Even if a kernel update comes out, it shouldn't be too hard to upgrade to it since the source code is available to make migrating to the newer kernel easier.
Keep in mind too that if they decide to change hardware platforms then they can fix bugs in the old code that make prevent them from doing the port if the cost of taking the new kernel is too expensive.
Great comments, even though I think you're wrong.:-)
We definitely have all been where this guy is. And we've all needed help along the way. My concern isn't that he needs help, but how he's going about asking for it. In some ways, submitting a question like this would be like going to a convention of heart surgeons, standing in front of the group, and saying, "hey, some day I think I might have some heart problems, and rather than going to med school or even buying a couple of books on heart surgery, I'd like you to dedicate your conference to teaching me all about the heart."
My pushback on this particular submission is that Ask Slashdot has seen its fair share of complaints about the questions submitted. I've been close a couple of times to pulling it out of my list, but I always think that there may be an opportunity to both learn and teach. If the submissions are all like this, I don't think that there's much value for either me or the person submitting the question. I think that you'd have to agree that the OP really didn't seem to have any real focus, so any comments submitted are going to be in the context of the person posting the comment rather than in the context of the person seeking the information.
I had to smile when I saw your comment about an Apple ][e. I had a ][c for a while in my youth. (I was 14 at the time). It's surprising that given your history that you'd defend laziness. You remember just how hard it was to get information on anything back in those days, so I don't think asking someone to spend a little time on Google before seeking advice is asking all that much.
Let me give you one more thing to ponder. Even though I've done very little telephony, I'm now working on building out a fairly sophisicated Asterisk server. If you've ever worked with this technology then you'll know that it's less than well documented, but that doesn't mean that I'm not responsible for doing research before asking questions. If I were to put a post on Ask Slashdot saying "I want to build an Asterisk server that connects to a database - tell me how" then the community would be right in flaming me. If I was to submit a question like "is there a better way to interact with a database than the system command?" then I would expect to get some really good answers. (For anyone that's interested, AGI is pretty cool and works well for our application.)
If you have to pay people to use your free service, you have a problem.
Microsoft isn't doing this for the direct revenue it generates. They're doing it to get more eyeballs on their other web properties. They're also doing it to help maintain their position as an industry leader. Back in the good old days of the dotcom era, we used to call this "mindshare". Microsoft has lost much mindshare of late, and if they don't stop the bleeding then they'll become completely irrelevant.
... but he really just a kid (look at his homepage).
I did, and it wasn't obvious to me that he was young. So I did some digging on his site, and found this picture. I'd agree that he's young, but I think that if you're old enough to have facial hair, you're old enough to use Google.:-)
He is at the beginning of the curve. Laughing at him won't help.
Normally, I'd agree with this. I've even been known to flame people for being too harsh in their responses. I think the GP has a point though. I think that Ask Slashdot works best when the topics are of broad interest, have some technical merit, and the poster can evaluate the responses in some context. When I read this question, my first thought was to RTFM. After all, he states that "I think this is what people mean when they talk about libraries and/or APIs, but not really sure", so it's pretty clear that he hasn't done any real research on the topic. If the question was to compare the merits of CVS against Subversion, or some other specific question about how to structure a library, then I think the question would have merit. But this just seems like a grand waste of time since there are numerous references for this kind of information (books, web sites, etc.) I see a huge difference between "what's your experience in this area" and "I'm too lazy to look for readily available information". I don't want to judge this guy too quickly, but virtually the entire question reads as though he's lazy.
For what it's worth, I think this guy should go to college. Seriously. It may be a lot of money, but most quality schools will cover topics like this in CS101. Even lots of community colleges will cover basics like this.
The reason Windows invaded the home was because people wanted compatibility with the systems they used at work.
Yes and no. Yes, they wanted word processing functionality. And yes, they bought what they used at the office. But it's all predicated on the fact that people desired the functionality. Tell me what feature they could possibly build into Office any more that would appeal to your average Joe.
