The client isn't forcing the poster into using limited tools. He's just specified a platform. What the poster fails to mention is if the client is already running a Windows based shop and already has money invested in XP machines and software, which is probably why the client wants a Windows solution.
What the poster *should* do is subcontract the bulk of the job to someone who knows how to do this in Windows and take a cut off the top instead of bitching about how the job would be so much better if he could operate in his own comfort zone.
Sheesh.
Re:For those who don't want to RTFA, the top 10:
on
Top 10 Web Fads
·
· Score: 5, Funny
WHAT??!!
No Badgers?? There should be Badgers on the list!!
Top 10 Things We Wish People Would Stop Putting On Web Sites
10: Pictures of pets 9: Really bad rhyming poetry 8: Really bad Haiku 7: Some joke someone e-mailed them 6: The word "cool" 5: 18 endlessly looping animated.gifs 4: Pictures of ugly people naked 3: Their contribution to the Kirk Vs. Picard debate 2: Terrible, error-ridden, fan fiction 1: TOP 10 LISTS!!!!!!!
Before Galileo, the "law" was that different items of different weights would fall at different speeds. When Galileo proved otherwise, the "law" had to be amended.
What we call the "laws of physics" are merely best-evidence postulates to be held until better information comes along.
Many of science's greatest advances have come from men who "fought the law" and won.
"You cannot change the laws of physics"
Keep repeating that. Perhaps if you say it loud enough and often enough, you can get a place in the history books as the fool who tried to discourage one of science's future greats from changing our understanding of the universe yet again.
Look at what we did in the last century...
We went from balooning to moon landings.
We discovered how to transplant vital organs.
We discovered new elements.
We split the atom.
And at some point there was a majority of someones who said the "laws" of science prohibited such things from being possible.
Einstein wasn't a professor in a university lab when he published his famed papers in 1905. He was a patent clerk, working on his papers in his spare time. At least figuratively, he was a young man, working in his garage.
If you want to say "improbable", okay. But when you say "impossible", you risk being history's fool.
I keep seeing posts about how the whole idea is ludicrous and has been proven ludicrous.
How many of you have an income because of young guys, tinkering in garages, defying conventional wisdom, doing things experts condemned as impossible or improbable, or in some cases just finding a way to do some existing thing in a much better way?
I know this looks like BS on the surface, but just possibly they had an epiphany no one else has had and figured out a better way. From this tiny article, you got the schematics and engineering specifications of their devide? You know it can't work?
Unlikely that it's a true innovation? Possibly. No way in hell it's a true innovation? You're brave men to deal in such absolutes.
Due to the low voltage, ridiculously large currents are necessary.
I don't mean to contradict someone who knows more about electronics than I do. I took one year of elementary electronics in high school and then went into creative pursuits that required less math. But if a car's battery & electrical system run at 12 volts, 80 amps creates just short of a kilowatt.
Given that other systems in the car draw current, the system won't get a full kilowatt, or maybe not even half a kilowatt.
As I said, I went into creative pursuits which required less math, so I can't do the calculations on how many BTUs a Peltier cooler can exchange. And the following is just back-of-envelope calculation based on bits and pieces I've picked up, so excuse me for any inaccuracies: I know that a 6,000 BTU window AC unit can cool around 900 cubic feet pretty well, and I know that the interior of your average mid-size sedan is maybe 150 cubic feet at most, so the Peltier AC would need to rate at around 1,000 BTUs.
Can a Peltier system, with a COP of 0.4, turn 200-300 watts of power into 1,000 BTUs or more of heat exchange?
Wal-Mart sued Amazon back in 1998 for poaching employees to get hold of privileged information about Wal-Mart's IT systems.
The non-compete is generally intended to keep you from taking knowledge derived from Employer A's research and development dollars over to Employer B. Poaching employees is a sort of wink-wink-nudge-nudge form of corporate espionage that such non-competes are intended to prevent.
As long as the non-compete is properly scoped and is null and void if you're fired, there shouldn't be a problem. If it's overly broad and applies even if you're fired, then you should refuse to sign it. If you're the type of employee who would be valuable enough to poach, you're also one who is valuable enough to negotiate his/her employment contract rather than accept the first draft.
