I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they can buy a wireless networking card without having to wonder "Will this work with Linux?" -Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (paraphrased)
With users comes support. Under the old regime, when you bought something at the old compushack, it worked under DOS, maybe Windoze if you were lucky.
Now that Mac has become vastly popular, these little Mac OS/X compatible stickers are starting to pop up...
If enough people start using the stuff I use (linux, mozilla, etc.), they will get support! Manufacturers will build stuff for ME!
Everyone I know is getting sick of me saying it: I want my MP3! Not WMA or whatever proprietary DRM'd crap they feel like this week.
When I buy something, including music, I want it to be portable. I don't need a (personal) MP3 player for the gym and a seperate one for working in the yard. I can take it out of my gym bag and clip it to my belt. Why, then, should my music not be portable?
Software guys have a problem with overkill. They can't do ANYTHING without a full-blown personal computer backing it up.
One project of mine is a little php/mysql app to manage my dvd collection. A friend of mine suggested that the program should also control the DVD player, selecting the proper DVD.
Then he started specing out the machinery. Nothing short of an ITX machine seemed to satify his desire. A desire, I might add, which consisted of nothing more than accepting network input and outputting IR.
All told, we were talking about $300-500 to run an IR Blaster off a serial port.
But that's the mentality. Software guys are so used to starting with predetermined hardware and then writing whatever code they want to on top of it, and if it's too slow, you just add more metal.
It's just a matter of perspective. You're looking at it from "I need a to talk to a server" and the hardware supplier is looking at it from "How do I connect a PC to this server?"
Throughout my college career (1994-1998), I carried a 3.5" floppy disk in the back pocket of my jeans. For the most part, this contained my entire semester's work and was often the only copy in existance.
Last semester I bought my girlfriend a USB flash dongle so she could work on her papers freely from home, work, even on my linux boxes. And with a quarter gig of memory, she could store her entire college career on one little device... and still have enough space left over to store anything else she wanted to.
I thought it was funny, the stark contrast between technology then (my HDD was 170MB) and now (I've peed things bigger than her 256MB drive).
Am I the only one that finds it a little biased that the Java Developer Journal is reporting "Java is Back"?
JDJ "earns" their income by selling their rag to java developers. If Java declines, so do their sales. If Java's on the rise, their subscription base will also be "on the rise".
Not to mention, as I recall from the Java Evangelist days, JDJ wasn't exactly the most honest of rags. They seemed to devote entire issues to praising products that advertised heavily on their pages.
I am continually amazed that people believe open source is a good place for terrorists to hide evil, anti-government bugs...
The cornerstone of open source is that it is OPEN SOURCE. The government is free to view and evaluate all the packages to their little, demonic hearts' content.
If I were a terrorist, I'd think I would penetrate a closed-source house (say, Microsoft or Green Hills) and hack some little nasties into their source.
But,, maybe that's why Dan O'Dowd isn't a very good terrorist.
Any news on the format to be used? The article merely said that they would be sold through legit channels and would not be resellable. No mention of DRM.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. I have no problem paying for music downloads, but they MUST be MP3.
My Saturn SC1 never got CLOSE to the estimated mileage. BUT, the mileage was a selling point. Saturn was billing themselves as "green" (like hybrids today).
On the other hand, if you're buying a Mustang, you want to see power and maybe even low mileage (low mileage = more burn = more power per cubic inch). So on a "performance" car, low mileage is "good" so they may not cheat as much.
My first reaction was "Woohoo! No way SCO can win now!"
My second reaction was "What if they don't like it?"
Then it dawned on me that individual judges neither have interest nor reasonable say in what their computers are running. So, for the most part, the point is moot.
However, there is one interesting twist. How much leniency is SCO allowed to give the federal government. You know the "if sco wins, it will cost the federal government $22M" point will come out in court. While that should not have a direct effect, no judge wants to have his name attached to that. Of course, SCO will cut a deal for government use of "their" code. But big a deal are they allowed to give the government before it's considered preferential treatment?
I don't think I'm turned on by the idea of backward compatibility. I wouldn't use it. But I am turned off by a lack of backward compatibility. It reeks of conspiracy, making you re-purchase all your games, makes you wonder what was SO WRONG with the original architecture that it needed to be completely revamped.
