At work, we just got a slew of Aopen XCCube machines (they were out of the white ones, so I got black), and I have to say, they're quite potent. Onboard gig-E, onboard SATA, DVD drive, and room for several HDs internally (and more if you get a stack of firewire enclosures and slap in some 300-500GB drives).
The machines are fast enough to do anything a fileserver would need (and then some) they're quiet, as they use Duron chips for low heat/power, and they look good enough to put on your desk or whever you want them (if you're so inclined).
Considering that the cost of these machines was $699 CDN ($570 US) for a full small package, I'm imprsesed. You could probably do better building one one your own with a large case, but for a place where space is an issue (or where you don't need THAT much HD space or don't want to build one), it's an interesting machine.
Just to provide an alternate viewpoint, I've been playing WoW since the Open Beta and have never had a single issue. I've never seen a quest that wouldn't complete, I'd never seen a queue until just the other day, and all-in-all, it's been a fantastic experience.
I think some servers just had it worse than others, but mine was a high-pop server, so who knows.
I don't agree with that at all. Evolution is a fact, it's been observed, and it happens, period.
Evolutionism, however, is a theory. The idea that humans evolved can easily be said to be a theory, the the process of evolution itself can be seen and observed. Bacteria mutate in the lab and in the real world in observable ways (resistance to antibiotics, for example) - this is evolution, on a microscopic scale.
If they had said 'human evolution is a (generally accepted) theory' blah blah, then I'd be happy with that.
The guns can store multiple profiles. Civilians most likely shouldn't be using a police officer's service pistol in any circumstance. Most civilians (even those who have a license) aren't properly trained enough to make good snap decisions, and most would deal poorly (emotionally speaking) if they did manage to get a shot off and killed the individual (or even worse, a bystander).
Of course, some people wouldn't feel bad about killing others. Those people are called sociopaths.
The question that needs to be asked is which direction does it error in? Does it allow 10% of bad-users to fire the weapon, or does it prevent 10% of good-users from firing the weapon? If it's the latter, then yes, but if it's the former, that's another matter entirely. Not perfect, but a lot better than 100%.
I wonder how long it will take before everyone has been to prison at least once. Maybe the US could save time and trouble by making everyone server 4 years in prison, just like other countries require manditory military service. You could be exempted if you give something back to your country instead, like joining the military or being rich, or the son or daughter of someone rich. It would save a lot of the judicial system's time, anyway.
This is obviously a troll but I will reply anyway.
IE's support for technologies usually encompasses the latest technologies, just not completely. IE's support for CSS1 is spotty, yes, but it does have support for CSS2 - which also is spotty. Still, IE tends to support the majority of any given technology, just not completely or correctly.
IE will support CSS3, as long as CSS3 is ratified before Longhorn goes gold. Its support will be poor at first, and people will complain, and then it will get better, but it will be there.
Besides which, web developers should be using the new technologies the way they are supposed to be used, and if users aren't getting the whole picture, they can switch. Idealistic, yes, but now that Firefox is getting headway, it's not entirely unrealistic.
Frankly, if you can be run out of business by a state run corporation you really don't deserver to be in business at all.
Frankly, if you can be run out of business by one single website open-sourcing their code, you really don't deserve to be in business at all.
Specifically, if your software's usefulness is so precarious that a little-known website (globally speaking) open-sourcing their code can put a dent in your customer base, you have problems.
In my capacity as a web developer, here are the software packages that I feel you should have a firm understanding of:
XHTML - not just 'HTML', XHTML has a few changes that you should get used to (such as closing all tags, even <img src="..."/> and <br/> tags, and all tags being lowercase). For the upcoming specifications, such as XHTML 2.0, which will be very different (you can apply an href="..." property to ANY object, instead of having to wrap it in an <a href=..."> tag), it never hurts to be prepared.
CSS3 - May as well read up now, it's going to be relevant in not too long.
Photoshop - Use The GIMP if you must, but I find Photoshop generally does what I need it to with less hassle.
