A couple of years ago we (Atlassian) showed up at a trade show with a "Friends don't let friends use Sourceforge" banner. Maybe there's some latent corporate hostility.:)
Regardless, I don't understand what this article is truing to say and I sit two desks across from the Bitbucket team!
I hate to break this to you, but universities are businesses, and reasonably large ones.
"There's no cost, no down time."
Every successful intrusion costs, and requires down-time. Sure, the guy SAYS he didn't do anything bad or leave behind any surprises, but how far can you trust a guy who broke into your system to begin with?
"I'm sick an tired of seeing these cookie cutter CIS & IST majors graduating having ZERO or less then one year of real world experience. I would much rather hire this guy."
"If you have two candidates with identical creditentials except for the certification, it will and should make a difference."
Rubbish.
In IT, all a certification means is that one of the candidate's previous employers had a training budget. I'd consider the two candidates exactly equal. If I could only hire one, I'd fall back on my gut feel of which one interviewed better.
I suspect that it's a bastard of a game to balance. There shouldn't be one particular race that's going to automatically have the best survival potential. If I want to make a race of peacenik herbivores, the game should make that both possible, and fun. If I hate the arcade sections at the front and want to get through them as quickly as I can to get to the strategic bits, the game shouldn't penalise me. If I love the arcade sections and get really good at them, the game shouldn't make me feel like I've wasted my time when I get to the next stage.
The criticism of Gore's "jet-setting" is a cheap shot, though. As a politician, Gore knows the value of face-to-face meetings, and that actually being somewhere gives your cause a lot more attention than sitting at home phoning up journalists and taking part in video conferences. There are several orders of magnitude difference between the gains he's trying to achieve, and what he's spending to achieve them.
Am I misunderstanding your point, or perhaps missing the sarcasm?
Motion blur is an artifact of capturing frames on film because anything that moves too fast when the frame is exposed gets blurred. Without the blur, however, you wouldn't get a convincing illusion of movement. Any gamer will tell you, 24fps just isn't good enough when you're drawing clean graphics. Motion blur isn't some artificial convention, it's a result of how to make something that isn't moving smoothly appear to the human eye to be doing so.
You could equally say that you can't really show three-dimensions on a two-dimensional screen, so we have to resort to stupid perspective tricks to make it look like it's 3D.
So, slashdot is a forum. Actually, it's a combination of technology news site and discussion forum. But definitely not a blog. Linking to erroneous definitions doesn't change that fact. If it were a weblog, it would only be about websites, and would be written by a single author.
What you're suffering from is a bad case of cognitive dissonance: "I like Slashdot. I don't like blogs. Therefore, Slashdot is not a blog."
90% of the posts on Slashdot are links to other websites, decorated with two or three sentences of editorialising. Meanwhile, many blogs have multiple authors (for example boingboing, all the Weblogs Inc. and Gawker Media blogs), and the vast majority support user comments (displayed in chronological order - reverse chronological order is only for the articles themselves). Nobody ever questions whether Engadget is a blog, despite the fact that it has multiple authors, accepts user submission of links, and boasts more editorial content than Slashdot.
When your definition of a word, especially a newly coined one, differs from that of almost everyone else who uses it regularly, you might want to reconsider your definition.
"Finally?" Who here from Oz has actually been waiting for iTunes?
/me raises his hand
Provided the store charges something close to the US$0.99 of its overseas counterparts, I'm going to be a happy (but maybe slightly poorer) little consumer next week. Legally purchased popular music in Australia comes in one of two forms: massively overpriced compact discs, or massively overpriced WMA downloads that won't play on my iPod.
If Apple can launch a store where I can buy only marginally overpriced music that will play on my iPod, I'll be ecstatic.
Marcus J. Ranum is a world-renowned expert on security system design and implementation. He is recognized as the inventor of the proxy firewall, and the implementor of the first commercial firewall product. Since the late 1980's, he has designed a number of groundbreaking security products including the DEC SEAL, the TIS firewall toolkit, the Gauntlet firewall, and NFR's Network Flight Recorder intrusion detection system.
You have your employer buy you the laptop as a salary sacrifice, which means the cost of the laptop is removed from your taxable income for the year. Normally doing something like this would attract Fringe Benefits Tax to balance out the income tax you're avoiding, but you're allowed one laptop a year FBT-free as a work-related expense.
While common practice, it probably isn't a good idea to immediately sell the laptop on eBay and pocket the bonus cash, because if you're audited the ATO can quite justifiably ask you why you weren't using it for work like you said you were.
