Who's up for guessing what the difference is between Windows 7 'Starter' and Windows 7 'Home Basic?'"
Ok, I'll have a go:
About $120 - the price you pay for an upgrade from the OEM-bundled "Starter" to the "Home Basic" which you need to get anything meaningful done that's a tiny bit more demanding than minesweeper.
Oh yes, absolutely. Just think of the chiiiildren. Remove from sight what offends you and everything will be fine. You can't change human nature, but you can push it underground, into repression, where you can then capitalise on it. That's been modus operandi of the catholic church and every other conservative power group for at least a thousand years, probably a lot more.
See, removing child porn from the Internet is so much more important than actually finding and locking up the people who produce it. And filtering out the blood from a shooter is a lot better, and also easier, than stopping to think that you're, you know, like shooting people, blood or no blood.
In fact, there's some research out there (not undisputed I should say, to be totally honest) that indicates that displays of "clean violence" is more likely to result in actions of violence than splatter, blood and gore, because the consequences of violence are hidden and thus don't enter consideration as much.
It's a well-researched fact that scarcity rises demand. The checkout thing was just one illustration of that. Luxury goods are another, maybe closer to your OS example, if you like. The reason why diamonds or gold or whatever are expensive, and the reason why designer shoes and clothes, jewellery, etc. are both expensive and in high demand, is scarcity.
Do we really have to archive everything? Does it serve a purpose, besides just wanting to do it because we can?
Seriously, I found that regarding my personal affairs, the less stuff I keep around, the better things work out. Yeah, every once in a blue moon I might need that e-mail from last month. But frankly, the damage of keeping thousands of mails I'll never look at again is higher than the damage of not finding an old one every now and then.
Same for physical papers.
Memorablia can be a nice touch to your flat, but if there are too many, they too burden you down. I'd rather get new things into my life than spending it managing all the old things.
And the one thing about the Web that I like is that it can be so easily changed, that I can go to the same URL every day and always get current information. That's what makes it more useful than a newspaper or most books, except for the convenience factor sometimes (books are still better to read than screens).
Errr... no? There are entire economies built around the fact that you are wrong. The garbage bins near the checkout counter in pretty much every large store are the most visible stuff. They're called "impulse goods" in the industry (though I'm not sure if that's the actual english term, I only know the german one that would translate as such). This is the crap that people buy while waiting, on the "looks nice" impulse, without considering whether or not they really need it.
In economics, it's generally known that reduced supply creates more demand, simply by the fact that we are "wired" to believe that rare equals valuable. It's also generally known that you can artifically create scarcity, to boost demand. That's the theory behind all the "just this week" or "sale ends on 31st" or even "only as long as supply lasts" sales labels.
Wikipedia was an interesting experiment. With the stress on experiment. It taught us the Do's and Dont's of a massive collaboration effort.
However, as with all experiments, lots of things turned out to be different than we thought, or more difficult. Wikipedia suffers badly from the grey areas around its core idea. Deletionism is the most famous one - the fact alone that even after years of discussion there is no consensus should serve to illustrate that there's still something to be done here. Edit Wars are another topic of that kind. There's obviously a problem here, and no one has found a solution so far.
What has been done for the past two years or so is patchwork. It reminds me of DOS/Windos. You've got something that through luck and being there at the right time exploded into this huge, dominant system, and now you're stuck with all the legacy crap.
Enforcement is mostly based on fear. If you aren't on the licence database they will write to you every three-ish months with one of a rotating set of letters.
The fear works both ways, though. Many years ago I was tired of that and wrote them a stern letter essentially saying "don't contact me unless I contact you first" as well as the keywords "harrassment", "lawyer" and "lawsuit".
Never heard from them again, for almost ten years now.
Psychologically, I say this is the extreme conversatives who would really like to outlaw nudity, masturbation and while we're at it, even thinking about sex. Since they can't, they are looking for alternatives.
Stripping away all the legality nonsense, what they've done is outlawing the naked human body, at least as long as it's young. That's a step in the "proper" (according to their belief) direction.
There is no thought about "harm" because it is replaced by a strong belief that there is "irrepairable moral harm". And by "strong belief" I mean "belief that is unimpressed by proof".
