart and Gamestop. Toys R Us and Circuit City also get a decent amount of systems shipped to them. Check their weekly ads online after midnight on Saturday to find out where they'll be available.
Best of luck!
"Or did you mean "trademark" as in "distinctive product look and feel", which is not implicitly protected by US IP law. (Canada, sure. If the design is registered. Or the EU. Or Japan.)"
This Just In: Apple, Inc. moves to Canada. More at 11 (if we don't get sued).
I don't have an opinion on the causes of global warming (it seems impossible to draw correlations or causations based on such limited data), but I think the chart that you linked to contradicts your opinion. The red line representing CO2 concentration seems to correlate to the temperature variation. At the far right end of the chart (indicating the last 100 years or so), the red line spikes to around double of what it was in entire 400,000 years that are graphed. The disturbing part is, if the CO2 concentration is playing a role in the temperature variation, then the datapoints graphed over the last 100 years would create a temperature variation that is completely off of the graph.
Thanks for the link, it's nice to see some pure scientific data with respect to this issue.
I have to agree that VS allows folks with little programming experience to whip up something quickly. However, having worked in a mixed environment for the past 5 years (Java /.NET), and having experienced Eclipse for over the past 2 years, I can see how VS can lead you down a dark path.
I wouldn't say that it effects the creativity of a good developer, but it does wear one down. The fundamental problem, from a developer's standpoint, is that VS creates barriers to progamming with any agility. Simple refactoring, such as changing a Class name, or changing a Class's package, are major headaches in VS. After a few hours of fixing errors for those "mistakes", you tend to start looking at your calendar and realize you just cannot go back and fix every single Class or namespace issue.
Then you have a lack of simple code generation, such as generate Properties (in java it's getters/setters) or implement abstract methods from a base class (there is only code completion for implementing interfaces). This leads to encouraging developers to shy away from using abstract classes.
The Object Hierarchy tool is generally useless. What classes implement this interface? What classes extend this class? These are questions you have to find out on your own. Without this knowledge, many existing wheels seem to get reinvinted.
Also, the lack of incremental compile, even if it were just a low priority background thread that ran as you saved, is non existent. This makes developers unnecessarily pour over syntax that the compiler will pick up for you.
There is no mechanism to organize imports (or "using"'s in.NET). This wastes valuable time and leads to copying and pasting imports from a similar class, which is just plain sloppy, but due to the fact that you actually have to deliver working software, isn't exactly high priority.
Oh, and Visual Source Safe, which is really an oxymoron, is the only revision control system that VS supports. Choice? Nope, so we use CVS outside of the "IDE" (in quotes because the first term in the acronym is supposed to stand for "Integrated").
It wears me down. Trying to be a good developer using VS is an uphill battle. Always.
I've been working with C# since.NET 1.0 Beta 1 and with Java since 1.2. When it first came on the scene, my initial reaction was very favorable to C#. Creating and consuming Web Services was incredibly easy (this was 2001, when SOAP had just arrived), and the builtin event/delegate model of.NET made event handling much more intuitive then Java.
Then along came Eclipse, which breathed new life into the Java development experience. Nowadays, Eclipse has become an integral part of using Java; most folks I know don't think twice about the IDE they'd choose to develop Java in. The best part of all this is that Eclipse is cross platform as well, which allows me to switch operating systems without hesitation. This could definitely be considered a path to Linux (and in fact, it has been for me).
In the same way, Visual Studio.NET enhances productivity in.NET programming, although it is far inferior to Eclipse by way of refactoring tools, incremental compile, and plugin support. Even so, any productivity benefits reaped from using Visual Studio cannot be experienced in Linux, because Microsoft will not port Visual Studio to it.
The easier path to Linux doesn't come down to a language or its Virtual Machine. In the development world, it comes down to your development environment, which is at the core of what a developer does everyday.
