USB on Win2K... my experience with this was with an external HP CDRW connected via USB. The power connector on the CDRW did not hold onto the plug very well, and one day it fell out, and Win2K blue-screened. Wasn't USB supposed to be a bit more accepting of unexpectedly losing connectivity to attached devices?
Not all of them have forgotten. Look into people who do their own wool dyeing. Modern dyes are great for vibrant colors, but your traditional tweeds are still hand-dyed from various and sundried plant materials. There is even one dye (a rather vibrant dark red) that is made from the shell of a small desert beetle...
While things like this might erode such skills, I'm pretty certain that there isn't much call for the lost art of wagon wheel making thanks to Mr Ford, or lye soap making etc... its the natural way of things. Film developing has kind of gone out of style these days too... uhhh so what?
Alas, none of these skills have entirely gone away, either. Wagon wheel making is not a lost art. Neither is the lost art of making wood barrels. Or wood slat baskets (does your wife/girlfriend have a bunch of Longeberger baskets?). As long as hand-tossed pizza crusts don't go out of style, the world will still be livable.
As much as I like and use plastic boxes and crates, I still will buy an old wood box or crate if its in good shape at a garage sale. For one, they're SQUARE all around (angles, not shape). They're more rigid, which sometimes is nice, too.
So, do you work in an art-related field? Probably not, so don't worry about it.
Most people nowdays live in cities. Killing things with pointy sticks is not a key survival item. For the rest who don't, yes, killing things with pointy sticks or sharp knives still has to be done, whether ot put food on the table or simply to hasten the death of a farm animal to end its suffering.
What about the decline in common sense in recent years? I don't know. Why don't you tell us about it? You're sort of calling the kettle black here, Mr. Pot.
Art is whatever the observer thinks it is. Yes, for the end product, that is true. But this statement has nothing to do with the process of getting from a blank piece of paper to an animated movie.
The odd thing is, though, that for places like Pixar or most computer game shops, they have a artist who approaches things from the 2d paper->3d computer world work on things first, and the technical engineering/physics people work on things from that angle. They seem to work together to make both of their things work as one. For the animation part, the computer does a lot of the monkey work (fill-in animation, background automation, physics models, etc), and the animators provide the details, structure, design work, etc. for the character models.
Or, this is how the documentary parts of Pixar animated DVDs, etc. seem to make it work.
Going back to early CGI works, like "Luxo Jr.", I'm going to guess that a good portion of those early shorts existed on paper and in an animator's workbook as animated line drawings, at least. Once the animator(s) felt good about things, then they translated them into the computer to fill in the rest of the animation and rendering.
My favorite animations, though, are still the Chuck Jones/Warner Bros. works from the 40's and 50's. It's hard to explain why. Some of it is the coloring (something fascinating about Technicolor movies in general from then), and layout designs, for sure. But some of the Disney stuff is good, too.
I wonder if someone will create a CGI movie based in a Max Parrish-styled world? That could be rather cool...
Re:Apple is going to make a killing...
on
Going To Boot Camp
·
· Score: 1
This is true for many Perl developers I know.
All 5 of you?
So why exactly did you buy the Mac? Obviously, the reasons you bought it were more compelling for you than what you spend most of your time doing on your computer. Nothing wrong with that at all.
Sure, OS X is nice, but having Perl running natively on the best hardware available
It sounds objective, but it really is subjective. Does your code run faster on the Mac than on a PC (short of any Altivec code)? What about same code on an Intel Linux box?
Most people don't buy computers to write code.
When I get around to buying a new computer, it's going to be a Mac. The PCs will be kept around for games or shelf weights or Linux servers. But I have too much perspective over the last 15 years or so of computing and pricing. Bitching about a Mac that costs $200 more than a speced out WinTel box is meaningless when all the other timesinks that seem to come with running a Wintel computer well is factored in.
People balk at paying $500 for a Dell machine that a couple of years ago or less was a spec'd out high-end monster, *without* the 17" LCD monitor.