That's an important step in legal history. Finally the courts have arrived at where we around here have been for years. But what the courts think matters, what we think matters little, in the context of immediate real-world impact.
It's a good thing, and it takes away the RIAA/MPAA's most important FUD element.
I'm certain, in another 3-4 years, the media will arrive at where the courts are now, and stop spreading the RIAA/MPAA FUD unchecked.
However, it ignores rotation. It can keep relative velocity, but without force being applied, it won't keep relative rotation. So for that one minute it "skips", it should not rotate, arriving in some kind of odd orientation, moving into a slightly different direction than it originally did.
While it does look interesting, I do wonder whether the core idea, that a browser is enough, really is solid. I knew it was Netscape's dream once, but did it work out?
When I think about what I do, certainly Firefox gets a lot of time. However, there's a lot of PDF content out there that I want to view and/or print - does this device do that? That's not an unusual usage scenario, btw. - when you book online tickets, or buy stuff online, very often you get the ticket and/or receipt in.pdf format. Then there's the whole "download" scenario. Does it do that? Lots of people come across cool stuff they want to download. It doesn't have to launch Keynote, sorry OpenOffice or whatever the external App is, but at least ''saving'' something to an external shared device would be a requirement. Then there's mail. There are still people around who don't use webmail, you know?
So, I quite like the idea, but I do wonder whether '''just''' the browser isn't a little too little.
With management, it's not what is being asked, but who is asking.
So get the CEO on your side. Have him send out the policy with a friendly request to please read it and a just as friendly notice that he expects everyone to know these rules by next week.
Why should an "invisbility cloak" only be useful if it works 100%? Camouflage is being used in pretty much every war, and it's far from perfect. A cloak that "leaks" could still be great in low-light or reduced visibility settings. It doesn't have to be "perfect" to be useful. The stealth fighters aren't really radar-invisible, either. Just very difficult to detect, and for most settings that's good enough.
You also need the incoming side. Yeah, I know, POP3 and everything. I'd still trust a local mailserver more, but maybe that's because I used to run a BBS.
Both of the terms are used as describing the goal and purpose, which we all know are not reachable. Just like "justice" is a goal of our justice system, but it does fail now and then.
The point is to not shrug and accept the failure, but consider it something out of the ordinary, something that should not have happened, and investigate why it did and what you have to do to prevent it from happening again.
That sounds like a lot of work, initially. Then you realize it also means you only make the same mistake once. And that dramatically reduces cost and time.
You want fetchmail and a local SMTP server with modified queue times.
In essence, you want what used to be the norm back in the BBS days - queued up mail. When you go to port, you get a connection and fetch all your mails, then reply to them and send the answers at next opportunity. 15 years ago, that was how mail worked, whether it be Usenet or FIDO or others. The tools are still around.
And you want to become accustomed to not having a 24/7 connection for a change. I know it can be hard, but if you're doing something it's a quick change. I was without any Internet at all for 5 days in a row twice last summer, and I barely noticed except by the amount of mail that had piled up when I came back. So: It ain't that bad. You can live without Internet. It's doable.:-)
Google for "zero defect software development" for one approach.
"It is too expensive" is almost always an excuse. There's a simple test: Ask "How much, exactly?" None of the people I have ever met who told me that good, bug-free software would be too expensive could answer that question. Not one. When pressed further, most of them even have to admit they can't even begin to make a good estimate, they just "feel" (sometimes, they call it "know") that it "ought to be" more expensive.
Maybe. Maybe 10 cents. Maybe $10, maybe $10 mio.
If you don't know, how can you make the decision between writing good code from the beginning and having to fix lots of bugs afterwards (which also is not exactly cheap) ?
Answer is that you don't. The decision makers assume and have hunches. Also, they have release dates.
Oh yes, the "fact" that developing bug-free software takes a lot more time is also a myth. Same test applies.
But the difference is that today, with all the RAD tools around, you have a fair lot of "programmers" who don't even know what they're doing and get away with it.
Mod parent up. Twice!
That's the exact problem we are having. When I was at university, as an assistant in the C programming courses, I made it a habit to enter "abc" or just return or whatever when the program asked for an integer, and it broke those poor students programs left, right and center.
I never thought I'd see that kind of beginners' mistakes after university. Boy was I wrong!
