Funny you should say that, because Hilary Rosen used to be the director of the HRC. She left over "differences of opinion with the board" in late 2004. She apparently has a hard time supporting tolerance, understanding, and gay rights even when it's her job.
The 6502 instruction set is a pain. For my senior thesis, I wrote a dynamic recompiler that translated 6502 code into PowerPC code. Useless? Totally, but fun to see it disassemble code from old Apple II programs and reassemble them into PowerPC code.
whose name escapes me at the moment. But the idea is that you write comments that are like "psuedo-code" but much more English-like than ordinary psuedo-code. Then you refine the comments down further and further until you replace the lowest-level comments with individual statements, and the higher-level comments stay in as documentation. I remember trying this once and, while overkill for the simple project I was doing, I wrote some damn fine (and readable!) code that way.
True, but TDD is an agile methodology. And if you're doing agile, that probably means that you're collaborating with other people. The tests go a long way toward explaining what the interfaces are supposed to do, but the implementation might still be non-obvious. I don't think you need nearly as many comments when you do TDD, but they're still great to clarify things that may have become unclear when you you refactoring. Also, I like to use comments like "tabs in a 3-ring binder" -- to separate source files into nice, neat sections.
Does Longhorn still use the Themes service like XP? Meaning: could I get a Windows 2000 style desktop again? I really don't care for the themes -- they take up too much desk space and the Themes service occupies memory that I'd rather have for apps. (Also, my PC is pretty old)
I know this is an unpopular opinion here, but I have no problem with Apple's DRM. I knew the terms when I bought the music, and if I didn't like it, I would have bought it elsewhere. I own three computers, so I can listen to my purchased music on all of them. I burn CDs to play in the car, and I take music with me on my iPod. I can do everything I want with my music; the DRM doesn't limit my enjoyment of my purchased music in any material way.
And I think that's the point of Apple's DRM. Keep the music industry happy by preventing sharing of these files, and offer usage rights that are liberal enough that they won't inconvenience most people.
Legally? Just as screwed. But there would sure as hell be fallout. That employee could easily assemble an army of anti-gay fanatics. That's one thing that lots of gay rights activists point out: that although gay managers are rare, they still have the right to fire anyone, deny housing or banking to anyone, or deny any other damn fool thing to anyone they please on the basis of their sexual orientation.
Would you be upset if Microsoft backed environmental legislation? That's not really their battle either. My guess is that Microsoft sponsors legislation like this to show that, from time to time, they can be good people. Say what you will about Microsoft, but they do have a fairly progressive policy toward employees in same-sex relationships.
I know others have written that corporations exist to serve their stockholders, and that is certainly true. But being in management requires maintaining a delicate balance between stockholders and employees. What many stockholders don't realize is that the best interests of the employee are also the best interests of the stockholder. Meaning: happy employees -> good employees -> higher profits. Sadly, investors are a fickle lot. They can pull their money out at any time, so companies usually bow to investor pressure instead of doing what's best, in the long run, for both shareholders and employees.
By the way, does anyone know if the "radical right" boycotts IBM? They advertise the gay-friendly nature of their corporate culture in HRC's Equality newsletter all the time. They're one of the HRC's top corporate contributers, too.
What the PC Mag writer neglected -- or was oblivous to -- is the fact that those other processes occupying the second (or hereafter known as "wasted") core use a hell of a lot of I/O. A virus scanner scans everything going into the secondary storage. Sure, you have effectively two processors, but that doesn't do you any good if one of those processes is constantly scanning stuff on the hard drive. You're not going to be able to run Norton and Half-Life at the same time, no matter how fast the processor.
The point is that you shouldn't have to have all of those I/O bandwidth-hogging "crutches" (such as virus scanners, spyware scanners and the like) stealing your machine's I/O bandwidth. The title of this article has it right: you already do need a more powerful machine just to keep Windows "chugging" along.
Yep. I downloaded it too, about eight hours after the original broadcast in the states. It took awhile, but the video quality was, as the Doctor would say, "fantastic!" And it was worth it to laugh at the iPod and Britney Spears jokes! I have no idea if Dr. Who will ever make it to the US, and I don't care. I can get great HD files right over BT (despite my lack of an actual HDTV).
