If you split the day into 10 hours, each hour into 100 minutes and each minute into 100 seconds, each metric second equals eight tenths of an analog second. Close enough for government work, I say.
Your day on Metric Time: You get up in the morning around half-past 2 (that's 2:50, 50 minutes after the hour of 2, or 6AM analog time). You start work at a quarter hour before 4 (3:75 metric, or 9AM analog), You break for lunch at the stroke of 5 (your old analog lunch hour now lasts 42 minutes). You leave work around 7, and sit down to watch Leno around a quarter hour before 10 (79 minutes after 9 to be precise).
That's all Eastern Americas Timezone, of course. In the U.S., that's east of the Mississippi River to the Atlantic Ocean. What, you didn't think the old analog timezones would stay in place, did you?
Oh, today at 11PM analog would be written in metric as December 12.958, 2007.
I don't know what's scarier, the fact that I knew all those numbers, or that I had them at my fingertips.
That's why I decided to become a computer programmer in the first place. Machines are much more reasonable on a Monday morning, for one thing. My preference is a decent sized cube with very high walls, a low ceiling, and dim overhead lights, so I can bask in the warm nurturing glow of the monitor. The telephone is an annoyance (people again), but what can you do? At least I can pretend email doesn't involve a human being.
Besides, open office plans are designed for paranoid bosses who feel they have to keep an eye on everyone from their glass-walled offices, looking out over the length and breadth of their sovereign domain.
How about Googling for something like John Smith or John Jones (of course, there's Jim Jones, which will return some interesting historic references)? I doubt very much that any potential employer will be able to find references to your work amongst all the thousands of returns that are *not* you. So, unless you have a relatively unique name, Google isn't going to help.
As for discovering your on-line nickname, I'm sure the NSA or the FBI will happily provide the service (if they don't already).
Oh, I don't mean I actually want to *run* it, no sir! But a lot of machines being sold today have cheap prices on fairly hefty hardware. When I think of what Ubuntu will do with that hardware after I strip off that Microsoft crap, well...
And if I need to run Windows *software*, and Wine won't do the trick, I have old copies of both 2000 and XP that will work just fine on it.
Several patent trolls have threatened to sue, claiming the work violates over 200 of their top-secret patents ("Just because the device functions on a quantum scale is not enough to avoid licensing costs" one source was quoted.) The trolls have claimed that research like this, if allowed to continue, will stifle true innovation by their exclusive licensees.
The aggressive power saving settings here are perhaps a little too aggressive, but did anyone really think you could do that totally without cost? This isn't magic, you know. It's a trade-off. If you tell your computer (usually in a laptop) to spin down the hard drives to save power, you're going to cause greater wear-and-tear on the things because each time they spin down, they have to spin back up before you can use them again. If you want to save energy without the wear, turn the bloody thing off when you're not using it.
What, you're in too much of a hurry to view the latest pr0n? Chill, dude, before you go blind!
If you run a desktop, it's doubtful you'll have a problem with this, as most desktop users turn power saving features off entirely (and yeah, I also drive a big honkin' SUV. Bite me), but be careful on a laptop. If your hard drive supports SMART, you can do a quick check of the numbers (I think the one you want is # 193, IIRC), and see if you're at risk. But not all drives support SMART (I have a laptop drive that doesn't), so as usual, YMMV.
I'm on your side (I'm in my 50's), but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for a sea-change if I were you.
I started playing video games when the original Atari 2600 was first released (Pong, anyone? How about Space Invaders?), and still play video games today (favorites now are Unreal Tournament and Postal 2). so I dispute the idea that there's some sort of generational thing going on. What's happening is that a large segment of the population is clueless when it comes to video games. This group prefers to lie back on the sofa and passively watch television. Why in heaven's name would anyone want to *participate* in the entertainment? Actually pay attention and *do* something? Hell, if they wanted to work *that* hard, they'd read a book (albeit a novelization of a movie or television show). They should read "The Marching Morons" sometime and see themselves in *that* mirror!