I know a few folks like this, and while most people wouldn't consider them intellectuals, I sure do. They can tell you more about cows then you'd care to know, and they don't need weather radar to tell you when it's going to rain.
On a related note: I watch my fair share of NASCAR, and while it definitely caters to the southern, Republican, Bible-belt crowd (tell me one other sport where they pray before the event), it's really a lot more sophisticated than people think. Most folks consider NASCAR to be all axle-grease, but every team on the circuit has really sharp people who know lots about aerodynamics and mechanics. But even with all their intelligence, I'm sure they'd be laughed out of a room of elite intellectuals who think that in order to be really smart you have to enjoy opera and the arts. (Don't get me wrong, those are ok too. It's just that they're not better than anything else.)
Small businesses, even home users may find themselves put upon to have the same tools or access to documents (etc.) sent to them.
I would have agreed with the statement a few years back, but not any more. Unless you have just a few really large clients, you can usually push back on your customers and let them know that you can't open their document and to "please send this in a standarized format". Or you can offer buy the tools you need and bill them for the copies. For as price sensitive as many companies are for the services they purchase, I think most understand that the price that they pay is directly related to the costs their vendors incur.
I think it is Fear Of Not Having Every Feature which drives a lot of purchasing
But it could also work against you. If you start pushing documents out the door and your customers complain that they can't read then then you have to turn off the advanced features, at which time people start to ask "why am I paying for this?". Any time there's a lot of sharing going on then you need a lowest common denominator, or you need to take Acrobat's approach and provide read-only and read-write versions.
Ben the moron (I'm sorry, I think he really is sometimes) will think it's too difficult for plebs to understand.
For as much as I love open source, this is why it can be such a tough sell. No matter how you feel about Microsoft's business model, their strength is in taking care of the little stuff. I've never really understood why good software === stuff my mom can't run.
Of course, they haven't done it overtly, but through portraying themselves as common, simple people and by portraying intelluctuals as untrustworthy.
I don't get why this has to be an either-or proposition. I consider myself an intellectual, yet I live a simple life. In fact, I find most pure intellectuals to be very simple people. They eat simply, don't get very involved in politics, and generally keep to things that interest them. I find those who portray themselves as being sophisiticated to be generally dishonest, because they take things that they know little about and pretend as though they're experts.
Mod this "+5, Firefox doesn't kill my machine any more". Set the cache at 64MB and all works well. It's scary to see memory grow when loading a large image, only to have it go back to a reasonable level. It's sad that this isn't on by default, since my mom doesn't want to have to mess around with about:config to keep her machine alive.
I agree with your point, but I'm not sure advertising would have helped much. I can just imagine my reaction to an Atari ad. Probably something like "yeah, I remember those guys from way back when. Haven't heard much about them lately. I'm really surprised that they're still in business." And then I'd have moved on to something else.
Carly Fiorina left HP a very hurting company and yet she walked out...
HP was in trouble when she came on board, and was in even more trouble when she left. They seem to be turning it around now that she's out of the way. It's really sad that CEOs can do nothing and get paid for it, but it's even worse when they can do real damage and still get a hefty paycheck.
Their customer list is worth something, as are their call center and distribution systems. The interesting thing about a customer list is how to value it. If it's a million happy customers then it's worth a lot. If it's a million unhappy customers then it ain't worth squat.
And some of us still would never buy from them again. After having them mess up some memory and not step up to fix the problem, I wrote them off my vendor list. In this industry, there are always other players, so you have to keep your current customers happy or they'll go elsewhere for solutions.
I use Freeview which works through your existing aerial and has all the channels I need.
It's interesting that here in the US, few people even know what an aerial is any more. For years, real estate developers have been making deals with cable companies to force their residents into purchasing cable TV. This is done by writing clauses into local convenants (CC&Rs) that restrict home owners from putting up an antenna for aesthetic reasons, so most people just buy cable whether they need it or not.