PHP, ASP, Coldfusion, and J2EE - You don't have to learn how to program in each one, but learn about these solutions, if for no other reason than to make compelling arguments against them if the bosses ever ask you about them (or worse, fail to ask you about them)
Apache and IIS - for the same reasons as listed above; also, a lot of things in Apache (mod_rewrite, for example) can help you solve problems down the road. Good things to know.
A good editor. I use ViM myself, but what you use is up to you. What you'll want is syntax highlighting, auto-indenting, and a powerful (preferably regex) search/replace. Learn to use your editor and you will save hours of work with seconds of typing.
And now for some soft skills. First, you'll need to learn to give effective presentations. You could use Powerpoint for this, or Keynote or Impress or just print them on transparencies and put them on an overhead projector. How you do it is up to you. Will you ever need to give presentations? Not really, but effective presentations require a lot of soft skills - eye contact, graphic design, pacing, speech tones, body language - that to be skilled in presentations in general means to be skilled in a lot of other areas.
You should also familiarize yourself with colour. Learn about Pantone, just so that you know about it. Learn how colours play off each other, which colors look good on which backgrounds. Learn about bordering, whitespace, balance, and form. Consider the Pantone Guide to Communicating with Color - out of 61 reader reviews, it got 4.5/5 stars, and is a good place to start.
Learn about logos. How companies make logos, and why. What goes into making a logo, subconscious suggestions from logos (there's a reason Playboy picked a bunny for their logo, and it's not obvious). This will help in your graphic design and page layout.
I'm probably missing a ton of important stuff, but if you do it right and are willing to learn (and posting on slashdot seems to imply that), you'll probably learn what you need to know as you go. If not, just come back and post another Ask Slashdot.
The first computer I used with any regularity was a Mac Plus, with one 3.5", 400K disk drive, and no hard drive. It had SCSI, so you could add one pretty easily, but it didn't have one.
My next was a Mac SE, with a 20 megabyte hard drive and an 800K disk drive. After that was the 386SX with the 80MB hard drive.
I remember the first time I ever heard the word gigabyte. My uncle had a Giga-ROM CD for Mac - 650 megs of archives, over a gigabyte of software on one disc! It took me forever to look through a tenth of what was on the disc. As if CDs weren't big enough already! I'd never even filled up the 20 MB drive the Mac had (until then).
One Christmas morning, I opened one of my presents to discover - joy of joys! - a 1.7GB hard drive! along with my wavetable sound card, my 56k modem, and my ATI All-in-Wonder Pro, and the P75 chip and 16 megs of ram I'd upgraded to, my system was now complete! Finally, I could play games, listen to MP3s, it was on baby!
So for anyone who says 'so what?', that's what. This is a major milestone. Just the other day, I was looking at 200G drives, wondering when I fell so far out of the loop that I hadn't heard about them when they came out. The last I'd heard was 120G, and now that I've gotten over the shock of 200G and am working on 300G, we have half-terabyte drives.
I grew up in the computer age, and I still can't keep up with the pace of technological innovation and advancement. Any time I think I have a grasp on what we can do, I find out we can do something twice as fast, with more storage, and more lickable widgets. Once I get over that, I'm awestruck with ideas of the things that we'll be seeing on slashdot within a few years, if that. Carbon nanotubes? Two years ago, I didn't know they could make those (never heard of the idea), but now they're talking about making monitors out of them? I'm still waiting for OLEDs, and we've already got something that might well be better.
This is why I come to Slashdot: the latest and greatest, the bleeding, hemophiliac edge. If the pace of today's rapid technological innovation doesn't excite you, you're on the wrong website.
Are you implying that allowing users to post torrents (that other users use to illegaly download infringing files) shouldn't be illegal? This is basically 'accessory to piracy', and 'accessory to x', where x is a crime, is usually a crime as well.
It's not like they're arresting the authors of Bittornado and Bittorrent (programs that arguably are used more for piracy than anything else). They're shutting down sites that directly facilitate piracy, making the trading of millions of dollars worth of bytes into a matter of minutes.
