It's not just their telephony products - in fact, those are moving to a virtualization-supported model anyway. Cisco sells all kinds of application servers that they have to buy from HP and IBM that cover all kinds of things: wireless management & security come to mind immediately. This puts them in business for themselves instead of handing money over to companies who compete with them (especially HP).
I realized just now that if some other company had started up and created a new search engine called "Bing" I would probably find it really charming. But when Microsoft does it, it just seems like The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show. The human subconscious is a player-hater.
Really? Because I'm looking at my local newspaper right now. Here's what they appear to deliver:
1) Rehashings and 8th-grade-level analysis of events anyone can see for themselves - this includes: city council meeting minutes, sports homilies rife with latent homoeroticism, summaries of government press releases with a few quotes, clumsy write-ups of things seen on TV...
2) Items cribbed from wire services, which are equally stupid or worse...
3) Editorials, in which the writer presents himself or herself as the voice of sanity, whereas their readers are drunk retarded children...
4) Sales inserts...
5) Garfield
Now, don't get me wrong. I really like Garfield, but it's really just a few square inches of pen art, and I can get that for free elsewhere.
Far more likely is that someone inside Twitter started a rumor about Apple buying Twitter so that interest in Twitter will go up, increasing its sale value.
People are starting to catch on that Twitter is chat, except with an incredibly slow, unreliable, barely usable interface. They have crested. Now that they are no longer going to be growing exponentially, it's no longer going to be a fun place to work. Time to sell.
A large gravitational force passing by this star might have a significant effect. The fact that only part of this star completely collapsed seems like possible evidence of... a moving black hole?
Go right ahead, Ballmer. You can bribe those oily Europeans until they're shining your car, but I dare you to budge the courageous and independent public officials of Texas! They cannot be bought and will stand tall against oh my god who am I kidding here open document formats are doomed.
In a world where constant operating system updates are considered good and necessary, this is probably the wrong way of going about it. There have to be some better occasions to celebrate.
For instance, instead of announcing anniversaries, how about announcing things like "Windows Vista Update 31323485: fixes a problem Linux has been immune to for 11 years."
Mod parent up! The "Josh"es of the world aren't saving anyone money if the company is spending money to fix the problems he creates.
Switch him to design work. If he's such a genius, he can easily envision what's to be done architecturally and transmit that vision to coders. If he can't do that, then his career is at a brick wall anyway.
I'll save you the intense effort it must take to scroll up and read the summary. The answer is COMPATIBILITY.
"As is the extfs tradition, mounting a current ext3 filesystem as ext4 will work seamlessly; however, most new features will not be available with the same on-disk format, meaning a fresh format with ext4 or converting the disk layout to ext4 will offer the best experience."
For my own purposes, I can't use ReiserFS because I can't stop thinking about that guy when I install it. Just...ick.
...and there is no, I mean, NO excuse for what this guy allowed to happen, from the perspective of a telephony engineer.
Point #1: how weak is your security that an external entity can log in and gain access?
Point #2: why in the world does his voice mail system have a class of service that allows outdialing? Typically a telephony engineer restricts the class of service on the ports connecting to the phone system so that they can only pass calls to the phone system itself, not to the outside world.
This guy is unbelievably lazy, and the fact that he wants someone else to pay for his mistakes is insane. He fails at life.
My area of expertise is not in programming, but rather in engineering - similar, but different too - so take this with a grain of salt.
As a manager of technically proficient people, you have only a few major tasks in front of you: first, be sure to marginalize or fire uncooperative or difficult people (the "no-assholes rule"). You can live with lower levels of expertise, but you cannot live with drama. To paraphrase Roger Zelazny, the graveyards are full of people who thought they couldn't be replaced.
Second, it's important to know that, aside from keeping the team asshole-free, you are not "in charge" here. They know what they are doing and they can track it better than you can. Employees of technical expertise actually need facilitators to assist them more than they need managers to direct their efforts. So be available to your team to take up the things they cannot afford to spend time doing - communicate with other departments, run interference with project managers, make sure that they get the help they need.
In my particular field, a manager should be prepared to provide more assistance than control. I don't think programming would be that different.
I realize this headline is trying to make an issue out of something that isn't there. But I can't help but pose the question: If someone is so obsessed with his own orthodoxy that no practical wide release can meet his standards, do we really care what he says anymore?
