Management is not fun, it is work, and it is harder work then being a cog in the machine. This is why the big bucks come at the top. Good luck.
The first part of this is true. Being an effective manager is really hard work -- contrary to what you may have been led to believe by watching crappy managers -- and not everyone has the peculiar set of talents for it, much less the actual skills.
The second part is not true: the actual correlation is between earnings and your perceived value to the organization. That's the other half of being a manager: effectively selling yourself. Some genuinely excellent managers are very poor at selling themselves to their superiors, and some genuinely awful managers are very good at selling themselves. This is a separate skill, but one you must also master.
I've turned down management positions before, sometimes several times within the same organization, so it's not necessarily true that you'll never get another chance, but the offers will decrease in frequency over time. (Most increases in position come from changing companies anyway, so this need not be a disaster.) In my case, I turned them down not because I'm a poor manager -- I've done very well as a manager before -- but because I absolutely hate doing it. But I knew I was choosing to do what I loved (programming) at the expense of higher earnings. Some people really get off on climbing the ladder, usually less for money than for the challenge or the prestige. If you're one of those people and you think you can face the challenge, by all means, do it. But if not, there is no shame in recognizing where your real strengths lie and refusing to be seduced away from it.
The old saying about getting what you pay was formulated as a result of experience with commercial enterprises. Of course you "get the shaft" with "free" commercial products -- commercial enterprises don't exist for the purpose of giving things away. Companies only give things away in the hopes that you'll actually buy something.
Open Source projects, on the other hand, are usually formed with the express goal of giving something away. They have every incentive to make their products valuable and no incentive to produce shoddy loss-leaders.
"You get what you pay for," even with respect to for-sale products, doesn't mean "you get value commensurate with your expenditure". Commercial enterprises are strongly incentivized to give the least possible value for the highest possible price. Extra quality and value, above and beyond the expectations of the customer, is an unnecessary expense to a business. Competition alleviates this somewhat, but companies are still only playing to the level of the competition. Doing the very best possible will seldom if ever be their goal, in contradistinction to Open Source projects, where it is frequently the main goal.
To tell the truth, I've never considered the topic of good versus evil in my favorite games. Of course, my favorite game is Galaga, and there's really no ambiguity about who my enemies are: they're anything that moves. It's entirely possible that, instead of the implicit assumption that I'm defending my homeworld from hordes of invading bugs, that I'm actually invading bug-space with the intention of dropping a gigantic bomb on their homeworld, but as the levels appear to repeat endlessly with increasing difficulty, there is, as of at least level 17, an unresolved moral ambiguity. In fact, it's entirely possible that Galaga is an unlicensed derivative of Starship Troopers, but with the story boiled down to 16x16 sprites, it's hard to say for sure.
I appreciate the contents of your comments but I do get slightly annoyed by people who expect Open Source software to always be released as finished, feature-rich products that do everything every user could desire the moment they install them. This is not the way the Open Source community works.
If the Open Source community wants general public acceptance, then it must change the way it works to suit the general public. Period.
For all of its bitching and grousing, it is plainly evident that the overwhelming majority of the general public is either happy with Microsoft's way of doing things, or at least not sufficiently unhappy with it to switch to F/OSS products. Folks like you and I, who are happy (or at least willing) to tinker with sloppily packaged applications and able to dig into makefiles and source code are and will always be a tiny minority.
People want ease of use. And they want it ahead of technical superiority. They don't care about standards compliance, and most of them aren't even aware that there are standards. Moreover, that isn't going to change soon or in two thousand years.
F/OSS isn't a business as such, but we are selling product. We may not be after money as an end product in most cases, but we are after widespread user acceptance. To get that, we must give people what they want. It's just that simple. It boggles my mind that marketroids with room-temperature IQs can grasp this concept as the inalterable law of economics that it is, but screamingly brilliant programmers often have trouble understanding it or its paramount importance.
However, you do now have a voice in getting the software you want if you care enough about it and speak up enough - that's the mindset change.
That's not mindset change; that's just a recipe for being one of those annoying technology advocacy twerps who turn people off to otherwise worthwhile products. Outside of their dwindling fan bases, the only thing people remember about heavily-advocated products like OS/2 and the Amiga is how annoying their advocates were.
The idea that we can just give it to them and make them like it is a Microsoft concept we would do well not to adopt. Microsoft can get away with it because their product is, for the most part, blitheringly easy for an idiot to use. That's the lesson we need to learn here. Make it blitheringly easy, and then and only then, the technical superiority we enjoy in so many areas will begin to be a compelling advantage, but not until then.