Hello,
If you're interested in an alternative bug tracking tool that is open source, you should check out TrackIt. Not only does it manage bugs, but it also supports features, requirements, test cases, and much more, in addition to any user defined item types. It integrates with Subversion and CVS, as well as preliminary integration with Eclipse. Other features include a Timeline view that is also viewable via RSS, a Listing driven by HQL, Reports driven by SQL, fully customizable lookup lists, project news, a high level summary view, nightly build integration, and user customizable RSS feeds.
Under the hood, it's implemented using Hibernate 3 and the fully AJAX enabled Java web toolkit, Echo2
I've been working on a project with web services running in JBoss and clients connecting in.NET for over a year now (JBoss 4.x,.NET 2.0 Beta). These web services involve objects that are fairly complex. The biggest "incompatibility" we've experienced has been upgrading JBoss versions, which unfortunately introduce pervasive changes to the application.
So my question is, where's the incompatibility with respect to JBoss and.NET? If it exists, I sure haven't seen it. We even recently upgraded to jdk 1.5 and were able to get the services to use enum's on both ends in one day. I don't think there is any other common ground besides web services that JBoss and.NET (which I like to refer to as "not yet") could or should be compatible.
Why not just use Echo2 and not have to worry about the details of an AJAX implementation for Java? I generally prefer not to reinvent the wheel, and with all of the various browser quirks with respect to AJAX, that's quite a non-trivial wheel to try and recreate.
Even though he states that (good) hackers have any special, hardwired mental abilities, I disagree.
From the article:
What I wanted to achieve is to show how to think creatively and see problems that go beyond textbook examples
This is exactly what I've always thought good hacking was all about - creative problem solving. I agree that good hackers go beyond a textbook or class work in order to solve problems, but I also think this is an ability that some have and others just don't. Good problem solvers can be found way beyond IT. It's the same as people that are considered good "handymen", for lack of a better term. Give them a problem, be it move some heavy furniture or fix something that's broken and they'll come up with a creative solution, even though it initially looked impossible to solve. I'll even bet that some hackers are considered good "handymen" around their neighborhood.
Then you'll like this one too. After many requests for our manager to upgrade our desktop machines from limping 500 Mhz processors (this was 3 years ago, when Ghz was old news), I finally decided to send out an email detailing the loss of productivity in compile time on those machines versus my Athlon 1300+ at home. The numbers came out to over a 5x compile time increase, enough to staff an extra developer for an entire month. I had all the screenshots and graphs and charts to back it up. The response? "You make a good argument here, but you forget that we bill by the hour."
Some managers will never get it. There are a dangerous breed out there (like the one mentioned above) that relentlessly pursue power, no matter how (un)qualified they are. Also, the sad but true Peter Principal further facilitates this incompetency. The only effective counter that I've found is to go the grassroots route. If you garner enough support, you may end up with your marketing folks hanging printouts on every office door entitled "Ask not what your developer can do for you, ask what you can do for your developer". It didn't take long after that.
From my experience, Echo 2 is by and large the most complete and stable AJAX toolkit for Java. It has a very nice pure Java swing-like API and is very extensible. The
Online Demos are very cool and definitely worth a look. If Atlas is the AJAX framework for.NET, Echo2 has got to be the equivalent for Java.
I've used it on TrackIt for a few weeks now and in my opinion, it is head and shoulders above any open source Java web framework, AJAX enabled or otherwise.
Face it: from a standpoint of physics, wind, water, and solar...
Solar power will be a real option if a Space Elevator gets built. Brad Edwards was telling me that some countries have shown an interest in the elavator for that very reason. Basically, since space is uninhibited by the plagues of solar power on Earth (clouds), it can be 100% efficient. The problem is that rocketry for satelites mounted with solar panels that are several miles in diameter is not cost effective. However, with a space elevator, they could pump out several of them for practically nothing.
The power would be beamed back to Earth (this is the part where he kind of lost me) in the form of a laser or something similar, to a receiving station. With proper failover and observation, there would be no waste or risk.
