I've heard people say that sweat can be acidic, or that the oils are different for some people. Maybe that's true, maybe not, but I do know that I have to change the plastic watch strap I wear every year or so because it becomes brittle and cracks (other people can get away with the same strap for many years). I've even tried swapping to a silicone strap that is supposed to last a lifetime, and it is already hardening after 18 months.
The surface of the wrist-rests on my Aluminium Powerbook 12" is severely pitted. When I first got it, there was a slight nick in the wrist-rest on the left side. After six months of use, the area is very obviously dissolving. The right side is fine. I'm told this is because the surface of the aluminium is anodized, but if the surface is scratched, then the oils can get underneath and eat away at the aluminium, as well as eat it out from under the anodization (I assume).
- Reports about someone earning "X" per month are meaningless out of context. How much, exactly, do other workers in their locale earn? What is the overall cost of living? (Yes, I'm aware that the article makes reference to food and rent consuming "half" their salary.)
Perhaps tech workers are in a different situation, but until I got my current job (six weeks ago), food and rent was consuming more than half of my wages, and I was making better money than most people I know. Think of someone on minimum wage, making $8/hr working 30 hours/wk in Montreal, where rent is likely to cost you $300-400, food is likely to cost $100 if you're lucky, public transit is another $70, heating is $100/mo in winter, and in a bad month, you're suddenly paying $700 in recurring bills on $960/mo before taxes. I'm finally in a situation where food and shelter isn't taking the vast majority of my wages, and I'm breathing a lot easier because of it.
I read an article a week or so ago where someone mentioned that these sweat shops are welcomed by the local populace. Instead of selling their daughters into prostitution, people can get jobs at these factories, earning more money than they'd ever dreamed of, feeding their families well, and being far better off than they ever hoped, because of the huge disparity between our cost of living and theirs. These jobs are highly prized, and everyone wants their crack at them. By our standards, they're not fantastic, and it would be great if we could pay them all $20k/yr for their work, but think of what would happen if we did.
If we paid these people wages that are 'acceptable' by North American standards, without thinking about what the local income is, then the entire economical balance in the area would be destroyed. Suddenly, you would have people making tens or hundreds of times more than anyone else in their area, bringing in huge amounts of income. With the market prices in the areas, the people would have no normal outlet for their expenditures, so they would either end up buying up all the land, farms, and businesses in the area, or just stockpiling money. Great for the banks, bad for inflation. When market prices begin to rise because the income of these nouveau riche is destroying the balance, everyone who doesn't have one of these jobs is going to be SOL, because they won't be able to afford the cost of living in this new economy.
So before you make judgements for Apple contracting out to a company that hires a poor populace, take the time to find out the facts.
As much as I'd love to love Java, and as much as I know most people would if it truly delivered all that it promised, there are a lot of issues with it that can tend to cause problems. One example that bit my company:
Our company writes and sells a large medical imaging archival system, and one of the components of it is a web-based front-end using Tomcat, which accesses the backend database for pretty much everything.
Recently a feature was added to our software which opens a database connection to the various other servers in the system to check the status of their queues. This worked fantastically in testing, but when it was deployed, we found sites whose frontend became completely unresponsive.
The long and the short of it is that JDBC calls (DriverManager.getConnection()) are sychronous, meaning that you can only be opening one connection at a time. This works fine in an ideal circumstance, but if one of the hosts you're trying to connect to happens to be off the network, then all threads in all apps in that JVM have to wait before they can open a connection.
As a result, when our background thread cycles through the databases to check the status of their queues and comes across a down server, DriverManager.getConnection() blocks - for three minutes! - while the TCP connection times out. This means that our entire application locks up completely, since every action requires a database connection. Sun's response?
'Introducing a change such as this risks breaking existing applications that have come to expect this behaviour.'
I like Java, but problems like this are just absurd. In C, I could either rewrite the library, or (preferably) change the source of the existing library. Failing that, I could fork separate processes instead of threads (ugly and inefficient). In Java, I don't have this option, because it affects the entire JVM. Fortunately, there is a workaround, but it's not a particularly fantastic one.
Java/C#/etc have a great deal of benefits over C/C++/etc, but there are always going to be problems as long as someone else decides what should be fixed and how. The real question is whether or not, for your application, the benefits outweigh the (potential) drawbacks.
I read an interview a while back (no source, sorry) with a game developer who was talking about the XBox 360. Their complaint was that even on dual-layer discs, they were already having to cram data in as tight as they could. Judging from how the XB/PS2/GameCube games progressed, getting more optimised and looking even better as developers figured out how to optimise the console, I'm inclined to agree with the developer's final conclusion - multi-DVD XB360 games are coming, and sooner than you think.