All that being said, the Mozilla team seems to have made excellent progress so far, and I have high hopes that they will achieve full parity and then blow clean past it.
Except for -- as noted by other posters -- dedicated gaming cafes, internet access alone is not a particularly compelling reason to go anywhere. It's too cheap and pervasive to be much of a commodity unless you have a captive audience, as in airports, or you offer all kinds of additional bells and whistles, like Kinko's, and frankly, I don't know how successful that end of their business is.
Most of the successful places I've seen in this market would be successful without it. Back in my hometown (Nashville, TN), there's a little joint called Cafe Coco. It's an old house that has been converted into a coffee bar/restaurant and general hangout. Free access by WiFi and a few hotly contested CAT-5 cables is just a perk that they offer. There are always several people there with laptops (including me, when I'm in town), though to be honest, they don't always seem to be buying much food. But they're right next to Vanderbilt University, and I suspect most folks would come with or without the net access. This includes me, since I don't have a WiFi card in my laptop and seldom bother fighting for a strand of CAT-5.
In short, make the cafe your main focus, and treat the cyber as a minor marketing point. An old Linux firewall/NAT box and some cheap APs are a minor investment, anyway. If you're talking about providing the machines as well, you're insane. That's a major expense even for ordinary businesses where the employees can (usually) be expected not to screw them up on purpose.
Now the Canadians are talking about a probe for Mars in 2011.
They do know that liquid beer can't exist under Martian atmospheric pressures, don't they?
Re:Why wouldn't math be known across the universe?
on
The Golden Ratio
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· Score: 1
It's one of the major works of genius of science. The first time i read it, it was shocking how advanced it was, and simple! Any division such as 1.748362 / 59487 can be done long handed (pencil and paper) in a minute.
My sixth-grade daughter, who has been using a calculator since second grade, would probably be similarly shocked. Those of us who grew up doing long division on paper without calculators are not. In fact, if it takes you a whole minute to perform a simple division problem like that, it's a sign you need to practice for a couple of weeks.
I'm not trying to be snide here, but when people start viewing long division (or, for that matter, hand-coded assembly) with awe, it's just evidence of unfamiliarity. I suspect that many ancient engineering feats -- building pyramids, for example -- were little more than the combination of hard work and some elegant but mundane technical skills that have been forgotten.
Re:Debunking constants
on
The Golden Ratio
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· Score: 2, Interesting
This was actually the most tedious part of Livio's book. His argument, essentially, is that if a) the artist does not explicitly say that he used the Golden Ratio, or b) the Golden Ratio appears in the work to an accuracy of the third decimal, then the Golden Ratio was not used.
Aside from conveniently (and fallaciously) proving a negative, the first condition is highly unlikely to be satisfied in any premodern work, and the second condition borders on the absurd. In one case, he takes a discrepancy of less than a quarter inch in a painting measuring more than four feet high as a "disproof" of the use of the Golden Ratio.
In fact, the majority of the book is devoted to such sloppy debunking. The remaining fraction of the text -- which actually touches on real mathematics -- is quite interesting, but comprises perhaps fifty pages at most, and probably could have been condensed into a longish magazine article.
Analog watches: I use analog watches exclusively, and it's not because they're easier to read, even though I grew up before digital watches were available. Analog watches are essentially fashion accessories, distinguished from other jewelry only in that they happen to tell time. (This is especially true if you're part of the crowd that buys expensive Rolexes and the like.) For myself, I just prefer a simple, inexpensive, and tasteful analog watch over an ugly black piece of plastic with a primitive multi-segment LCD display that looks like a refugee from the late 70's.
Dot-matrix printers: This is probably lost on folks who came of age after inkjet and laser took over, but I find it a lot easier to read code when it's not interrupted by arbitrary page breaks. I long ago got in the habit of printing out code modules on greenbar paper, marking them up with highlighters and ballpoint notations, and tacking them to the wall. The later 24-pin models are reasonably quiet, perfectly legible, fast, and cheap as hell to operate. Moreover, they last forever, too. I still have and use an Epson dot matrix from 1984, and it works as well as when it was new. And if you want to do multipart forms, you can't use anything else.
And while this wasn't on the list, I have to mention...
Analog film cameras: There are still a lot of things you can't do as well digitally, but even if that were not the case, that's missing the point. Photography is an activity, just like snowboarding or building hotrods. Even if digital was better across the board, a lot of people would still use film cameras, just as a lot of people kept painting after film arrived.
