We could stop sending our toxic computer waste to their countries. We could stop quietly condoning their use of child labor in sweatshop conditions. They could use food, water, shelter.
Even this guy had something sane to say about it, can you guess his name before you follow the link?
I'm all for the advancement of standards and the cleanup of bad practices sanctioned by older HTML, but we all know this changes nothing in our immediate future. Most normal (non-Slashdot-reading) users aren't going to download and install the browser of the week, and most web authors aren't going to go back and rework all their web content for new standards.
My community phonebook called me to ask if I would repeat the message there...
I would suspect it's not because they love Linux though. Anyone who considers sponsoring a NASCAR race car as "cheap" is a great person for salescritters to contact for other advertising opportunities. BTW, if you want to place banner ads on my site I'll give you a great $25 CPM for 10 million of them.
Microsoft started making mice in the mid-1980s mainly because it was a Windows 1.0 enabler. Over the years it's been the same basic tenet: sell cool hardware mainly to increase the attractiveness of Windows as a platform.
BTW, the same goes for Intel, think about the non-processor things they've done. Most of them were related to improving speeds and feeds to make sure the CPU stayed the bottleneck and you'd get the next faster processor.
I don't see this as a bad thing--yet. Most of the 802.11b stuff I've tried is a nightmare to set up with WEP, and sets itself up in insecure mode by default. I know Microsoft can do a better job with setup; perhaps they'll set an example that will get others to improve as well.
Over time, any worthwhile product becomes commoditized. If Microsoft's wireless card is the next Microsoft Mouse then others will copy it. If it's the next Microsoft Phone then they won't.
This is a very good idea, and if it doesn't help the situation then there may be more than just electronics failure involved.
A few years ago I worked at a company where a RAID array in another group's server had one of those "win the lottery and get hit by lightning in one day" moments. Our own IT person got suspicious and started asking questions. It turns out that they had a single drive failure, but when they put in the replacement drive the guy had moved the remaining drives around in the bays because he wanted the newest drive in a particular position. This totally confused the poor controller.
Instead of moving the drives back, he reformatted. And the last backup tape was bad, and the one before that. The weekly was only three days old though, and that one was readable. So all's well that ends well I guess.
This is a perfect job for even the simplest search-and-replace functionality.
Sure, on a one or two person project that works fine. Now imagine you're on a a big project with five multi-person teams and someone decides they made a mistake defining the type on a Hungarian-style interface definition that a lot of the teams use. Without Hungarian notation, it's probably a one-line change to a single header file.
With the Hungarian need for variable renaming, all five teams have to make global changes to all their code. If they are sane they will do a thorough test of a complete build including only that change, because the next set of diffs are going to be a mess to use for figuring out any other logical changes. There's a good chance in many big-company structures that any change causing that kind of disruption will be subject to time-consuming and gumption-sapping review, especially since it's one group causing work for other groups. And it may affect design documentation and require more work there as well.
Spend about 15 minutes editing the Bitflux demo and then navigate off the page with the back button or close the window. You will silently and efficiently lose 15 minutes of work.
This kind of thing has always been a problem in browser data entry like form posts, but now it's getting more complex and the data is becoming more precious. You can try to mitigate the issue by having an onunload handler, but most ad blockers and other apps like Proxomitron disable onunload because of its abuse by pr0n and advertising.
Perhaps if this is only used in an app that uses Mozilla technologies embedded inside it--rather than the Mozilla browser with its standard navigational options--there won't be a problem. But it sure is a problem for the demo.
The OP mentions "a couple of Windows 2000 systems" so I'd tend to agree. If we're talking 50 systems then installing ActiveState Perl and running PPM to get the modules set up on each one would take some time.
Some more information would help us improve the quality of advice. For example, is this a web CGI app, where the overhead of Perl2exe's static linking will be large compared to ISAPI Perl? Is the app run often enough that this overhead would matter?