For the PS3, I'm expecting to see games with DVD-style 'bonus features', such as behind-the-scenes interviews, making-of, and so on, most of which these days goes on a separate DVD. This is the sort of thing that blu-ray will enable, whereas the XB360 will probably see multi-disc games, with bonus discs on top of that, in not too long of a time.
Waaaaay too many functions that are very inconsistent that would confuse someone who doesn't know which one to use.
Almost all of which are named exactly the same as the underlying library functions they represent (e.g. mysql_escape_string() and mysql_real_escape_string() are wrappers for the same functions in the mysql client library) - blame library developers for this one. The extension writers are consistent, it's their sources that aren't.
Magic quotes are sadly still there
And disabled by default. If you enable them, it's your own fault. If your hosting provider does, it's their fault. Don't blame PHP for having deprecated features that idiots can still enable.
I would learn something like Perl
Which doesn't have the (common in every other language) switch/case construct? Which has the do...unless construct, which I've never heard of before? Which keeps track of state like output buffering in variables like $| ? Perl may have its uses, but as a first language, I'd never recommend it in a million years. It's as though the language was designed to encourage bad habits, and that's not a first language I would recommend.
Laptops are highly specialized and customized marvels of engineering and required trick engineering just to get all of the pieces in the box (ever try disassembling one and getting it all back together?).
As a matter of fact, I have. I'd never buy a Dell laptop again, but the one thing I will say about it is that they are fantastically easy to service. After taking it apart twice for the experience (and to clean kool-aid out of the keyboard), I could have my Inspiron 5150 down to parts in five minutes, tops (not including removing the LCD panel from the lid). I was truly astonished at how easy it was to take that system apart, and more so how easy it was to put back together without having bits left over (which is more than I can say for my former boss's Satellite A70).
Dell seems to engineer their laptops for easy service, which is important because it seems like every other month something goes wrong with them. If you have the on-site service, however, getting them fixed is trivial, largely for this reason.
(yes, I know 5.0 has SPs, and InnoDB gives you transactions, but I said "standard fare")
What does this even mean? You know that they are available, but you don't want to use them? You don't support using the latest versions? You seem to want to imply something, but I can't figure out what it is.
For some purposes, widescreen is pretty nice. The problem I have is that the Dock takes up space along the bottom, so for a widescreen laptop, you're going to be lacking in vertical space for several reasons (iSight too), while having an abundance of horizontal (for Adium maybe? I dunno...)
Still, I'm going to get one as soon as I can afford to.
Many people turn off the polls, in part because of how stupid and irrelevant they usually are. Personally, I turn off the whole sidebar, as I find it incredibly useless. If this were a poll, I'd never know about it until it went live.
This could also be solved by setting the footer to 'clear: both;' which would put it below the longest floated box, whichever one that turns out to be.
If you're Calvin, this would be a great time to philosophize on the meaning of life and the socio-political ramifications of our day-to-day cultural biases and the actions we take because of them.
Add another $50 to the system and throw in a second controller (at maybe a $10 cost to them) and a first-party title (at maybe a $2 cost to them), call it a bundle, give them a Nintendo Power subscription, and you're sold. Your margins go up, your first-party launch title gets free sales and gets the word out there, and people don't get sticker shock at the register.
It wasn't long ago that the sickening sweetness of canned beverages just got too much for me, and I gave up on them entirely. I replaced them with drinks like coffee (well, lattes) and orange juice, but after a while of this, my digestive intolerance returned, and I've been unable to drink either of those as much as I used to.
Lately, I've started drinking gatorade. Six bucks for a pack of six bottles, tastes good but not too sweet, easy to drink, convenient size, and great after a run. Give it a try.
I was in Future Shop in an old (unfashionable) long-sleeved shirt, well-worn, and a pair of khakis that were wearing thin and hadn't been washed in a week. My hair was a mess, I felt like a wreck, and I looked like hell.... And someone still came up to me and asked if I worked there. I guess that's just how people are. Sigh.
I have the same powerbook, but my choice of phone was the RAZR. Why? It syncs/file transfers over bluetooth, it charges over USB, it acts as a modem, it syncs with iSync. It's an all-around great phone, and I'm glad I got it.
This is all on top of the fact that with bluetooth, you can do things like send/receive/archive SMS messages from your Powerbook (google BluePhoneElite), which is a handy feature if you send/receive a lot of messages - something I've started to do now that I have a phone with surprisingly good predictive text input.