His list has one point I'd argue: typewriters. They'll die with the current crop of older adults that still use them. (I'm 42 and haven't touched one in probably 17 years.) Offices used to keep them around, even after entering "the computer age", but if you walk into any small business now, you'll find the token typewriter stuffed in a closet, no longer even usable.
I disagree. Mind you, though I keep an old Underwood around only as a piece of decor, a lot of offices I visit use them for envelopes and labels. It's a major pain in the ass to do a single label with a printer, and I can't remember the last time I saw anyone try to fit a single envelope into an inkjet or laser printer. What will kill them off is the advent of special-purpose one-off label printers, which I see in increasing numbers in offices. That being said, though, if you poke around the clerical staff areas in many medium to large business, especially in manufacturing and shipping, you will find an IBM Selectric that has been used by more than one person in the last 24 hours.
Why was putting out "Ghettopoly" a dumb business decision? What ever happened to humor? Or maybe caving in to some idiot protesters was the bad business decision.
What the blurb doesn't describe, oddly enough, is the openly racist content of the game. Go dig for older, more detailed articles on Google. It was sufficiently heinous that one wonders if the manufacturer hired the Klan to come up the the design.
First of all, Google is trying to optimize the user's perception of speed - and downloading a separate CSS doc would require a second TCP connection, etc., etc., which could negatively impact both the user experience and the load on Google's servers
Except that a separate stylesheet would be downloaded once by the client browser and then cached, resulting in savings on each successive page load. Having spent a lot of time separating out CSS and Javascript on my own site, which gets nowhere near the traffic Google does, I can say this can result in substantial reductions in traffic. It also enables you to use a fast, simple, single-threaded server like thttpd to serve up the static content and leave the dynamic content to Apache.
I wager that their common case is one search per user.
One search per user ever? I'd wager that the bulk of Google users conduct a second search before a separate CSS file would expire from their caches.
You don't think you're really going to peak the interest of semi-literate/. readers with your snide, elitist rant, do you? How rediculous! How ludicrist! You'll definitely loose karma for this!
(Hint to the ignoranti: it's pique, ridiculous, ludicrous, and lose. And contrary to the parent, the trailing comma comes inside the quotes in English and outside the quotes in C.)
I'd hate to see either OO or KOffice achieve dominance. Indeed, why would anyone see that as desirable? The goal is to have a common file format, not applications monoculture. We already have that with Microsoft.
The whole office suite idea is flawed and only serves to line the pockets of commercial office suite producers and to create a winner-takes-all (and user-gets-screwed) environment. If it suits my particular preferences and needs, I ought to be able to run the word processor from KOffice, the spreadsheet from OpenOffice, and some commercial charting program and have them all interoperate.
If we have interoperability based on open standards, then software competes on its merits. (With the understanding, often lost here on Slashdot, that the merits of software are a matter of individual needs and opinions.) Without open interoperability, we have vendor lock-in and monopolies.
He claimed that whenever he reached page 298, Word would just crash. I opened it in OpenOffice.org, scrolled to page 298, and braced for a crash. All I saw were a couple of strange boxes that show up for unknown characters. I removed those and saved in.doc. He opened it in Word, scrolled through it, and found nothing has changed, except for the crashing part.
I use Office 97 on my laptop because it's an ancient 133MHz Pentium with only 48 megs of RAM -- and therefore incapable of running Linux, X, and OpenOffice simultaneously. On my more capable desktop machine, I run OpenOffice. I've come across situations where several large Word documents produce an error that says something like, "This document may have been corrupted. Save in a new file and reload to attempt to correct the problem," whenever I open them. Of course, this doesn't work. But if I open them in OpenOffice and re-save them in Word format, the problem is fixed.
Consequently, I've often advised my Word-using friends to install OpenOffice just to repair damaged Word docs. A few of them have decided they prefer OO to Word.
FWIW, I haven't run into any cases where OO doesn't handle the formatting in Word 97 docs, but my docs, while average 300+ pages, aren't terribly complex, either. YMMV.
Therefore in the time since rocks were crystallised they haven't been in the presence of water.
More accurately, they haven't been in the presence of water for very long. If, as has been suggested, periods of liquid water on the surface of Mars have been the result of transitory and possibly catastrophic phases in Martian history, it's quite possible that Gusev Crater was indeed a lake briefly, but not long enough for all of the olivine to break down.
As a concrete demonstration, put some olivine in a glass of water and wait for the water to evaporate. Trust me, it will still be olivine.
What I'd like to see more than a rant...