I live near Seattle, and before that in Michigan, and only once had cable service. I cancelled when it got to $13/mo because I didn't see the value in it. I have always been able to get lots of programming, much of which is not worth watching anyway. Yet if I compare the quality of over-the-air TV to that of cable, I really don't see that much difference. Yes, I'd like to have The History Channel and a few others, but I can buy DVDs to fill in the gaps. Then I own the content and can watch it whenever I want. Just the other day we picked up a season of Quantum Leap, which along with Stargate (own all 8 seasons on DVD so far) is really the only reason I'd want SciFi. At $50 a season, I've only spent $400 on Stargate which has given me far more entertainment value than dropping $600/year on cable, and I can still watch Judge Judy over-the-air for free.:-)
Agreed. I was thinking about this discussion more in terms of the original post, which was "how to I track down bugs in real time?" I'd hope that before they started that they'd have done some kind of sanity check on the code.:-)
If these guys are so advanced, can't they come up with a video stream that works on more than one platform? At least this time their tracking web site seems to be keeping up with the traffic. I found it ironic that for all Branson's money, they couldn't handle all the page views last time.
Ok, maybe I'm missing something in your comment, but my exact point was that you can't catch a lot of errors with unit tests of individual components. You not only have to test multiple threads hitting the component, but also different numbers of threads and different timing for the calls. I'm not saying that unit tests can't help you stabilize the code, but there are many, many conditions that can only be found in the real environment. Since this is a telephony app, just the speed at which people press keys and the duration of the keypress could have a huge impact on the behavior of the individual components.
The lowest-level components won't care how they're called, only that they're called with the right parameters.
Huh? My experience is that it's usually the low level components that are most sensitive. Create an accidental buffer overrun and it won't show up in any unit tests.
Something that frustrates me, though, is the apparent lack of VOIP for small businesses.
We tried VOIP for about a year for our small business, and went back to POTS for day-to-day calls. We couldn't get the call quality we wanted for business class calls when operating over DSL.
We were talking about how cool it would be to set up an Asterisk box so we could have the voicemail, forwarding, etc. It's just not something I have time for.
We just set up an Asterisk box with BroadVoice for an independent project that doesn't involve real-time communications. It was a bit of a pain to get right, but it's pretty cool once it gets working. It's a couple of days work. Just be aware that often the information you need to set up an account is spread out in multiple articles. Google is your friend.
Slashdot Mirror
Keep in mind too that if they decide to change hardware platforms then they can fix bugs in the old code that make prevent them from doing the port if the cost of taking the new kernel is too expensive.
We definitely have all been where this guy is. And we've all needed help along the way. My concern isn't that he needs help, but how he's going about asking for it. In some ways, submitting a question like this would be like going to a convention of heart surgeons, standing in front of the group, and saying, "hey, some day I think I might have some heart problems, and rather than going to med school or even buying a couple of books on heart surgery, I'd like you to dedicate your conference to teaching me all about the heart."
My pushback on this particular submission is that Ask Slashdot has seen its fair share of complaints about the questions submitted. I've been close a couple of times to pulling it out of my list, but I always think that there may be an opportunity to both learn and teach. If the submissions are all like this, I don't think that there's much value for either me or the person submitting the question. I think that you'd have to agree that the OP really didn't seem to have any real focus, so any comments submitted are going to be in the context of the person posting the comment rather than in the context of the person seeking the information.
I had to smile when I saw your comment about an Apple ][e. I had a ][c for a while in my youth. (I was 14 at the time). It's surprising that given your history that you'd defend laziness. You remember just how hard it was to get information on anything back in those days, so I don't think asking someone to spend a little time on Google before seeking advice is asking all that much.