Now, whether or not piracy is as big of a problem for them as they make it out to be is a different matter (would I buy Virtual PC 2005 if I couldn't download it? not a chance, but I can get Stargate seasons for free and I buy the DVDs instead), but as it is, these sites are directly, intentionally, and knowingly facilitating colossal amounts of piracy, while at the same time rarely distributing legal, noninfringing downloads.
I'm no fan of the MPAA/RIAA/BSA, don't get me wrong. I'm pretty sure they're scum, not even at the level of the scum you find in your mouth the morning after a major bender. Still, I'm not going to cry for people knowingly and willingly helping people break the law. I wish suprnova was back up, but it's no violation of anyone's rights to shut them or any other tracker down.
I don't know much about DiVX so comments would be appreciated
According to doom9, you'd be looking at using XviD or NeroDigital (depending on your preferences). You could probably cut the average movie down to a gig of absurdly-good-(for-ripped-movies)-quality or so, if you so desired. You could even (if you so chose) keep the subtitles, separate audio tracks, etc. by using a container format like Matroska or Ogg if you so chose. I mean really, another 5.1 or 7.1 channel audio track won't take up THAT much space. For the content I store, anyway, I'd at least keep subtites and the Japanese and English language tracks.
If you wanted to get crazy with it, you could set up VideoLAN and then just make streaming requests over the network for whatever you want (VideoLAN primer article). After you had that set up, you could throw a (few) TV tuner card(s) with hardware MPEG encode and stream TV channels around the house as well. Throw in another TV card to act as your TiVo to record/encode/archive programmes and add them to the collection to be indexed, allowing them to be streamed on demand.
With 2.5 terabytes of space, you could do a LOT of archiving. Once you figure out how to get the system set up to do everything I discribed above, you'd be set until well after we start seeing 1GB drives for $200 or less, at which point you can upgrade to 5GB and onward.
And without giving too much away, the GenuineCheck program that it offers for download (if you're not using IE) doesn't really do its job. I mean, I DO have a licensed Windows product key, I just didn't use it for this install. Still, it didn't seem to pick up on that.
Or maybe the goons are on their way as we speak. Who knows.
You seem to imply that running a deficit means that he is socialist. That doesn't make any sense at all. Canada is running a budget surplus, and has been for years.
Government spending money is not socialism, that's what governments do. Otherwise, they wouldn't be of any use at all. Bush, however, is not spending it on social policies, he's burning it in the name of national defense, something that, no matter anyone's opinion, governments SHOULD spend money on. Just... not that much, and not so wastefully.
When I was working at the local Starbucks, we were trying to figure out the best way to arrange the furniture in the cozy little nook with the fireplace. Every time I suggested something that would work great, the manager would say 'Yeah, that would be great, except it's blocking the outlets.'
It was not entirely unusual to see three or four people with laptops there. Some would plug in, some wouldn't, but any were welcome to if they were sitting near an outlet.
If you've eaten part of the pizza, and/or the pizza is not freshly goopy, and/or the pizza's toppings are relatively firmly affixed to the crust, this is not a problem.
One New Year's, a friend and I took a half a pizza into a movie theatre, with the box tucked securely under my arm. We got some weird looks (one employee almost walked into a customer while she was looking at me) but no one said anything, and the pizza remained in excellent eating condition.
When I was young and living with my parents (which admittedly wasn't that long ago), I used to always take my supper back to my room so I could keep programming/chatting/studying my CCNA/etc. Without fail, my stepfather would tell me 'you should come eat with us and spend time with your family'.
Of course, all they ever did was sit in front of the TV and watch the news that I had been reading about on cbc.ca and canada.com all day, and if I tried to talk at any point other than the commercials, I was shushed.
I honestly get the feeling that this is how most families are nowadays. Socializing means zombifying yourself in front of the TV with others. Despite my family's wishes, I'd always choose to talk to people than 'socialize'.