But it's not just for overseas stuff you can't get. Desperate Housewives overlaps with a couple of shows on my TiVo. Solution? Download the files the next day! Then you've got unecrypted files you can burn to a DVD and watch again and again. Plus, the HD streams I've downloaded tend to have *less* watermarkey crap on them than the original analog broadcast here does!
I hear you! I'm originally from Sioux City (western Iowa), and I live in Cedar Falls/Waterloo (eastern Iowa). It's incredible how little money the state will spend on the western half of the state. The two cities are nearly identical in size, yet this area gets *boatloads* of money from the state.
It's just because eastern side of the state is more populous. The highway that connects northeast Iowa to northwest Iowa changes from a nice four-lane interstate into a poorly maintained two-lane highway almost *exactly* in the middle of the state.
And our governor wonders why people -- especially young people -- are leaving this state in great droves!
It's a great idea, except it won't work. It's no different than in a basic economics course when someone inevitably says the government should only tax businesses. Fine, but now the government just added 15, 30, 40% to every business's overhead which means that the prices must go up by a corresponding amount to make the same amount of profit.
The same thing is true of taxes employers pay. Every penny they pay in taxes on your behalf is (at least) a penny you're never going to see. So, the company may be more than happy to pay 15% of the employee's salary to the state, but the employee will have to take a 15% pay cut for them to do it. That is, a company won't pay you more than you're worth, and that includes payments they make on your behalf.
In other words, as my -- and probably everybody else's -- economics professor said, a tax on either party is a tax on both. It really doesn't matter who forks over the cash; the burden will be shared.
I have a PowerBook -- I'm using it to write this post right now, in fact. I actually find it really difficult to use a PC laptop anymore. Even though I'm right-handed, I prefer to use the trackpad with my left hand, and I always hit the wrong mouse button on PC laptops. (Strangely enough, I can't use a mouse with my left hand to save my life!) For me, having one great big button below the trackpad is really nice.
About your OS dilemma, I can say that the Mac OS depends a lot less on the right mouse button, which makes sense when you consider that they only ship mice without them. There are times when a right mouse button would be handy, and for those instances, there's Control-click. But you get used to the one mouse button really quickly, because you can do almost everything you want to do without a second button.
If you're using an OS like Linux, which generally assumes that you have two -- or even three -- mouse buttons, it's going to make a much bigger difference. Think about all the right-clicking you do in Windows and Linux, and you'll realize how quickly that missing right mouse button is going to hurt. If you were going to use Linux almost exclusively on a laptop, the absent right mouse button may be a deal-breaker for you. If you've ever used Blackbox, you know how important three mouse buttons are. Either way, PowerBooks and ThinkPads are both built like tanks, so you'll definitely be happy with either one once you've resolved your mouse dilemma.
That said, I've never seen any compelling reason to put Linux on a Mac -- the hardware support's just not there for a lot of stuff -- although it's better on PowerBooks, I'm told -- and it's especially hard to get running on a G5. Most of the great UNIX tools are included out of the box and there are good Mac OS ports of a lot of the better Linux stuff.
JERRY: Well wait a second, don't you see that's 555-FILK. KRAMER: What's Filk? JERRY: Filk's nothing, but 555-FILM is Movie Phone. KRAMER: Oh Movie Phone. JERRY: Yes, so people are just dialing it by mistake and getting you. KRAMER: So, I'm Filk? JERRY: You're Filk. KRAMER: Oh, Mama.
I'm from Iowa, and here, IPTV = Iowa Public Television. I was very confused when I first read this headline! Microsoft is about the only thing that could make Iowa Public TV worse.
The consumer has a right to choose, but why does that imply that Google is compelled to provide those images? Google, as a company, has its own best interests in mind, which means providing what they consider to be the best to the consumer. If you don't think it's the best, then it's your responsibility to seek something better.
I, for one, am a big fan of the thin client. The simpler the better, I think, especially for something as big and complex as Office. But let's not forget, there will always be a layer that can get outdated, or which they will simply choose not to support. I doubt you'll be able to run Office over the version of IE for your Coleco computer, and heaven only knows how long ago they stopped supporting that.