I know. We should all just use JBoss and ignore any other attempt to make an open source Java application server. Competition is a terrible thing to have in any market, and should be discouraged at every opportunity.
If you read the included readme file, this was very much a spur-of-the-moment idea he had while sitting around doing interviews. Seeing as Reznor is a Mac user, and iLife is installed on all Macs by default, GarageBand was probably the most appropriate (i.e. widely-distributed, cheap, hobbyist) software Reznor had lying around at the time.
As far as I know there's no standard open format for this kind of data, so you can't really fault someone for choosing one closed format over another.
Here is a man, who for some reason or another, seems to have devoted a large proportion of the last twenty years of his life to the veneration of the works of Douglas Adams.
Look at his CV in the Google Cache (since the original site's down), the guy looks more like a fanboy than an objective biographer: one of those people who becomes the "guy everyone ends up interviewing" in the fan community, but who doesn't have any real connection to Adams beyond his fandom.
Of course the review is going to be bad. He's devoted far too much of his life to a belief in the genius of one man. To believe that anyone else could match that man's vision by bringing Adams' work to the screen in his absence would be far too much cognitive dissonance for him to handle.
Plenty of links to positive reviews have been posted in other threads - I'll wait for the Rotten Tomatoes verdict, I think.
How long it would take for the associated energy savings to overcome the cost to make, test, and deploy the necessary code changes?
Probably not nearly as long as you'd think. Keeping the clock set to the right time tends to be the job of the operating system, and OS's have had the problem of variable daylight savings times fixed for quite a while now.
I remember that when Sydney hosted the 2000 Olympics, we moved the timing of Daylight Savings around so it wouldn't disrupt the Games. I didn't notice any banks closing or planes dropping out of the sky. I didn't even have to manually change the settings on any of my computers: they just got the new settings in some random software update.
So the site isn't actually divulging Apple secrets at all! Case dismissed
I said "hit and miss", which implies the occasional hit. And that's part of the problem. The times Think Secret do get some legitimate insider information (like the full specs of the Mac Mini) adds an undeserved weight to the rest of the time when he's just pissing in the wind (or reporting someone else's wind-pissing).
So you end up with situations like the iPod Mini, which got a lot of bad press on its release thanks to the Think Secret-fueled assumption that it was going to cost $100. Everyone had been primed to expect a $100 iPod, despite the fact tht $100 was a totally unrealistic price for the unit. Of course the Mini went on to be wildly successful anyway, but this sort of thing could really have hurt a product that had less brand momentum than the iPod.
And a lot more can be found perusing the archives.
Mostly, ThinkSecret gets its reputation from confirmation bias. You remember the hits more significantly than the misses, so it feels far more accurate than it really is. In fact, while they're good at reporting rumours that everyone else knows - like the fact the mini was in the works - or things that can be easily verified - like the contents of the latest Tiger developer seed, or the obvious conclusion from Apple buying up heaps of flash memory - their exclusive scoops from "insider sources" are very hit and miss.
Meaning no disrespect to Doohan, but all a walk of fame star really means is that you paid $15,000 to the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, and they recognised your name.
Inclusion on the walk of fame is done entirely based on nomination, and since a successful nomination costs so much, people only ever nominate themselves, or are nominated by their studio/publicists. Which is why Britney Spears, David Spade and Pee Wee Herman all have their own stars, but Al Pacino never bothered.
It was last November when Steve Jobs admitted that Apple made no money from the iTunes Music Store, and that pretty much all the money goes to the labels. Sure, in the six months since some more economies of scale may have kicked in, but we've heard nothing to contradict this yet:
So now we have it on record: the music store is a loss leader. Jobs said Apple would pay its dues to the RIAA, then seek to make money where it could, from its line of hardware accessories. When the conversation turned to rivals such as eTunes and Napster, Jobs said: "They don't make iPods, so they don't have a related business where they do [make money]". (The Register)
Apple will always have the advantage in the music store -> iPod battle because the iPod needs iTunes, and iTunes has the music store built in. So Apple remains the first stop for people looking for something to play on an iPod, by definition.
Meanwhile, we're supposed to believe that Apple are somehow worried because Real have taken a bite into this profit-shy business in order to give people another way they can put music on an iPod, thus allowing Apple to maybe ship more units? I can't quite imagine Steve Jobs crying into his breakfast cereal over that one.