The thing I like about bluetooth can be summarised by describing the setup that a guy I know had. All of his kit was bluetooth - phone, PDA, and laptop - and he had purchased a bluetooth headset. His phone stayed in his bag. When it rang, it rang in his ear; he would pull out his PDA to see who it was, and choose whether or not to accept the call (I you could also have your PDA ring, if you wanted to). When he wanted to make a call, he would pull out his PDA, choose someone out of the address book, and click 'Dial', and it would dial his cellphone. Very handy, and you don't have to have all your electronics within easy reach.
If you don't like the RAZR, the SLVR is also a nice phone, and has the benefit of iTunes capabilities (if this tickles your fancy), which is only available on some models of RAZR.
I personally feel that there are so many "disorders" these days, that people often find a crutch for every vice and desire. Instead of working tochange for the better, people say "That's the way I am... I can't change."
Some of these people may think this article proves that thought. I for one, feel it supports the opposite.
Regarding issues such as this as an excuse seems to be a common way of looking at it, and I'll admit to having seen things that way once as well, though I've had a change of heart recently.
I've never been able to follow through on things - I'll start a project but not finish it, I get distracted, I lose interest. I'm always doing a dozen things but I never finish any of them. The conclusion that I came to was that I was just a loser. I had no ambition, I had no drive, and I was never going to be able to see something through, so what was the point? I was just a hopeless, worthless excuse for a person.
Discovering that all of these things I thought were wrong with me were all symptoms of ADHD was a liberating experience. I'm not on Ritalin or any other kinds of medication for my condition (I'm considering talking to my doctor about it, to see if that would benefit me at all), but just knowing that the problems I have are not personal failures inherent to who I am, but instead are a disorder that prevents me from being who I am makes all the difference in the world.
No longer do I think of myself as just a worthless excuse of a person. Now I see that while I have problems, I can deal with them and learn to function normally. There's nothing wrong with me as a person, I just have challenges that have to be dealt with for me to be able to do what I want to do. I see the 'ADHD' classification, not as an excuse for my behavior, but as a challenge to overcome. Since this realisation, I haven't turned my life around, but things are going really well for me.
So for those whose first reaction is to say 'Oh, now people will use this as an excuse' - people will use anything as an excuse, it doesn't have to be medical. Someone in perfect health can have problems like this, and they'll find something to blame too. In the case of real medical problems, however, it's a relief, and can help people be MORE productive, and help them deal with their problems. Discoveries like this are a Good Thing.
Quite simply, a monolithic kernel like the one used in Linux or most of the other Open Source Unix clones is inherently two to three times faster for integer calculations than the Mach microkernel presently used in OS X 10.4.... Apple has evidently reached the point where they need to trade claimed performance, -- typically based on floating-point operations that aren't a part of much web or database service -- for real performance.
In this amusing quote, Cringely is asserting that the mostly-microkernel architecture of Xnu is responsible for poor integer performance, which wrecks web/db performance, but does fine with floating-point operations. Makes sense to me!
Speeding-up performance is great, but normally a system vendor won't want to do that for older hardware, which might encourage some users to keep their old box and just add a new OS. But in this case, Apple HAS NO installed base of Intel Macs to worry about having to compete with, so speeding up the OS becomes a no-brainer, especially if it simultaneously encourages PowerPC owners to upgrade so they can share in the fun.
Apple already does make their OS releases faster from one to another - I don't know about other Apple policies, but the WebKit team, for example has a strict 'no performance regressions' policy which is enforced pretty well. It wouldn't surprise me to find the same is true of the rest of the OS and components. Asserting that Apple is so intent on selling new hardware that they would intentionally ignore potential performance improvements is ludicrous to say the least.
Re:Some artists just want to be heard...
on
CRIA Falling Apart?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Your argument is flawed.
You compare a one-time service to a succession of purchases. If you fix my car I pay you once and I don't have to pay you ever again. If you buy my CD, you pay me once and don't have to pay me ever again.
People in this thread seem to be suggesting that an artist should only get paid once for a song. Ok, sure, so I create an album, I get paid for it (what, $15? for a year's work or more?) and then if I want any more money, I have to create a new album?
You're suggesting that patrons of the arts (as a whole) should only have to compensate an artist once. Should prints available at the Louvre be free? I mean, the artist has already been paid for their painting, right?
Without copyright licensing (and copyright expiration, grrr Disney), then the creative process becomes something that people can only do in their spare time, when they're not working at their day jobs. I hate to tell you, but making art is not exactly an easy process. You don't just sit down and think 'I know, I'll make a hit single!' and then spend a few hours a night for the rest of the week polishing it up. It takes hard work, it takes passion, it takes enthusiasm.
