Well, if you've good karma you can switch ad's off and I'd say a lot of the technical audience slashdot attracts is probably adblocking too whilst their at it, but regardless of that...
I don't mind provocative posts, but completely misguided posts are another thing. Slashdots appeal is that its meant to be news for nerds, if more stuff like this makes it through the quality and returning visits from the very people slashdot attracts and therefore can provide that extra value as a platform for its advertisers will go down with time. As a niche news site it would be in slashdots interest surely to continue to attract the sort of people that the targetted ad's are aimed at not dumb itself down to yet another "regular" tech site.
Re-reading that, I admit thats probably already happened for a lot of people but I still think of slashdot as a higher-than-normal tech site. Just about.
I was expecting something really crazy and complex but what I saw was well documented and made sense. Seriously, how on earth is this front page news on slashdot?? I wont repeat the many well made statements that "API's arent for users" above. I'm just surprised this has made it to the front page as a developers link. I sure hope I don't work with the sub. at any point if he thinks this is an example of people being "too smart for their own good"./saddened
As a taxpayer, I want nothing more than to see our health systems improve and run more efficiently.
This is the sort of thing that should be raised with your senator or congressman. Assuming they're not in the pocket of MS already. People need to get governments round to the idea that open source is good for them. In Europe we're a bit more keen to run with such strategies and I would imagine someone ending up fired for that sort of email.
Opera & Safari have the advantage that a site that is working "properly" in Firefox or IE7 is more than likely going to run just fine on those two as well, if IE6 did that too the whole discussion would be moot.
The development of new languages and new ways of simplifying coding has been a part of the computer landscape since the whole thing began. You can argue that coding in Python is a form of "dumbed down" assembly. I wouldn't think of creating a webapp with assembly! Django has "dumbed down" much of the mundane parts I often have to create and dealing with forms and templating. But the one thing I have noticed is that no matter how easy "programming" gets there are still people that will just not "do it".
I still can't see the masses suddenly deciding that they're going to program applications now. Hell, most of the people I know think conditional formatting in excel is just too much effort. I can see this just being used by actual programmers for users but I dont think it will see in a swath of uber-uber-amateur programmers all of a sudden.
I don't doubt that these chips probably were much more likely to fail and be of in general far lower quality but it does sound like he was doing what many bar owners do with their vodka - buy the cheap one and sell it expensively to those that want that particular brand.
This is of course totally wrong but I don't think the intention was to supply chips that would knowingly fail as an ultior motive. I think he was basically saying I get chip-X for $10, they want chip-Y that does the same thing but costs $50. If he's rebranding chips, they must've done the same job when in place. I don't think his motive was one of causing chaos, just money.
Would I be better off not bringing my laptop and just using Internet kiosks (do they exist in London?)
Are you kidding me?. Although I would bring your laptop with anyway and make use of the many free wifi spots in pubs (sorry, bars) and the like. We are quite connected here.
After I read the summary and saw this "Apress, to offer the ebook version for free, believing (strongly) that it would promote sales of the paper book.", I had to post just to say I totally agree. I much prefer a paper back copy (and not a loosely bound pile of A4 printouts) for studying material at leisure. Especially when I'm dipping into a new topic and want a good overview rather than the stage where I'm piecing together bits of knowledge from the net.I really like the typesetting and format of the Apress books so after a couple of days of reading through their Pro Drupal and the PHP patterns book via the PDF I decided I really did want these books and went off to pick them up from the bookstore.
Whilst I agree that there are some that always will just take the stuff, for those that can afford it many will buy it if they want it. I'm going to get the PDF anyway from something like ebookee or even google so just give up already and promote it on your site and take the print sales as they come. Those that really want this book will buy it. Fair play to the author.
From what I remember 10.4 was out when the first intel mac's hit the scene and since 10.6 is now intel only, the most they'd of had to test was an upgrade from 10.4->.5->.6. Which you'd of thought would not be a big deal and a normal sort of thing to check. The actual way the bug is triggered doesn't seem like that random a scenario to envisage.
Serving the data up isn't the same as consuming it. And just because one group manages to get it working one way doesn't mean others will find it as easy to integrate it into their own apps. No doubt made made more difficult by the fact the documentation has had to be 'reversed.