The GE fuel cells are supposed to run an entire house and aren't that big. They are fueled by natural or LP gas, I don't know how that might affect size vs. power.
It does seem odd that GM would over-engineer the power plant by a large margin to run a farm, but on the other hand maybe the farm is using Energy Star sheep shears and milking machines.
...and unfair moderation. How does this rate a Troll?
To address the poster's legit question, the German govt is doing this exactly because they have no dog in this race and the players are US-based companies.
Think about how Airbus got its start, how it continues to be propped up by European govts, and how we're responding by propping up our own airline industry. I wonder if the US govt will respond to this threat to US software dominance in some protectionist way.
You guys are nutz. Battlebots is still an awesome show, the problem is that they only show three 3-minute battles per show and pad it with a bunch of shots of Carmen Electra's silicone implants. Get a Tivo and watch the darned thing that way! I can get through a 30 minute episode in about 10 minutes and not miss any of the destruction.
I run a site that has a bandwidth test, and there are people who run big multi-megabyte tests every hour or less to "see if there are any problems" in their connection. Multiply this times lots of people and lots of bandwidth test sites and I'm convinced that a lot of the bandwidth on the Internet is wasted in testing connection speed!
That's the diff between programmers and lawyers. You're seeing the issue in binary, and he sees shades of gray. That's what the legal profession is about. He's come up with a definition of "open relay" that's unusual to say the least.
I don't think so. That's why I have all my programming done by kids under 18. They just take what they need from Open Source projects and then we can sell our products without regard for publishing the source. It really keeps the costs down and gives us a competitive edge.
Where is this going? Mobile computing is best served with a laptop, IMHO. The costs for good performance are high...
Today there is a high price premium for laptops. I'd hope that one outcome of products like this would be to have a larger pool of generic small components like slimline CD/DVDs, ITX and MicroATX mobos, heat pipe cooling, and power supplies in interesting form factors.
A generic-component solution will never reach the design integration level of a custom notebook design, but notebooks have limits of their own. Having a small display attached to a cramped keyboard by a hinge is great for portability but sucks for ergonomics.
His patented voicemail technology is used by the majority of telephone companies throughout the world. I believe they're talking about patent 5,475,748 which you can look up here. Was there really no prior art on this?
What he's doing is just immersive research. And he's paying for it with his own money...
So if we were able to see his tax return he wouldn't have possibly deducted the cost of the house as a business expense for research. No siree. Wouldn't do that. After all, the USPTO has already made him a rich man by giving him a monopoly on an idea, so why would he begrudge them some of those winnings?
IE5+, Opera, Mozilla, or Netscape 6+ is now a great platform for developing many types of applications. Sure there are incompatibilities but they all generally support a big common set of Javascript, DOM, and CSS that lets you do some awesome things.
The irony of it is that these platforms are using JAVASCRIPT for their language yet are still fast enough in most cases. (Remember the complaints about Java being slow?) All the heavy lifting is done by the browser itself, and that's compiled code.
From a training and learning standpoint, it's a natural progression from HTML and CSS into programming with Javascript and DOM. That's not true for the move to Java.
By default you will see CODEBASE in the registry value. That means if there is a CODEBASE parameter in the OBJECT tag on the web page, IE will use it if the correct control version is not installed. However, you can also remove CODEBASE from the string and set this path to a location on your own network, where you place only the small set of trusted ActiveX controls you want your company to use. No other controls will be loaded.
And I'm too tired to be writing coherent posts, obviously. As you said, the solutions that put the source INSIDE the database have failed. But that's because it's not necessary. I don't think that needs to be done in order to have an effective design/code environment.
Every compiler vendor who has sold a mainstream language compiler/IDE using a "program database" or some other such approach has tanked.
Well, except for Microsoft. Visual Studio 6 didn't go far enough in that direction, but it was a start.