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BSD For Linux Users
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I'd like to see a relatively impartial comparison of the relative strengths and weaknesses of Linux and the various BSDs. I hear, for example, that FreeBSD has a more efficient TCP stack than Linux, and you can therefore get better performance with Apache under FreeBSD than under Linux. I have noticed that OpenBSD seems to be more responsive to user input under heavy load than Linux, but I haven't used OpenBSD enough to know if that subjective impression actually bears out consistently.
Dealing with these questions would be far more useful than taking saying
foreach("Amiga", "Mac", "OS/2", "*BSD", "WinXP") {
print "$_ is better than your OS.\n"; }
which is my impression of where these screeds come from.
Call me crazy, but Jackson handled LOTR with about the most love and care and achievement I could ever expect from making it into a Hollywood trilogy.
With all due respect to Peter Jackson, whose handling of LOTR has indeed been spectacular, who's going to write the damn things? Some of the credit for LOTR, after all, should go to, um, J.R.R. Tolkien. Having the skill to make great movies from great books is one thing; it is quite another to write a great book in the first place.
And with the exception of a few surviving oldbies, the current slate of science fiction writers don't inspire a great deal of confidence in me.
If Microsoft provides a client for Unix filesystems, they get "embrace and extend" comments. If Microsoft doesn't, they get the "refusing to support open standards" comments. What do you want them to do? Do you want them to attempt to work with Unix, or do you want them to completely ignore the fact that Unix exists?
With no clear advantage over other free unixes, why is this hobbyOS getting so much attention?
Why is it that any time someone comes up with either a new operating system or a new webserver, the invariable refrain is, "But we already have Linux," or "We already have Apache"?
It's a good thing that Linus didn't say, "Well, we already have Minix," and that the original Apache developers didn't say, "Well, we already have NCSA httpd."
Experimentation is good. Choice is good. I don't want to live in a world where my only choice is Linux any more than I want to live in a world where my only choice is Windows. Both of them have serious shortcomings. If nothing else, maybe SkyOS and the odd hundred other OS projects will come up with ideas that can be incorporated into Linux that the Linux developers wouldn't have come up with on their own.
2. Film is no more likely to disappear in the face of digital cameras than oil paint disappeared in the face of film. What's happening is that its primary use is changing. When film came along, painters were no longer in high demand for portraits, so they started exploring different possibilities, and we ended up with modern art. There are certainly more painters in the world today than there were in the 18th century. As digital replaces film as the primary medium for casual snapshots, something similar is likely to happen to film. Art photographers will still use it, and will probably use it in more creative ways.
Why hasn't anybody mentioned unions as an answer to all this? Seems we could really use them right now.
Mostly, it's because the bulk of the crowd here are, as another poster put it, "knuckleheaded Objectivist brats," or as they would no doubt describe themselves, "Libertarians," or, as they were known in the 19th century, "social Darwinists". Sure, it's an intellectually bankrupt philosophy and has been so since well before the labor movements it provoked into existence, and it's even harmful to the people who believe it most strongly, but if that were an objection, we wouldn't have mass religion running loose in the world, either.
But from a practical (and sympathetic) standpoint, it won't work. Unions are as weak as they are today because of the supply of cheap foreign labor. You can get cheap labor in the US from illegals -- apparently with the approval of the current regime, which sees in them their own profits -- and if the unions put up too much of a fuss, you can just create a foreign subsidiary and move the jobs offshore.
To be effective, you'd need an international labor movement. But there are two major obstacles there: Firstly, the biggest source of offshore labor is China, which is not a free country. And secondly, the current regime and its cronies would dust off their old anti-communist rhetoric so fast it'd curl your hair while making sure that Red China remains available as a source of cheap and democracy-resistant labor.
Our dirt cheap goods are possible because we "allowed" loads of manufacturing jobs to go to China.
The problem with this theory, namely, that we enjoy our high standard of living because goods are cheap, and goods are cheap because we use cheap foreign labor, is this: those goods are cheap because you're paid a fantastic sum of money by world standards. As the jobs dry up, those cheap foreign goods won't seem so cheap. Go from making $50k a year to $25k a year, and the price of everything has effectively doubled. And once sales decline, you start to lose all of the nice economy-of-scale effects of mass production, and the prices start to go up as well.
This is short-sighted, half-assed pseudo-economics along the lines of Rush Limbaugh snorting "Rich investors make jobs!" as if the economy wasn't a cycle. If there are no affluent consumers to buy your products, then there's nothing to invest in, and no jobs to create. This chain is only as strong as its weakest link.
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Management is not fun, it is work, and it is harder work then being a cog in the machine. This is why the big bucks come at the top. Good luck.