The local school board was throwing out a bunch of hardware years ago, and the IT guy there was the leader of our local computer club. The equipment was being stored at a Telus warehouse. Anyone who wanted anything was welcome to help themselves before noon when the garbage truck dropped by.
I and a friend skipped school that morning, and my mother drove us there to load up the car with whatever we could salvage for ourselves. Among the treasures was various Mac LC IIs and IIIs, some strange monitors I'd never seen (come to find out they had the old coax-style RGB connections, I had no idea), and so on.
Lo and behold, mine eyes did not deceive me - a 512k mac sitting there, all alone. I immediately put it in the pile to be salvaged. And another! And - treasure of treasures - a 128k! Two! They went in the pile as well.
Of all the loot we found that day, including a ton of ram, a few motherboards, and some various hard drives, those four machines were our treasures. We decided to split them, one of each for myself and my friend.
It was only when we got home that we discovered none of them had gotten loaded into the car.
Still, it was very exciting to behold, a piece of history was in my hands, and that in itself is worth the trouble.
However I've installed Firefox on ten different distros (probably more now) and never once seen an icon for it appear automatically in my GNOME menu.
I recently installed the latest Debian (Sarge) into a virtual machine, and to my unending surprise, whenever I installed something via apt-get, it appeared immediately in my GNOME menu. I was very shocked, I'm not used to that kind of usability on linux, but the latest Debian has a ton of enhancements that make it almost ready for prime-time. Very exciting.
Ideally all confi files would follow the same format and syntax (god no please don't say XML).
Now, I understand that XML is overhyped - when you see a two-inch-thick book on a file format, you know you're in deep - but hype aside, why not?
A lot of people say XML is harder to parse, more complex, etc. etc. You pretty much have to use external libraries, it takes longer to parse things, and so on. This is true, but doesn't matter, because the increase in time is trivial.
XML has a lot of benefits to it. After a DTD is established for how config files should work (OS X does this), then all config files behave the same. Once this is possible, then you can have one configuration interface for EVERYTHING on the systme (as well as being able to change configuration options from inside the program). Any program would be able to modify any config file, because all the information they need would be there already.
This could lead to an actual useful configuration interface (think YaST) for linux/unix systems - and let's face it, there's a lot to configure with these systems.
Config files could be validated automatically by the system. No more missing a ; in bind.conf and wiping 250 domains off the server - that's braindead. Still, for a lot of config file formats, there's no certain way for the program to know if the config is messed up. With a standardized XML interface, each program could just run the system validation routine on the file (or the user could run it him/herself manually).
Aside from all this, is capable of doing things like heirarchical data (i.e. websites -> darien.ca -> sites.darien.ca -> allowed hosts) instead of just flat files. Any other heirarchial config file formats I've seen usually end up a lot like XML anyway (Apache's config files are almost, but not quite, completely unlike XML - yet they still use tags, but only sometimes, but you don't have to, but you should, but not always).
Yes, anything XML does can be duplicated with another format - but the XML spec does so much that we would want that we would be reinventing the wheel. Maybe you don't like XML, and sure it's not always pretty to look at, but it's here, it's done, it works, and it's a standard. There's really no good reason I can think of not to use it.
This reminded me of another option for those running XP Pro, 2k, or 2k3 - Microsoft's Services for Unix. NFS client/server, suppord for unix on the command-line, and quite a lot of other neat stuff.
I concur on this part. Photoshop has been developed over the last 14 years to be the world's premiere image-editing program, by professionals for professionals. It has power, extensibility, and ease of use attached to its name, can open more image formats than I'm aware of, processes images surprisingly fast, is stable, can do batch jobs, etc.
GIMP has all of this except for ease of use. The right-click menus are a pain (I expect right-click to give me a contextual menu, not the only menu), the toolbars-as-separate-windows idea is cumbersome, and the single-document interface is a pain and slows down my working time.