Fact is, though, that Office is simply too big and complex, I think, to be run entirely in a web browser. Have you ever tried to use that Outlook web client thingy? Unless you're running compatible versions of Office, IE, and Windows, it's a disaster. And, let's not forget that this necessarily locks you into a Microsoft platform combination.
I know Microsoft is not in favor of giving its users a lot of choice in terms of what software they use. Hell, they even try to force you to upgrade their own products. But think about how useful a platform-independent version of Office would be. I could go to some Internet cafe halfway around the world and work as if I were at the office. I could use my Mac, Linux box, or Coleco to do my work.
Microsoft may lose some dominance in some areas to do this, but it would increase the value of Office astronomically. The real money, it seems to me, is to be made on the server. I think Microsoft is starting to see this, but they're having a really hard time accepting that the money is not to be made on the client.
Besides, think about the kinds of things you could do with distributed computing. While I'm typing, you're using my processor -- and yours -- to sort a big list. When I start sorting a big list, I kick you off my processor. We both end up happy because we have nicely sorted lists quickly, and we haven't tied up the server's resources to do it. Everyone can do what they need to do quickly, in a high-performance way, and we have the best of all possible situations.
If Microsoft had developed a version of Office that worked like Java WebStart -- even poorly -- we wouldn't be having this dialogue. We would all be typing away in our Internet-enabled versions of Word, happy as can be that we can save our document anywhere, retrieve it anywhere, print it anywhere, and never have to think twice about it.
*That's* something I would pay hundreds of dollars a seat for -- just don't tell me what kind of seat I have to sit in.
Here's a question I wish someone would answer: beyond the features that have been in Office for years, how many of the "new features" do people really use? I'm sure someone uses each feature, but how many people do you know who say, "I use Word to type letters" and that's about it? I know I've never used any of the features in any of the Office programs that came out after about 1995.
It seems to me that one could convince users to upgrade if Microsoft spent more time making their products easier to use -- cut out all the extra cruft that people don't use and leave them as "advanced features" that you have to turn on in some dialog box somewhere.
One good example: the menubar/toolbar UI. There's a feature that's bloated WAY too much! Does anyone really float a toolbar over their document? That "feature" obscures your work, and confuses most people. I can't tell you the number of times friends and family have called me worried that they've forever ruined their copy of Office by inadvertently dragging the menu bar off the top of the window.
It seems to me that most programs work much better when the most-used features are really easy to find, and the extra ones are hidden away where only the people who know to look for them can find them. I mostly use Apple computers and software, but I do have a copy of Office for the Mac. The difference between most Mac programs and Office is huge. No other program, save maybe Photoshop, would float so many windows around your document *by default*. Usually, in Apple and most Mac software, one must turn on inspectors to see more detailed information or access more sophisticated controls.
I remember reading about a Microsoft study done awhile ago that revealed that most users only use about 10% of the features of any Office program. There are two ways to view this: 1) there are too many features or 2) the users are unaware of these features.
If we go with 1, then that would require removing features, which will always break compatibility with someone's documents, so we can't do that.
If we go with 2, then we are first assuming that these features enhance the user's experience in some manner, and our conclusion is to add some UI component to expose them more directly. As computer geeks, we know that we can solve tedious problems with automation (e.g., Perl scripts), but sometimes figuring out how to do it the "easy way" is more trouble than it's worth.
Sure, you'll piss off some of your really advanced users who would like those features, but most users will love the relief from the visual clutter. Even then, most tedious tasks can be automated. You can "roll your own" features. That's why we have scripting languages: to leverage simple tools into more complex tools for solving very specific problems. A lot of the time, the really advanced features are simply too complex. It's hard to know which feature does exacly what you want, but you know which of the little features will do it.
Take mail-merge for example. It's a great idea, and a great deal of users take advantage of it. But, many users don't because there are too many options. Instead, they remember that they do know how to 1) write a letter, 2) make copies of it with copy and paste, and 3) edit each letter to contain the proper names and addresses. Those users, despite the circuitous route they took to accomplish their work, at least have the satisfaction of knowing that they've done it right.