On the other hand, when gamers want to relax and vegetate, they don't turn on the TV, they turn on cheat codes (hey, we all have guilty pleasures). As for the games themselves, we should start calling them "Interactive videos", which is a much more accurate description of what they're all about (particularly games like the original Deus Ex or System Shock 2). But then, I guess we'd chase away even *more* of the Mainstream world.
The end result of this will be to raise rates significantly, using some complicated scheme that will legally meet the government's requirements while forcing the consumer to pay more. We'll end up paying more for the channels we really watch than we do now for those channels plus all the crap.
Remember, the government rarely sets new regulations to benefit the little guy. It's all about how corporations with lots and lots of lobbying money can make lots more from you and me. It's not *our* government, you see, it's *theirs*!
If this goes through, in a couple of years you'll see cable prices high enough to drive a significant amount of TV show piracy, which will become a lot bigger deal than movie piracy. Almost as big as music piracy is today.
It's not about you and me. Never was. We're just a revenue stream.
"but there's nothing stopping you from leaving out all the server-specific stuff from your desktop kernel when you compile it"
The vast majority of Linux users these days don't know compiling from composting, and should never have to. The point of the article is to create two standard versions of the kernel that will be optimized for their respective purposes, and maintained without the user having to know any of the programming magic involved.
I'm sure that users like yourself consider it an outrage that -- dare I say it -- the common people are actually allowed to run Linux. It's like an auto mechanic demanding that you should be able to repair a car before being given a driver's license. It's an unreasonable expectation at best and elitism at worst.
Once again, Microsoft proves there's no such thing as doing it right the first time. Or the second (Service Pack 1). *Maybe* the third (Service Pack 2), but don't count on it. If you recall, Microsoft released the first version of NT as version 3.1 in an effort to combat this effect. And after they slip-stream the new OOXML changes into Office 2007, obsoleting old documents, sheeple will groan and moan, but they'll still drink the Kool-aide.
(Sigh!) Sometimes, I wonder why FLOSS even bothers.
Make the program so difficult to use that the user needs to purchase a maintenance agreement in order to get help running it. You should also consider making training classes available (for a substantial fee, of course). This will provide additional revenue streams. Finally, you need to mount a FUD campaign against your competition pointing out all the bad things in their product (make some up if you have to).
This is the only copy protection that will work. Any other solution will be cracked in days (if not hours) by pirates, leaving only your legitimate customers to suffer through the protection scheme. Copy protection doesn't work. It didn't work 25 years ago and it doesn't work today. Note well that, when Microsoft's Genuine Advantage servers went down, the pirates were the only ones *not* inconvenienced.
You don't "standardize" on an incomplete specification saying "We'll fix it later". Before OOXML is passed as a standard, it should be complete and correct *first*. As it stands, OOXML is a joke. Microsoft is proposing it as a standard for one reason only: maintain vendor lock-in. If they were serious about supplying it as a standard, it would be properly documented. IMHO it also goes without saying that if you are proposing a standard for everyone to use, you allow *everyone* who follows that standard to use your patents, and only go after them if they deliberately abuse that standard (as Microsoft did with Java, forcing Sun to nail them to the wall for contract violations). Saying "just use our products and you'll be okay" is unacceptable. It's not a true standard in that case.
Sorry, I have faith in no one. I trust no one. Until I have something actually in my hands, I will not believe it will exist, or that it will work as advertised. That goes for Microsoft, Apple, or anyone else. As it stands today, OOXML is a PR campaign, not a spec, and should be rejected unless and until it is a spec.
IMHO, databases would be much, much different today if IBM had extended the VSAM file type from the mainframe to the PC (for the uninitiated, think of a combination flat-file table with one built-in index). In my experience, the vast majority of database requirements of office workers are simple, so simple that even applications like Access are overkill. What do people use a database for? Scan through an entire table looking for one specific piece of data using only one key. VSAM files would be perfect!
And things like the column-based database table (which strangely enough strikes me as an attempt by a spreadsheet user who naturally thinks sideways instead of down to create a sideways-oriented database) is even greater overkill.