Maybe, but it's probably a slippery slope for Windows. If non-games are more compelling on the Mac side, and people keep/use Windows either for "critical" apps or games, eventually Windows becomes marginalized. What hasn't happened for Linux will probably happen for the Mac: the "critical" apps will eventually be ported to the MacOS. That'll leave gaming. Windows then becomes solely a gamer platform. Might as well buy an XBox360/PS3 at that point, because it'll be far less hassle.
Any developer resistance will be for those who love the complexity (for complexity's sake, more often than not) they've "mastered" with C++ or Java who don't want to try and wrap their brains around ObjC, just like there are people who don't want to wrap their brains around Ruby and stick with Perl, PHP, Python, J2EE, etc.
Too bad Loki went out of business and Paul Allen/Vulcan Ventures didn't throw some money their way to keep it going for a couple more years (look at all the money Paul has thrown at the Portland Trailblazers and the ROI on that...). Oh well. Playing SMAC or RT3 on Linux is still just better and faster than playing them on Windows.
Re:boot camp made me buy a mac
on
Going To Boot Camp
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
No, it sounds like Microsoft is trying to convince OEMs to NOT SELL other competing products. In the US this tactic is probably edging close to racketeering, and is similar to the same kind of BS that got them in trouble with the USDOJ in the first place (OEMs had to pay for MS licenses even for Intel-based computers that did not ship with Windows on them, in order to keep selling PCs with Microsoft OSes on them).
When I worked at Abbott Laboratories, Abbott bought lots of Dells with WinXP licenses, only to wipe them and put Win2K Pro on them. This left open (at the time) the possibility later of "upgrading" them to WinXP, which was starting to happen when I left. New machines that "kept" WinXP on them were wiped over with one of several different corporate XP images.
I think the reasoning was that the "Windows XP sticker" on the box allowed Abbott to "degrade" to W2K, and "upgrade" at a later date.
But then there is the flip side. Company X has already paid for an Enterprise license, that lets them install it on more than a few CPUs, probably in support of some other enterprise-level software application (SAP, PeopleSoft, Siebel, etc). The Oracle license is trivial compared to the other software license fees. So the DBAs set up a development Oracle server, as well as another server to host stupid little departmental databases that get upsized from MS Access, at least those that have grown beyond the thumb-handed hacker that managed to crib something together to scratch an itch.
As far as the MySQL-developed application, with all the cool business logic and stuff written in a custom application layer, how is one supposed to develop another application (that can also update the data...) off of the same layer? How does one access that middle tier to get some of the logic out of it for reporting or data warehousing?
Urrgh, if there is a flamefest that sucks even more than Windows vs MacOS, it's MySQL vs every other SQL-based RDBMS (including Access).
Well, most animal slime is a mix of sugars and water. The sugars hold a large amount of water, relatively speaking, so if it's the same with bacteria, then the bacteria does not have to expel much of the sugar mix, so the metabolic demands are gonna be relatively small.
NASA in and of itself is not a "pork machine", but is used by the reps of states containing divisions of the companies associated with the space program, such as Boeing, Lockmart, Loral, etc., as well as the states and districts that contain major NASA facilities (notice that most of these facilities exist because at the time they came to be, a politically powerful politician got them to be in their districts...), etc. It's really a Congressional "pork machine". The Space Shuttle is serviced by two major defense contractors, who are in some good $$$ in contracts in "supporting" (or prolonging) the Space Shuttle program. Because Congress allocates the $$$ that NASA spends, despite what NASA's director may wish, and essentially has the final say on its budget, even though it is an Executive Branch office, it will always be that way.
We like to blame NASA's director for its problems, but the problems are really created by Congress and lobbyists from various constituents that get their slop from the trough by way of NASA.
Why is it exactly an advertisement for Snapper? It's a long book excerpt, by a now former corporate officer for the company, dealing with Walmart. Should the editors have instead pasted in "a high-quality lawn maintenance equipment manufacturer" or somesuch instead of simply mentioning the company? No, because that is ludicrous.
Do you feel compelled to buy a Snapper riding lawnmower from this article? If so, then perhaps you need to have your meds adjusted.
Instead of seeing it as an ad for Snapper, do you instead see it as a dire warning for those in a position to have to deal with Walmart? That's kind of how I see it.