Suddenly we're back to the FSF's concept of software. People should never be paid to write software, it all wants to be free! So work shitty day jobs, and then write software in your spare time. The flaw in that analogy is that paid, directed work accomplishes more than loosely-organised communities of hackers ever have. Cases in point: Apache (Apache foundation), PHP (Zend), MySQL (MySQL AB), Linux (RedHat, Suse, IBM, Sun, etc), and so on).
So we should not contribute to the artists that make music we wish to listen to? They should give us their creativity for free? We should not have to pay for performances? If you honestly think this, then you don't understand what art is all about.
My questions are relating to the website - Why is it so slow, why did you switch to Rails, who wrote your search function such that it is incapable of locating a comic even if you type in a word in the comic title, and so on.
I want to know how much they paid for this terrible, worthless site redesign that they got, because if there's a market for shitty sites, I want to know what I should be charging.
Don't get me wrong, I love the comic, but ever since the new design came around, it's been almost completely impossible to find any of the old content.
Token Ring is a great idea, in theory, but in the days of full-duplex GigE over Cat5e with 100 hosts on a segment, passing a token around is horribly inefficient, as well as pointless. We don't need it, so why use it? Old installations should have been replaced years ago, moved up to commodity ethernet hardware that everyone and their dog supports, for less than it costs to employ someone who knows about token ring.
Using sudo provides a host of benefits besides giving you root. Sudo allows you to grant access to specific users for specific commands, and then revoke those commands later. Compare this with giving the root password to everyone, which requires the password to be changed whenever someone leaves the company (or someone's root privs are revoked).
I can grant access via sudo to users for specific commands, without giving them complete administrative access to the entire system.
When I'm using 'sudo' to do things, my environment stays the same. This means that my $PATH variable stays the same, and so does my prompt. It means that any time I say ~ it refers to/home/myusername and not/root, meaning I can get to it later.
When I'm not using sudo and I do 'cd/var/www/certs/domainname/' and it doesn't give me an error, I know that the permissions are wrong on that directory (more of a reminder than anything). I've gotten so used to this on most systems that the series of commands I use to access the IMAP virtualhost directory is essentially 'cd/var/spool/postfix/virtual; sudo bash; cd/var/spool/postfix/virtual', which slows me down surprisingly not much.
It doesn't take much to hit the up arrow, Ctrl-A, type 'sudo ' and then hit enter if you find you need to.
I can set in ~/.bash_profile that I want rm to use -i by default (alias rm='rm -i') for safety, which carries over into my 'sudo' environment; doing this for root by default can cause e.g. cronjobs to hang, waiting for input that will never come.
The benefits of sudo are not limited to 'gaining root' - they are multitudinous, and apparently your coworkers have never considered versatility to be a benefit; nor, for that matter, have they done likewise for security. Perhaps they should be educated.
This article reminded me of a book that caught my attention in a bookstore quite some time ago, entitled The Customer Comes Second - I didn't get a chance to read it at the time, but the premise of the book seems to be pretty straightforward: take good care of your employees, and your employees will take good care of your customers.
Definitely an important idea for managers to learn. The American standard seems to be 'force all that you can out of your employees for the best interests of management', so this book was definitely an interesting sight to behold.
I would not give credit for 802.11g to Apple, or gigabit ethernet. Bluetooth is Nokia's baby, all the way through. USB is Wintel, pure and simple -- Apple was pushing firewire.
What you have to understand is that it's not about creating new technologies - it's about creating a market for new technologies. USB wasn't Apple's baby, but Apple was the first to push it with any degree of enthusiasm (iMac). Gigabit ethernet wasn't Apple's either, but they were the first to offer it on consumer-grade hardware (the Powerbook line and the Powermac line; later iBooks and iMacs).
Bluetooth is Nokia, sure, but when I was laptop shopping even in 2004, Dell didn't have any models I could afford that had a Bluetooth option. Their offerings were either sans-bluetooth, or were completely outside of my spec, or were ludicrously priced (the XPS series). Meanwhile, every Mac model was Bluetooth-capable. 802.11g doesn't get as much credit for this - backwards- and forwards-compatibilty of the two specs (b and g) meant that support was a no-brainer, but I still remember Apple making it standard on their systems when everyone else was providing it as an 'option' on some of the higher-end models.
Apple doesn't have to invent technologies, but they push the cutting edge with them. Compare this to Dell, which neither invents nor keeps up to date, but instead watches to see what customers are buying and then eventually decides to implement it.
Don't forget other first-to-market standard features, like gigabit ethernet, bluetooth, USB, 802.11g, and many other features that weren't standard until Apple started pushing them. Dell may not be Intel's lapdog necessarily (debatable), but they certainly aren't the innovators they claim to be.