It raises doubt, which is a bad thing in the consumer appliance business.
While I don't suggest using your current Page-A-Day, my officemate keeps an old Page-A-Day in his drawer for the sole purpose of writing quick notes.
It's brilliant. He always has it handy for writing things down and when you get a note from him, you get a free Far Side comic with it! And since he got it just after the new year, he paid a buck for it. Can't argue with cooler AND cheaper. (and the date on your desk will be correct)
I was looking at the similar problem of inventory tracking at my company. Every so often, the admin (conveniently my girlfriend) has to run around, tracking down who has what. We just just plain old inventory tags to keep track of things, but you have to get people to locate their items, locate the tags, transcribe them properly and not miss anything (dude, I didn't know THAT had a tag on it!).
My solution was RFID. Then she could walk into an office, "hear" the items in the room, and go about her day. It sure beat any other system I could think of for tracking items (especially when techs, engineers, and managers trade items around the office without letting her know).
The problem?
Primarily size. RFID tags are not available in the "paper-thin" size you hear about on/. They are big and bulky and have a rather limited range (meaning inches, not feet). There was also a question of cost and how efficient it would be place a $1 RFID tag on everything from a server to a mouse.
The really cool part (and the science part, IMO) is that what made the baloon bomes possible was the Japanese discovery of the jet stream. At the time, no one knew it existed
Only by coincidence did the Yanks discover that the bombs really were coming from Japan. The sand used in the sandbags was analysed and turned out very unique. However, as the Americans had done a complete survey of Japan's beaches (your granddad's tax dollars at work), they were able to narrow it down to a sand composition at a single beach in Japan.
Curious, a couple planes were sent to investigate...
So until 1940-whatever... No idea the jet stream existed.
If I build a RAID-5 array out of, say, 5 250gb hard drives and five years down the road one of the drives craps out, can I replace it with a 250gb drive of a different make and model? Maybe a different speed?
Question 2
What if I want to add another 250gb drive to my array (to bring the total up to 6)? Would that be possible?
Well, I'm specifically talking about racing karts at an organized facility, not some kids in the back yard. If I wasted a kart at F1 Boston, I'd be worried what they might do to my car. The karts they run there cost a couple grand a pop and they take very good care of them. If you drive like an ass, they boot you.
Remind me to stay out of your town.:P
Speed isn't really a bad thing. It's control that you have to be afraid of. If you're going 100mph in complete control of the machine, you're fine. If you're going 50mph out of control, your life is in luck's hands.
Of course, I'm not advocating driving fast on the street. I actually have a mangled No Parking sign from the scene of a police chase. I keep it as a reminder that if plate steel can get mangled, so can I.
There are karting facilities all over the country (my local one is F1 Boston). Not only is it a fun experience (and you can experience it TOGETHER), it is a great introduction to motorsport.
In addition to open racing, most facilities have leagues in which your son could compete (league racing is much more economical than open racing).
While you're at it, drop Going Faster! in his lap. This is a fantastic book which brings driving down to a science. Maybe he can even use it to counter all the crap they teach you in Driver's Ed (IMO, driver's ed causes as many accidents as it avoids).
Okay, so I know. "I don't want my kid racing!" Tell you what. Do a survey of race drivers at all levels vs. soccer moms. Drivers are fully aware of the dangers of driving and are by FAR more knowledgeable in how to deal with not only standard driving situations, but also extraordinary situations.
I've always had problems with people who DON'T know how to race, because they don't understand the dynamics of taking a turn (racers maximize the radius of a turn, allowing more speed in a race situation or more "wiggle room" in a street situation) or how to deal with a problem (most drivers hit the brakes, as they were taught to do in drivers' ed., usually resulting in a lock; brake lock = no traction, race drivers recognise the situation, adjust their driving line, and just keep on keeping on). Ever notice that screeaching brakes often ends in a THUD? Those people never learned to race.
And for the love of God, teach him to put down the goddamn phone!
What do I take home from this? One step closer to ripping the teeth out of the DMCA.
It's a little thing called precedent.