There are several lessons in there, that most of us have probably been made aware of:
o US manufacturers (and service companies...) cannot ultimately prosper simply by offering the cheapest product at the lowest price point. China and India currently seem to have the trumps on that one.
o US manufacturers (and service companies...) instead need to focus on providing a higher quality product at a reasonable price point, while still offering a healthy profit margin, and a lot of this comes through efficiency. Instead of efficiency of scale to hit the lowest price point, it's optimizing quality output while minimizing input costs.
Been to a sawmill lately? Look at pictures of one from even the 70's, compared to today. Automation has replaced a lot of menial jobs. One guy oversees a computer-operated saw that automatically measures a log, decides how it should be cut to minimize waste in order to meet the desired production needs. The saw operator watches over it in case there are problems. In the 70's, there would be several different saws set up to cut logs differently, each with operators, crews to help keep them fed and clear jams, etc.
Or farms. Look at old pictures of wheat harvesters from the early 1900's: 40-horse teams pulling a rudimentary combine, with 80 or so people working along with it, maybe working 100 acres a day. Now, one guy in a JD 9660 combine can do that work in a couple of hours.
Now that I think of it, Software is the only thing in meatspace which can both be patented and copyrighted. Are the words and pictures in a book patented? No. Nor is placing a separate page with a color printing on it in an otherwise black and white book, etc. They just are used by everyone, and the *content* of what is published is protected by copyright, not patent.
But in Software, no. not only is the "expression" protected by copyright, the "technique" is protected by patent. Too bad someone smart in the governing bodies of the world won't say, "choose one, but not both".
This is why I'm against software patents. Why does software need two layers of protection? It doesn't, right?
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USB on Win2K... my experience with this was with an external HP CDRW connected via USB. The power connector on the CDRW did not hold onto the plug very well, and one day it fell out, and Win2K blue-screened. Wasn't USB supposed to be a bit more accepting of unexpectedly losing connectivity to attached devices?
...then just plunk down the $500 or so for a MiniMac, and if it doesn't work out for you, sell it on eBay.
Geez.
Because the community can't/won't pay for getting it certified by Sun.
One dollar is the minimum amount that is considered "consideration" in contract law terms.
Not all of them have forgotten. Look into people who do their own wool dyeing. Modern dyes are great for vibrant colors, but your traditional tweeds are still hand-dyed from various and sundried plant materials. There is even one dye (a rather vibrant dark red) that is made from the shell of a small desert beetle...
While things like this might erode such skills, I'm pretty certain that there isn't much call for the lost art of wagon wheel making thanks to Mr Ford, or lye soap making etc... its the natural way of things. Film developing has kind of gone out of style these days too... uhhh so what?
Alas, none of these skills have entirely gone away, either. Wagon wheel making is not a lost art. Neither is the lost art of making wood barrels. Or wood slat baskets (does your wife/girlfriend have a bunch of Longeberger baskets?). As long as hand-tossed pizza crusts don't go out of style, the world will still be livable.
As much as I like and use plastic boxes and crates, I still will buy an old wood box or crate if its in good shape at a garage sale. For one, they're SQUARE all around (angles, not shape). They're more rigid, which sometimes is nice, too.
So, do you work in an art-related field? Probably not, so don't worry about it.
Most people nowdays live in cities. Killing things with pointy sticks is not a key survival item. For the rest who don't, yes, killing things with pointy sticks or sharp knives still has to be done, whether ot put food on the table or simply to hasten the death of a farm animal to end its suffering.
What about the decline in common sense in recent years?
I don't know. Why don't you tell us about it? You're sort of calling the kettle black here, Mr. Pot.
Art is whatever the observer thinks it is.
Yes, for the end product, that is true. But this statement has nothing to do with the process of getting from a blank piece of paper to an animated movie.
Oh well, I suppose I fed the troll.
The odd thing is, though, that for places like Pixar or most computer game shops, they have a artist who approaches things from the 2d paper->3d computer world work on things first, and the technical engineering/physics people work on things from that angle. They seem to work together to make both of their things work as one. For the animation part, the computer does a lot of the monkey work (fill-in animation, background automation, physics models, etc), and the animators provide the details, structure, design work, etc. for the character models.
