I don't know how much this review holds water, but its results are not surprising to me. Google was voted the number one search engine (of '02) by the vast majority (65%) of this popular vote, Yahoo! got 7%. When asked what their second choice would be for searching, Yahoo! again didn't get the most votes, that went to Overture's AllTheWeb with 29% (adjusted).
Very good point, I completely agree. Also interesting to consider, therein, is the fact that there doesn't seem to be much visionary writing going on like that today -- at least nothing to speak of... Where is today's Asimov or Verne?
Anyone who is upset by average folks thinking this is actually a product is ridiculous. How can you blame them, especially when Sony is advertising robotic dogs and Honda is advertising ON TELEVISION a robotic assistant!?
We are not that far away from seeing robotics in consumer environment on a regular basis. This trailer is identical in format to the Honda ads, doesn't really say anything and just kind of gives you the "cool stuff, coming soon" feel.
Honestly, some of you really put the 'eek' in 'geek'.
Remember the scene from Police Academy when mahoney and the other guy ties their flashlights to the dogs collars, so that when the dogs are running around at night Harris thinks they are picking up trash?
The phone calls do make a huge a difference. Around 91 when I started into BBSes, the best (non stolen) phone deal I could get was 10 cent local calls. And the "local" area I was (suburb of New York City), was a hot bed of BBS activity. But thats not to say I didn't make lots of long distance calls. I remember spending good money calling other countries for certain software.
Once I started running my own BBS, most of the calls were inbound, so that helped reduce operating costs.
Kinda nostalgic... I look back and remember those days when I'd sleep all day in school, and then stay awake all night working on the system.
I like that... "shipped with" -- back when I ran a BBS, I didn't even know that there was such a concept as giving money for software. I thought "paying for software" meant getting warez in less than 0-3 days.
You are mostly right in what you wrote in the first paragraph -- they do embrace more open standards (at least properly) than MSFT does.
However, I totally disagree with your second paragraph. There is no comparison between the hardware of mac vs pc. You can easily yank your hard drive from a dell and through it in any other pc manufacturer and be pretty assured it will run. If you fight with Dell you can switch to ten other major manufacturers, or build your own. With apple, you are pretty well screwed. Especially with laptops.
Why not install php wiki for them? It's easy to get running and super easy to use. It has all sorts of nifty add ons for galleries, blogs, media, rss feeds, and more.
It's way past the novice level for installation, but solidly in novice ground for daily use. Plus it comes with a bunch of design themes (lots more available online) and you can design your own.
If you want it only for use by your gift recipient, simply secure edit authority appropriately.
Good luck!
You also give up the right to fair competition in the market. If apple screws you, like they have in many horror stories, you have no recourse. And once your entire life is based on their proprietary systems (including software, hardware, vendors, etc.) the change factor is high.
Wired ran an article about embedded XP back in September. At the time I wrote a Letter to the Editor, which was not posted (so very un-slashdot-like), stating how insane it is that banks would be willing to risk their front end machines when their back end machines have been slammed repeatedly by Microsoft issues. That goes for windows and MS SQL.
Second, consider how long it took for electricity to become essential, or the refridgerator, or every other amazing invention. The Internet has only been broadly available for 10 years, and really only commercially available for about 10 years before that.
I'm proud to say that I buy games, books, clothing, groceries, other food (take-out), online. I use it for organizing events, meeting women, making new friends, trading securities, managing my finances, finding jobs, finding employees, marketing, sales, and about 100 other things. And on top of everything is pure communication. Email, IM, telephony, my personal web site, and more.
If that doesn't sound like the making of an essential technology, you may want to reconsider your defintion of terms.
Ok, this type of response is so poorly thought through. Society also made it through the dark ages, the plague, and lack of electricity. I don't see you suggesting that vaccines and electricity be taken away. Where is the line?
It is quite clear that Internet is becoming an essential part of life, and will continue to increase in value.
Try to see the big picture.
I think the significant point that you are missing is that the Internet connection at Universities is NOT just for academics and research. For most students university is their whole life for several years, but especially the first year: when they LIVE on campus, EAT on campus, often WORK on campus. In the 12/1 issue of "BusinessWeek" statistics from The College Board show that the average costs of attending private colleges in 2004 will have risen to close to $50k/year -- state unis are probably not far behind.
It is ridiculous to believe that a student, who pays a fortune, and makes that university their life, does not have the right to use the Internet connection HOWEVER they feel, as long as it is not illegal. And, frankly, I do not believe it should be the universities job to monitor their usage in anyway (other than to maintain the stability of the network, or maybe for pure research) or to restrict their usage even if to maintain legality.