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I've heard people say that sweat can be acidic, or that the oils are different for some people. Maybe that's true, maybe not, but I do know that I have to change the plastic watch strap I wear every year or so because it becomes brittle and cracks (other people can get away with the same strap for many years). I've even tried swapping to a silicone strap that is supposed to last a lifetime, and it is already hardening after 18 months.
The surface of the wrist-rests on my Aluminium Powerbook 12" is severely pitted. When I first got it, there was a slight nick in the wrist-rest on the left side. After six months of use, the area is very obviously dissolving. The right side is fine. I'm told this is because the surface of the aluminium is anodized, but if the surface is scratched, then the oils can get underneath and eat away at the aluminium, as well as eat it out from under the anodization (I assume).
Sad, but true.
- Reports about someone earning "X" per month are meaningless out of context. How much, exactly, do other workers in their locale earn? What is the overall cost of living? (Yes, I'm aware that the article makes reference to food and rent consuming "half" their salary.)
Perhaps tech workers are in a different situation, but until I got my current job (six weeks ago), food and rent was consuming more than half of my wages, and I was making better money than most people I know. Think of someone on minimum wage, making $8/hr working 30 hours/wk in Montreal, where rent is likely to cost you $300-400, food is likely to cost $100 if you're lucky, public transit is another $70, heating is $100/mo in winter, and in a bad month, you're suddenly paying $700 in recurring bills on $960/mo before taxes. I'm finally in a situation where food and shelter isn't taking the vast majority of my wages, and I'm breathing a lot easier because of it.
I read an article a week or so ago where someone mentioned that these sweat shops are welcomed by the local populace. Instead of selling their daughters into prostitution, people can get jobs at these factories, earning more money than they'd ever dreamed of, feeding their families well, and being far better off than they ever hoped, because of the huge disparity between our cost of living and theirs. These jobs are highly prized, and everyone wants their crack at them. By our standards, they're not fantastic, and it would be great if we could pay them all $20k/yr for their work, but think of what would happen if we did.
If we paid these people wages that are 'acceptable' by North American standards, without thinking about what the local income is, then the entire economical balance in the area would be destroyed. Suddenly, you would have people making tens or hundreds of times more than anyone else in their area, bringing in huge amounts of income. With the market prices in the areas, the people would have no normal outlet for their expenditures, so they would either end up buying up all the land, farms, and businesses in the area, or just stockpiling money. Great for the banks, bad for inflation. When market prices begin to rise because the income of these nouveau riche is destroying the balance, everyone who doesn't have one of these jobs is going to be SOL, because they won't be able to afford the cost of living in this new economy.
So before you make judgements for Apple contracting out to a company that hires a poor populace, take the time to find out the facts.
As much as I'd love to love Java, and as much as I know most people would if it truly delivered all that it promised, there are a lot of issues with it that can tend to cause problems. One example that bit my company:
d =4263113d =4912686
Our company writes and sells a large medical imaging archival system, and one of the components of it is a web-based front-end using Tomcat, which accesses the backend database for pretty much everything.
Recently a feature was added to our software which opens a database connection to the various other servers in the system to check the status of their queues. This worked fantastically in testing, but when it was deployed, we found sites whose frontend became completely unresponsive.
After some digging, our developers found these:
http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_i
http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_i
The long and the short of it is that JDBC calls (DriverManager.getConnection()) are sychronous, meaning that you can only be opening one connection at a time. This works fine in an ideal circumstance, but if one of the hosts you're trying to connect to happens to be off the network, then all threads in all apps in that JVM have to wait before they can open a connection.
As a result, when our background thread cycles through the databases to check the status of their queues and comes across a down server, DriverManager.getConnection() blocks - for three minutes! - while the TCP connection times out. This means that our entire application locks up completely, since every action requires a database connection. Sun's response?
'Introducing a change such as this risks breaking existing applications that have come to expect this behaviour.'
I like Java, but problems like this are just absurd. In C, I could either rewrite the library, or (preferably) change the source of the existing library. Failing that, I could fork separate processes instead of threads (ugly and inefficient). In Java, I don't have this option, because it affects the entire JVM. Fortunately, there is a workaround, but it's not a particularly fantastic one.
Java/C#/etc have a great deal of benefits over C/C++/etc, but there are always going to be problems as long as someone else decides what should be fixed and how. The real question is whether or not, for your application, the benefits outweigh the (potential) drawbacks.
I read an interview a while back (no source, sorry) with a game developer who was talking about the XBox 360. Their complaint was that even on dual-layer discs, they were already having to cram data in as tight as they could. Judging from how the XB/PS2/GameCube games progressed, getting more optimised and looking even better as developers figured out how to optimise the console, I'm inclined to agree with the developer's final conclusion - multi-DVD XB360 games are coming, and sooner than you think.