The first part of this is true. Being an effective manager is really hard work -- contrary to what you may have been led to believe by watching crappy managers -- and not everyone has the peculiar set of talents for it, much less the actual skills.
The second part is not true: the actual correlation is between earnings and your perceived value to the organization. That's the other half of being a manager: effectively selling yourself. Some genuinely excellent managers are very poor at selling themselves to their superiors, and some genuinely awful managers are very good at selling themselves. This is a separate skill, but one you must also master.
I've turned down management positions before, sometimes several times within the same organization, so it's not necessarily true that you'll never get another chance, but the offers will decrease in frequency over time. (Most increases in position come from changing companies anyway, so this need not be a disaster.) In my case, I turned them down not because I'm a poor manager -- I've done very well as a manager before -- but because I absolutely hate doing it. But I knew I was choosing to do what I loved (programming) at the expense of higher earnings. Some people really get off on climbing the ladder, usually less for money than for the challenge or the prestige. If you're one of those people and you think you can face the challenge, by all means, do it. But if not, there is no shame in recognizing where your real strengths lie and refusing to be seduced away from it.
The old saying about getting what you pay was formulated as a result of experience with commercial enterprises. Of course you "get the shaft" with "free" commercial products -- commercial enterprises don't exist for the purpose of giving things away. Companies only give things away in the hopes that you'll actually buy something.
Open Source projects, on the other hand, are usually formed with the express goal of giving something away. They have every incentive to make their products valuable and no incentive to produce shoddy loss-leaders.
"You get what you pay for," even with respect to for-sale products, doesn't mean "you get value commensurate with your expenditure". Commercial enterprises are strongly incentivized to give the least possible value for the highest possible price. Extra quality and value, above and beyond the expectations of the customer, is an unnecessary expense to a business. Competition alleviates this somewhat, but companies are still only playing to the level of the competition. Doing the very best possible will seldom if ever be their goal, in contradistinction to Open Source projects, where it is frequently the main goal.
To tell the truth, I've never considered the topic of good versus evil in my favorite games. Of course, my favorite game is Galaga, and there's really no ambiguity about who my enemies are: they're anything that moves. It's entirely possible that, instead of the implicit assumption that I'm defending my homeworld from hordes of invading bugs, that I'm actually invading bug-space with the intention of dropping a gigantic bomb on their homeworld, but as the levels appear to repeat endlessly with increasing difficulty, there is, as of at least level 17, an unresolved moral ambiguity. In fact, it's entirely possible that Galaga is an unlicensed derivative of Starship Troopers, but with the story boiled down to 16x16 sprites, it's hard to say for sure.
I appreciate the contents of your comments but I do get slightly annoyed by people who expect Open Source software to always be released as finished, feature-rich products that do everything every user could desire the moment they install them. This is not the way the Open Source community works.
If the Open Source community wants general public acceptance, then it must change the way it works to suit the general public. Period.
For all of its bitching and grousing, it is plainly evident that the overwhelming majority of the general public is either happy with Microsoft's way of doing things, or at least not sufficiently unhappy with it to switch to F/OSS products. Folks like you and I, who are happy (or at least willing) to tinker with sloppily packaged applications and able to dig into makefiles and source code are and will always be a tiny minority.
People want ease of use. And they want it ahead of technical superiority. They don't care about standards compliance, and most of them aren't even aware that there are standards. Moreover, that isn't going to change soon or in two thousand years.
F/OSS isn't a business as such, but we are selling product. We may not be after money as an end product in most cases, but we are after widespread user acceptance. To get that, we must give people what they want. It's just that simple. It boggles my mind that marketroids with room-temperature IQs can grasp this concept as the inalterable law of economics that it is, but screamingly brilliant programmers often have trouble understanding it or its paramount importance.
However, you do now have a voice in getting the software you want if you care enough about it and speak up enough - that's the mindset change.
That's not mindset change; that's just a recipe for being one of those annoying technology advocacy twerps who turn people off to otherwise worthwhile products. Outside of their dwindling fan bases, the only thing people remember about heavily-advocated products like OS/2 and the Amiga is how annoying their advocates were.
The idea that we can just give it to them and make them like it is a Microsoft concept we would do well not to adopt. Microsoft can get away with it because their product is, for the most part, blitheringly easy for an idiot to use. That's the lesson we need to learn here. Make it blitheringly easy, and then and only then, the technical superiority we enjoy in so many areas will begin to be a compelling advantage, but not until then.