Or, this is how the documentary parts of Pixar animated DVDs, etc. seem to make it work.
Going back to early CGI works, like "Luxo Jr.", I'm going to guess that a good portion of those early shorts existed on paper and in an animator's workbook as animated line drawings, at least. Once the animator(s) felt good about things, then they translated them into the computer to fill in the rest of the animation and rendering.
My favorite animations, though, are still the Chuck Jones/Warner Bros. works from the 40's and 50's. It's hard to explain why. Some of it is the coloring (something fascinating about Technicolor movies in general from then), and layout designs, for sure. But some of the Disney stuff is good, too.
I wonder if someone will create a CGI movie based in a Max Parrish-styled world? That could be rather cool...
...or that they just aren't coming in at all.
This is true for many Perl developers I know.
All 5 of you?
So why exactly did you buy the Mac? Obviously, the reasons you bought it were more compelling for you than what you spend most of your time doing on your computer. Nothing wrong with that at all.
Sure, OS X is nice, but having Perl running natively on the best hardware available
It sounds objective, but it really is subjective. Does your code run faster on the Mac than on a PC (short of any Altivec code)? What about same code on an Intel Linux box?
Most people don't buy computers to write code.
When I get around to buying a new computer, it's going to be a Mac. The PCs will be kept around for games or shelf weights or Linux servers. But I have too much perspective over the last 15 years or so of computing and pricing. Bitching about a Mac that costs $200 more than a speced out WinTel box is meaningless when all the other timesinks that seem to come with running a Wintel computer well is factored in.
People balk at paying $500 for a Dell machine that a couple of years ago or less was a spec'd out high-end monster, *without* the 17" LCD monitor.
Maybe, but it's probably a slippery slope for Windows. If non-games are more compelling on the Mac side, and people keep/use Windows either for "critical" apps or games, eventually Windows becomes marginalized. What hasn't happened for Linux will probably happen for the Mac: the "critical" apps will eventually be ported to the MacOS. That'll leave gaming. Windows then becomes solely a gamer platform. Might as well buy an XBox360/PS3 at that point, because it'll be far less hassle.
Any developer resistance will be for those who love the complexity (for complexity's sake, more often than not) they've "mastered" with C++ or Java who don't want to try and wrap their brains around ObjC, just like there are people who don't want to wrap their brains around Ruby and stick with Perl, PHP, Python, J2EE, etc.
Too bad Loki went out of business and Paul Allen/Vulcan Ventures didn't throw some money their way to keep it going for a couple more years (look at all the money Paul has thrown at the Portland Trailblazers and the ROI on that...). Oh well. Playing SMAC or RT3 on Linux is still just better and faster than playing them on Windows.
Has anyone tried Bootcamp with Win2K Pro?
No, it sounds like Microsoft is trying to convince OEMs to NOT SELL other competing products. In the US this tactic is probably edging close to racketeering, and is similar to the same kind of BS that got them in trouble with the USDOJ in the first place (OEMs had to pay for MS licenses even for Intel-based computers that did not ship with Windows on them, in order to keep selling PCs with Microsoft OSes on them).
When I worked at Abbott Laboratories, Abbott bought lots of Dells with WinXP licenses, only to wipe them and put Win2K Pro on them. This left open (at the time) the possibility later of "upgrading" them to WinXP, which was starting to happen when I left. New machines that "kept" WinXP on them were wiped over with one of several different corporate XP images.
I think the reasoning was that the "Windows XP sticker" on the box allowed Abbott to "degrade" to W2K, and "upgrade" at a later date.
But then there is the flip side. Company X has already paid for an Enterprise license, that lets them install it on more than a few CPUs, probably in support of some other enterprise-level software application (SAP, PeopleSoft, Siebel, etc). The Oracle license is trivial compared to the other software license fees. So the DBAs set up a development Oracle server, as well as another server to host stupid little departmental databases that get upsized from MS Access, at least those that have grown beyond the thumb-handed hacker that managed to crib something together to scratch an itch.
As far as the MySQL-developed application, with all the cool business logic and stuff written in a custom application layer, how is one supposed to develop another application (that can also update the data...) off of the same layer? How does one access that middle tier to get some of the logic out of it for reporting or data warehousing?