For the PS3, I'm expecting to see games with DVD-style 'bonus features', such as behind-the-scenes interviews, making-of, and so on, most of which these days goes on a separate DVD. This is the sort of thing that blu-ray will enable, whereas the XB360 will probably see multi-disc games, with bonus discs on top of that, in not too long of a time.
Waaaaay too many functions that are very inconsistent that would confuse someone who doesn't know which one to use.
Almost all of which are named exactly the same as the underlying library functions they represent (e.g. mysql_escape_string() and mysql_real_escape_string() are wrappers for the same functions in the mysql client library) - blame library developers for this one. The extension writers are consistent, it's their sources that aren't.
Magic quotes are sadly still there
And disabled by default. If you enable them, it's your own fault. If your hosting provider does, it's their fault. Don't blame PHP for having deprecated features that idiots can still enable.
I would learn something like Perl
Which doesn't have the (common in every other language) switch/case construct? Which has the do...unless construct, which I've never heard of before? Which keeps track of state like output buffering in variables like $| ? Perl may have its uses, but as a first language, I'd never recommend it in a million years. It's as though the language was designed to encourage bad habits, and that's not a first language I would recommend.
Laptops are highly specialized and customized marvels of engineering and required trick engineering just to get all of the pieces in the box (ever try disassembling one and getting it all back together?).
As a matter of fact, I have. I'd never buy a Dell laptop again, but the one thing I will say about it is that they are fantastically easy to service. After taking it apart twice for the experience (and to clean kool-aid out of the keyboard), I could have my Inspiron 5150 down to parts in five minutes, tops (not including removing the LCD panel from the lid). I was truly astonished at how easy it was to take that system apart, and more so how easy it was to put back together without having bits left over (which is more than I can say for my former boss's Satellite A70).
Dell seems to engineer their laptops for easy service, which is important because it seems like every other month something goes wrong with them. If you have the on-site service, however, getting them fixed is trivial, largely for this reason.
(yes, I know 5.0 has SPs, and InnoDB gives you transactions, but I said "standard fare")
What does this even mean? You know that they are available, but you don't want to use them? You don't support using the latest versions? You seem to want to imply something, but I can't figure out what it is.
For some purposes, widescreen is pretty nice. The problem I have is that the Dock takes up space along the bottom, so for a widescreen laptop, you're going to be lacking in vertical space for several reasons (iSight too), while having an abundance of horizontal (for Adium maybe? I dunno...)
Still, I'm going to get one as soon as I can afford to.
Many people turn off the polls, in part because of how stupid and irrelevant they usually are. Personally, I turn off the whole sidebar, as I find it incredibly useless. If this were a poll, I'd never know about it until it went live.
This could also be solved by setting the footer to 'clear: both;' which would put it below the longest floated box, whichever one that turns out to be.
If you're Calvin, this would be a great time to philosophize on the meaning of life and the socio-political ramifications of our day-to-day cultural biases and the actions we take because of them.
Add another $50 to the system and throw in a second controller (at maybe a $10 cost to them) and a first-party title (at maybe a $2 cost to them), call it a bundle, give them a Nintendo Power subscription, and you're sold. Your margins go up, your first-party launch title gets free sales and gets the word out there, and people don't get sticker shock at the register.
It wasn't long ago that the sickening sweetness of canned beverages just got too much for me, and I gave up on them entirely. I replaced them with drinks like coffee (well, lattes) and orange juice, but after a while of this, my digestive intolerance returned, and I've been unable to drink either of those as much as I used to.
Lately, I've started drinking gatorade. Six bucks for a pack of six bottles, tastes good but not too sweet, easy to drink, convenient size, and great after a run. Give it a try.
I was in Future Shop in an old (unfashionable) long-sleeved shirt, well-worn, and a pair of khakis that were wearing thin and hadn't been washed in a week. My hair was a mess, I felt like a wreck, and I looked like hell.... And someone still came up to me and asked if I worked there. I guess that's just how people are. Sigh.
I have the same powerbook, but my choice of phone was the RAZR. Why? It syncs/file transfers over bluetooth, it charges over USB, it acts as a modem, it syncs with iSync. It's an all-around great phone, and I'm glad I got it.
This is all on top of the fact that with bluetooth, you can do things like send/receive/archive SMS messages from your Powerbook (google BluePhoneElite), which is a handy feature if you send/receive a lot of messages - something I've started to do now that I have a phone with surprisingly good predictive text input.