If you're still not convinced, think about "grammar check". Oh dear Lord this one gives me headaches. I hate that Word thinks that I've made an error if I type an incomplete sentence in a proper context, like a caption. It's sheer arrogance on the part of the software to insist that, "I know better than you." If the computer's so great at grammar, I should be able to tell it, in plain English, the specifications of my document, "It's a report on Furbies for my fourth-grade show-n
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Funny you should say that, because Hilary Rosen used to be the director of the HRC. She left over "differences of opinion with the board" in late 2004. She apparently has a hard time supporting tolerance, understanding, and gay rights even when it's her job.
Maybe it too will have a hand crank! That would be innovative :-)
The 6502 instruction set is a pain. For my senior thesis, I wrote a dynamic recompiler that translated 6502 code into PowerPC code. Useless? Totally, but fun to see it disassemble code from old Apple II programs and reassemble them into PowerPC code.
whose name escapes me at the moment. But the idea is that you write comments that are like "psuedo-code" but much more English-like than ordinary psuedo-code. Then you refine the comments down further and further until you replace the lowest-level comments with individual statements, and the higher-level comments stay in as documentation. I remember trying this once and, while overkill for the simple project I was doing, I wrote some damn fine (and readable!) code that way.
True, but TDD is an agile methodology. And if you're doing agile, that probably means that you're collaborating with other people. The tests go a long way toward explaining what the interfaces are supposed to do, but the implementation might still be non-obvious. I don't think you need nearly as many comments when you do TDD, but they're still great to clarify things that may have become unclear when you you refactoring. Also, I like to use comments like "tabs in a 3-ring binder" -- to separate source files into nice, neat sections.
Does Longhorn still use the Themes service like XP? Meaning: could I get a Windows 2000 style desktop again? I really don't care for the themes -- they take up too much desk space and the Themes service occupies memory that I'd rather have for apps. (Also, my PC is pretty old)
I know this is an unpopular opinion here, but I have no problem with Apple's DRM. I knew the terms when I bought the music, and if I didn't like it, I would have bought it elsewhere. I own three computers, so I can listen to my purchased music on all of them. I burn CDs to play in the car, and I take music with me on my iPod. I can do everything I want with my music; the DRM doesn't limit my enjoyment of my purchased music in any material way.
And I think that's the point of Apple's DRM. Keep the music industry happy by preventing sharing of these files, and offer usage rights that are liberal enough that they won't inconvenience most people.
Legally? Just as screwed. But there would sure as hell be fallout. That employee could easily assemble an army of anti-gay fanatics. That's one thing that lots of gay rights activists point out: that although gay managers are rare, they still have the right to fire anyone, deny housing or banking to anyone, or deny any other damn fool thing to anyone they please on the basis of their sexual orientation.
Would you be upset if Microsoft backed environmental legislation? That's not really their battle either. My guess is that Microsoft sponsors legislation like this to show that, from time to time, they can be good people. Say what you will about Microsoft, but they do have a fairly progressive policy toward employees in same-sex relationships.
I know others have written that corporations exist to serve their stockholders, and that is certainly true. But being in management requires maintaining a delicate balance between stockholders and employees. What many stockholders don't realize is that the best interests of the employee are also the best interests of the stockholder. Meaning: happy employees -> good employees -> higher profits. Sadly, investors are a fickle lot. They can pull their money out at any time, so companies usually bow to investor pressure instead of doing what's best, in the long run, for both shareholders and employees.
By the way, does anyone know if the "radical right" boycotts IBM? They advertise the gay-friendly nature of their corporate culture in HRC's Equality newsletter all the time. They're one of the HRC's top corporate contributers, too.
<flame>
It's true, emacs is a *great* environment. It just lacks a good text editor.
</flame>
What the PC Mag writer neglected -- or was oblivous to -- is the fact that those other processes occupying the second (or hereafter known as "wasted") core use a hell of a lot of I/O. A virus scanner scans everything going into the secondary storage. Sure, you have effectively two processors, but that doesn't do you any good if one of those processes is constantly scanning stuff on the hard drive. You're not going to be able to run Norton and Half-Life at the same time, no matter how fast the processor.
The point is that you shouldn't have to have all of those I/O bandwidth-hogging "crutches" (such as virus scanners, spyware scanners and the like) stealing your machine's I/O bandwidth. The title of this article has it right: you already do need a more powerful machine just to keep Windows "chugging" along.