I guess the point of all that is to say that there are energy sources that are still to be uncovered. Does the current situation in the US warrant an all out move to nuclear power? Personally, I don't think so. Moving to an experimental source of energy while at the same time cutting the financial legs out from under an already unstable middle east is enough reason to fund some research and see what we can come up with.
It doesn't look like the gmail trademark means anything but $'s to that handful of other companies; they're just trying to squeeze some cash out of google. I hope google gets it back, or there's going to be some angry beta testers (myself included).
Definitely some poor planning.
I use a Hard Drive Enclosure for backing up files. With IDE HDD's getting less and less expensive, picking one of these versatile enclosures up for less than $50 is a good value. I own a DVD burner but rarely use it for data storage since the enclosure is way more convenient.
Now as far as 10 250GB drives in a Raid configuration, how redundant redundant do you need you data to be? Or is it that you're just overly cautious after having your backup DVD's fail? Just curious.
I've had the SN41G2 running for about 15 months non-stop as my media center. With a little Modding you can make this a silent machine. The design these guys come up with is remarkable; while cramming that much functionality into a "toaster" is in and of itself an accomplishment, the forethought in the design of these machines make installation less tedious than one would imagine. My only regret is how much horsepower I'm wasting by only only using it as a home theater pc.
Slashdot Mirror
A couple of months ago, I setup a new laptop for dual booting Windows and Ubuntu. (Ubuntu is my primary environment, but I need Windows around for testing). After installing Ubuntu Gutsy, the following "just worked":
- Wireless networking
- Wired networking
- Native screen resolution / acceleration*
- Bluetooth
- Printer Detection on the LAN (TCP / IP)
- Compression / Decompression support for a wide array of formats
- Playback of virtually any multimedia type
When I installed Windows, I got none of this out of the box, aside from a crappy zip tool. Also, it's great fun to have to go to another computer, download drivers to a thumb drive, and copy them over, just to get the ethernet card to work (with a reboot, of course).
Now, there's a ton of other great software for Linux that I use all the time but didn't mention, because the point is that there are basic things that "just work" with a Linux installation and don't work without experiencing some pain in Windows.
While the original discussion was about the "usability" of Windows vs. Linux, part of that usability these days consists of the "usability" of a newly rebuilt a system; let's face it, a majority of those dreaded calls that we get from friends / family (you know, the ones that start with "Well, I double-clicked Screensaver.exe") end with either rebuilding their system from scratch or spec'ing out a new one and transferring their stuff over to it. The clear winner right now is Ubuntu (and probably many other distros).
* required a simple dialog to download and install nvidia driver
Sworn testimony by her, the "Geek Squad", and an ex boyfriend, indicate that the hard drive was replaced at least a month before the notice from the RIAA had arrived, for reasons of system instability. And as far as being "1337", I think she would have picked a better lawyer or, at the very least, picked the collective brain of /. for ideas.
... as soon as the judge backtracked this morning and ruled that "making available" was adequate evidence to demonstrate a violation of the copyright holder's rights. From Ars:
"Instruction no. 14 proved to be a sticking point, as Thomas' counsel Brian Toder told Ars tonight that the judge's proposed instruction indicated that the plaintiffs must show that an actual transfer took place in order for there to be a finding of infringement. "
Later, the judge reversed his opinion, at which point I knew this was over, but was at least still hopeful that the damages would be somewhat reasonable.
According to the coverage at Ars, it was pretty clear that the RIAA had found the right person; they had used this same account name for an email address that a witness had verified was hers. The only remaining question in my mind was how well the making available argument would hold up before a jury. Unfortunately, it appeared as though the defense didn't focus any attention on this critical part of the prosecution's argument (until the 11th hour when the judge was deciding what instructions to give the jury for deliberations). Had the defense been pounding the drum of "making available is not provable infringement" instead of "let me show you how fast you can rip a CD", then this jury (and perhaps even the judge with respect to the jury instructions) may have been compelled to decide differently.