Of course, Apple have an opportunity here: the opportunity being the chance to extract license fees for putting Real's software on the iPod. They can wave around the threat of the DMCA and an expensive lawsuit for a while. Then they can pull out the carrot of integration: giving Real the chance to put their player on the iPod without having it break every time the iPod software was updated. Meanwhile Apple get some nice pocket-change in licensing fees, and the chance to deflect some WMA heat by waving the banner of a more open music-playing platform.
I see no reason why OS X should take any less time than Linux to support and...
I'd take a look at Apple Remote Desktop as an example of why it's easier to support. Simple, standard GUI tool to manage all your desktops centrally, from keeping stats on what sort of hardware is where, to pushing out software updates and configurations.
There's also a lot of central management stuff in OS X server that makes running a network a lot easier. Sure all this stuff could be imitated in the Linux world with a mess of shell scripts (and has been, over and over again, everywhere I've ever worked), but it's easier when that sort of thing comes out of the box.
Macs cost much more than Linux systems.
Compared to hardware, skilled people are rather expensive.
The most likely fate of Java in the event of Sun's death would be IBM acquiring the IP in the fire-sale. They have both the means and the motive to do so, and would be pretty good custodians of the language. They might then choose to open-source it themselves, although I am guessing that they'd quickly change their tune about that if they had just paid money to buy the language.
A company's assets don't just vanish when the company dies. On top of that, established companies don't ever really die: they just get bought out and gutted over the course of a few years.
I think the entire point is that to claim that P2P is causing increased sales is at least as defensible a position as the record industry's continual complaints over the last few years that P2P was the cause of decreasing sales.
It's actually pretty obvious from reading the article that the reason for increased sales was a decrease in prices, and a less pessimistic economy. People felt they were getting more value for money, and thus bought 8% more units (resuitling in a 2% higher gross after the price reduction was taken into account). But given that the record industry has been ignoring the fact that they were selling an overpriced product in a depressed economy, and have been blaming their downturn on file-sharing instead, it is perfectly justifiable to turn that argument around and assume that any increase in sales is attributable to the same force.
The world makes a great deal more sense if you don't go around taking everything you read literally.
Slashdot Mirror
A couple of years ago we (Atlassian) showed up at a trade show with a "Friends don't let friends use Sourceforge" banner. Maybe there's some latent corporate hostility. :)
Regardless, I don't understand what this article is truing to say and I sit two desks across from the Bitbucket team!
"This is a University, not a business."
I hate to break this to you, but universities are businesses, and reasonably large ones.
"There's no cost, no down time."
Every successful intrusion costs, and requires down-time. Sure, the guy SAYS he didn't do anything bad or leave behind any surprises, but how far can you trust a guy who broke into your system to begin with?
"I'm sick an tired of seeing these cookie cutter CIS & IST majors graduating having ZERO or less then one year of real world experience. I would much rather hire this guy."
I strongly recommend you read this email from Marcus Ranum to the firewall-wizards mailing-list for an alternative point of view.
Charles
"If you have two candidates with identical creditentials except for the certification, it will and should make a difference."
Rubbish.
In IT, all a certification means is that one of the candidate's previous employers had a training budget. I'd consider the two candidates exactly equal. If I could only hire one, I'd fall back on my gut feel of which one interviewed better.
Charles Miller
I suspect that it's a bastard of a game to balance. There shouldn't be one particular race that's going to automatically have the best survival potential. If I want to make a race of peacenik herbivores, the game should make that both possible, and fun. If I hate the arcade sections at the front and want to get through them as quickly as I can to get to the strategic bits, the game shouldn't penalise me. If I love the arcade sections and get really good at them, the game shouldn't make me feel like I've wasted my time when I get to the next stage.
Charles
The criticism of Gore's "jet-setting" is a cheap shot, though. As a politician, Gore knows the value of face-to-face meetings, and that actually being somewhere gives your cause a lot more attention than sitting at home phoning up journalists and taking part in video conferences. There are several orders of magnitude difference between the gains he's trying to achieve, and what he's spending to achieve them.
Charles
Am I misunderstanding your point, or perhaps missing the sarcasm?
Motion blur is an artifact of capturing frames on film because anything that moves too fast when the frame is exposed gets blurred. Without the blur, however, you wouldn't get a convincing illusion of movement. Any gamer will tell you, 24fps just isn't good enough when you're drawing clean graphics. Motion blur isn't some artificial convention, it's a result of how to make something that isn't moving smoothly appear to the human eye to be doing so.
You could equally say that you can't really show three-dimensions on a two-dimensional screen, so we have to resort to stupid perspective tricks to make it look like it's 3D.