Yep. I downloaded it too, about eight hours after the original broadcast in the states. It took awhile, but the video quality was, as the Doctor would say, "fantastic!" And it was worth it to laugh at the iPod and Britney Spears jokes! I have no idea if Dr. Who will ever make it to the US, and I don't care. I can get great HD files right over BT (despite my lack of an actual HDTV).
But it's not just for overseas stuff you can't get. Desperate Housewives overlaps with a couple of shows on my TiVo. Solution? Download the files the next day! Then you've got unecrypted files you can burn to a DVD and watch again and again. Plus, the HD streams I've downloaded tend to have *less* watermarkey crap on them than the original analog broadcast here does!
I hear you! I'm originally from Sioux City (western Iowa), and I live in Cedar Falls/Waterloo (eastern Iowa). It's incredible how little money the state will spend on the western half of the state. The two cities are nearly identical in size, yet this area gets *boatloads* of money from the state.
It's just because eastern side of the state is more populous. The highway that connects northeast Iowa to northwest Iowa changes from a nice four-lane interstate into a poorly maintained two-lane highway almost *exactly* in the middle of the state.
And our governor wonders why people -- especially young people -- are leaving this state in great droves!
It's a great idea, except it won't work. It's no different than in a basic economics course when someone inevitably says the government should only tax businesses. Fine, but now the government just added 15, 30, 40% to every business's overhead which means that the prices must go up by a corresponding amount to make the same amount of profit.
The same thing is true of taxes employers pay. Every penny they pay in taxes on your behalf is (at least) a penny you're never going to see. So, the company may be more than happy to pay 15% of the employee's salary to the state, but the employee will have to take a 15% pay cut for them to do it. That is, a company won't pay you more than you're worth, and that includes payments they make on your behalf.
In other words, as my -- and probably everybody else's -- economics professor said, a tax on either party is a tax on both. It really doesn't matter who forks over the cash; the burden will be shared.
I have a PowerBook -- I'm using it to write this post right now, in fact. I actually find it really difficult to use a PC laptop anymore. Even though I'm right-handed, I prefer to use the trackpad with my left hand, and I always hit the wrong mouse button on PC laptops. (Strangely enough, I can't use a mouse with my left hand to save my life!) For me, having one great big button below the trackpad is really nice.
About your OS dilemma, I can say that the Mac OS depends a lot less on the right mouse button, which makes sense when you consider that they only ship mice without them. There are times when a right mouse button would be handy, and for those instances, there's Control-click. But you get used to the one mouse button really quickly, because you can do almost everything you want to do without a second button.
If you're using an OS like Linux, which generally assumes that you have two -- or even three -- mouse buttons, it's going to make a much bigger difference. Think about all the right-clicking you do in Windows and Linux, and you'll realize how quickly that missing right mouse button is going to hurt. If you were going to use Linux almost exclusively on a laptop, the absent right mouse button may be a deal-breaker for you. If you've ever used Blackbox, you know how important three mouse buttons are. Either way, PowerBooks and ThinkPads are both built like tanks, so you'll definitely be happy with either one once you've resolved your mouse dilemma.
That said, I've never seen any compelling reason to put Linux on a Mac -- the hardware support's just not there for a lot of stuff -- although it's better on PowerBooks, I'm told -- and it's especially hard to get running on a G5. Most of the great UNIX tools are included out of the box and there are good Mac OS ports of a lot of the better Linux stuff.
What's the conversion rate from ducats to quatloos?
I don't know, Apple Mac also rolls off the tongue more easily than IBM PC XT. Maybe a name's not everything.
1H2005 means this: on June 30, 2005 at 11:59 PM, a single person somewhere in Iowa will get a copy of Tiger.
Oooh! I am a single person somewhere in Iowa! Maybe it will be me!
Since when do Louis Vuitton bags -- real ones -- cost the same as an iPod? Maybe Coach.
I'm from Iowa, and here, IPTV = Iowa Public Television. I was very confused when I first read this headline! Microsoft is about the only thing that could make Iowa Public TV worse.
The consumer has a right to choose, but why does that imply that Google is compelled to provide those images? Google, as a company, has its own best interests in mind, which means providing what they consider to be the best to the consumer. If you don't think it's the best, then it's your responsibility to seek something better.