The thing I like about bluetooth can be summarised by describing the setup that a guy I know had. All of his kit was bluetooth - phone, PDA, and laptop - and he had purchased a bluetooth headset. His phone stayed in his bag. When it rang, it rang in his ear; he would pull out his PDA to see who it was, and choose whether or not to accept the call (I you could also have your PDA ring, if you wanted to). When he wanted to make a call, he would pull out his PDA, choose someone out of the address book, and click 'Dial', and it would dial his cellphone. Very handy, and you don't have to have all your electronics within easy reach.
If you don't like the RAZR, the SLVR is also a nice phone, and has the benefit of iTunes capabilities (if this tickles your fancy), which is only available on some models of RAZR.
I personally feel that there are so many "disorders" these days, that people often find a crutch for every vice and desire. Instead of working tochange for the better, people say "That's the way I am... I can't change."
Some of these people may think this article proves that thought. I for one, feel it supports the opposite.
Regarding issues such as this as an excuse seems to be a common way of looking at it, and I'll admit to having seen things that way once as well, though I've had a change of heart recently.
I've never been able to follow through on things - I'll start a project but not finish it, I get distracted, I lose interest. I'm always doing a dozen things but I never finish any of them. The conclusion that I came to was that I was just a loser. I had no ambition, I had no drive, and I was never going to be able to see something through, so what was the point? I was just a hopeless, worthless excuse for a person.
Discovering that all of these things I thought were wrong with me were all symptoms of ADHD was a liberating experience. I'm not on Ritalin or any other kinds of medication for my condition (I'm considering talking to my doctor about it, to see if that would benefit me at all), but just knowing that the problems I have are not personal failures inherent to who I am, but instead are a disorder that prevents me from being who I am makes all the difference in the world.
No longer do I think of myself as just a worthless excuse of a person. Now I see that while I have problems, I can deal with them and learn to function normally. There's nothing wrong with me as a person, I just have challenges that have to be dealt with for me to be able to do what I want to do. I see the 'ADHD' classification, not as an excuse for my behavior, but as a challenge to overcome. Since this realisation, I haven't turned my life around, but things are going really well for me.
So for those whose first reaction is to say 'Oh, now people will use this as an excuse' - people will use anything as an excuse, it doesn't have to be medical. Someone in perfect health can have problems like this, and they'll find something to blame too. In the case of real medical problems, however, it's a relief, and can help people be MORE productive, and help them deal with their problems. Discoveries like this are a Good Thing.
Quite simply, a monolithic kernel like the one used in Linux or most of the other Open Source Unix clones is inherently two to three times faster for integer calculations than the Mach microkernel presently used in OS X 10.4. ... Apple has evidently reached the point where they need to trade claimed performance, -- typically based on floating-point operations that aren't a part of much web or database service -- for real performance.
In this amusing quote, Cringely is asserting that the mostly-microkernel architecture of Xnu is responsible for poor integer performance, which wrecks web/db performance, but does fine with floating-point operations. Makes sense to me!
Speeding-up performance is great, but normally a system vendor won't want to do that for older hardware, which might encourage some users to keep their old box and just add a new OS. But in this case, Apple HAS NO installed base of Intel Macs to worry about having to compete with, so speeding up the OS becomes a no-brainer, especially if it simultaneously encourages PowerPC owners to upgrade so they can share in the fun.
Apple already does make their OS releases faster from one to another - I don't know about other Apple policies, but the WebKit team, for example has a strict 'no performance regressions' policy which is enforced pretty well. It wouldn't surprise me to find the same is true of the rest of the OS and components. Asserting that Apple is so intent on selling new hardware that they would intentionally ignore potential performance improvements is ludicrous to say the least.
Your argument is flawed.
You compare a one-time service to a succession of purchases. If you fix my car I pay you once and I don't have to pay you ever again. If you buy my CD, you pay me once and don't have to pay me ever again.
People in this thread seem to be suggesting that an artist should only get paid once for a song. Ok, sure, so I create an album, I get paid for it (what, $15? for a year's work or more?) and then if I want any more money, I have to create a new album?
You're suggesting that patrons of the arts (as a whole) should only have to compensate an artist once. Should prints available at the Louvre be free? I mean, the artist has already been paid for their painting, right?
Without copyright licensing (and copyright expiration, grrr Disney), then the creative process becomes something that people can only do in their spare time, when they're not working at their day jobs. I hate to tell you, but making art is not exactly an easy process. You don't just sit down and think 'I know, I'll make a hit single!' and then spend a few hours a night for the rest of the week polishing it up. It takes hard work, it takes passion, it takes enthusiasm.