I just forgot this isn't reddit, so I can't upmod your post arbitrarily. But the thought is there.Your comment regarding the header includes hits the nail on the metaphorical head.
I think you're confused on that bit, the 3.8% refers to as this summary says "only 4% of respondents said they wouldn't buy a new 360 because of hardware failures". That doesn't at all mean 3.8% of people said they would buy a new 360. That means that 3.8% said they would be put off buying another one because their old one failed. 96% said that the hardware failure wouldn't put them off buying another one. It doesnt mean that theres not other reasons that they wouldnt buy an xbox, but just that 96% of them wouldn't avoid an xbox because of past problems - which is actually hugely positive for microsoft. They'll take from this the silver lining that even if the hardware eventually dies on people more than half the time they'll come back for more and not necessarily jump ship and quit the console itself.
I find the typesetting and just the layout itself make the Apress books quite good to read. The actual content is also pretty damn good too - they seem to have a good range of more in-depth topics compared to something like Wrox (I can't stand their "programmer to programmer" books). I also find their books are targetted at the right level, i.e. when I buy their php patterns book it doesnt have a whole 100 pages on "this is a for loop and here is assignment".
I really enjoy what I do (web-developer) and I do end up taking a lot of work home with me but I'm still at the age (and the projects are interesting) where I can enjoy it. I can imagine it being an absolute nightmare of having to do something you hate or find boring and then being expected to work late on it for free. It's definitely a difficult area to balance, I guess it comes down to whats in your contract and if you are willing to argue it with your employer. If you do work late and you arent getting paid though, at the very least make them aware you're doing them the favour. Just dont expect it returned.
I'd have to agree with this. The minute people start to use non-internal staff & resources to provide information infrastructure you're implicitly trusting that the company as a whole will protect your data.
I'd just as well trust Google with my mail data & docs than yet another consultancy that provides core IT services.
The bottom line is who do you trust. The best option in my opinion, which has been mentioned plenty before, is let your clients know what you think, give them the (quantified) risks and what (if any) violations of policy it would entail and let them decide. Then make sure its in a signed agreement.
Proper legal advice would also be the order of the day when you've done as much research that you can on your own (i.e., stuff like this)
i was just about to say something along the same lines. that photo is huge. the thing i find most weird is so few people actually pointing this out. i've seen this story now in the local papers here (london), reddit, digg and now slashdot and a whole lot of people actually seem to believe that this is possible.
you are not printing out meter-sized prints from a photo a few hundred pixels across. you'd be lucky if it looked good at a couple of inches across: photo sizes/resolution.
4.2 is a grea release: its a good upgrade from 3.5
on
KDE 4.2.4 Released
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
As a long term KDE user (since the very first version) I have found 3.5 to be a great release. It's still what I'm running on my work desktop. I have to say, installing 4.0 at home was a mistake. It definitly put me off upgrading my work machine. The 4.0 release basically rendered my home environment as almost unusable. On top of that the semi-upgrade made the 3.5 install messed up, so I was pretty pissed.
When 4.1 came out I was fairly happy with the stability, a lot of little issues (things like the taskbar resizing) had been worked out but it still felt somewhat unfinished. Now, having upgraded to 4.2 I have to say I'm really impressed. I wasn't expecting the change to be as full as it was, 4.2 feels much more complete and definitely is the upgrade path you want to follow from 3.5 if your a KDE user. Things like the windowing effects work much better, the plasma desktop has reached a level that is usable all the time and the level of integration has improved a lot (checkboxes finally render properly when clicked in firefox for one, dolphin is getting pretty damn good and okular is great). KDE is at the point where I'm now planning on an upgrade at work.
I have to agree a bit with some of the UI criticism of amarok, I found the jump to version 2 pretty dramatic. It's almost like a whole new app but I'm giving it a good go for a while. The last media player I really used before amarok was xmms. But yeah, bottom line, two thumbs up for 4.2
I read this on Ars yesteday and essentially they're saying the poor sales figures could hurt future developer decisions to focus on "mature" content.
It's possible that gamers simply weren't interested in what they saw as a hacked-down version of the game, or that the demographic of the Nintendo DS really is as young as the haters would have you believe, no matter how many anecdotes you hear about adults buying the system.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, if you've good karma you can switch ad's off and I'd say a lot of the technical audience slashdot attracts is probably adblocking too whilst their at it, but regardless of that...