The last place I worked, I usually had a higher salary and more stock options than my direct manager because the exec who recruited me wanted me badly enough to go to bat for me in the contract negotiations.
I've got to say the Linux desktop has become a truly viable option for large-scale corporate deployments. That said, there are still niggling questions about its long-term viability as a desktop OS.
With the BSD ports collection, the slick Apple interface, many great OSS options being multi-platform anyway, and virtualizing XP for the few XP apps I can't let go of... Why not just go MacTel when I buy my next PC in '06 or '07?
IMO, MacTel could be a Linux killer, or at least help keep it a niche OS instead of a major mainstream competitor.
The phone companies have long enjoyed local monopolies that were only recently (last decade or so) broken down with requirements that they have to share their copper. The cable companies on the other hand won a recent FCC ruling that they don't have to share their coax.
The fact is that these companies are rolling out fiber to the home on their own phased schedules, the timelines of which do not sit well with a lot of bandwidth-starved consumers, particularly those in markets that are far down the roadmaps. So it's not surprising that the municipalities are trying to accelerate this rollout with a DIY philosophy. The municipal governments are doing what they really should be doing, which is serving their residents. You don't see the cities implementing municipal-run ISPs to compete with existing, viable solutions from the cable and telephone companies. The municipal-run ISPs are being constructed precisely because they're filling a gap the big communications corporations are voluntarily leaving.
The sad thing is that the cable companies and telephone companies are trying to protect these markets by suing the cities rather than rolling out the services that they want. Their philosophy is "you'll get it when we get around to you, and if your government tries to provide services in the meantime (or invite in alternative service providers), we'll try to prevent it". This is wrong and arrogant. It treats consumers like a resource these companies have some sort of divine right to exploit, rather than a market which can and should be able to vote with its ballots and pocketbooks.
In a free market, if you ignore a market segment, you should not have a legal way to prevent others from coming in and serving it. While I can understand the desire of the big communication companies to protect their markets, they should protect them by serving them, not by suing those who would fill the gaps they're leaving.
We are in a world where broadband is synoonymous with prosperity, or close to it. The availability of broadband is an economic growth factor and an economic indicator. No single corporation should have the power to determine the timeline when such a powerful tool comes to a community.
- G
Long, long ago (in the '90s), when pondering an activist anti-spam site, I was able to get the name and phone number of Spamford Wallace's mom through doing a variety of online searches, and was seriously considering posting it with a suggestion that people call her and tell her what a terrible mother she must be for raising such a scumbag of a son.
The reason I didn't... such a sword cuts both ways. If I put his mom in play, all moms became fair game.
But this was 8 or 9 years ago, and the only thing that reporter cited that I wasn't able to do then was examine satellite photos of Spamford's mom's house.
Too bad all you Slashbots won't be reading Harry Potter due to your god's utterences. I'm sure he probably has some nice poetry or something on his site to ease the pain.
No, but he does have quite the "mad prophet in the desert" hair and beard.
This is interesting as a business model (if Paramount doesn't shut them down). Much like PBS they're operating off mostly donations from viewers (who get a behind the scenes DVD as a premium). But if they can get the funding they need to continue profitably and on a reasonable schedule, it shows that the networks/studios can continue shows with large enough fan bases, moving the revenue over to a 'made for DVD' model rather than a broadcast sponsorship model.
They're not there yet in terms of funding, it seems. But if unfettered fanfic productions could compete, it begs the question of whether the competition would weed out the weak and determine the best as the winner or if it would fracture the support of the fan base so much that no project could obtain sufficient funding.
Okay, Jeff Bezos claims he gets these patents defensively to prevent someone else from getting them and suing Amazon. But the effort he goes to in convincing the patent office they're even valid seems enormous.
And considering all the money spent on lawyers to go back and forth 5 times, answering the patent examiner's objections, could have bought off at least one senator, maybe two. Could have bought a handful of congressmen. Multiply his filing and lawyer fees by all the patents he's gobbled up like some braying pacman, and you've got enough lobbyist money to get some real patent reform, the lack of which is the reason behind his defensive patents.