If the GIMP wants a good interface, the parent has the right suggestion: make it look, work, and feel like Photoshop, minus inconsistancies/annoyances (I can't think of any, but people probably have some I haven't encountered). Copy it feature-for-feature, make it look-alike and work-alike, put menu items in the same-named menus, and then maybe, just maybe, the pros will be willing to switch.
Then all Linux will need is an InDesign clone, a Final Cut Pro clone, and a few others, and professional graphics and video artists can start switching over.
Slashdot Mirror
At work, we just got a slew of Aopen XCCube machines (they were out of the white ones, so I got black), and I have to say, they're quite potent. Onboard gig-E, onboard SATA, DVD drive, and room for several HDs internally (and more if you get a stack of firewire enclosures and slap in some 300-500GB drives).
The machines are fast enough to do anything a fileserver would need (and then some) they're quiet, as they use Duron chips for low heat/power, and they look good enough to put on your desk or whever you want them (if you're so inclined).
Considering that the cost of these machines was $699 CDN ($570 US) for a full small package, I'm imprsesed. You could probably do better building one one your own with a large case, but for a place where space is an issue (or where you don't need THAT much HD space or don't want to build one), it's an interesting machine.
Just to provide an alternate viewpoint, I've been playing WoW since the Open Beta and have never had a single issue. I've never seen a quest that wouldn't complete, I'd never seen a queue until just the other day, and all-in-all, it's been a fantastic experience.
I think some servers just had it worse than others, but mine was a high-pop server, so who knows.
I don't agree with that at all. Evolution is a fact, it's been observed, and it happens, period.
Evolutionism, however, is a theory. The idea that humans evolved can easily be said to be a theory, the the process of evolution itself can be seen and observed. Bacteria mutate in the lab and in the real world in observable ways (resistance to antibiotics, for example) - this is evolution, on a microscopic scale.
If they had said 'human evolution is a (generally accepted) theory' blah blah, then I'd be happy with that.
The guns can store multiple profiles. Civilians most likely shouldn't be using a police officer's service pistol in any circumstance. Most civilians (even those who have a license) aren't properly trained enough to make good snap decisions, and most would deal poorly (emotionally speaking) if they did manage to get a shot off and killed the individual (or even worse, a bystander).
Of course, some people wouldn't feel bad about killing others. Those people are called sociopaths.
The question that needs to be asked is which direction does it error in? Does it allow 10% of bad-users to fire the weapon, or does it prevent 10% of good-users from firing the weapon? If it's the latter, then yes, but if it's the former, that's another matter entirely. Not perfect, but a lot better than 100%.
I wonder how long it will take before everyone has been to prison at least once. Maybe the US could save time and trouble by making everyone server 4 years in prison, just like other countries require manditory military service. You could be exempted if you give something back to your country instead, like joining the military or being rich, or the son or daughter of someone rich. It would save a lot of the judicial system's time, anyway.
This is obviously a troll but I will reply anyway.
IE's support for technologies usually encompasses the latest technologies, just not completely. IE's support for CSS1 is spotty, yes, but it does have support for CSS2 - which also is spotty. Still, IE tends to support the majority of any given technology, just not completely or correctly.
IE will support CSS3, as long as CSS3 is ratified before Longhorn goes gold. Its support will be poor at first, and people will complain, and then it will get better, but it will be there.
Besides which, web developers should be using the new technologies the way they are supposed to be used, and if users aren't getting the whole picture, they can switch. Idealistic, yes, but now that Firefox is getting headway, it's not entirely unrealistic.
Frankly, if you can be run out of business by a state run corporation you really don't deserver to be in business at all.
Frankly, if you can be run out of business by one single website open-sourcing their code, you really don't deserve to be in business at all.
Specifically, if your software's usefulness is so precarious that a little-known website (globally speaking) open-sourcing their code can put a dent in your customer base, you have problems.