In any event, it is what it is. The RIAA set their desired precedent, but for me there are still a couple of lingering questions:
1. Is this really a good thing for the RIAA? I mean, we've heard about the lawsuit threats against dead people, grandmas, and kids, but now there is an actual verdict in a jury trial that pins a $220K judgment against a single mother. I have this feeling that this case is going to make much greater waves in the main stream media then the no-go lawsuit threats (dismissed with/without prejudice) or the tens of thousands of settlement cases. Because of this I also think there is a huge potential for blowback on a large scale, not just in the geek circles.
2. Does the judge have any discretion to lower the damages? It seems as though he's given the defense every opportunity to succeed, from the "this courtroom is not your soap box" comments to the RIAA, to initially requiring evidence of a file transfer actually taking place in the jury instructions. If he does have discretion, I would be surprised if he didn't use it.
All in all, this is a sad situation. Single mother, probably with little to no idea what she was doing, targeted by the RIAA, then levied with enough fines to ruin her life. The RIAA, a lawsuit happy organization continuing to rob artists, consumers, and own our government, are having a champagne toast tonight thanks to their victory in court today. Enjoy your victory, and as far as "setting a precedent," you should be careful what you wish for.
Thanks for the story, I have another one which is probably just one more of many other similar stories out there.
:-)
:-)
I have a friend that was in the same situation; he knew nothing about computers, only needed to access email, surf the web, and edit Office documents. One day the hard drive on his laptop crashed, badly (boot partition got corrupted). Despite a lot of recovery attempts, it finally appeared that the disk was physically corrupted. Luckily for him, I had an old laptop laying around that I had replaced with a new one just a few months earlier. I offer to let him have the hard drive from it as a replacement if he'll let me run an experiment by installing Ubuntu for him to use since he has virtually no technical knowledge. He was actually a little curious, saying "you know, I've heard about this Linux stuff, go ahead and we'll give it a try." After all, in typical Dell fashion, he didn't have his XP installation media anyway.
Well, I got Dapper installed, but my display was locked in at 800x600, which I found out on the forums* was due to:
1) A required BIOS update
2) An edit to xorg.conf (Surprise!)
Upon correcting these issues, we were in business. One thing was for sure though - his 128 MB of RAM wasn't going to cut it (although the Celeron 1.2 Ghz was doing fine). So I plunked down $30 for a 256MB chip for him and the thing was super snappy, including wireless.
I would ask him every so often how everything was going, and he would say that everything was great. After about 2 months I asked him, "Ok, so what do you really think about it?" and he replied, "well, it's kind of like shopping at Aldi's [a local discount market] - everything's kind of generic, but it's got everything you need". Then I laughed. Hard.
So he's still using it to this day, and it's been at least 9 months now. Just the other day he was showing me that he had changed the desktop wallpaper to a funny picture of Borat
The experience definitely taught me to never underestimate the usability of a Linux system for a user with little to no technical knowledge (although having a geek friend helps).
* Without the friendly and informative atmosphere of the forums, ubuntu would not be anywhere near the product that it is today. Good job guys. If only other internet forums could follow your example
Oracle is a company that appears to be driven by talented technical folks with blinders on. I'm only a techie, so I could be completely wrong here, but how many times has Oracle tried to reinvent the wheel rather than buy companies with the capabilities they were looking for? There are too many to list here, but after browsing their site (over the course of several years, which you'll have to do if you ever want to use their database product), they have invested a lot into things that they should have acquired.
They targeted the Java development crowd, but failed to do anything that appealed to a typical Java development shop. For instance, they have some kind of ORM tool, but JBoss bought Hibernate, which has now become nearly standard, as much of it is backed by/included with EJB 3. Adobe bought JRun from Alaire which, at the time, Oracle had the cash to purchase. Instead, as far as I know, Oracle chooses not to provide their own Servlet container. Furthermore, they probably could've bought BEA at some point, but chose not to. Arguably this could have made them be what it appears they're trying to become - an end to end solution for application development.