Besides, everyone knows that the database query users *really* want to run is: "SELECT * FROM *", and get upset when told they can't do it. That's another reason they prefer flat file databases to relational. It's easier to print the data out on fan-fold paper and do searches the old fashioned way.
I'd like to know what the people at Microsoft have against anyone else having a slice of the computer software pie. While I appreciate the idea of competition, Microsoft isn't about competing fairly. It appears they will not be content until they are the only software company left. Do they have so little confidence in their own ability to compete that they must drive everyone else into oblivion?
Just for the record, I despise Flash in all of its incarnations. Most web sites only use it for annoying ads anyway, so avoiding it is a small loss. But why Microsoft feels it has to drive Flash out of the market with their monopolistic efforts is beyond me.
IIRC, Microsoft's first operating system was written for IBM during many long and sleepless nights in a hotel room just down the road from them.
Can you say "cowboy programmers"? Sure, I knew you could.
IMHO, what we have now is a company with the size, resources and commercial power of an IBM, and the corporate culture of a garage band. There is no excuse for putting untested code into production, particularly if this has happened before. This carelessness, combined with its extreme paranoia against all competition (Redmond's definition of competition: anyone who creates products that use computer chips) is creating an environment that threatens the safety and stability of IT operations world-wide.
Let me put a finer point on it, if I may. User programs may be closed-source. Operating systems should *never* be. Operating systems are too important to the finances, security and stability of an organization to keep any secrets. In this day and age, you can't afford to trust anyone, because everyone is indeed against you.
Slashdot Mirror
If you split the day into 10 hours, each hour into 100 minutes and each minute into 100 seconds, each metric second equals eight tenths of an analog second. Close enough for government work, I say.
Your day on Metric Time: You get up in the morning around half-past 2 (that's 2:50, 50 minutes after the hour of 2, or 6AM analog time). You start work at a quarter hour before 4 (3:75 metric, or 9AM analog), You break for lunch at the stroke of 5 (your old analog lunch hour now lasts 42 minutes). You leave work around 7, and sit down to watch Leno around a quarter hour before 10 (79 minutes after 9 to be precise).
That's all Eastern Americas Timezone, of course. In the U.S., that's east of the Mississippi River to the Atlantic Ocean. What, you didn't think the old analog timezones would stay in place, did you?
Oh, today at 11PM analog would be written in metric as December 12.958, 2007.
I don't know what's scarier, the fact that I knew all those numbers, or that I had them at my fingertips.
Oh, wait! hardly anyone actually went to see it.
Never mind.
That's why I decided to become a computer programmer in the first place. Machines are much more reasonable on a Monday morning, for one thing. My preference is a decent sized cube with very high walls, a low ceiling, and dim overhead lights, so I can bask in the warm nurturing glow of the monitor. The telephone is an annoyance (people again), but what can you do? At least I can pretend email doesn't involve a human being.
Besides, open office plans are designed for paranoid bosses who feel they have to keep an eye on everyone from their glass-walled offices, looking out over the length and breadth of their sovereign domain.
How about Googling for something like John Smith or John Jones (of course, there's Jim Jones, which will return some interesting historic references)? I doubt very much that any potential employer will be able to find references to your work amongst all the thousands of returns that are *not* you. So, unless you have a relatively unique name, Google isn't going to help.
As for discovering your on-line nickname, I'm sure the NSA or the FBI will happily provide the service (if they don't already).
It was Goofy.
Oh, I don't mean I actually want to *run* it, no sir! But a lot of machines being sold today have cheap prices on fairly hefty hardware. When I think of what Ubuntu will do with that hardware after I strip off that Microsoft crap, well...
And if I need to run Windows *software*, and Wine won't do the trick, I have old copies of both 2000 and XP that will work just fine on it.
Viva la Vista, baby!
Yeah, put *that* tune on your 45 spindle and smoke it!