In my capacity as a web developer, here are the software packages that I feel you should have a firm understanding of:
And now for some soft skills. First, you'll need to learn to give effective presentations. You could use Powerpoint for this, or Keynote or Impress or just print them on transparencies and put them on an overhead projector. How you do it is up to you. Will you ever need to give presentations? Not really, but effective presentations require a lot of soft skills - eye contact, graphic design, pacing, speech tones, body language - that to be skilled in presentations in general means to be skilled in a lot of other areas.
You should also familiarize yourself with colour. Learn about Pantone, just so that you know about it. Learn how colours play off each other, which colors look good on which backgrounds. Learn about bordering, whitespace, balance, and form. Consider the Pantone Guide to Communicating with Color - out of 61 reader reviews, it got 4.5/5 stars, and is a good place to start.
Learn about logos. How companies make logos, and why. What goes into making a logo, subconscious suggestions from logos (there's a reason Playboy picked a bunny for their logo, and it's not obvious). This will help in your graphic design and page layout.
Learn about accessibility and colour-blindness.
I'm probably missing a ton of important stuff, but if you do it right and are willing to learn (and posting on slashdot seems to imply that), you'll probably learn what you need to know as you go. If not, just come back and post another Ask Slashdot.
The first computer I used with any regularity was a Mac Plus, with one 3.5", 400K disk drive, and no hard drive. It had SCSI, so you could add one pretty easily, but it didn't have one.
My next was a Mac SE, with a 20 megabyte hard drive and an 800K disk drive. After that was the 386SX with the 80MB hard drive.
I remember the first time I ever heard the word gigabyte. My uncle had a Giga-ROM CD for Mac - 650 megs of archives, over a gigabyte of software on one disc! It took me forever to look through a tenth of what was on the disc. As if CDs weren't big enough already! I'd never even filled up the 20 MB drive the Mac had (until then).
One Christmas morning, I opened one of my presents to discover - joy of joys! - a 1.7GB hard drive! along with my wavetable sound card, my 56k modem, and my ATI All-in-Wonder Pro, and the P75 chip and 16 megs of ram I'd upgraded to, my system was now complete! Finally, I could play games, listen to MP3s, it was on baby!
So for anyone who says 'so what?', that's what. This is a major milestone. Just the other day, I was looking at 200G drives, wondering when I fell so far out of the loop that I hadn't heard about them when they came out. The last I'd heard was 120G, and now that I've gotten over the shock of 200G and am working on 300G, we have half-terabyte drives.
I grew up in the computer age, and I still can't keep up with the pace of technological innovation and advancement. Any time I think I have a grasp on what we can do, I find out we can do something twice as fast, with more storage, and more lickable widgets. Once I get over that, I'm awestruck with ideas of the things that we'll be seeing on slashdot within a few years, if that. Carbon nanotubes? Two years ago, I didn't know they could make those (never heard of the idea), but now they're talking about making monitors out of them? I'm still waiting for OLEDs, and we've already got something that might well be better.
This is why I come to Slashdot: the latest and greatest, the bleeding, hemophiliac edge. If the pace of today's rapid technological innovation doesn't excite you, you're on the wrong website.
Are you implying that allowing users to post torrents (that other users use to illegaly download infringing files) shouldn't be illegal? This is basically 'accessory to piracy', and 'accessory to x', where x is a crime, is usually a crime as well.
It's not like they're arresting the authors of Bittornado and Bittorrent (programs that arguably are used more for piracy than anything else). They're shutting down sites that directly facilitate piracy, making the trading of millions of dollars worth of bytes into a matter of minutes.
Now, whether or not piracy is as big of a problem for them as they make it out to be is a different matter (would I buy Virtual PC 2005 if I couldn't download it? not a chance, but I can get Stargate seasons for free and I buy the DVDs instead), but as it is, these sites are directly, intentionally, and knowingly facilitating colossal amounts of piracy, while at the same time rarely distributing legal, noninfringing downloads.
I'm no fan of the MPAA/RIAA/BSA, don't get me wrong. I'm pretty sure they're scum, not even at the level of the scum you find in your mouth the morning after a major bender. Still, I'm not going to cry for people knowingly and willingly helping people break the law. I wish suprnova was back up, but it's no violation of anyone's rights to shut them or any other tracker down.