I don't mind provocative posts, but completely misguided posts are another thing. Slashdots appeal is that its meant to be news for nerds, if more stuff like this makes it through the quality and returning visits from the very people slashdot attracts and therefore can provide that extra value as a platform for its advertisers will go down with time. As a niche news site it would be in slashdots interest surely to continue to attract the sort of people that the targetted ad's are aimed at not dumb itself down to yet another "regular" tech site.
Re-reading that, I admit thats probably already happened for a lot of people but I still think of slashdot as a higher-than-normal tech site. Just about.
I was expecting something really crazy and complex but what I saw was well documented and made sense. Seriously, how on earth is this front page news on slashdot?? I wont repeat the many well made statements that "API's arent for users" above. I'm just surprised this has made it to the front page as a developers link. I sure hope I don't work with the sub. at any point if he thinks this is an example of people being "too smart for their own good". /saddened
Salespeople were promised payment based on how many other salespeople they signed up to the program, although few appear to have received payment.
Seriously? How people ever think this sort of plan makes fiscal sense and isn't at all dodgy I will never understand.
This is the sort of thing that should be raised with your senator or congressman. Assuming they're not in the pocket of MS already. People need to get governments round to the idea that open source is good for them. In Europe we're a bit more keen to run with such strategies and I would imagine someone ending up fired for that sort of email.
Opera & Safari have the advantage that a site that is working "properly" in Firefox or IE7 is more than likely going to run just fine on those two as well, if IE6 did that too the whole discussion would be moot.
Boy am I glad you're not in charge of sentencing guidelines.
The development of new languages and new ways of simplifying coding has been a part of the computer landscape since the whole thing began. You can argue that coding in Python is a form of "dumbed down" assembly. I wouldn't think of creating a webapp with assembly! Django has "dumbed down" much of the mundane parts I often have to create and dealing with forms and templating. But the one thing I have noticed is that no matter how easy "programming" gets there are still people that will just not "do it".
I still can't see the masses suddenly deciding that they're going to program applications now. Hell, most of the people I know think conditional formatting in excel is just too much effort. I can see this just being used by actual programmers for users but I dont think it will see in a swath of uber-uber-amateur programmers all of a sudden.
I don't doubt that these chips probably were much more likely to fail and be of in general far lower quality but it does sound like he was doing what many bar owners do with their vodka - buy the cheap one and sell it expensively to those that want that particular brand.
This is of course totally wrong but I don't think the intention was to supply chips that would knowingly fail as an ultior motive. I think he was basically saying I get chip-X for $10, they want chip-Y that does the same thing but costs $50. If he's rebranding chips, they must've done the same job when in place. I don't think his motive was one of causing chaos, just money.
Where & when can I hire you to speak to my clients? Its like talking to a brick wall sometimes!
Are you kidding me?. Although I would bring your laptop with anyway and make use of the many free wifi spots in pubs (sorry, bars) and the like. We are quite connected here.
I just have to point out how well that PDF looked from a purely graphic point of view... That is all. Interesting content to boot.
After I read the summary and saw this "Apress, to offer the ebook version for free, believing (strongly) that it would promote sales of the paper book.", I had to post just to say I totally agree. I much prefer a paper back copy (and not a loosely bound pile of A4 printouts) for studying material at leisure. Especially when I'm dipping into a new topic and want a good overview rather than the stage where I'm piecing together bits of knowledge from the net.I really like the typesetting and format of the Apress books so after a couple of days of reading through their Pro Drupal and the PHP patterns book via the PDF I decided I really did want these books and went off to pick them up from the bookstore.
Whilst I agree that there are some that always will just take the stuff, for those that can afford it many will buy it if they want it. I'm going to get the PDF anyway from something like ebookee or even google so just give up already and promote it on your site and take the print sales as they come. Those that really want this book will buy it. Fair play to the author.
From what I remember 10.4 was out when the first intel mac's hit the scene and since 10.6 is now intel only, the most they'd of had to test was an upgrade from 10.4->.5->.6. Which you'd of thought would not be a big deal and a normal sort of thing to check. The actual way the bug is triggered doesn't seem like that random a scenario to envisage.