So, if I'll ever get to make those decisions, I would not hire a programmer without a code example, and a thorough search for the kind of mistakes that you simply should not make unless you're still in school.
The main point he's making, I think, is a little hidden: "At least we had a model."
The problem with almost every software development department I've seen so far is that they rely entirely on the abilities of their coders. The few guidelines they have for coding style and documentation can be called something like a "standard", if you are gracious. But that's where it ends. There are few processes above the code level. Many heads of software developments can't answer trivial questions that are perfectly normal in every other industry where stuff is being built or developed - like "how many known problems do you have at the moment?" or "what is your margin of error before you pull the product?" or even just "what's the date of your last QA?".
So don't bother them with anything more complicated, like a development process. They think "process" is another word for "deadline" because that's what the process consists of "ship on this date, or as close as you can manage". That's it.
No, but there is a fairly high correlation between "young" and "idiot".
The older people have had more time for mistakes, and more opportunities to learn from them. Also, they have often learnt the most important lesson: You don't always know better, and sometimes what looks like sheer stupidity has a reason to it that you just don't know.
There is, however, another kind of stupidity that is more often present among older people. That of being stuck to the "we've always done it like that" way. It is just less common (they've also had time to thin their ranks out) and more obvious, so easier to avoid.
Honestly, after several companies and experiences from excellent to horrible, I'm fairly sure that you can show me the people in your IT department and I can tell you if your IT sucks. And age is one factor.
What if the cleaning program fouls a hospital's computers? Or fouls up some other important infrastructure.
Excuse me?
These are zombies participating in a botnet. I'd say they already are fouled up.
And yes, if there's a crime going on, I would shove you out of the way to step in and stop it. If you fall and break something because I shoved you, I'll be sorry but not terribly so. You should've stepped forward yourself instead of standing in the way.
Slashdot Mirror
Who's up for guessing what the difference is between Windows 7 'Starter' and Windows 7 'Home Basic?'"
Ok, I'll have a go:
About $120 - the price you pay for an upgrade from the OEM-bundled "Starter" to the "Home Basic" which you need to get anything meaningful done that's a tiny bit more demanding than minesweeper.
Oh yes, absolutely. Just think of the chiiiildren. Remove from sight what offends you and everything will be fine. You can't change human nature, but you can push it underground, into repression, where you can then capitalise on it. That's been modus operandi of the catholic church and every other conservative power group for at least a thousand years, probably a lot more.
See, removing child porn from the Internet is so much more important than actually finding and locking up the people who produce it. And filtering out the blood from a shooter is a lot better, and also easier, than stopping to think that you're, you know, like shooting people, blood or no blood.
In fact, there's some research out there (not undisputed I should say, to be totally honest) that indicates that displays of "clean violence" is more likely to result in actions of violence than splatter, blood and gore, because the consequences of violence are hidden and thus don't enter consideration as much.
That was never the claim. :-)
It's a well-researched fact that scarcity rises demand. The checkout thing was just one illustration of that. Luxury goods are another, maybe closer to your OS example, if you like. The reason why diamonds or gold or whatever are expensive, and the reason why designer shoes and clothes, jewellery, etc. are both expensive and in high demand, is scarcity.
Do we really have to archive everything? Does it serve a purpose, besides just wanting to do it because we can?
Seriously, I found that regarding my personal affairs, the less stuff I keep around, the better things work out. Yeah, every once in a blue moon I might need that e-mail from last month. But frankly, the damage of keeping thousands of mails I'll never look at again is higher than the damage of not finding an old one every now and then.
Same for physical papers.
Memorablia can be a nice touch to your flat, but if there are too many, they too burden you down. I'd rather get new things into my life than spending it managing all the old things.
And the one thing about the Web that I like is that it can be so easily changed, that I can go to the same URL every day and always get current information. That's what makes it more useful than a newspaper or most books, except for the convenience factor sometimes (books are still better to read than screens).
Errr... no? There are entire economies built around the fact that you are wrong. The garbage bins near the checkout counter in pretty much every large store are the most visible stuff. They're called "impulse goods" in the industry (though I'm not sure if that's the actual english term, I only know the german one that would translate as such). This is the crap that people buy while waiting, on the "looks nice" impulse, without considering whether or not they really need it.