Several patent trolls have threatened to sue, claiming the work violates over 200 of their top-secret patents ("Just because the device functions on a quantum scale is not enough to avoid licensing costs" one source was quoted.) The trolls have claimed that research like this, if allowed to continue, will stifle true innovation by their exclusive licensees.
The aggressive power saving settings here are perhaps a little too aggressive, but did anyone really think you could do that totally without cost? This isn't magic, you know. It's a trade-off. If you tell your computer (usually in a laptop) to spin down the hard drives to save power, you're going to cause greater wear-and-tear on the things because each time they spin down, they have to spin back up before you can use them again. If you want to save energy without the wear, turn the bloody thing off when you're not using it.
What, you're in too much of a hurry to view the latest pr0n? Chill, dude, before you go blind!
If you run a desktop, it's doubtful you'll have a problem with this, as most desktop users turn power saving features off entirely (and yeah, I also drive a big honkin' SUV. Bite me), but be careful on a laptop. If your hard drive supports SMART, you can do a quick check of the numbers (I think the one you want is # 193, IIRC), and see if you're at risk. But not all drives support SMART (I have a laptop drive that doesn't), so as usual, YMMV.
..And if you disagree, the terrorists win. Bush says so, and I believe him.
I'm on your side (I'm in my 50's), but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for a sea-change if I were you.
I started playing video games when the original Atari 2600 was first released (Pong, anyone? How about Space Invaders?), and still play video games today (favorites now are Unreal Tournament and Postal 2). so I dispute the idea that there's some sort of generational thing going on. What's happening is that a large segment of the population is clueless when it comes to video games. This group prefers to lie back on the sofa and passively watch television. Why in heaven's name would anyone want to *participate* in the entertainment? Actually pay attention and *do* something? Hell, if they wanted to work *that* hard, they'd read a book (albeit a novelization of a movie or television show). They should read "The Marching Morons" sometime and see themselves in *that* mirror!
On the other hand, when gamers want to relax and vegetate, they don't turn on the TV, they turn on cheat codes (hey, we all have guilty pleasures). As for the games themselves, we should start calling them "Interactive videos", which is a much more accurate description of what they're all about (particularly games like the original Deus Ex or System Shock 2). But then, I guess we'd chase away even *more* of the Mainstream world.
Don't blink, don't turn away, don't close your eyes, and whatever you do, don't blink!
(for those of you who didn't recognize the Doctor Who quote in the parent, turn in your geek badge!)
I didn't know George Bush was running for office in Canada. Who knew?
...will immediately follow the release of Duke Nukem Forever and the return of Elvis in a flying saucer.
Sorry to disappoint you.
The end result of this will be to raise rates significantly, using some complicated scheme that will legally meet the government's requirements while forcing the consumer to pay more. We'll end up paying more for the channels we really watch than we do now for those channels plus all the crap.
Remember, the government rarely sets new regulations to benefit the little guy. It's all about how corporations with lots and lots of lobbying money can make lots more from you and me. It's not *our* government, you see, it's *theirs*!
If this goes through, in a couple of years you'll see cable prices high enough to drive a significant amount of TV show piracy, which will become a lot bigger deal than movie piracy. Almost as big as music piracy is today.
It's not about you and me. Never was. We're just a revenue stream.
The vast majority of Linux users these days don't know compiling from composting, and should never have to. The point of the article is to create two standard versions of the kernel that will be optimized for their respective purposes, and maintained without the user having to know any of the programming magic involved.
I'm sure that users like yourself consider it an outrage that -- dare I say it -- the common people are actually allowed to run Linux. It's like an auto mechanic demanding that you should be able to repair a car before being given a driver's license. It's an unreasonable expectation at best and elitism at worst.
/rant
Once again, Microsoft proves there's no such thing as doing it right the first time.
Or the second (Service Pack 1).
*Maybe* the third (Service Pack 2), but don't count on it. If you recall, Microsoft released the first version of NT as version 3.1 in an effort to combat this effect. And after they slip-stream the new OOXML changes into Office 2007, obsoleting old documents, sheeple will groan and moan, but they'll still drink the Kool-aide.