I don't know much about DiVX so comments would be appreciated
According to doom9, you'd be looking at using XviD or NeroDigital (depending on your preferences). You could probably cut the average movie down to a gig of absurdly-good-(for-ripped-movies)-quality or so, if you so desired. You could even (if you so chose) keep the subtitles, separate audio tracks, etc. by using a container format like Matroska or Ogg if you so chose. I mean really, another 5.1 or 7.1 channel audio track won't take up THAT much space. For the content I store, anyway, I'd at least keep subtites and the Japanese and English language tracks.
If you wanted to get crazy with it, you could set up VideoLAN and then just make streaming requests over the network for whatever you want (VideoLAN primer article). After you had that set up, you could throw a (few) TV tuner card(s) with hardware MPEG encode and stream TV channels around the house as well. Throw in another TV card to act as your TiVo to record/encode/archive programmes and add them to the collection to be indexed, allowing them to be streamed on demand.
With 2.5 terabytes of space, you could do a LOT of archiving. Once you figure out how to get the system set up to do everything I discribed above, you'd be set until well after we start seeing 1GB drives for $200 or less, at which point you can upgrade to 5GB and onward.
That'd be pretty cool, actually.
And without giving too much away, the GenuineCheck program that it offers for download (if you're not using IE) doesn't really do its job. I mean, I DO have a licensed Windows product key, I just didn't use it for this install. Still, it didn't seem to pick up on that.
Or maybe the goons are on their way as we speak. Who knows.
You seem to imply that running a deficit means that he is socialist. That doesn't make any sense at all. Canada is running a budget surplus, and has been for years.
Government spending money is not socialism, that's what governments do. Otherwise, they wouldn't be of any use at all. Bush, however, is not spending it on social policies, he's burning it in the name of national defense, something that, no matter anyone's opinion, governments SHOULD spend money on. Just... not that much, and not so wastefully.
When I was working at the local Starbucks, we were trying to figure out the best way to arrange the furniture in the cozy little nook with the fireplace. Every time I suggested something that would work great, the manager would say 'Yeah, that would be great, except it's blocking the outlets.'
It was not entirely unusual to see three or four people with laptops there. Some would plug in, some wouldn't, but any were welcome to if they were sitting near an outlet.
When I first started reading that post, the first thing that came to mind was 'Are you a bad enough dude to rescue Jordan Mechner?'
I guess I'm a little TOO oldschool.
If you've eaten part of the pizza, and/or the pizza is not freshly goopy, and/or the pizza's toppings are relatively firmly affixed to the crust, this is not a problem.
One New Year's, a friend and I took a half a pizza into a movie theatre, with the box tucked securely under my arm. We got some weird looks (one employee almost walked into a customer while she was looking at me) but no one said anything, and the pizza remained in excellent eating condition.
When I was young and living with my parents (which admittedly wasn't that long ago), I used to always take my supper back to my room so I could keep programming/chatting/studying my CCNA/etc. Without fail, my stepfather would tell me 'you should come eat with us and spend time with your family'.
Of course, all they ever did was sit in front of the TV and watch the news that I had been reading about on cbc.ca and canada.com all day, and if I tried to talk at any point other than the commercials, I was shushed.
I honestly get the feeling that this is how most families are nowadays. Socializing means zombifying yourself in front of the TV with others. Despite my family's wishes, I'd always choose to talk to people than 'socialize'.
The local school board was throwing out a bunch of hardware years ago, and the IT guy there was the leader of our local computer club. The equipment was being stored at a Telus warehouse. Anyone who wanted anything was welcome to help themselves before noon when the garbage truck dropped by.
I and a friend skipped school that morning, and my mother drove us there to load up the car with whatever we could salvage for ourselves. Among the treasures was various Mac LC IIs and IIIs, some strange monitors I'd never seen (come to find out they had the old coax-style RGB connections, I had no idea), and so on.