Let me give you one more thing to ponder. Even though I've done very little telephony, I'm now working on building out a fairly sophisicated Asterisk server. If you've ever worked with this technology then you'll know that it's less than well documented, but that doesn't mean that I'm not responsible for doing research before asking questions. If I were to put a post on Ask Slashdot saying "I want to build an Asterisk server that connects to a database - tell me how" then the community would be right in flaming me. If I was to submit a question like "is there a better way to interact with a database than the system command?" then I would expect to get some really good answers. (For anyone that's interested, AGI is pretty cool and works well for our application.)
Microsoft isn't doing this for the direct revenue it generates. They're doing it to get more eyeballs on their other web properties. They're also doing it to help maintain their position as an industry leader. Back in the good old days of the dotcom era, we used to call this "mindshare". Microsoft has lost much mindshare of late, and if they don't stop the bleeding then they'll become completely irrelevant.
Maybe Microsoft should give away free downloads on iTunes. ;-)
I did. All I had to do was send a check for $199.95 for shipping/handling and I got a free copy of Windows XP.
Probably? Version control is great for everything, perhaps with the exception of stuff you TiVo.
I did, and it wasn't obvious to me that he was young. So I did some digging on his site, and found this picture. I'd agree that he's young, but I think that if you're old enough to have facial hair, you're old enough to use Google. :-)
Normally, I'd agree with this. I've even been known to flame people for being too harsh in their responses. I think the GP has a point though. I think that Ask Slashdot works best when the topics are of broad interest, have some technical merit, and the poster can evaluate the responses in some context. When I read this question, my first thought was to RTFM. After all, he states that "I think this is what people mean when they talk about libraries and/or APIs, but not really sure", so it's pretty clear that he hasn't done any real research on the topic. If the question was to compare the merits of CVS against Subversion, or some other specific question about how to structure a library, then I think the question would have merit. But this just seems like a grand waste of time since there are numerous references for this kind of information (books, web sites, etc.) I see a huge difference between "what's your experience in this area" and "I'm too lazy to look for readily available information". I don't want to judge this guy too quickly, but virtually the entire question reads as though he's lazy.
For what it's worth, I think this guy should go to college. Seriously. It may be a lot of money, but most quality schools will cover topics like this in CS101. Even lots of community colleges will cover basics like this.
Yes and no. Yes, they wanted word processing functionality. And yes, they bought what they used at the office. But it's all predicated on the fact that people desired the functionality. Tell me what feature they could possibly build into Office any more that would appeal to your average Joe.
I know a few folks like this, and while most people wouldn't consider them intellectuals, I sure do. They can tell you more about cows then you'd care to know, and they don't need weather radar to tell you when it's going to rain.
On a related note: I watch my fair share of NASCAR, and while it definitely caters to the southern, Republican, Bible-belt crowd (tell me one other sport where they pray before the event), it's really a lot more sophisticated than people think. Most folks consider NASCAR to be all axle-grease, but every team on the circuit has really sharp people who know lots about aerodynamics and mechanics. But even with all their intelligence, I'm sure they'd be laughed out of a room of elite intellectuals who think that in order to be really smart you have to enjoy opera and the arts. (Don't get me wrong, those are ok too. It's just that they're not better than anything else.)
I would have agreed with the statement a few years back, but not any more. Unless you have just a few really large clients, you can usually push back on your customers and let them know that you can't open their document and to "please send this in a standarized format". Or you can offer buy the tools you need and bill them for the copies. For as price sensitive as many companies are for the services they purchase, I think most understand that the price that they pay is directly related to the costs their vendors incur.
But it could also work against you. If you start pushing documents out the door and your customers complain that they can't read then then you have to turn off the advanced features, at which time people start to ask "why am I paying for this?". Any time there's a lot of sharing going on then you need a lowest common denominator, or you need to take Acrobat's approach and provide read-only and read-write versions.
For as much as I love open source, this is why it can be such a tough sell. No matter how you feel about Microsoft's business model, their strength is in taking care of the little stuff. I've never really understood why good software === stuff my mom can't run.