In economics, it's generally known that reduced supply creates more demand, simply by the fact that we are "wired" to believe that rare equals valuable. It's also generally known that you can artifically create scarcity, to boost demand. That's the theory behind all the "just this week" or "sale ends on 31st" or even "only as long as supply lasts" sales labels.
Just saying, you know.
Wikipedia was an interesting experiment. With the stress on experiment. It taught us the Do's and Dont's of a massive collaboration effort.
However, as with all experiments, lots of things turned out to be different than we thought, or more difficult. Wikipedia suffers badly from the grey areas around its core idea. Deletionism is the most famous one - the fact alone that even after years of discussion there is no consensus should serve to illustrate that there's still something to be done here. Edit Wars are another topic of that kind. There's obviously a problem here, and no one has found a solution so far.
What has been done for the past two years or so is patchwork. It reminds me of DOS/Windos. You've got something that through luck and being there at the right time exploded into this huge, dominant system, and now you're stuck with all the legacy crap.
Enforcement is mostly based on fear. If you aren't on the licence database they will write to you every three-ish months with one of a rotating set of letters.
The fear works both ways, though. Many years ago I was tired of that and wrote them a stern letter essentially saying "don't contact me unless I contact you first" as well as the keywords "harrassment", "lawyer" and "lawsuit".
Never heard from them again, for almost ten years now.
YMMV
It sounds as if they were, in the sense of not only interrupting the regular program, but actually songs right in the middle.
I'd call that "invasive". It would make me change station.
Psychologically, I say this is the extreme conversatives who would really like to outlaw nudity, masturbation and while we're at it, even thinking about sex. Since they can't, they are looking for alternatives.
Stripping away all the legality nonsense, what they've done is outlawing the naked human body, at least as long as it's young. That's a step in the "proper" (according to their belief) direction.
There is no thought about "harm" because it is replaced by a strong belief that there is "irrepairable moral harm". And by "strong belief" I mean "belief that is unimpressed by proof".
That's an important step in legal history. Finally the courts have arrived at where we around here have been for years. But what the courts think matters, what we think matters little, in the context of immediate real-world impact.
It's a good thing, and it takes away the RIAA/MPAA's most important FUD element.
I'm certain, in another 3-4 years, the media will arrive at where the courts are now, and stop spreading the RIAA/MPAA FUD unchecked.
Excellent point.
However, it ignores rotation. It can keep relative velocity, but without force being applied, it won't keep relative rotation. So for that one minute it "skips", it should not rotate, arriving in some kind of odd orientation, moving into a slightly different direction than it originally did.
Apparently not. Google does create quite a bit of standalone software that you can download.
Google Earth
Sketchup
Picasa
just to name a few.
So even Google seems to think that for some things, the browser alone isn't enough.
While it does look interesting, I do wonder whether the core idea, that a browser is enough, really is solid. I knew it was Netscape's dream once, but did it work out?
When I think about what I do, certainly Firefox gets a lot of time. However, there's a lot of PDF content out there that I want to view and/or print - does this device do that? That's not an unusual usage scenario, btw. - when you book online tickets, or buy stuff online, very often you get the ticket and/or receipt in .pdf format.
Then there's the whole "download" scenario. Does it do that? Lots of people come across cool stuff they want to download. It doesn't have to launch Keynote, sorry OpenOffice or whatever the external App is, but at least ''saving'' something to an external shared device would be a requirement.
Then there's mail. There are still people around who don't use webmail, you know?
So, I quite like the idea, but I do wonder whether '''just''' the browser isn't a little too little.
I'm sure if you ask them to, they will.
With management, it's not what is being asked, but who is asking.
So get the CEO on your side. Have him send out the policy with a friendly request to please read it and a just as friendly notice that he expects everyone to know these rules by next week.
Management will read it.
If not, you need a new CEO.
Submitter needs to re-check his assumptions.
Why should an "invisbility cloak" only be useful if it works 100%? Camouflage is being used in pretty much every war, and it's far from perfect. A cloak that "leaks" could still be great in low-light or reduced visibility settings. It doesn't have to be "perfect" to be useful. The stealth fighters aren't really radar-invisible, either. Just very difficult to detect, and for most settings that's good enough.
You also need the incoming side. Yeah, I know, POP3 and everything. I'd still trust a local mailserver more, but maybe that's because I used to run a BBS.