(Sigh!) Sometimes, I wonder why FLOSS even bothers.
Make the program so difficult to use that the user needs to purchase a maintenance agreement in order to get help running it. You should also consider making training classes available (for a substantial fee, of course). This will provide additional revenue streams. Finally, you need to mount a FUD campaign against your competition pointing out all the bad things in their product (make some up if you have to).
This is the only copy protection that will work. Any other solution will be cracked in days (if not hours) by pirates, leaving only your legitimate customers to suffer through the protection scheme. Copy protection doesn't work. It didn't work 25 years ago and it doesn't work today. Note well that, when Microsoft's Genuine Advantage servers went down, the pirates were the only ones *not* inconvenienced.
Of course, being that I live in the U.S., and the store's in the U.K., I wouldn't buy anything from them anyway, but there you go.
No, no, no.
You don't "standardize" on an incomplete specification saying "We'll fix it later". Before OOXML is passed as a standard, it should be complete and correct *first*. As it stands, OOXML is a joke. Microsoft is proposing it as a standard for one reason only: maintain vendor lock-in. If they were serious about supplying it as a standard, it would be properly documented. IMHO it also goes without saying that if you are proposing a standard for everyone to use, you allow *everyone* who follows that standard to use your patents, and only go after them if they deliberately abuse that standard (as Microsoft did with Java, forcing Sun to nail them to the wall for contract violations). Saying "just use our products and you'll be okay" is unacceptable. It's not a true standard in that case.
Sorry, I have faith in no one. I trust no one. Until I have something actually in my hands, I will not believe it will exist, or that it will work as advertised. That goes for Microsoft, Apple, or anyone else. As it stands today, OOXML is a PR campaign, not a spec, and should be rejected unless and until it is a spec.
More like a "Hotel Redmond" coder (You can check out anytime you like, but you may never leave. Cue guitars.)
IMHO, databases would be much, much different today if IBM had extended the VSAM file type from the mainframe to the PC (for the uninitiated, think of a combination flat-file table with one built-in index). In my experience, the vast majority of database requirements of office workers are simple, so simple that even applications like Access are overkill. What do people use a database for? Scan through an entire table looking for one specific piece of data using only one key. VSAM files would be perfect!
And things like the column-based database table (which strangely enough strikes me as an attempt by a spreadsheet user who naturally thinks sideways instead of down to create a sideways-oriented database) is even greater overkill.
Besides, everyone knows that the database query users *really* want to run is: "SELECT * FROM *", and get upset when told they can't do it. That's another reason they prefer flat file databases to relational. It's easier to print the data out on fan-fold paper and do searches the old fashioned way.
You have buddies in Low Earth Orbit? WTF?
I'd like to know what the people at Microsoft have against anyone else having a slice of the computer software pie. While I appreciate the idea of competition, Microsoft isn't about competing fairly. It appears they will not be content until they are the only software company left. Do they have so little confidence in their own ability to compete that they must drive everyone else into oblivion?
Just for the record, I despise Flash in all of its incarnations. Most web sites only use it for annoying ads anyway, so avoiding it is a small loss. But why Microsoft feels it has to drive Flash out of the market with their monopolistic efforts is beyond me.
Excuse me while I get a little cranky.
IIRC, Microsoft's first operating system was written for IBM during many long and sleepless nights in a hotel room just down the road from them.
Can you say "cowboy programmers"? Sure, I knew you could.
IMHO, what we have now is a company with the size, resources and commercial power of an IBM, and the corporate culture of a garage band. There is no excuse for putting untested code into production, particularly if this has happened before. This carelessness, combined with its extreme paranoia against all competition (Redmond's definition of competition: anyone who creates products that use computer chips) is creating an environment that threatens the safety and stability of IT operations world-wide.
Let me put a finer point on it, if I may.
User programs may be closed-source. Operating systems should *never* be. Operating systems are too important to the finances, security and stability of an organization to keep any secrets. In this day and age, you can't afford to trust anyone, because everyone is indeed against you.