At some point in the past, the press stopped being interested in the truth and started promoting conflict. This was mainly because instead of sending reporters to pull documents and ask questions, it was much easier to simply interview two pundits on "both sides" of a given issue. Sometimes this was too much, and the press simply made stories out of the press releases put out by organizations on "both sides" of an issue.
The problem with this approach (other than its amazing laziness) is that sometimes, there are simply issues that don't have two viable sides. The party on one end is almost certainly right and the party on the other is almost certainly wrong.
I'll give an example: whether or not to go to war in Iraq. One side had been militarizing the intelligence community to produce information it wanted to hear; it had ignored this same militarized intelligence when even that did not produce evidence of large weapons in Iraq; and it attempted to destroy persons who pointed out these facts. There was no evidence of an international Iraqi threat, and the people who were saying that one existed were simply wrong.
The press did a huge disservice to the public by treating these people seriously, even long after they had discredited themselves in the eyes of the public.
If the press seemed to favor Obama in this election, what of it? It was hard to ignore the fact that he was, by the judgment of a pretty large majority of educated people, the far superior man for the job. Sometimes the plain facts on the ground aren't "balanced," and it is wrong of press to give the impression that they are. There's a seed of truth to the famous Colbert assertion that "reality has a well-known liberal bias."
Oh my god, my parents got me one of those Aquarius things (I'm an old-timer). It's still sitting in a box somewhere. The article does a fair job of describing the keyboard as "gummy" but it does no justice to the absolute horror of spending more than 10 minutes trying to use it. The only interactive confirmation that the user got that a key was successfully pressed was by watching the screen. The keys had no give to them at all, and you had to guess how hard each key needed to be pressed to produce results (each key had its own level of responsiveness). Add this to the fact that so much of what you had to do with this keyboard included using the SHIFT and CTRL keys, and you have a horror show. To this day, I have nightmares about the following things:
* Did I press the button or not? The cursor didn't move. But I know I pressed the key. I'll press it again. Hmmm, nothing happened this time either. What if I press it really hard? Oh god, now there are two of them. I should backspace. Where's the backspace key?
* Being near the end of typing in a huge BASIC program (such as the "simulated analog clock") and accidentally hitting that horribly misplaced "RESET" button.
* You would think that the feature to use a "control" key as a way to bring up BASIC command macros assigned to each key would help, but it really doesn't. You have to search the keyboard overlay for the right command every single time, and a lot of the time you're searching for something that isn't there and you have to type it in longhand anyway.
* Typing in a huge BASIC program found in a student textbook, only to find out that the Aquarius didn't have enough RAM to contain it, or didn't support certain BASIC commands that were standard on every other interpreter. Oh, and...
* There were never any storage devices that worked for the Aquarius. They were promised, but they were either never released or put out in a very limited release. No disk drives and not even any stupid tape recorders, a la Commodore. It turned out that the planned tape recorder never even worked consistently anyway.
* Aquarius BASIC by Micro-Soft (c) 1982
* Wow, they have some of the same games as the Intellivision!...except the Aquarius versions had crappier sound and graphics. And the game controllers were actually WORSE than on the Intellivision, which is an impressive achievement.
God damn, I wasted tons of time trying to make that thing usable.
They have certain objectives with each OS release - they focus intentionally only on the "hip" and "now" features that are getting all the press and buzz. Features that are flashy now, but in a couple of years, will seem incredibly dated and myopic. Then they can later market a new OS version by telling us that the older one was missing all kinds of important design features. Well, duh! It's like that by design.
Why not just get an operating system that's more modular, and it will have all the features you want? That way, you won't have to pay for an expensive upgrade just so that you can have that one really neat thing. It'll already have that one really neat thing, because you already installed it the minute it was available.
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't say that having Gov. Bobby Jindal on our side is necessarily "good news."
It's not just their telephony products - in fact, those are moving to a virtualization-supported model anyway. Cisco sells all kinds of application servers that they have to buy from HP and IBM that cover all kinds of things: wireless management & security come to mind immediately. This puts them in business for themselves instead of handing money over to companies who compete with them (especially HP).
Bang? Bebinged?
This thread is starting to sound like a Blue Man Group concert.