Recently, a friend got a spam about MP3's patent issues and a software package backed by some lawyer and programmer to convert your MP3s into a non-patented format. Stupid, because Microsoft has claimed WMA is free (and just about every portable player and PC jukebox supports it), and if you don't trust Microsoft, you can always go with OGG. Why buy anything from these spammers?
They make some vague claims, such as "we believe [the patent owners] are serving papers right now." Note the fact that they have no concrete examples of this happening. They just believe it is. Then: "it's believed that one Website Owner has recently settled out of court for several millions." Once again, no concrete example. Just a belief that this has happened.
But great scams always include a grain of truth, this one being that MP3's patent is owned by Thomson, and they have set licensing terms.
So my question is, does anyone KNOW of Thomson actually suing anyone or gearing up for a rash of suits as the spammers claim? And this is not "I believe they are" or "a friend knows a guy whose sister's boyfriend's cousin's hairdresser's uncle got sued by Thomson while removing a gerbil from Richard Gere's butt." Does anyone have any concrete info on Thomson enforcing their patents?
I wonder when we're going to see ads appearing on google maps.
That's definitely been one of my greater concerns with Google Maps. I also wonder how it conflicts if you're using AdSense on the same page, or if perhaps you're using another ad solution on the same page.
My primary problem with Google Maps, though, is that they do have a limit on how many maps you can serve in a specific time period before they cut you off. It's great if you have a low-traffic page, but if you get slashdotted or just start getting popular, your maps *could* disappear. I say "could" because I don't know if Google Maps is enforcing the limit, but they do state it exists. So even if they're not enforcing it, they could do so whenever they choose.
If your site is your business, you need a greater reliability and predictability than Google Maps beta. Of course, most open-source mapping options are either for in-car GPS or are in some stage of being not ready for prime time. Trust me, I've been hunting for one as I cobble together a kick-butt mapping solution for my site.
Closest I've come is RiMap, but I don't know how well 1.0 (The GPL'ed version) works, and it's $300 for 2.3 (recent version - not GPL'ed) with all the states.
Also worth noting is the Geo::Coder::US extension for Perl at CPAN. It doesn't draw maps, but it can crunch 27 gigs of Census TIGER Line data down into a 750 meg database and then give you very quick lookups for addresses (whether they exist in the database and what their lat/long coordinates are).
As the theme song from "Baretta" says: Don't do the crime if you can't do the time.
The point is that these computer geeks may well get put in a general population with drug dealers, strong-arm robbers, and other violent criminals who will abuse them.
But to all those who say this is harsh and that the punishment should fit the crime... how do we punish that scumbag who kidnapped that little girl and her brother, after killing their mother and older brother, eventually killed the little boy, and was caught in a Denny's with the little girl he'd been sexually abusing and terrorizing for two months?
What punishment fits that crime?
The only words that come to mind are "Hell on Earth".
Slashdot Mirror
What the poster *should* do is subcontract the bulk of the job to someone who knows how to do this in Windows and take a cut off the top instead of bitching about how the job would be so much better if he could operate in his own comfort zone.
Sheesh.
No Badgers?? There should be Badgers on the list!!
We don't need no steenking badgers!!!!
Sorry, someone had to say it.
-g
Top 10 Things We Wish People Would Stop Putting On Web Sites
.gifs
10: Pictures of pets
9: Really bad rhyming poetry
8: Really bad Haiku
7: Some joke someone e-mailed them
6: The word "cool"
5: 18 endlessly looping animated
4: Pictures of ugly people naked
3: Their contribution to the Kirk Vs. Picard debate
2: Terrible, error-ridden, fan fiction
1: TOP 10 LISTS!!!!!!!
Before Galileo, the "law" was that different items of different weights would fall at different speeds. When Galileo proved otherwise, the "law" had to be amended.
What we call the "laws of physics" are merely best-evidence postulates to be held until better information comes along.
Many of science's greatest advances have come from men who "fought the law" and won. "You cannot change the laws of physics"
Keep repeating that. Perhaps if you say it loud enough and often enough, you can get a place in the history books as the fool who tried to discourage one of science's future greats from changing our understanding of the universe yet again.
Look at what we did in the last century...
We went from balooning to moon landings.
We discovered how to transplant vital organs.
We discovered new elements.
We split the atom.
And at some point there was a majority of someones who said the "laws" of science prohibited such things from being possible.