Suddenly we're back to the FSF's concept of software. People should never be paid to write software, it all wants to be free! So work shitty day jobs, and then write software in your spare time. The flaw in that analogy is that paid, directed work accomplishes more than loosely-organised communities of hackers ever have. Cases in point: Apache (Apache foundation), PHP (Zend), MySQL (MySQL AB), Linux (RedHat, Suse, IBM, Sun, etc), and so on).
So we should not contribute to the artists that make music we wish to listen to? They should give us their creativity for free? We should not have to pay for performances? If you honestly think this, then you don't understand what art is all about.
Apple is no longer relying on MS for a browser - why rely on MS for an office suite?
They're not.
ODF support would be nice though.
My questions are relating to the website - Why is it so slow, why did you switch to Rails, who wrote your search function such that it is incapable of locating a comic even if you type in a word in the comic title, and so on.
I want to know how much they paid for this terrible, worthless site redesign that they got, because if there's a market for shitty sites, I want to know what I should be charging.
Don't get me wrong, I love the comic, but ever since the new design came around, it's been almost completely impossible to find any of the old content.
No.
Token Ring is a great idea, in theory, but in the days of full-duplex GigE over Cat5e with 100 hosts on a segment, passing a token around is horribly inefficient, as well as pointless. We don't need it, so why use it? Old installations should have been replaced years ago, moved up to commodity ethernet hardware that everyone and their dog supports, for less than it costs to employ someone who knows about token ring.
Using sudo provides a host of benefits besides giving you root. Sudo allows you to grant access to specific users for specific commands, and then revoke those commands later. Compare this with giving the root password to everyone, which requires the password to be changed whenever someone leaves the company (or someone's root privs are revoked).
/home/myusername and not /root, meaning I can get to it later.
/var/www/certs/domainname/' and it doesn't give me an error, I know that the permissions are wrong on that directory (more of a reminder than anything). I've gotten so used to this on most systems that the series of commands I use to access the IMAP virtualhost directory is essentially 'cd /var/spool/postfix/virtual; sudo bash; cd /var/spool/postfix/virtual', which slows me down surprisingly not much.
I can grant access via sudo to users for specific commands, without giving them complete administrative access to the entire system.
When I'm using 'sudo' to do things, my environment stays the same. This means that my $PATH variable stays the same, and so does my prompt. It means that any time I say ~ it refers to
When I'm not using sudo and I do 'cd
It doesn't take much to hit the up arrow, Ctrl-A, type 'sudo ' and then hit enter if you find you need to.
I can set in ~/.bash_profile that I want rm to use -i by default (alias rm='rm -i') for safety, which carries over into my 'sudo' environment; doing this for root by default can cause e.g. cronjobs to hang, waiting for input that will never come.
The benefits of sudo are not limited to 'gaining root' - they are multitudinous, and apparently your coworkers have never considered versatility to be a benefit; nor, for that matter, have they done likewise for security. Perhaps they should be educated.
This article reminded me of a book that caught my attention in a bookstore quite some time ago, entitled The Customer Comes Second - I didn't get a chance to read it at the time, but the premise of the book seems to be pretty straightforward: take good care of your employees, and your employees will take good care of your customers.
Definitely an important idea for managers to learn. The American standard seems to be 'force all that you can out of your employees for the best interests of management', so this book was definitely an interesting sight to behold.
I would not give credit for 802.11g to Apple, or gigabit ethernet. Bluetooth is Nokia's baby, all the way through. USB is Wintel, pure and simple -- Apple was pushing firewire.
What you have to understand is that it's not about creating new technologies - it's about creating a market for new technologies. USB wasn't Apple's baby, but Apple was the first to push it with any degree of enthusiasm (iMac). Gigabit ethernet wasn't Apple's either, but they were the first to offer it on consumer-grade hardware (the Powerbook line and the Powermac line; later iBooks and iMacs).
Bluetooth is Nokia, sure, but when I was laptop shopping even in 2004, Dell didn't have any models I could afford that had a Bluetooth option. Their offerings were either sans-bluetooth, or were completely outside of my spec, or were ludicrously priced (the XPS series). Meanwhile, every Mac model was Bluetooth-capable. 802.11g doesn't get as much credit for this - backwards- and forwards-compatibilty of the two specs (b and g) meant that support was a no-brainer, but I still remember Apple making it standard on their systems when everyone else was providing it as an 'option' on some of the higher-end models.
Apple doesn't have to invent technologies, but they push the cutting edge with them. Compare this to Dell, which neither invents nor keeps up to date, but instead watches to see what customers are buying and then eventually decides to implement it.
Don't forget other first-to-market standard features, like gigabit ethernet, bluetooth, USB, 802.11g, and many other features that weren't standard until Apple started pushing them. Dell may not be Intel's lapdog necessarily (debatable), but they certainly aren't the innovators they claim to be.