Charles
So, slashdot is a forum. Actually, it's a combination of technology news site and discussion forum. But definitely not a blog. Linking to erroneous definitions doesn't change that fact. If it were a weblog, it would only be about websites, and would be written by a single author.
What you're suffering from is a bad case of cognitive dissonance: "I like Slashdot. I don't like blogs. Therefore, Slashdot is not a blog."
90% of the posts on Slashdot are links to other websites, decorated with two or three sentences of editorialising. Meanwhile, many blogs have multiple authors (for example boingboing, all the Weblogs Inc. and Gawker Media blogs), and the vast majority support user comments (displayed in chronological order - reverse chronological order is only for the articles themselves). Nobody ever questions whether Engadget is a blog, despite the fact that it has multiple authors, accepts user submission of links, and boasts more editorial content than Slashdot.
When your definition of a word, especially a newly coined one, differs from that of almost everyone else who uses it regularly, you might want to reconsider your definition.
Charles Miller
/me raises his hand
Provided the store charges something close to the US$0.99 of its overseas counterparts, I'm going to be a happy (but maybe slightly poorer) little consumer next week. Legally purchased popular music in Australia comes in one of two forms: massively overpriced compact discs, or massively overpriced WMA downloads that won't play on my iPod.
If Apple can launch a store where I can buy only marginally overpriced music that will play on my iPod, I'll be ecstatic.
Charles
I think, as a rule, anyone who posts "this show sucks" should also list their five favourite shows, so readers can see what it's being compared with.
From his bio page:
Marcus J. Ranum is a world-renowned expert on security system design and implementation. He is recognized as the inventor of the proxy firewall, and the implementor of the first commercial firewall product. Since the late 1980's, he has designed a number of groundbreaking security products including the DEC SEAL, the TIS firewall toolkit, the Gauntlet firewall, and NFR's Network Flight Recorder intrusion detection system.
You have your employer buy you the laptop as a salary sacrifice, which means the cost of the laptop is removed from your taxable income for the year. Normally doing something like this would attract Fringe Benefits Tax to balance out the income tax you're avoiding, but you're allowed one laptop a year FBT-free as a work-related expense.
While common practice, it probably isn't a good idea to immediately sell the laptop on eBay and pocket the bonus cash, because if you're audited the ATO can quite justifiably ask you why you weren't using it for work like you said you were.
Charles
I know. We should all just use JBoss and ignore any other attempt to make an open source Java application server. Competition is a terrible thing to have in any market, and should be discouraged at every opportunity.
Charles
I suspect "because it was there".
If you read the included readme file, this was very much a spur-of-the-moment idea he had while sitting around doing interviews. Seeing as Reznor is a Mac user, and iLife is installed on all Macs by default, GarageBand was probably the most appropriate (i.e. widely-distributed, cheap, hobbyist) software Reznor had lying around at the time.
As far as I know there's no standard open format for this kind of data, so you can't really fault someone for choosing one closed format over another.
Charles
Here is a man, who for some reason or another, seems to have devoted a large proportion of the last twenty years of his life to the veneration of the works of Douglas Adams.
Look at his CV in the Google Cache (since the original site's down), the guy looks more like a fanboy than an objective biographer: one of those people who becomes the "guy everyone ends up interviewing" in the fan community, but who doesn't have any real connection to Adams beyond his fandom.
Of course the review is going to be bad. He's devoted far too much of his life to a belief in the genius of one man. To believe that anyone else could match that man's vision by bringing Adams' work to the screen in his absence would be far too much cognitive dissonance for him to handle.
Plenty of links to positive reviews have been posted in other threads - I'll wait for the Rotten Tomatoes verdict, I think.
Charles
Probably not nearly as long as you'd think. Keeping the clock set to the right time tends to be the job of the operating system, and OS's have had the problem of variable daylight savings times fixed for quite a while now.
I remember that when Sydney hosted the 2000 Olympics, we moved the timing of Daylight Savings around so it wouldn't disrupt the Games. I didn't notice any banks closing or planes dropping out of the sky. I didn't even have to manually change the settings on any of my computers: they just got the new settings in some random software update.
Charles
In-n-out's fries are marginally this side of inedible.
I said "hit and miss", which implies the occasional hit. And that's part of the problem. The times Think Secret do get some legitimate insider information (like the full specs of the Mac Mini) adds an undeserved weight to the rest of the time when he's just pissing in the wind (or reporting someone else's wind-pissing).