All that being said, the Mozilla team seems to have made excellent progress so far, and I have high hopes that they will achieve full parity and then blow clean past it.
I hope he wins. Anything to limit the availability of Harlan Ellison's crapulous prose will be a boon to humanity.
Except for -- as noted by other posters -- dedicated gaming cafes, internet access alone is not a particularly compelling reason to go anywhere. It's too cheap and pervasive to be much of a commodity unless you have a captive audience, as in airports, or you offer all kinds of additional bells and whistles, like Kinko's, and frankly, I don't know how successful that end of their business is.
Most of the successful places I've seen in this market would be successful without it. Back in my hometown (Nashville, TN), there's a little joint called Cafe Coco. It's an old house that has been converted into a coffee bar/restaurant and general hangout. Free access by WiFi and a few hotly contested CAT-5 cables is just a perk that they offer. There are always several people there with laptops (including me, when I'm in town), though to be honest, they don't always seem to be buying much food. But they're right next to Vanderbilt University, and I suspect most folks would come with or without the net access. This includes me, since I don't have a WiFi card in my laptop and seldom bother fighting for a strand of CAT-5.
In short, make the cafe your main focus, and treat the cyber as a minor marketing point. An old Linux firewall/NAT box and some cheap APs are a minor investment, anyway. If you're talking about providing the machines as well, you're insane. That's a major expense even for ordinary businesses where the employees can (usually) be expected not to screw them up on purpose.
Now the Canadians are talking about a probe for Mars in 2011.
They do know that liquid beer can't exist under Martian atmospheric pressures, don't they?
It's one of the major works of genius of science. The first time i read it, it was shocking how advanced it was, and simple! Any division such as 1.748362 / 59487 can be done long handed (pencil and paper) in a minute.
My sixth-grade daughter, who has been using a calculator since second grade, would probably be similarly shocked. Those of us who grew up doing long division on paper without calculators are not. In fact, if it takes you a whole minute to perform a simple division problem like that, it's a sign you need to practice for a couple of weeks.
I'm not trying to be snide here, but when people start viewing long division (or, for that matter, hand-coded assembly) with awe, it's just evidence of unfamiliarity. I suspect that many ancient engineering feats -- building pyramids, for example -- were little more than the combination of hard work and some elegant but mundane technical skills that have been forgotten.
This was actually the most tedious part of Livio's book. His argument, essentially, is that if a) the artist does not explicitly say that he used the Golden Ratio, or b) the Golden Ratio appears in the work to an accuracy of the third decimal, then the Golden Ratio was not used.
Aside from conveniently (and fallaciously) proving a negative, the first condition is highly unlikely to be satisfied in any premodern work, and the second condition borders on the absurd. In one case, he takes a discrepancy of less than a quarter inch in a painting measuring more than four feet high as a "disproof" of the use of the Golden Ratio.
In fact, the majority of the book is devoted to such sloppy debunking. The remaining fraction of the text -- which actually touches on real mathematics -- is quite interesting, but comprises perhaps fifty pages at most, and probably could have been condensed into a longish magazine article.
Analog watches: I use analog watches exclusively, and it's not because they're easier to read, even though I grew up before digital watches were available. Analog watches are essentially fashion accessories, distinguished from other jewelry only in that they happen to tell time. (This is especially true if you're part of the crowd that buys expensive Rolexes and the like.) For myself, I just prefer a simple, inexpensive, and tasteful analog watch over an ugly black piece of plastic with a primitive multi-segment LCD display that looks like a refugee from the late 70's.
Dot-matrix printers: This is probably lost on folks who came of age after inkjet and laser took over, but I find it a lot easier to read code when it's not interrupted by arbitrary page breaks. I long ago got in the habit of printing out code modules on greenbar paper, marking them up with highlighters and ballpoint notations, and tacking them to the wall. The later 24-pin models are reasonably quiet, perfectly legible, fast, and cheap as hell to operate. Moreover, they last forever, too. I still have and use an Epson dot matrix from 1984, and it works as well as when it was new. And if you want to do multipart forms, you can't use anything else.
And while this wasn't on the list, I have to mention...
Analog film cameras: There are still a lot of things you can't do as well digitally, but even if that were not the case, that's missing the point. Photography is an activity, just like snowboarding or building hotrods. Even if digital was better across the board, a lot of people would still use film cameras, just as a lot of people kept painting after film arrived.
His list has one point I'd argue: typewriters. They'll die with the current crop of older adults that still use them. (I'm 42 and haven't touched one in probably 17 years.) Offices used to keep them around, even after entering "the computer age", but if you walk into any small business now, you'll find the token typewriter stuffed in a closet, no longer even usable.