I realized just now that if some other company had started up and created a new search engine called "Bing" I would probably find it really charming. But when Microsoft does it, it just seems like The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show. The human subconscious is a player-hater.
Really? Because I'm looking at my local newspaper right now. Here's what they appear to deliver:
1) Rehashings and 8th-grade-level analysis of events anyone can see for themselves - this includes: city council meeting minutes, sports homilies rife with latent homoeroticism, summaries of government press releases with a few quotes, clumsy write-ups of things seen on TV...
2) Items cribbed from wire services, which are equally stupid or worse...
3) Editorials, in which the writer presents himself or herself as the voice of sanity, whereas their readers are drunk retarded children...
4) Sales inserts...
5) Garfield
Now, don't get me wrong. I really like Garfield, but it's really just a few square inches of pen art, and I can get that for free elsewhere.
"How can we make ourselves even more irrelevant than we are now?"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jETv3NURwLc
Everything is awesome and no one is happy!
Far more likely is that someone inside Twitter started a rumor about Apple buying Twitter so that interest in Twitter will go up, increasing its sale value.
People are starting to catch on that Twitter is chat, except with an incredibly slow, unreliable, barely usable interface. They have crested. Now that they are no longer going to be growing exponentially, it's no longer going to be a fun place to work. Time to sell.
I have another study, funded by me and demonstrated by my 2-year-old daughter. The answer to why toddlers don't do what they're told is:
"Because."
When I asked her to expound upon these results, she said:
"NO!"
I guess that means we're ready for publication.
A large gravitational force passing by this star might have a significant effect. The fact that only part of this star completely collapsed seems like possible evidence of ... a moving black hole?
Go right ahead, Ballmer. You can bribe those oily Europeans until they're shining your car, but I dare you to budge the courageous and independent public officials of Texas! They cannot be bought and will stand tall against oh my god who am I kidding here open document formats are doomed.
In a world where constant operating system updates are considered good and necessary, this is probably the wrong way of going about it. There have to be some better occasions to celebrate.
For instance, instead of announcing anniversaries, how about announcing things like "Windows Vista Update 31323485: fixes a problem Linux has been immune to for 11 years."
Hear hear. I never got a bachelors degree of any kind and my salary has tripled in the last 5 years. In my line of work, degrees don't mean much.
Mod parent up! The "Josh"es of the world aren't saving anyone money if the company is spending money to fix the problems he creates.
Switch him to design work. If he's such a genius, he can easily envision what's to be done architecturally and transmit that vision to coders. If he can't do that, then his career is at a brick wall anyway.
I'll save you the intense effort it must take to scroll up and read the summary. The answer is COMPATIBILITY.
"As is the extfs tradition, mounting a current ext3 filesystem as ext4 will work seamlessly; however, most new features will not be available with the same on-disk format, meaning a fresh format with ext4 or converting the disk layout to ext4 will offer the best experience."
For my own purposes, I can't use ReiserFS because I can't stop thinking about that guy when I install it. Just...ick.
That's all well and good, but what about the new flag, the one that is just a white flag with a picture of a burning American flag on it?
...and there is no, I mean, NO excuse for what this guy allowed to happen, from the perspective of a telephony engineer.
Point #1: how weak is your security that an external entity can log in and gain access?
Point #2: why in the world does his voice mail system have a class of service that allows outdialing? Typically a telephony engineer restricts the class of service on the ports connecting to the phone system so that they can only pass calls to the phone system itself, not to the outside world.
This guy is unbelievably lazy, and the fact that he wants someone else to pay for his mistakes is insane. He fails at life.
My area of expertise is not in programming, but rather in engineering - similar, but different too - so take this with a grain of salt.
As a manager of technically proficient people, you have only a few major tasks in front of you: first, be sure to marginalize or fire uncooperative or difficult people (the "no-assholes rule"). You can live with lower levels of expertise, but you cannot live with drama. To paraphrase Roger Zelazny, the graveyards are full of people who thought they couldn't be replaced.
Second, it's important to know that, aside from keeping the team asshole-free, you are not "in charge" here. They know what they are doing and they can track it better than you can. Employees of technical expertise actually need facilitators to assist them more than they need managers to direct their efforts. So be available to your team to take up the things they cannot afford to spend time doing - communicate with other departments, run interference with project managers, make sure that they get the help they need.