Congress going out of its way to say "You own your car, you have a right to take it apart" begins a legal precedent in being able to take stuff you own apart. It's a baby step, but it's one step closer to Congress saying, "dude, you own it, you can take it apart"
It actually kind of sounds like she's interested in what's going on.
My poor mother's surrounded by geeks (my father's been writing code since grad school and I didn't follow far behind), but she has no interest in computers at all. She has no idea what we do and probably never will. If she were interested in it, my father could teach her anything she wants to know. But, she really has no interest.
If mom was just interested in her progeny's work, a demo usually does the trick. Five minutes of "see, and if I click here, Elmo says 'That Feels Funny'" usually does it for mothers, girlfriends, or software executives. Curiosity about how it WORKS is usually pretty genuine...
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-Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (paraphrased)
With users comes support. Under the old regime, when you bought something at the old compushack, it worked under DOS, maybe Windoze if you were lucky.
Now that Mac has become vastly popular, these little Mac OS/X compatible stickers are starting to pop up...
If enough people start using the stuff I use (linux, mozilla, etc.), they will get support! Manufacturers will build stuff for ME!
Do you mean the 1" LCD on the front of my phone or a 55" LCD TV?
Look, mom, I can store 5KB or my etch-a-sketch!
In fact, Windows has been banned from my house and I only begrudingly use it at work.
Sad. Just sad.
Hehehe, I remember when I used to think of myself as a Software Engineer... Then I started working for a living and realized I was a programmer...
When I buy something, including music, I want it to be portable. I don't need a (personal) MP3 player for the gym and a seperate one for working in the yard. I can take it out of my gym bag and clip it to my belt. Why, then, should my music not be portable?
One project of mine is a little php/mysql app to manage my dvd collection. A friend of mine suggested that the program should also control the DVD player, selecting the proper DVD.
Then he started specing out the machinery. Nothing short of an ITX machine seemed to satify his desire. A desire, I might add, which consisted of nothing more than accepting network input and outputting IR.
All told, we were talking about $300-500 to run an IR Blaster off a serial port.
But that's the mentality. Software guys are so used to starting with predetermined hardware and then writing whatever code they want to on top of it, and if it's too slow, you just add more metal.
It's just a matter of perspective. You're looking at it from "I need a to talk to a server" and the hardware supplier is looking at it from "How do I connect a PC to this server?"
Throughout my college career (1994-1998), I carried a 3.5" floppy disk in the back pocket of my jeans. For the most part, this contained my entire semester's work and was often the only copy in existance.
Last semester I bought my girlfriend a USB flash dongle so she could work on her papers freely from home, work, even on my linux boxes. And with a quarter gig of memory, she could store her entire college career on one little device... and still have enough space left over to store anything else she wanted to.
I thought it was funny, the stark contrast between technology then (my HDD was 170MB) and now (I've peed things bigger than her 256MB drive).
Aside from a stint on the first floor where drunks stumbling in would fiddle with the doors for laughs, I rarely ever locked my door in school.
Hell, I rarely even closed my doors.
JDJ "earns" their income by selling their rag to java developers. If Java declines, so do their sales. If Java's on the rise, their subscription base will also be "on the rise".
Not to mention, as I recall from the Java Evangelist days, JDJ wasn't exactly the most honest of rags. They seemed to devote entire issues to praising products that advertised heavily on their pages.
The cornerstone of open source is that it is OPEN SOURCE. The government is free to view and evaluate all the packages to their little, demonic hearts' content.
If I were a terrorist, I'd think I would penetrate a closed-source house (say, Microsoft or Green Hills) and hack some little nasties into their source.
But,, maybe that's why Dan O'Dowd isn't a very good terrorist.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. I have no problem paying for music downloads, but they MUST be MP3.
Music Should Be Free (as in Freedom, not Beer)
Jon Bentley's masterpiece.
I haven't read this version, but the original was spectacular.
On the other hand, if you're buying a Mustang, you want to see power and maybe even low mileage (low mileage = more burn = more power per cubic inch). So on a "performance" car, low mileage is "good" so they may not cheat as much.
Introducing the world's first computer store and car wash!