Do we have to say it? 1500 channels and nothing on.
Fact is, though, that Office is simply too big and complex, I think, to be run entirely in a web browser. Have you ever tried to use that Outlook web client thingy? Unless you're running compatible versions of Office, IE, and Windows, it's a disaster. And, let's not forget that this necessarily locks you into a Microsoft platform combination.
I know Microsoft is not in favor of giving its users a lot of choice in terms of what software they use. Hell, they even try to force you to upgrade their own products. But think about how useful a platform-independent version of Office would be. I could go to some Internet cafe halfway around the world and work as if I were at the office. I could use my Mac, Linux box, or Coleco to do my work.
Microsoft may lose some dominance in some areas to do this, but it would increase the value of Office astronomically. The real money, it seems to me, is to be made on the server. I think Microsoft is starting to see this, but they're having a really hard time accepting that the money is not to be made on the client.
Besides, think about the kinds of things you could do with distributed computing. While I'm typing, you're using my processor -- and yours -- to sort a big list. When I start sorting a big list, I kick you off my processor. We both end up happy because we have nicely sorted lists quickly, and we haven't tied up the server's resources to do it. Everyone can do what they need to do quickly, in a high-performance way, and we have the best of all possible situations.
If Microsoft had developed a version of Office that worked like Java WebStart -- even poorly -- we wouldn't be having this dialogue. We would all be typing away in our Internet-enabled versions of Word, happy as can be that we can save our document anywhere, retrieve it anywhere, print it anywhere, and never have to think twice about it.
*That's* something I would pay hundreds of dollars a seat for -- just don't tell me what kind of seat I have to sit in.
It seems to me that one could convince users to upgrade if Microsoft spent more time making their products easier to use -- cut out all the extra cruft that people don't use and leave them as "advanced features" that you have to turn on in some dialog box somewhere.
One good example: the menubar/toolbar UI. There's a feature that's bloated WAY too much! Does anyone really float a toolbar over their document? That "feature" obscures your work, and confuses most people. I can't tell you the number of times friends and family have called me worried that they've forever ruined their copy of Office by inadvertently dragging the menu bar off the top of the window.
It seems to me that most programs work much better when the most-used features are really easy to find, and the extra ones are hidden away where only the people who know to look for them can find them. I mostly use Apple computers and software, but I do have a copy of Office for the Mac. The difference between most Mac programs and Office is huge. No other program, save maybe Photoshop, would float so many windows around your document *by default*. Usually, in Apple and most Mac software, one must turn on inspectors to see more detailed information or access more sophisticated controls.
I remember reading about a Microsoft study done awhile ago that revealed that most users only use about 10% of the features of any Office program. There are two ways to view this: 1) there are too many features or 2) the users are unaware of these features.
If we go with 1, then that would require removing features, which will always break compatibility with someone's documents, so we can't do that.
If we go with 2, then we are first assuming that these features enhance the user's experience in some manner, and our conclusion is to add some UI component to expose them more directly. As computer geeks, we know that we can solve tedious problems with automation (e.g., Perl scripts), but sometimes figuring out how to do it the "easy way" is more trouble than it's worth.
Sure, you'll piss off some of your really advanced users who would like those features, but most users will love the relief from the visual clutter. Even then, most tedious tasks can be automated. You can "roll your own" features. That's why we have scripting languages: to leverage simple tools into more complex tools for solving very specific problems. A lot of the time, the really advanced features are simply too complex. It's hard to know which feature does exacly what you want, but you know which of the little features will do it.
Take mail-merge for example. It's a great idea, and a great deal of users take advantage of it. But, many users don't because there are too many options. Instead, they remember that they do know how to 1) write a letter, 2) make copies of it with copy and paste, and 3) edit each letter to contain the proper names and addresses. Those users, despite the circuitous route they took to accomplish their work, at least have the satisfaction of knowing that they've done it right.
If you're still not convinced, think about "grammar check". Oh dear Lord this one gives me headaches. I hate that Word thinks that I've made an error if I type an incomplete sentence in a proper context, like a caption. It's sheer arrogance on the part of the software to insist that, "I know better than you." If the computer's so great at grammar, I should be able to tell it, in plain English, the specifications of my document, "It's a report on Furbies for my fourth-grade show-n