Visual Studio.NET does a lot more. In addition to its own use of the database, the IDE is built so that third parties can hook into it and add their own functionality. For example, one vendor will be releasing an add-in that takes UML and creates source for the appropriate C# or VB classes. If you later change the classes in source, it updates the UML.
MS went to WordPerfect (and Lotus as well) BEGGING them to write for Windows
Yes, but remember that WordPerfect and Lotus had already spent a lot of money porting their products to OS/2 (for character mode, and later Presentation Manager) although sales were weak. But both of them decided it was better to bet on IBM. Microsoft suspicion was deep, even back in the early 90s, plus the technical guys (who used to actually have a say in computer companies product plans) saw OS/2 as a technically elegant solution. In the end it was like the Intel 8086 vs. Motorola 68000 battle a decade earlier; the uglier product won because it was good enough.
I really doubt that the core problem is you didn't make a high enough bid. To the client, a low bid may be an indication that you don't understand the project well enough. Did you provide a detailed written proposal or was your response "I think that will take a few weeks and cost $5,000"? Did your bid account for the inevitable post-delivery tweaks and fixes for misunderstandings about the requirements? If not, were you planning to try and charge extra for these as they arose? Did you put in time for training them on the operation of your code? If they plan to maintain it with in-house resources, did you account for that time as well?
Bidding is about risk management on both sides. Even the process of giving a bid is a calculated risk. If you spend a day or more to really understand the customer requirements and write up a good proposal, you're already in the hole on a project. Obviously you can reduce the initial cost by using the "two weeks and $5k" approach but that doesn't inspire confidence.
Once you've established a relationship with a client you can often dispense with the detailed written bids, but it's often important for that first foot in the door.
Slashdot Mirror
We could stop sending our toxic computer waste to their countries. We could stop quietly condoning their use of child labor in sweatshop conditions. They could use food, water, shelter.
Even this guy had something sane to say about it, can you guess his name before you follow the link?
Do people have any concept of what it means to live on less than a dollar a day? There's no electricity. Do they have PCs that don't use electricity?"
I'm all for the advancement of standards and the cleanup of bad practices sanctioned by older HTML, but we all know this changes nothing in our immediate future. Most normal (non-Slashdot-reading) users aren't going to download and install the browser of the week, and most web authors aren't going to go back and rework all their web content for new standards.
My community phonebook called me to ask if I would repeat the message there...
I would suspect it's not because they love Linux though. Anyone who considers sponsoring a NASCAR race car as "cheap" is a great person for salescritters to contact for other advertising opportunities. BTW, if you want to place banner ads on my site I'll give you a great $25 CPM for 10 million of them.
Microsoft started making mice in the mid-1980s mainly because it was a Windows 1.0 enabler. Over the years it's been the same basic tenet: sell cool hardware mainly to increase the attractiveness of Windows as a platform.
BTW, the same goes for Intel, think about the non-processor things they've done. Most of them were related to improving speeds and feeds to make sure the CPU stayed the bottleneck and you'd get the next faster processor.
I don't see this as a bad thing--yet. Most of the 802.11b stuff I've tried is a nightmare to set up with WEP, and sets itself up in insecure mode by default. I know Microsoft can do a better job with setup; perhaps they'll set an example that will get others to improve as well.
Over time, any worthwhile product becomes commoditized. If Microsoft's wireless card is the next Microsoft Mouse then others will copy it. If it's the next Microsoft Phone then they won't.
This is a very good idea, and if it doesn't help the situation then there may be more than just electronics failure involved.
A few years ago I worked at a company where a RAID array in another group's server had one of those "win the lottery and get hit by lightning in one day" moments. Our own IT person got suspicious and started asking questions. It turns out that they had a single drive failure, but when they put in the replacement drive the guy had moved the remaining drives around in the bays because he wanted the newest drive in a particular position. This totally confused the poor controller.
Instead of moving the drives back, he reformatted. And the last backup tape was bad, and the one before that. The weekly was only three days old though, and that one was readable. So all's well that ends well I guess.