Let the law do the law's work.
And, to finish my rant, let me also say: The more restriction university's put on their students, the less creativity we will see. What would have happened to the Internet had Stanford stopped Yahoo's traffic because it damaged the 'network and was an unsupervised host on the network.
I used to run an ISP that was owned by a real estate firm. We wired many buildings in NYC and provided additional services, such as wiring tenant offices and providing Internet access. There are several considerations not pointed out here:
A. Limitation of Knowledge. The guys who do a lot of the wiring work don't know what the cables do -- believe it or not. My two most experienced, and best, pullers couldn't tell you what ethernet was if their life depended on it. Heck, I had one guy who didn't know what T568b was, but could punch down Cat5 to a T568b block in five seconds flat. All they knew was what they were told to install.
In the past I had specifically had discussions with them about pulling cables out. Unless they are explicitly directed by the landlord of the building (who knows even LESS than they do) they will not, and probably should not, touch cables that are pre-existing. This is due to fear of not knowing what they could be doing, and worse, what they are, or aren't, doing.
B. Cross-office runs. In one of my buildings, for example, each floor was an average of 12,500 feet. The average office was 800 sq. ft. Most floors had upwards of 10-12 offices on them. In order to get riser pulls (cabling run in the central, vertical risers of the building) to office drops (termination points for those cables), these typically ran over the other offices. It was typical for the first office, closest to the riser) to have anywhere from 20-40 cables running through their plenum cores that had nothing to do with that office.
Imagine you come in Monday morning, after a neighbor moved in that weekend, to find all your cabling (data, phone, cable TV, leased lines) had be removed by the overly eager data people.
C. Simple CBA. The bottomline for any real estate firm is, well, the bottomline. The risk of fire due to overly full cabling space is fairly minimal compared to the risk of losing money and facing lawsuits -- or worse, losing tenants.
The cost of pulling existing cabling plus the risk of damaging infrastructure minus the value of open space is just not in the favor of making the change. It's really that simple.
When all is said and done, with my engineering cap on, I'd like to see thorough documentation on cables and better diagrams of floors showing what cable goes where -- and it's really not that hard. But try telling a rushing tenant that they have to wait two weeks while your engineering team documents cables, yeah right.
Also, with my engineering cap on, I'd make one suggestion for anyone moving into a new office. If you are going to pull out the old cables, and it is in roughly strong strength, use it to snake your new cables! That's what we often did. There are a few snares with this trick to watch out for, but if you have good pullers they'll know what to do -- if you give them the green light.
Ok, let's get down to it... really the most important thing for any engineer to be reading (especially if they work in corporate America) is Dilbert. Get on it!
Slashdot Mirror
As a side note, relevant to yesterday's article on Vivivisimo, it was voted number one in meta search.
Very good point, I completely agree. Also interesting to consider, therein, is the fact that there doesn't seem to be much visionary writing going on like that today -- at least nothing to speak of... Where is today's Asimov or Verne?
We are not that far away from seeing robotics in consumer environment on a regular basis. This trailer is identical in format to the Honda ads, doesn't really say anything and just kind of gives you the "cool stuff, coming soon" feel.
Honestly, some of you really put the 'eek' in 'geek'.
"Do not tease happy fuel cell."
Oh wait, you actually went to space camp! D'oh.
Obviously buzz and friends will now be equipped with extra strength Great Stuff.
I used to run a porn site, RezX.com (about six years ago). All the content, porn included, was served out of a db.
Remember the scene from Police Academy when mahoney and the other guy ties their flashlights to the dogs collars, so that when the dogs are running around at night Harris thinks they are picking up trash?
Once I started running my own BBS, most of the calls were inbound, so that helped reduce operating costs.
Kinda nostalgic... I look back and remember those days when I'd sleep all day in school, and then stay awake all night working on the system.
I like that... "shipped with" -- back when I ran a BBS, I didn't even know that there was such a concept as giving money for software. I thought "paying for software" meant getting warez in less than 0-3 days.
"The dark side clouds all." - Yoda
Statistic: 80% of statistics are made up
You gotta love a nerdy chick who shows some hip (I see skin, I see skin!)
You are mostly right in what you wrote in the first paragraph -- they do embrace more open standards (at least properly) than MSFT does. However, I totally disagree with your second paragraph. There is no comparison between the hardware of mac vs pc. You can easily yank your hard drive from a dell and through it in any other pc manufacturer and be pretty assured it will run. If you fight with Dell you can switch to ten other major manufacturers, or build your own. With apple, you are pretty well screwed. Especially with laptops.