In my particular field, a manager should be prepared to provide more assistance than control. I don't think programming would be that different.
"MacArthur Foundation recommends for children more of everything you currently hate about teenagers."
I realize this headline is trying to make an issue out of something that isn't there. But I can't help but pose the question: If someone is so obsessed with his own orthodoxy that no practical wide release can meet his standards, do we really care what he says anymore?
At some point in the past, the press stopped being interested in the truth and started promoting conflict. This was mainly because instead of sending reporters to pull documents and ask questions, it was much easier to simply interview two pundits on "both sides" of a given issue. Sometimes this was too much, and the press simply made stories out of the press releases put out by organizations on "both sides" of an issue.
The problem with this approach (other than its amazing laziness) is that sometimes, there are simply issues that don't have two viable sides. The party on one end is almost certainly right and the party on the other is almost certainly wrong.
I'll give an example: whether or not to go to war in Iraq. One side had been militarizing the intelligence community to produce information it wanted to hear; it had ignored this same militarized intelligence when even that did not produce evidence of large weapons in Iraq; and it attempted to destroy persons who pointed out these facts. There was no evidence of an international Iraqi threat, and the people who were saying that one existed were simply wrong.
The press did a huge disservice to the public by treating these people seriously, even long after they had discredited themselves in the eyes of the public.
If the press seemed to favor Obama in this election, what of it? It was hard to ignore the fact that he was, by the judgment of a pretty large majority of educated people, the far superior man for the job. Sometimes the plain facts on the ground aren't "balanced," and it is wrong of press to give the impression that they are. There's a seed of truth to the famous Colbert assertion that "reality has a well-known liberal bias."
Oh my god, my parents got me one of those Aquarius things (I'm an old-timer). It's still sitting in a box somewhere. The article does a fair job of describing the keyboard as "gummy" but it does no justice to the absolute horror of spending more than 10 minutes trying to use it. The only interactive confirmation that the user got that a key was successfully pressed was by watching the screen. The keys had no give to them at all, and you had to guess how hard each key needed to be pressed to produce results (each key had its own level of responsiveness). Add this to the fact that so much of what you had to do with this keyboard included using the SHIFT and CTRL keys, and you have a horror show. To this day, I have nightmares about the following things:
...except the Aquarius versions had crappier sound and graphics. And the game controllers were actually WORSE than on the Intellivision, which is an impressive achievement.
* Did I press the button or not? The cursor didn't move. But I know I pressed the key. I'll press it again. Hmmm, nothing happened this time either. What if I press it really hard? Oh god, now there are two of them. I should backspace. Where's the backspace key?
* Being near the end of typing in a huge BASIC program (such as the "simulated analog clock") and accidentally hitting that horribly misplaced "RESET" button.
* You would think that the feature to use a "control" key as a way to bring up BASIC command macros assigned to each key would help, but it really doesn't. You have to search the keyboard overlay for the right command every single time, and a lot of the time you're searching for something that isn't there and you have to type it in longhand anyway.
* Typing in a huge BASIC program found in a student textbook, only to find out that the Aquarius didn't have enough RAM to contain it, or didn't support certain BASIC commands that were standard on every other interpreter. Oh, and...
* There were never any storage devices that worked for the Aquarius. They were promised, but they were either never released or put out in a very limited release. No disk drives and not even any stupid tape recorders, a la Commodore. It turned out that the planned tape recorder never even worked consistently anyway.
* Aquarius BASIC by Micro-Soft (c) 1982
* Wow, they have some of the same games as the Intellivision!
God damn, I wasted tons of time trying to make that thing usable.
They have certain objectives with each OS release - they focus intentionally only on the "hip" and "now" features that are getting all the press and buzz. Features that are flashy now, but in a couple of years, will seem incredibly dated and myopic. Then they can later market a new OS version by telling us that the older one was missing all kinds of important design features. Well, duh! It's like that by design.
Why not just get an operating system that's more modular, and it will have all the features you want? That way, you won't have to pay for an expensive upgrade just so that you can have that one really neat thing. It'll already have that one really neat thing, because you already installed it the minute it was available.
Quicktime (or equivalent ;) ) required to watch.