Couple that with the fact that they are getting hit hard by MySQL, PostgresSQL, and SQL Server, and you have a solid case as to why Oracle is on their way down. A friend and I were talking about this just the other day. The conclusion we came to was that sure, Oracle was great and innovative back when we were still using 486 processors, but now they are irrelevant for 90% of the market, if not more, due to increased availability of fast hardware. Oh, and their database is in large part a huge pain in the ass that cannot be uninstalled. As mentioned before, much of it is unnecessary for 90% of applications out there. Actually, the only people I see using/advocating it are people with the same mentality of "People never got fired for choosing Microsoft", or people that are a "DBA" in Oracle, which is equally absurd.
"Thanks to TV and the movies, the average person actually thinks CPR is a fairly successful procedure - they get (sometimes violently) angry when you tell them the actual success rate."
Couldn't agree more, and to add to that I think TV shoes and movies do an even greater disservice - anytime someone is unconscious in a scene, they immediately go for the chest compressions, often without even checking the vital signs first (pulse and breaths), and the victim magically gains conciousness. I think that this goes beyond misinformation and has potential to actually risk lives; in reality, if you're doing chest compressions (or just breaths for that matter), the victim is most often not going to regain conciousness very quickly, if at all. If it's only breaths that are required (they have a pulse), then there may be a chance, but by no means should one expect a victim to magically come to conciousness within minutes, let alone before emergency personel arrive, like the televison and movies would have you believe.
In contrast to what should be done, even if done slightly incorrectly (but correct enough to keep someone alive until emergency workers arrive), Hollywood would lead the average untrained person to believe that in most cases, simply pounding on someone's chest should do the trick within seconds, regardless of what their vital signs may be.
Edit to previous post - Wii's available at Sears.com now!
Hopefully you can score one using one of these. Availability link for CompUSA (Enter Zip) and Target (Change zip code in URL). Also, the bundles have been coming in and out of stock at Wal-Mart and Gamestop. Toys R Us and Circuit City also get a decent amount of systems shipped to them. Check their weekly ads online after midnight on Saturday to find out where they'll be available. Best of luck!
"Or did you mean "trademark" as in "distinctive product look and feel", which is not implicitly protected by US IP law. (Canada, sure. If the design is registered. Or the EU. Or Japan.)" This Just In: Apple, Inc. moves to Canada. More at 11 (if we don't get sued).
I don't have an opinion on the causes of global warming (it seems impossible to draw correlations or causations based on such limited data), but I think the chart that you linked to contradicts your opinion. The red line representing CO2 concentration seems to correlate to the temperature variation. At the far right end of the chart (indicating the last 100 years or so), the red line spikes to around double of what it was in entire 400,000 years that are graphed. The disturbing part is, if the CO2 concentration is playing a role in the temperature variation, then the datapoints graphed over the last 100 years would create a temperature variation that is completely off of the graph.
Thanks for the link, it's nice to see some pure scientific data with respect to this issue.
NASA has an interesting write-up about it." Bottom line is "we still have a lot to learn about hurricanes."
C'mon NASA. As part of the government, I'm sure you're in the know about what's really going on.
I have to agree that VS allows folks with little programming experience to whip up something quickly. However, having worked in a mixed environment for the past 5 years (Java / .NET), and having experienced Eclipse for over the past 2 years, I can see how VS can lead you down a dark path.
.NET). This wastes valuable time and leads to copying and pasting imports from a similar class, which is just plain sloppy, but due to the fact that you actually have to deliver working software, isn't exactly high priority.