My second reaction was "What if they don't like it?"
Then it dawned on me that individual judges neither have interest nor reasonable say in what their computers are running. So, for the most part, the point is moot.
However, there is one interesting twist. How much leniency is SCO allowed to give the federal government. You know the "if sco wins, it will cost the federal government $22M" point will come out in court. While that should not have a direct effect, no judge wants to have his name attached to that. Of course, SCO will cut a deal for government use of "their" code. But big a deal are they allowed to give the government before it's considered preferential treatment?
It raises doubt, which is a bad thing in the consumer appliance business.
It's brilliant. He always has it handy for writing things down and when you get a note from him, you get a free Far Side comic with it! And since he got it just after the new year, he paid a buck for it. Can't argue with cooler AND cheaper. (and the date on your desk will be correct)
I use post-its. I'm boring.
My solution was RFID. Then she could walk into an office, "hear" the items in the room, and go about her day. It sure beat any other system I could think of for tracking items (especially when techs, engineers, and managers trade items around the office without letting her know).
The problem? /. They are big and bulky and have a rather limited range (meaning inches, not feet). There was also a question of cost and how efficient it would be place a $1 RFID tag on everything from a server to a mouse.
Primarily size. RFID tags are not available in the "paper-thin" size you hear about on
Only by coincidence did the Yanks discover that the bombs really were coming from Japan. The sand used in the sandbags was analysed and turned out very unique. However, as the Americans had done a complete survey of Japan's beaches (your granddad's tax dollars at work), they were able to narrow it down to a sand composition at a single beach in Japan.
Curious, a couple planes were sent to investigate...
So until 1940-whatever... No idea the jet stream existed.
Question 2
What if I want to add another 250gb drive to my array (to bring the total up to 6)? Would that be possible?
Remind me to stay out of your town. :P
Speed isn't really a bad thing. It's control that you have to be afraid of. If you're going 100mph in complete control of the machine, you're fine. If you're going 50mph out of control, your life is in luck's hands.
Of course, I'm not advocating driving fast on the street. I actually have a mangled No Parking sign from the scene of a police chase. I keep it as a reminder that if plate steel can get mangled, so can I.
There are karting facilities all over the country (my local one is F1 Boston). Not only is it a fun experience (and you can experience it TOGETHER), it is a great introduction to motorsport.
In addition to open racing, most facilities have leagues in which your son could compete (league racing is much more economical than open racing).
While you're at it, drop Going Faster! in his lap. This is a fantastic book which brings driving down to a science. Maybe he can even use it to counter all the crap they teach you in Driver's Ed (IMO, driver's ed causes as many accidents as it avoids).
Okay, so I know. "I don't want my kid racing!" Tell you what. Do a survey of race drivers at all levels vs. soccer moms. Drivers are fully aware of the dangers of driving and are by FAR more knowledgeable in how to deal with not only standard driving situations, but also extraordinary situations.
I've always had problems with people who DON'T know how to race, because they don't understand the dynamics of taking a turn (racers maximize the radius of a turn, allowing more speed in a race situation or more "wiggle room" in a street situation) or how to deal with a problem (most drivers hit the brakes, as they were taught to do in drivers' ed., usually resulting in a lock; brake lock = no traction, race drivers recognise the situation, adjust their driving line, and just keep on keeping on). Ever notice that screeaching brakes often ends in a THUD? Those people never learned to race.
And for the love of God, teach him to put down the goddamn phone!
It's a little thing called precedent.
Congress going out of its way to say "You own your car, you have a right to take it apart" begins a legal precedent in being able to take stuff you own apart. It's a baby step, but it's one step closer to Congress saying, "dude, you own it, you can take it apart"
My poor mother's surrounded by geeks (my father's been writing code since grad school and I didn't follow far behind), but she has no interest in computers at all. She has no idea what we do and probably never will. If she were interested in it, my father could teach her anything she wants to know. But, she really has no interest.
If mom was just interested in her progeny's work, a demo usually does the trick. Five minutes of "see, and if I click here, Elmo says 'That Feels Funny'" usually does it for mothers, girlfriends, or software executives. Curiosity about how it WORKS is usually pretty genuine...