This is a perfect job for even the simplest search-and-replace functionality.
Sure, on a one or two person project that works fine. Now imagine you're on a a big project with five multi-person teams and someone decides they made a mistake defining the type on a Hungarian-style interface definition that a lot of the teams use. Without Hungarian notation, it's probably a one-line change to a single header file.
With the Hungarian need for variable renaming, all five teams have to make global changes to all their code. If they are sane they will do a thorough test of a complete build including only that change, because the next set of diffs are going to be a mess to use for figuring out any other logical changes. There's a good chance in many big-company structures that any change causing that kind of disruption will be subject to time-consuming and gumption-sapping review, especially since it's one group causing work for other groups. And it may affect design documentation and require more work there as well.
Spend about 15 minutes editing the Bitflux demo and then navigate off the page with the back button or close the window. You will silently and efficiently lose 15 minutes of work.
This kind of thing has always been a problem in browser data entry like form posts, but now it's getting more complex and the data is becoming more precious. You can try to mitigate the issue by having an onunload handler, but most ad blockers and other apps like Proxomitron disable onunload because of its abuse by pr0n and advertising.
Perhaps if this is only used in an app that uses Mozilla technologies embedded inside it--rather than the Mozilla browser with its standard navigational options--there won't be a problem. But it sure is a problem for the demo.
The OP mentions "a couple of Windows 2000 systems" so I'd tend to agree. If we're talking 50 systems then installing ActiveState Perl and running PPM to get the modules set up on each one would take some time.
Some more information would help us improve the quality of advice. For example, is this a web CGI app, where the overhead of Perl2exe's static linking will be large compared to ISAPI Perl? Is the app run often enough that this overhead would matter?
Link to GE fuel cells
The GE fuel cells are supposed to run an entire house and aren't that big. They are fueled by natural or LP gas, I don't know how that might affect size vs. power.
It does seem odd that GM would over-engineer the power plant by a large margin to run a farm, but on the other hand maybe the farm is using Energy Star sheep shears and milking machines.
...and unfair moderation. How does this rate a Troll?
To address the poster's legit question, the German govt is doing this exactly because they have no dog in this race and the players are US-based companies.
Think about how Airbus got its start, how it continues to be propped up by European govts, and how we're responding by propping up our own airline industry. I wonder if the US govt will respond to this threat to US software dominance in some protectionist way.
You guys are nutz. Battlebots is still an awesome show, the problem is that they only show three 3-minute battles per show and pad it with a bunch of shots of Carmen Electra's silicone implants. Get a Tivo and watch the darned thing that way! I can get through a 30 minute episode in about 10 minutes and not miss any of the destruction.
I run a site that has a bandwidth test, and there are people who run big multi-megabyte tests every hour or less to "see if there are any problems" in their connection. Multiply this times lots of people and lots of bandwidth test sites and I'm convinced that a lot of the bandwidth on the Internet is wasted in testing connection speed!
If it's not closed, it's open
That's the diff between programmers and lawyers. You're seeing the issue in binary, and he sees shades of gray. That's what the legal profession is about. He's come up with a definition of "open relay" that's unusual to say the least.
If you are worried about bandwidth use on your site, the worst thing you could do was post a link to it on Slashdot!
If museums should use their IMAX screens just to maximize revenue, then let's cut to the chase and have them run paid commercials or show porn.
Most museums have benefactors and patrons that contribute with the idea that they are promoting a non-commercial environment for learning.
I don't think so. That's why I have all my programming done by kids under 18. They just take what they need from Open Source projects and then we can sell our products without regard for publishing the source. It really keeps the costs down and gives us a competitive edge.
Shoe feels funny on the other foot, eh?
Where is this going? Mobile computing is best served with a laptop, IMHO. The costs for good performance are high ...
Today there is a high price premium for laptops. I'd hope that one outcome of products like this would be to have a larger pool of generic small components like slimline CD/DVDs, ITX and MicroATX mobos, heat pipe cooling, and power supplies in interesting form factors.