So you end up with situations like the iPod Mini, which got a lot of bad press on its release thanks to the Think Secret-fueled assumption that it was going to cost $100. Everyone had been primed to expect a $100 iPod, despite the fact tht $100 was a totally unrealistic price for the unit. Of course the Mini went on to be wildly successful anyway, but this sort of thing could really have hurt a product that had less brand momentum than the iPod.
Charles Miller
This being the same ThinkSecret that reported as fact that the iPod mini was going to be updated with a colour screen on February 24th?
Or that the flash-based iPod would feature a screen that was as wide as the iPod mini, but a few lines shorter.
Or that a 2Gb iPod mini would cost around US$100.
And a lot more can be found perusing the archives.
Mostly, ThinkSecret gets its reputation from confirmation bias. You remember the hits more significantly than the misses, so it feels far more accurate than it really is. In fact, while they're good at reporting rumours that everyone else knows - like the fact the mini was in the works - or things that can be easily verified - like the contents of the latest Tiger developer seed, or the obvious conclusion from Apple buying up heaps of flash memory - their exclusive scoops from "insider sources" are very hit and miss.
Meaning no disrespect to Doohan, but all a walk of fame star really means is that you paid $15,000 to the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, and they recognised your name.
Inclusion on the walk of fame is done entirely based on nomination, and since a successful nomination costs so much, people only ever nominate themselves, or are nominated by their studio/publicists. Which is why Britney Spears, David Spade and Pee Wee Herman all have their own stars, but Al Pacino never bothered.
I guess so. Although now maybe they'll change their mind since it's a fait accompli.
The whole thing's a non-story, though. Real are quite firmly in the "Hey, weren't they relevant once?" camp.
Charles Miller
It was last November when Steve Jobs admitted that Apple made no money from the iTunes Music Store, and that pretty much all the money goes to the labels. Sure, in the six months since some more economies of scale may have kicked in, but we've heard nothing to contradict this yet:
Apple will always have the advantage in the music store -> iPod battle because the iPod needs iTunes, and iTunes has the music store built in. So Apple remains the first stop for people looking for something to play on an iPod, by definition.
Meanwhile, we're supposed to believe that Apple are somehow worried because Real have taken a bite into this profit-shy business in order to give people another way they can put music on an iPod, thus allowing Apple to maybe ship more units? I can't quite imagine Steve Jobs crying into his breakfast cereal over that one.
Of course, Apple have an opportunity here: the opportunity being the chance to extract license fees for putting Real's software on the iPod. They can wave around the threat of the DMCA and an expensive lawsuit for a while. Then they can pull out the carrot of integration: giving Real the chance to put their player on the iPod without having it break every time the iPod software was updated. Meanwhile Apple get some nice pocket-change in licensing fees, and the chance to deflect some WMA heat by waving the banner of a more open music-playing platform.
Charles Miller
I'd take a look at Apple Remote Desktop as an example of why it's easier to support. Simple, standard GUI tool to manage all your desktops centrally, from keeping stats on what sort of hardware is where, to pushing out software updates and configurations.
There's also a lot of central management stuff in OS X server that makes running a network a lot easier. Sure all this stuff could be imitated in the Linux world with a mess of shell scripts (and has been, over and over again, everywhere I've ever worked), but it's easier when that sort of thing comes out of the box.
Compared to hardware, skilled people are rather expensive.
Charles Miller
The most likely fate of Java in the event of Sun's death would be IBM acquiring the IP in the fire-sale. They have both the means and the motive to do so, and would be pretty good custodians of the language. They might then choose to open-source it themselves, although I am guessing that they'd quickly change their tune about that if they had just paid money to buy the language.
A company's assets don't just vanish when the company dies. On top of that, established companies don't ever really die: they just get bought out and gutted over the course of a few years.
But HTF can anyone claim that p2p is the cause?
I think the entire point is that to claim that P2P is causing increased sales is at least as defensible a position as the record industry's continual complaints over the last few years that P2P was the cause of decreasing sales.
It's actually pretty obvious from reading the article that the reason for increased sales was a decrease in prices, and a less pessimistic economy. People felt they were getting more value for money, and thus bought 8% more units (resuitling in a 2% higher gross after the price reduction was taken into account). But given that the record industry has been ignoring the fact that they were selling an overpriced product in a depressed economy, and have been blaming their downturn on file-sharing instead, it is perfectly justifiable to turn that argument around and assume that any increase in sales is attributable to the same force.
The world makes a great deal more sense if you don't go around taking everything you read literally.
Charles Miller
Python-enabled phones were just announced at eTech by Nokia's CTO.