I don't get why this has to be an either-or proposition. I consider myself an intellectual, yet I live a simple life. In fact, I find most pure intellectuals to be very simple people. They eat simply, don't get very involved in politics, and generally keep to things that interest them. I find those who portray themselves as being sophisiticated to be generally dishonest, because they take things that they know little about and pretend as though they're experts.
Mod this "+5, Firefox doesn't kill my machine any more". Set the cache at 64MB and all works well. It's scary to see memory grow when loading a large image, only to have it go back to a reasonable level. It's sad that this isn't on by default, since my mom doesn't want to have to mess around with about:config to keep her machine alive.
I agree with your point, but I'm not sure advertising would have helped much. I can just imagine my reaction to an Atari ad. Probably something like "yeah, I remember those guys from way back when. Haven't heard much about them lately. I'm really surprised that they're still in business." And then I'd have moved on to something else.
HP was in trouble when she came on board, and was in even more trouble when she left. They seem to be turning it around now that she's out of the way. It's really sad that CEOs can do nothing and get paid for it, but it's even worse when they can do real damage and still get a hefty paycheck.
Their customer list is worth something, as are their call center and distribution systems. The interesting thing about a customer list is how to value it. If it's a million happy customers then it's worth a lot. If it's a million unhappy customers then it ain't worth squat.
And some of us still would never buy from them again. After having them mess up some memory and not step up to fix the problem, I wrote them off my vendor list. In this industry, there are always other players, so you have to keep your current customers happy or they'll go elsewhere for solutions.
It's interesting that here in the US, few people even know what an aerial is any more. For years, real estate developers have been making deals with cable companies to force their residents into purchasing cable TV. This is done by writing clauses into local convenants (CC&Rs) that restrict home owners from putting up an antenna for aesthetic reasons, so most people just buy cable whether they need it or not.
I live near Seattle, and before that in Michigan, and only once had cable service. I cancelled when it got to $13/mo because I didn't see the value in it. I have always been able to get lots of programming, much of which is not worth watching anyway. Yet if I compare the quality of over-the-air TV to that of cable, I really don't see that much difference. Yes, I'd like to have The History Channel and a few others, but I can buy DVDs to fill in the gaps. Then I own the content and can watch it whenever I want. Just the other day we picked up a season of Quantum Leap, which along with Stargate (own all 8 seasons on DVD so far) is really the only reason I'd want SciFi. At $50 a season, I've only spent $400 on Stargate which has given me far more entertainment value than dropping $600/year on cable, and I can still watch Judge Judy over-the-air for free. :-)
Agreed. I was thinking about this discussion more in terms of the original post, which was "how to I track down bugs in real time?" I'd hope that before they started that they'd have done some kind of sanity check on the code. :-)
If these guys are so advanced, can't they come up with a video stream that works on more than one platform? At least this time their tracking web site seems to be keeping up with the traffic. I found it ironic that for all Branson's money, they couldn't handle all the page views last time.
Ok, maybe I'm missing something in your comment, but my exact point was that you can't catch a lot of errors with unit tests of individual components. You not only have to test multiple threads hitting the component, but also different numbers of threads and different timing for the calls. I'm not saying that unit tests can't help you stabilize the code, but there are many, many conditions that can only be found in the real environment. Since this is a telephony app, just the speed at which people press keys and the duration of the keypress could have a huge impact on the behavior of the individual components.
Huh? My experience is that it's usually the low level components that are most sensitive. Create an accidental buffer overrun and it won't show up in any unit tests.
We tried VOIP for about a year for our small business, and went back to POTS for day-to-day calls. We couldn't get the call quality we wanted for business class calls when operating over DSL.
We were talking about how cool it would be to set up an Asterisk box so we could have the voicemail, forwarding, etc. It's just not something I have time for.
We just set up an Asterisk box with BroadVoice for an independent project that doesn't involve real-time communications. It was a bit of a pain to get right, but it's pretty cool once it gets working. It's a couple of days work. Just be aware that often the information you need to set up an account is spread out in multiple articles. Google is your friend.