I disagree. Mind you, though I keep an old Underwood around only as a piece of decor, a lot of offices I visit use them for envelopes and labels. It's a major pain in the ass to do a single label with a printer, and I can't remember the last time I saw anyone try to fit a single envelope into an inkjet or laser printer. What will kill them off is the advent of special-purpose one-off label printers, which I see in increasing numbers in offices. That being said, though, if you poke around the clerical staff areas in many medium to large business, especially in manufacturing and shipping, you will find an IBM Selectric that has been used by more than one person in the last 24 hours.
Why was putting out "Ghettopoly" a dumb business decision? What ever happened to humor? Or maybe caving in to some idiot protesters was the bad business decision.
What the blurb doesn't describe, oddly enough, is the openly racist content of the game. Go dig for older, more detailed articles on Google. It was sufficiently heinous that one wonders if the manufacturer hired the Klan to come up the the design.
First of all, Google is trying to optimize the user's perception of speed - and downloading a separate CSS doc would require a second TCP connection, etc., etc., which could negatively impact both the user experience and the load on Google's servers
Except that a separate stylesheet would be downloaded once by the client browser and then cached, resulting in savings on each successive page load. Having spent a lot of time separating out CSS and Javascript on my own site, which gets nowhere near the traffic Google does, I can say this can result in substantial reductions in traffic. It also enables you to use a fast, simple, single-threaded server like thttpd to serve up the static content and leave the dynamic content to Apache.
I wager that their common case is one search per user.
One search per user ever? I'd wager that the bulk of Google users conduct a second search before a separate CSS file would expire from their caches.
Methinks the reality high-tech peeping tom world is probably quite a bit less sexy than some people's fantasies of it....
Sheesh, try being a mail admin sometime.
A story on Slashdot about accurate spelling!
/. readers with your snide, elitist rant, do you? How rediculous! How ludicrist! You'll definitely loose karma for this!
You don't think you're really going to peak the interest of semi-literate
(Hint to the ignoranti: it's pique, ridiculous, ludicrous, and lose. And contrary to the parent, the trailing comma comes inside the quotes in English and outside the quotes in C.)
I'd hate to see either OO or KOffice achieve dominance. Indeed, why would anyone see that as desirable? The goal is to have a common file format, not applications monoculture. We already have that with Microsoft.
The whole office suite idea is flawed and only serves to line the pockets of commercial office suite producers and to create a winner-takes-all (and user-gets-screwed) environment. If it suits my particular preferences and needs, I ought to be able to run the word processor from KOffice, the spreadsheet from OpenOffice, and some commercial charting program and have them all interoperate.
If we have interoperability based on open standards, then software competes on its merits. (With the understanding, often lost here on Slashdot, that the merits of software are a matter of individual needs and opinions.) Without open interoperability, we have vendor lock-in and monopolies.
He claimed that whenever he reached page 298, Word would just crash. I opened it in OpenOffice.org, scrolled to page 298, and braced for a crash. All I saw were a couple of strange boxes that show up for unknown characters. I removed those and saved in .doc. He opened it in Word, scrolled through it, and found nothing has changed, except for the crashing part.
I use Office 97 on my laptop because it's an ancient 133MHz Pentium with only 48 megs of RAM -- and therefore incapable of running Linux, X, and OpenOffice simultaneously. On my more capable desktop machine, I run OpenOffice. I've come across situations where several large Word documents produce an error that says something like, "This document may have been corrupted. Save in a new file and reload to attempt to correct the problem," whenever I open them. Of course, this doesn't work. But if I open them in OpenOffice and re-save them in Word format, the problem is fixed.
Consequently, I've often advised my Word-using friends to install OpenOffice just to repair damaged Word docs. A few of them have decided they prefer OO to Word.
FWIW, I haven't run into any cases where OO doesn't handle the formatting in Word 97 docs, but my docs, while average 300+ pages, aren't terribly complex, either. YMMV.
Therefore in the time since rocks were crystallised they haven't been in the presence of water.
More accurately, they haven't been in the presence of water for very long. If, as has been suggested, periods of liquid water on the surface of Mars have been the result of transitory and possibly catastrophic phases in Martian history, it's quite possible that Gusev Crater was indeed a lake briefly, but not long enough for all of the olivine to break down.
As a concrete demonstration, put some olivine in a glass of water and wait for the water to evaporate. Trust me, it will still be olivine.