I wouldn't say that it effects the creativity of a good developer, but it does wear one down. The fundamental problem, from a developer's standpoint, is that VS creates barriers to progamming with any agility. Simple refactoring, such as changing a Class name, or changing a Class's package, are major headaches in VS. After a few hours of fixing errors for those "mistakes", you tend to start looking at your calendar and realize you just cannot go back and fix every single Class or namespace issue.
Then you have a lack of simple code generation, such as generate Properties (in java it's getters/setters) or implement abstract methods from a base class (there is only code completion for implementing interfaces). This leads to encouraging developers to shy away from using abstract classes.
The Object Hierarchy tool is generally useless. What classes implement this interface? What classes extend this class? These are questions you have to find out on your own. Without this knowledge, many existing wheels seem to get reinvinted.
Also, the lack of incremental compile, even if it were just a low priority background thread that ran as you saved, is non existent. This makes developers unnecessarily pour over syntax that the compiler will pick up for you.
There is no mechanism to organize imports (or "using"'s in
Oh, and Visual Source Safe, which is really an oxymoron, is the only revision control system that VS supports. Choice? Nope, so we use CVS outside of the "IDE" (in quotes because the first term in the acronym is supposed to stand for "Integrated").
It wears me down. Trying to be a good developer using VS is an uphill battle. Always.
I think these guys already have that covered. Warning: Not safe for work.
I've been working with C# since .NET 1.0 Beta 1 and with Java since 1.2. When it first came on the scene, my initial reaction was very favorable to C#. Creating and consuming Web Services was incredibly easy (this was 2001, when SOAP had just arrived), and the builtin event/delegate model of .NET made event handling much more intuitive then Java.
.NET enhances productivity in .NET programming, although it is far inferior to Eclipse by way of refactoring tools, incremental compile, and plugin support. Even so, any productivity benefits reaped from using Visual Studio cannot be experienced in Linux, because Microsoft will not port Visual Studio to it.
Then along came Eclipse, which breathed new life into the Java development experience. Nowadays, Eclipse has become an integral part of using Java; most folks I know don't think twice about the IDE they'd choose to develop Java in. The best part of all this is that Eclipse is cross platform as well, which allows me to switch operating systems without hesitation. This could definitely be considered a path to Linux (and in fact, it has been for me).
In the same way, Visual Studio
The easier path to Linux doesn't come down to a language or its Virtual Machine. In the development world, it comes down to your development environment, which is at the core of what a developer does everyday.
Hello, If you're interested in an alternative bug tracking tool that is open source, you should check out TrackIt. Not only does it manage bugs, but it also supports features, requirements, test cases, and much more, in addition to any user defined item types. It integrates with Subversion and CVS, as well as preliminary integration with Eclipse. Other features include a Timeline view that is also viewable via RSS, a Listing driven by HQL, Reports driven by SQL, fully customizable lookup lists, project news, a high level summary view, nightly build integration, and user customizable RSS feeds.
Under the hood, it's implemented using Hibernate 3 and the fully AJAX enabled Java web toolkit, Echo2
I've been working on a project with web services running in JBoss and clients connecting in .NET for over a year now (JBoss 4.x, .NET 2.0 Beta). These web services involve objects that are fairly complex. The biggest "incompatibility" we've experienced has been upgrading JBoss versions, which unfortunately introduce pervasive changes to the application.
.NET? If it exists, I sure haven't seen it. We even recently upgraded to jdk 1.5 and were able to get the services to use enum's on both ends in one day. I don't think there is any other common ground besides web services that JBoss and .NET (which I like to refer to as "not yet") could or should be compatible.
So my question is, where's the incompatibility with respect to JBoss and
Why not just use Echo2 and not have to worry about the details of an AJAX implementation for Java? I generally prefer not to reinvent the wheel, and with all of the various browser quirks with respect to AJAX, that's quite a non-trivial wheel to try and recreate.
Even though he states that (good) hackers have any special, hardwired mental abilities, I disagree.