A generic-component solution will never reach the design integration level of a custom notebook design, but notebooks have limits of their own. Having a small display attached to a cramped keyboard by a hinge is great for portability but sucks for ergonomics.
His patented voicemail technology is used by the majority of telephone companies throughout the world.
I believe they're talking about patent 5,475,748 which you can look up here. Was there really no prior art on this?
What he's doing is just immersive research. And he's paying for it with his own money...
So if we were able to see his tax return he wouldn't have possibly deducted the cost of the house as a business expense for research. No siree. Wouldn't do that. After all, the USPTO has already made him a rich man by giving him a monopoly on an idea, so why would he begrudge them some of those winnings?
IE5+, Opera, Mozilla, or Netscape 6+ is now a great platform for developing many types of applications. Sure there are incompatibilities but they all generally support a big common set of Javascript, DOM, and CSS that lets you do some awesome things.
The irony of it is that these platforms are using JAVASCRIPT for their language yet are still fast enough in most cases. (Remember the complaints about Java being slow?) All the heavy lifting is done by the browser itself, and that's compiled code.
From a training and learning standpoint, it's a natural progression from HTML and CSS into programming with Javascript and DOM. That's not true for the move to Java.
You can control the places where IE looks for ActiveX controls. The magic registry key is
t ernet Settings\CodeBaseSearchPath
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\In
By default you will see CODEBASE in the registry value. That means if there is a CODEBASE parameter in the OBJECT tag on the web page, IE will use it if the correct control version is not installed. However, you can also remove CODEBASE from the string and set this path to a location on your own network, where you place only the small set of trusted ActiveX controls you want your company to use. No other controls will be loaded.
I'm too tired to write it all down now
And I'm too tired to be writing coherent posts, obviously. As you said, the solutions that put the source INSIDE the database have failed. But that's because it's not necessary. I don't think that needs to be done in order to have an effective design/code environment.
Every compiler vendor who has sold a mainstream language compiler/IDE using a "program database" or some other such approach has tanked.
Well, except for Microsoft. Visual Studio 6 didn't go far enough in that direction, but it was a start.
Visual Studio.NET does a lot more. In addition to its own use of the database, the IDE is built so that third parties can hook into it and add their own functionality. For example, one vendor will be releasing an add-in that takes UML and creates source for the appropriate C# or VB classes. If you later change the classes in source, it updates the UML.
Sorry to sound like a marketing pitch.
MS went to WordPerfect (and Lotus as well) BEGGING them to write for Windows
Yes, but remember that WordPerfect and Lotus had already spent a lot of money porting their products to OS/2 (for character mode, and later Presentation Manager) although sales were weak. But both of them decided it was better to bet on IBM. Microsoft suspicion was deep, even back in the early 90s, plus the technical guys (who used to actually have a say in computer companies product plans) saw OS/2 as a technically elegant solution. In the end it was like the Intel 8086 vs. Motorola 68000 battle a decade earlier; the uglier product won because it was good enough.
I really doubt that the core problem is you didn't make a high enough bid. To the client, a low bid may be an indication that you don't understand the project well enough. Did you provide a detailed written proposal or was your response "I think that will take a few weeks and cost $5,000"? Did your bid account for the inevitable post-delivery tweaks and fixes for misunderstandings about the requirements? If not, were you planning to try and charge extra for these as they arose? Did you put in time for training them on the operation of your code? If they plan to maintain it with in-house resources, did you account for that time as well?
Bidding is about risk management on both sides. Even the process of giving a bid is a calculated risk. If you spend a day or more to really understand the customer requirements and write up a good proposal, you're already in the hole on a project. Obviously you can reduce the initial cost by using the "two weeks and $5k" approach but that doesn't inspire confidence.
Once you've established a relationship with a client you can often dispense with the detailed written bids, but it's often important for that first foot in the door.