Einstein wasn't a professor in a university lab when he published his famed papers in 1905. He was a patent clerk, working on his papers in his spare time. At least figuratively, he was a young man, working in his garage.
If you want to say "improbable", okay. But when you say "impossible", you risk being history's fool.
- G
How many of you have an income because of young guys, tinkering in garages, defying conventional wisdom, doing things experts condemned as impossible or improbable, or in some cases just finding a way to do some existing thing in a much better way?
I know this looks like BS on the surface, but just possibly they had an epiphany no one else has had and figured out a better way. From this tiny article, you got the schematics and engineering specifications of their devide? You know it can't work?
Unlikely that it's a true innovation? Possibly. No way in hell it's a true innovation? You're brave men to deal in such absolutes.
- G
I don't mean to contradict someone who knows more about electronics than I do. I took one year of elementary electronics in high school and then went into creative pursuits that required less math. But if a car's battery & electrical system run at 12 volts, 80 amps creates just short of a kilowatt.
Given that other systems in the car draw current, the system won't get a full kilowatt, or maybe not even half a kilowatt.
As I said, I went into creative pursuits which required less math, so I can't do the calculations on how many BTUs a Peltier cooler can exchange. And the following is just back-of-envelope calculation based on bits and pieces I've picked up, so excuse me for any inaccuracies: I know that a 6,000 BTU window AC unit can cool around 900 cubic feet pretty well, and I know that the interior of your average mid-size sedan is maybe 150 cubic feet at most, so the Peltier AC would need to rate at around 1,000 BTUs.
Can a Peltier system, with a COP of 0.4, turn 200-300 watts of power into 1,000 BTUs or more of heat exchange?
- G
The non-compete is generally intended to keep you from taking knowledge derived from Employer A's research and development dollars over to Employer B. Poaching employees is a sort of wink-wink-nudge-nudge form of corporate espionage that such non-competes are intended to prevent.
As long as the non-compete is properly scoped and is null and void if you're fired, there shouldn't be a problem. If it's overly broad and applies even if you're fired, then you should refuse to sign it. If you're the type of employee who would be valuable enough to poach, you're also one who is valuable enough to negotiate his/her employment contract rather than accept the first draft.
The last place I worked, I usually had a higher salary and more stock options than my direct manager because the exec who recruited me wanted me badly enough to go to bat for me in the contract negotiations.
- Greg
With the BSD ports collection, the slick Apple interface, many great OSS options being multi-platform anyway, and virtualizing XP for the few XP apps I can't let go of... Why not just go MacTel when I buy my next PC in '06 or '07?
IMO, MacTel could be a Linux killer, or at least help keep it a niche OS instead of a major mainstream competitor.
- Greg
The fact is that these companies are rolling out fiber to the home on their own phased schedules, the timelines of which do not sit well with a lot of bandwidth-starved consumers, particularly those in markets that are far down the roadmaps. So it's not surprising that the municipalities are trying to accelerate this rollout with a DIY philosophy. The municipal governments are doing what they really should be doing, which is serving their residents. You don't see the cities implementing municipal-run ISPs to compete with existing, viable solutions from the cable and telephone companies. The municipal-run ISPs are being constructed precisely because they're filling a gap the big communications corporations are voluntarily leaving.
The sad thing is that the cable companies and telephone companies are trying to protect these markets by suing the cities rather than rolling out the services that they want. Their philosophy is "you'll get it when we get around to you, and if your government tries to provide services in the meantime (or invite in alternative service providers), we'll try to prevent it". This is wrong and arrogant. It treats consumers like a resource these companies have some sort of divine right to exploit, rather than a market which can and should be able to vote with its ballots and pocketbooks.
In a free market, if you ignore a market segment, you should not have a legal way to prevent others from coming in and serving it. While I can understand the desire of the big communication companies to protect their markets, they should protect them by serving them, not by suing those who would fill the gaps they're leaving.
We are in a world where broadband is synoonymous with prosperity, or close to it. The availability of broadband is an economic growth factor and an economic indicator. No single corporation should have the power to determine the timeline when such a powerful tool comes to a community. - G
Doesn't make Bob Novak any less of a tool.