Both of the terms are used as describing the goal and purpose, which we all know are not reachable. Just like "justice" is a goal of our justice system, but it does fail now and then.
The point is to not shrug and accept the failure, but consider it something out of the ordinary, something that should not have happened, and investigate why it did and what you have to do to prevent it from happening again.
That sounds like a lot of work, initially. Then you realize it also means you only make the same mistake once. And that dramatically reduces cost and time.
You want fetchmail and a local SMTP server with modified queue times.
In essence, you want what used to be the norm back in the BBS days - queued up mail. When you go to port, you get a connection and fetch all your mails, then reply to them and send the answers at next opportunity. 15 years ago, that was how mail worked, whether it be Usenet or FIDO or others. The tools are still around.
And you want to become accustomed to not having a 24/7 connection for a change. I know it can be hard, but if you're doing something it's a quick change. I was without any Internet at all for 5 days in a row twice last summer, and I barely noticed except by the amount of mail that had piled up when I came back. So: It ain't that bad. You can live without Internet. It's doable. :-)
How much would it cost to have perfect software?
A lot less than most people assume.
Google for "zero defect software development" for one approach.
"It is too expensive" is almost always an excuse. There's a simple test: Ask "How much, exactly?"
None of the people I have ever met who told me that good, bug-free software would be too expensive could answer that question. Not one. When pressed further, most of them even have to admit they can't even begin to make a good estimate, they just "feel" (sometimes, they call it "know") that it "ought to be" more expensive.
Maybe.
Maybe 10 cents. Maybe $10, maybe $10 mio.
If you don't know, how can you make the decision between writing good code from the beginning and having to fix lots of bugs afterwards (which also is not exactly cheap) ?
Answer is that you don't. The decision makers assume and have hunches. Also, they have release dates.
Oh yes, the "fact" that developing bug-free software takes a lot more time is also a myth. Same test applies.
But the difference is that today, with all the RAD tools around, you have a fair lot of "programmers" who don't even know what they're doing and get away with it.
Mod parent up. Twice!
That's the exact problem we are having. When I was at university, as an assistant in the C programming courses, I made it a habit to enter "abc" or just return or whatever when the program asked for an integer, and it broke those poor students programs left, right and center.
I never thought I'd see that kind of beginners' mistakes after university. Boy was I wrong!
So, if I'll ever get to make those decisions, I would not hire a programmer without a code example, and a thorough search for the kind of mistakes that you simply should not make unless you're still in school.
The main point he's making, I think, is a little hidden: "At least we had a model."
The problem with almost every software development department I've seen so far is that they rely entirely on the abilities of their coders. The few guidelines they have for coding style and documentation can be called something like a "standard", if you are gracious. But that's where it ends. There are few processes above the code level. Many heads of software developments can't answer trivial questions that are perfectly normal in every other industry where stuff is being built or developed - like "how many known problems do you have at the moment?" or "what is your margin of error before you pull the product?" or even just "what's the date of your last QA?".
So don't bother them with anything more complicated, like a development process. They think "process" is another word for "deadline" because that's what the process consists of "ship on this date, or as close as you can manage". That's it.
No, but there is a fairly high correlation between "young" and "idiot".
The older people have had more time for mistakes, and more opportunities to learn from them. Also, they have often learnt the most important lesson: You don't always know better, and sometimes what looks like sheer stupidity has a reason to it that you just don't know.
There is, however, another kind of stupidity that is more often present among older people. That of being stuck to the "we've always done it like that" way. It is just less common (they've also had time to thin their ranks out) and more obvious, so easier to avoid.
Honestly, after several companies and experiences from excellent to horrible, I'm fairly sure that you can show me the people in your IT department and I can tell you if your IT sucks. And age is one factor.
The criminals do not care because they were criminals to begin with.
And the government doesn't care for precisely the same reason.
Which leaves the grandparent with very few options. :-)
What if the cleaning program fouls a hospital's computers? Or fouls up some other important infrastructure.
Excuse me?
These are zombies participating in a botnet. I'd say they already are fouled up.
And yes, if there's a crime going on, I would shove you out of the way to step in and stop it. If you fall and break something because I shoved you, I'll be sorry but not terribly so. You should've stepped forward yourself instead of standing in the way.