Why not install php wiki for them? It's easy to get running and super easy to use. It has all sorts of nifty add ons for galleries, blogs, media, rss feeds, and more. It's way past the novice level for installation, but solidly in novice ground for daily use. Plus it comes with a bunch of design themes (lots more available online) and you can design your own. If you want it only for use by your gift recipient, simply secure edit authority appropriately. Good luck!
You also give up the right to fair competition in the market. If apple screws you, like they have in many horror stories, you have no recourse. And once your entire life is based on their proprietary systems (including software, hardware, vendors, etc.) the change factor is high.
Wired ran an article about embedded XP back in September. At the time I wrote a Letter to the Editor, which was not posted (so very un-slashdot-like), stating how insane it is that banks would be willing to risk their front end machines when their back end machines have been slammed repeatedly by Microsoft issues. That goes for windows and MS SQL.
Second, consider how long it took for electricity to become essential, or the refridgerator, or every other amazing invention. The Internet has only been broadly available for 10 years, and really only commercially available for about 10 years before that.
I'm proud to say that I buy games, books, clothing, groceries, other food (take-out), online. I use it for organizing events, meeting women, making new friends, trading securities, managing my finances, finding jobs, finding employees, marketing, sales, and about 100 other things. And on top of everything is pure communication. Email, IM, telephony, my personal web site, and more.
If that doesn't sound like the making of an essential technology, you may want to reconsider your defintion of terms.
Ok, this type of response is so poorly thought through. Society also made it through the dark ages, the plague, and lack of electricity. I don't see you suggesting that vaccines and electricity be taken away. Where is the line? It is quite clear that Internet is becoming an essential part of life, and will continue to increase in value. Try to see the big picture.
It is ridiculous to believe that a student, who pays a fortune, and makes that university their life, does not have the right to use the Internet connection HOWEVER they feel, as long as it is not illegal. And, frankly, I do not believe it should be the universities job to monitor their usage in anyway (other than to maintain the stability of the network, or maybe for pure research) or to restrict their usage even if to maintain legality.
Let the law do the law's work.
And, to finish my rant, let me also say: The more restriction university's put on their students, the less creativity we will see. What would have happened to the Internet had Stanford stopped Yahoo's traffic because it damaged the 'network and was an unsupervised host on the network.
A. Limitation of Knowledge. The guys who do a lot of the wiring work don't know what the cables do -- believe it or not. My two most experienced, and best, pullers couldn't tell you what ethernet was if their life depended on it. Heck, I had one guy who didn't know what T568b was, but could punch down Cat5 to a T568b block in five seconds flat. All they knew was what they were told to install.
In the past I had specifically had discussions with them about pulling cables out. Unless they are explicitly directed by the landlord of the building (who knows even LESS than they do) they will not, and probably should not, touch cables that are pre-existing. This is due to fear of not knowing what they could be doing, and worse, what they are, or aren't, doing.
B. Cross-office runs. In one of my buildings, for example, each floor was an average of 12,500 feet. The average office was 800 sq. ft. Most floors had upwards of 10-12 offices on them. In order to get riser pulls (cabling run in the central, vertical risers of the building) to office drops (termination points for those cables), these typically ran over the other offices. It was typical for the first office, closest to the riser) to have anywhere from 20-40 cables running through their plenum cores that had nothing to do with that office.
Imagine you come in Monday morning, after a neighbor moved in that weekend, to find all your cabling (data, phone, cable TV, leased lines) had be removed by the overly eager data people.
C. Simple CBA. The bottomline for any real estate firm is, well, the bottomline. The risk of fire due to overly full cabling space is fairly minimal compared to the risk of losing money and facing lawsuits -- or worse, losing tenants.
The cost of pulling existing cabling plus the risk of damaging infrastructure minus the value of open space is just not in the favor of making the change. It's really that simple.
When all is said and done, with my engineering cap on, I'd like to see thorough documentation on cables and better diagrams of floors showing what cable goes where -- and it's really not that hard. But try telling a rushing tenant that they have to wait two weeks while your engineering team documents cables, yeah right.
Also, with my engineering cap on, I'd make one suggestion for anyone moving into a new office. If you are going to pull out the old cables, and it is in roughly strong strength, use it to snake your new cables! That's what we often did. There are a few snares with this trick to watch out for, but if you have good pullers they'll know what to do -- if you give them the green light.
I read this book... don't waste your time if you are remotely familiar with computer and tech history.
Ok, let's get down to it... really the most important thing for any engineer to be reading (especially if they work in corporate America) is Dilbert. Get on it!