- G
The Irish terrorists attacking Jack Ryan's house in Patriot Games comes to mind.
- G
The reason I didn't... such a sword cuts both ways. If I put his mom in play, all moms became fair game.
But this was 8 or 9 years ago, and the only thing that reporter cited that I wasn't able to do then was examine satellite photos of Spamford's mom's house.
- G
But what good is a certification in Logo? I guess coding for Windows beats making shoes for Nike.
Maybe they're getting them this young so someone's ready to work on the Y3K problem?
There once was a man from Nantucket
Who told all the world to suck it
Selling insecure code
He sure was a chode
And his ethics could not fill a bucket
- G
This is not the planet we're looking for.
Move along.
Move along.
George W Bush comes to mind.
Or George's hero... Jesus H. Christ
No, but he does have quite the "mad prophet in the desert" hair and beard.
- G
They're not there yet in terms of funding, it seems. But if unfettered fanfic productions could compete, it begs the question of whether the competition would weed out the weak and determine the best as the winner or if it would fracture the support of the fan base so much that no project could obtain sufficient funding.
And considering all the money spent on lawyers to go back and forth 5 times, answering the patent examiner's objections, could have bought off at least one senator, maybe two. Could have bought a handful of congressmen. Multiply his filing and lawyer fees by all the patents he's gobbled up like some braying pacman, and you've got enough lobbyist money to get some real patent reform, the lack of which is the reason behind his defensive patents.
Ummm, iTunes imports and convert it to AAC for your iPod.
- Greg
They make some vague claims, such as "we believe [the patent owners] are serving papers right now." Note the fact that they have no concrete examples of this happening. They just believe it is. Then: "it's believed that one Website Owner has recently settled out of court for several millions." Once again, no concrete example. Just a belief that this has happened.
But great scams always include a grain of truth, this one being that MP3's patent is owned by Thomson, and they have set licensing terms.
So my question is, does anyone KNOW of Thomson actually suing anyone or gearing up for a rash of suits as the spammers claim? And this is not "I believe they are" or "a friend knows a guy whose sister's boyfriend's cousin's hairdresser's uncle got sued by Thomson while removing a gerbil from Richard Gere's butt." Does anyone have any concrete info on Thomson enforcing their patents?
- Greg
That's definitely been one of my greater concerns with Google Maps. I also wonder how it conflicts if you're using AdSense on the same page, or if perhaps you're using another ad solution on the same page.
My primary problem with Google Maps, though, is that they do have a limit on how many maps you can serve in a specific time period before they cut you off. It's great if you have a low-traffic page, but if you get slashdotted or just start getting popular, your maps *could* disappear. I say "could" because I don't know if Google Maps is enforcing the limit, but they do state it exists. So even if they're not enforcing it, they could do so whenever they choose.
If your site is your business, you need a greater reliability and predictability than Google Maps beta. Of course, most open-source mapping options are either for in-car GPS or are in some stage of being not ready for prime time. Trust me, I've been hunting for one as I cobble together a kick-butt mapping solution for my site.
Closest I've come is RiMap, but I don't know how well 1.0 (The GPL'ed version) works, and it's $300 for 2.3 (recent version - not GPL'ed) with all the states.
Also worth noting is the Geo::Coder::US extension for Perl at CPAN. It doesn't draw maps, but it can crunch 27 gigs of Census TIGER Line data down into a 750 meg database and then give you very quick lookups for addresses (whether they exist in the database and what their lat/long coordinates are).
- Greg
Just got the "a user has moderated your post". *15* mod points were burned on the parent to end up at a +1 Funny. - Greg
The point is that these computer geeks may well get put in a general population with drug dealers, strong-arm robbers, and other violent criminals who will abuse them.
But to all those who say this is harsh and that the punishment should fit the crime... how do we punish that scumbag who kidnapped that little girl and her brother, after killing their mother and older brother, eventually killed the little boy, and was caught in a Denny's with the little girl he'd been sexually abusing and terrorizing for two months?
What punishment fits that crime?
The only words that come to mind are "Hell on Earth".
And you know, warez puppies are traded like cigarettes in lock-up.
This prison rape is brought to you courtesy of the fine folks at Electronic Arts.
Muahahahaha >:-)
- Greg