Serving the data up isn't the same as consuming it. And just because one group manages to get it working one way doesn't mean others will find it as easy to integrate it into their own apps. No doubt made made more difficult by the fact the documentation has had to be 'reversed.
that actually does daap correctly and doesn't look horrible
what, you mean the closed, propeitary protocol developed by apple for iTunes? what a shock.
I just forgot this isn't reddit, so I can't upmod your post arbitrarily. But the thought is there.Your comment regarding the header includes hits the nail on the metaphorical head.
My SNES under the tv would disagree with you (although agree about ex-warrantys...)
I think you're confused on that bit, the 3.8% refers to as this summary says "only 4% of respondents said they wouldn't buy a new 360 because of hardware failures". That doesn't at all mean 3.8% of people said they would buy a new 360. That means that 3.8% said they would be put off buying another one because their old one failed. 96% said that the hardware failure wouldn't put them off buying another one. It doesnt mean that theres not other reasons that they wouldnt buy an xbox, but just that 96% of them wouldn't avoid an xbox because of past problems - which is actually hugely positive for microsoft. They'll take from this the silver lining that even if the hardware eventually dies on people more than half the time they'll come back for more and not necessarily jump ship and quit the console itself.
hmm, that makes sense.
I find the typesetting and just the layout itself make the Apress books quite good to read. The actual content is also pretty damn good too - they seem to have a good range of more in-depth topics compared to something like Wrox (I can't stand their "programmer to programmer" books). I also find their books are targetted at the right level, i.e. when I buy their php patterns book it doesnt have a whole 100 pages on "this is a for loop and here is assignment".
I really enjoy what I do (web-developer) and I do end up taking a lot of work home with me but I'm still at the age (and the projects are interesting) where I can enjoy it. I can imagine it being an absolute nightmare of having to do something you hate or find boring and then being expected to work late on it for free. It's definitely a difficult area to balance, I guess it comes down to whats in your contract and if you are willing to argue it with your employer. If you do work late and you arent getting paid though, at the very least make them aware you're doing them the favour. Just dont expect it returned.
I'd have to agree with this. The minute people start to use non-internal staff & resources to provide information infrastructure you're implicitly trusting that the company as a whole will protect your data.
I'd just as well trust Google with my mail data & docs than yet another consultancy that provides core IT services.
The bottom line is who do you trust. The best option in my opinion, which has been mentioned plenty before, is let your clients know what you think, give them the (quantified) risks and what (if any) violations of policy it would entail and let them decide. Then make sure its in a signed agreement.
Proper legal advice would also be the order of the day when you've done as much research that you can on your own (i.e., stuff like this)
i was just about to say something along the same lines. that photo is huge. the thing i find most weird is so few people actually pointing this out. i've seen this story now in the local papers here (london), reddit, digg and now slashdot and a whole lot of people actually seem to believe that this is possible.
you are not printing out meter-sized prints from a photo a few hundred pixels across. you'd be lucky if it looked good at a couple of inches across: photo sizes/resolution.
As a long term KDE user (since the very first version) I have found 3.5 to be a great release. It's still what I'm running on my work desktop. I have to say, installing 4.0 at home was a mistake. It definitly put me off upgrading my work machine. The 4.0 release basically rendered my home environment as almost unusable. On top of that the semi-upgrade made the 3.5 install messed up, so I was pretty pissed.
When 4.1 came out I was fairly happy with the stability, a lot of little issues (things like the taskbar resizing) had been worked out but it still felt somewhat unfinished. Now, having upgraded to 4.2 I have to say I'm really impressed. I wasn't expecting the change to be as full as it was, 4.2 feels much more complete and definitely is the upgrade path you want to follow from 3.5 if your a KDE user. Things like the windowing effects work much better, the plasma desktop has reached a level that is usable all the time and the level of integration has improved a lot (checkboxes finally render properly when clicked in firefox for one, dolphin is getting pretty damn good and okular is great). KDE is at the point where I'm now planning on an upgrade at work.
I have to agree a bit with some of the UI criticism of amarok, I found the jump to version 2 pretty dramatic. It's almost like a whole new app but I'm giving it a good go for a while. The last media player I really used before amarok was xmms. But yeah, bottom line, two thumbs up for 4.2
DS Chinatown Wars flops badly