I'd like to see a relatively impartial comparison of the relative strengths and weaknesses of Linux and the various BSDs. I hear, for example, that FreeBSD has a more efficient TCP stack than Linux, and you can therefore get better performance with Apache under FreeBSD than under Linux. I have noticed that OpenBSD seems to be more responsive to user input under heavy load than Linux, but I haven't used OpenBSD enough to know if that subjective impression actually bears out consistently.
Dealing with these questions would be far more useful than taking saying
foreach("Amiga", "Mac", "OS/2", "*BSD", "WinXP") {
print "$_ is better than your OS.\n";
}
which is my impression of where these screeds come from.
Call me crazy, but Jackson handled LOTR with about the most love and care and achievement I could ever expect from making it into a Hollywood trilogy.
With all due respect to Peter Jackson, whose handling of LOTR has indeed been spectacular, who's going to write the damn things? Some of the credit for LOTR, after all, should go to, um, J.R.R. Tolkien. Having the skill to make great movies from great books is one thing; it is quite another to write a great book in the first place.
And with the exception of a few surviving oldbies, the current slate of science fiction writers don't inspire a great deal of confidence in me.
If Microsoft provides a client for Unix filesystems, they get "embrace and extend" comments. If Microsoft doesn't, they get the "refusing to support open standards" comments. What do you want them to do? Do you want them to attempt to work with Unix, or do you want them to completely ignore the fact that Unix exists?
I want them to go out of business.
With no clear advantage over other free unixes, why is this hobbyOS getting so much attention?
Why is it that any time someone comes up with either a new operating system or a new webserver, the invariable refrain is, "But we already have Linux," or "We already have Apache"?
It's a good thing that Linus didn't say, "Well, we already have Minix," and that the original Apache developers didn't say, "Well, we already have NCSA httpd."
Experimentation is good. Choice is good. I don't want to live in a world where my only choice is Linux any more than I want to live in a world where my only choice is Windows. Both of them have serious shortcomings. If nothing else, maybe SkyOS and the odd hundred other OS projects will come up with ideas that can be incorporated into Linux that the Linux developers wouldn't have come up with on their own.
Two thoughts here:
1. Kodak still made cameras?
2. Film is no more likely to disappear in the face of digital cameras than oil paint disappeared in the face of film. What's happening is that its primary use is changing. When film came along, painters were no longer in high demand for portraits, so they started exploring different possibilities, and we ended up with modern art. There are certainly more painters in the world today than there were in the 18th century. As digital replaces film as the primary medium for casual snapshots, something similar is likely to happen to film. Art photographers will still use it, and will probably use it in more creative ways.
Why hasn't anybody mentioned unions as an answer to all this? Seems we could really use them right now.
Mostly, it's because the bulk of the crowd here are, as another poster put it, "knuckleheaded Objectivist brats," or as they would no doubt describe themselves, "Libertarians," or, as they were known in the 19th century, "social Darwinists". Sure, it's an intellectually bankrupt philosophy and has been so since well before the labor movements it provoked into existence, and it's even harmful to the people who believe it most strongly, but if that were an objection, we wouldn't have mass religion running loose in the world, either.
But from a practical (and sympathetic) standpoint, it won't work. Unions are as weak as they are today because of the supply of cheap foreign labor. You can get cheap labor in the US from illegals -- apparently with the approval of the current regime, which sees in them their own profits -- and if the unions put up too much of a fuss, you can just create a foreign subsidiary and move the jobs offshore.
To be effective, you'd need an international labor movement. But there are two major obstacles there: Firstly, the biggest source of offshore labor is China, which is not a free country. And secondly, the current regime and its cronies would dust off their old anti-communist rhetoric so fast it'd curl your hair while making sure that Red China remains available as a source of cheap and democracy-resistant labor.
Our dirt cheap goods are possible because we "allowed" loads of manufacturing jobs to go to China.
The problem with this theory, namely, that we enjoy our high standard of living because goods are cheap, and goods are cheap because we use cheap foreign labor, is this: those goods are cheap because you're paid a fantastic sum of money by world standards. As the jobs dry up, those cheap foreign goods won't seem so cheap. Go from making $50k a year to $25k a year, and the price of everything has effectively doubled. And once sales decline, you start to lose all of the nice economy-of-scale effects of mass production, and the prices start to go up as well.
This is short-sighted, half-assed pseudo-economics along the lines of Rush Limbaugh snorting "Rich investors make jobs!" as if the economy wasn't a cycle. If there are no affluent consumers to buy your products, then there's nothing to invest in, and no jobs to create. This chain is only as strong as its weakest link.