From the article: What I wanted to achieve is to show how to think creatively and see problems that go beyond textbook examples
This is exactly what I've always thought good hacking was all about - creative problem solving. I agree that good hackers go beyond a textbook or class work in order to solve problems, but I also think this is an ability that some have and others just don't. Good problem solvers can be found way beyond IT. It's the same as people that are considered good "handymen", for lack of a better term. Give them a problem, be it move some heavy furniture or fix something that's broken and they'll come up with a creative solution, even though it initially looked impossible to solve. I'll even bet that some hackers are considered good "handymen" around their neighborhood.
Then you'll like this one too. After many requests for our manager to upgrade our desktop machines from limping 500 Mhz processors (this was 3 years ago, when Ghz was old news), I finally decided to send out an email detailing the loss of productivity in compile time on those machines versus my Athlon 1300+ at home. The numbers came out to over a 5x compile time increase, enough to staff an extra developer for an entire month. I had all the screenshots and graphs and charts to back it up. The response? "You make a good argument here, but you forget that we bill by the hour."
Some managers will never get it. There are a dangerous breed out there (like the one mentioned above) that relentlessly pursue power, no matter how (un)qualified they are. Also, the sad but true Peter Principal further facilitates this incompetency. The only effective counter that I've found is to go the grassroots route. If you garner enough support, you may end up with your marketing folks hanging printouts on every office door entitled "Ask not what your developer can do for you, ask what you can do for your developer". It didn't take long after that.
From my experience, Echo 2 is by and large the most complete and stable AJAX toolkit for Java. It has a very nice pure Java swing-like API and is very extensible. The Online Demos are very cool and definitely worth a look. If Atlas is the AJAX framework for .NET, Echo2 has got to be the equivalent for Java.
I've used it on TrackIt for a few weeks now and in my opinion, it is head and shoulders above any open source Java web framework, AJAX enabled or otherwise.
Solar power will be a real option if a Space Elevator gets built. Brad Edwards was telling me that some countries have shown an interest in the elavator for that very reason. Basically, since space is uninhibited by the plagues of solar power on Earth (clouds), it can be 100% efficient. The problem is that rocketry for satelites mounted with solar panels that are several miles in diameter is not cost effective. However, with a space elevator, they could pump out several of them for practically nothing.
The power would be beamed back to Earth (this is the part where he kind of lost me) in the form of a laser or something similar, to a receiving station. With proper failover and observation, there would be no waste or risk.
I guess the point of all that is to say that there are energy sources that are still to be uncovered. Does the current situation in the US warrant an all out move to nuclear power? Personally, I don't think so. Moving to an experimental source of energy while at the same time cutting the financial legs out from under an already unstable middle east is enough reason to fund some research and see what we can come up with.
"We've started a Development Process Improvement Project to get smarter and improve efficiency".
Sounds like Lumberg is phoning in the "Consultants."
The next memo will undoubtedly be littered with "Ask yourself, Is this good for the company?"
It doesn't look like the gmail trademark means anything but $'s to that handful of other companies; they're just trying to squeeze some cash out of google. I hope google gets it back, or there's going to be some angry beta testers (myself included). Definitely some poor planning.
I use a Hard Drive Enclosure for backing up files. With IDE HDD's getting less and less expensive, picking one of these versatile enclosures up for less than $50 is a good value. I own a DVD burner but rarely use it for data storage since the enclosure is way more convenient. Now as far as 10 250GB drives in a Raid configuration, how redundant redundant do you need you data to be? Or is it that you're just overly cautious after having your backup DVD's fail? Just curious.
I've had the SN41G2 running for about 15 months non-stop as my media center. With a little Modding you can make this a silent machine. The design these guys come up with is remarkable; while cramming that much functionality into a "toaster" is in and of itself an accomplishment, the forethought in the design of these machines make installation less tedious than one would imagine. My only regret is how much horsepower I'm wasting by only only using it as a home theater pc.