Lo and behold, mine eyes did not deceive me - a 512k mac sitting there, all alone. I immediately put it in the pile to be salvaged. And another! And - treasure of treasures - a 128k! Two! They went in the pile as well.
Of all the loot we found that day, including a ton of ram, a few motherboards, and some various hard drives, those four machines were our treasures. We decided to split them, one of each for myself and my friend.
It was only when we got home that we discovered none of them had gotten loaded into the car.
Still, it was very exciting to behold, a piece of history was in my hands, and that in itself is worth the trouble.
However I've installed Firefox on ten different distros (probably more now) and never once seen an icon for it appear automatically in my GNOME menu.
I recently installed the latest Debian (Sarge) into a virtual machine, and to my unending surprise, whenever I installed something via apt-get, it appeared immediately in my GNOME menu. I was very shocked, I'm not used to that kind of usability on linux, but the latest Debian has a ton of enhancements that make it almost ready for prime-time. Very exciting.
Well, not to be taciturn, but the only thing I really have to say to this is 'OS X'.
Ideally all confi files would follow the same format and syntax (god no please don't say XML).
Now, I understand that XML is overhyped - when you see a two-inch-thick book on a file format, you know you're in deep - but hype aside, why not?
A lot of people say XML is harder to parse, more complex, etc. etc. You pretty much have to use external libraries, it takes longer to parse things, and so on. This is true, but doesn't matter, because the increase in time is trivial.
XML has a lot of benefits to it. After a DTD is established for how config files should work (OS X does this), then all config files behave the same. Once this is possible, then you can have one configuration interface for EVERYTHING on the systme (as well as being able to change configuration options from inside the program). Any program would be able to modify any config file, because all the information they need would be there already.
This could lead to an actual useful configuration interface (think YaST) for linux/unix systems - and let's face it, there's a lot to configure with these systems.
Config files could be validated automatically by the system. No more missing a ; in bind.conf and wiping 250 domains off the server - that's braindead. Still, for a lot of config file formats, there's no certain way for the program to know if the config is messed up. With a standardized XML interface, each program could just run the system validation routine on the file (or the user could run it him/herself manually).
Aside from all this, is capable of doing things like heirarchical data (i.e. websites -> darien.ca -> sites.darien.ca -> allowed hosts) instead of just flat files. Any other heirarchial config file formats I've seen usually end up a lot like XML anyway (Apache's config files are almost, but not quite, completely unlike XML - yet they still use tags, but only sometimes, but you don't have to, but you should, but not always).
Yes, anything XML does can be duplicated with another format - but the XML spec does so much that we would want that we would be reinventing the wheel. Maybe you don't like XML, and sure it's not always pretty to look at, but it's here, it's done, it works, and it's a standard. There's really no good reason I can think of not to use it.
This reminded me of another option for those running XP Pro, 2k, or 2k3 - Microsoft's Services for Unix. NFS client/server, suppord for unix on the command-line, and quite a lot of other neat stuff.
BSPlayer http://www.bsplayer.org/
I concur on this part. Photoshop has been developed over the last 14 years to be the world's premiere image-editing program, by professionals for professionals. It has power, extensibility, and ease of use attached to its name, can open more image formats than I'm aware of, processes images surprisingly fast, is stable, can do batch jobs, etc.
GIMP has all of this except for ease of use. The right-click menus are a pain (I expect right-click to give me a contextual menu, not the only menu), the toolbars-as-separate-windows idea is cumbersome, and the single-document interface is a pain and slows down my working time.
If the GIMP wants a good interface, the parent has the right suggestion: make it look, work, and feel like Photoshop, minus inconsistancies/annoyances (I can't think of any, but people probably have some I haven't encountered). Copy it feature-for-feature, make it look-alike and work-alike, put menu items in the same-named menus, and then maybe, just maybe, the pros will be willing to switch.
Then all Linux will need is an InDesign clone, a Final Cut Pro clone, and a few others, and professional graphics and video artists can start switching over.