Urrgh, if there is a flamefest that sucks even more than Windows vs MacOS, it's MySQL vs every other SQL-based RDBMS (including Access).
Well, most animal slime is a mix of sugars and water. The sugars hold a large amount of water, relatively speaking, so if it's the same with bacteria, then the bacteria does not have to expel much of the sugar mix, so the metabolic demands are gonna be relatively small.
NASA in and of itself is not a "pork machine", but is used by the reps of states containing divisions of the companies associated with the space program, such as Boeing, Lockmart, Loral, etc., as well as the states and districts that contain major NASA facilities (notice that most of these facilities exist because at the time they came to be, a politically powerful politician got them to be in their districts...), etc. It's really a Congressional "pork machine". The Space Shuttle is serviced by two major defense contractors, who are in some good $$$ in contracts in "supporting" (or prolonging) the Space Shuttle program. Because Congress allocates the $$$ that NASA spends, despite what NASA's director may wish, and essentially has the final say on its budget, even though it is an Executive Branch office, it will always be that way.
We like to blame NASA's director for its problems, but the problems are really created by Congress and lobbyists from various constituents that get their slop from the trough by way of NASA.
Yes, but they don't do edges very well, or handle thick-stemmed or tall weeds, or under low-overhanging shrub branches, or heavy, lush grass growth.
That's why at the time I bought the 5HP battery-powered Black & Decker mower to replace the reel mower.
Nowadays, I just let my sheep take care of things.
You didn't check out the bicycles, sporting goods or kiddie toys sections... (or hardware tools, etc).
Why is it exactly an advertisement for Snapper? It's a long book excerpt, by a now former corporate officer for the company, dealing with Walmart. Should the editors have instead pasted in "a high-quality lawn maintenance equipment manufacturer" or somesuch instead of simply mentioning the company? No, because that is ludicrous.
Do you feel compelled to buy a Snapper riding lawnmower from this article? If so, then perhaps you need to have your meds adjusted.
Instead of seeing it as an ad for Snapper, do you instead see it as a dire warning for those in a position to have to deal with Walmart? That's kind of how I see it.
There are several lessons in there, that most of us have probably been made aware of:
o US manufacturers (and service companies...) cannot ultimately prosper simply by offering the cheapest product at the lowest price point. China and India currently seem to have the trumps on that one.
o US manufacturers (and service companies...) instead need to focus on providing a higher quality product at a reasonable price point, while still offering a healthy profit margin, and a lot of this comes through efficiency. Instead of efficiency of scale to hit the lowest price point, it's optimizing quality output while minimizing input costs.
Been to a sawmill lately? Look at pictures of one from even the 70's, compared to today. Automation has replaced a lot of menial jobs. One guy oversees a computer-operated saw that automatically measures a log, decides how it should be cut to minimize waste in order to meet the desired production needs. The saw operator watches over it in case there are problems. In the 70's, there would be several different saws set up to cut logs differently, each with operators, crews to help keep them fed and clear jams, etc.
Or farms. Look at old pictures of wheat harvesters from the early 1900's: 40-horse teams pulling a rudimentary combine, with 80 or so people working along with it, maybe working 100 acres a day. Now, one guy in a JD 9660 combine can do that work in a couple of hours.
But wasn't the Netscape browser directly developed off of NCSA Mosaic?
Now that I think of it, Software is the only thing in meatspace which can both be patented and copyrighted. Are the words and pictures in a book patented? No. Nor is placing a separate page with a color printing on it in an otherwise black and white book, etc. They just are used by everyone, and the *content* of what is published is protected by copyright, not patent.
But in Software, no. not only is the "expression" protected by copyright, the "technique" is protected by patent. Too bad someone smart in the governing bodies of the world won't say, "choose one, but not both".
This is why I'm against software patents. Why does software need two layers of protection? It doesn't, right?
OSCommerce has been on version 2.2 for...oh, at least 5 years now. Well supported? OK...Yeah.
What do you need/want the Oracle driver to be able to do?
has_and_belongs_to_many... It just works.