I don't wholey agree with you. I was heavily active in the DAoC mod community on a project (Dark Mod of Camelot) designed to allow player to replace 3-d models from the game with new models created by players. I worked with others on free shards coming up with scripting blocks that were used for machima videos. There are people out there who are very interested in introducing new player developed content into video games.
While 3-d modeling may be a bit above most players heads, things like player created housing and cities have been big successes. And other games have flirted with the idea of player created roads based on traffic patterns (run from point a to point b enough times and a path will appear, keep running and it will improve).
I think in the short term we are going to continue to see improvements in player controlled content (housing, city building, roads, etc...) while long term we will likely see some of the 2nd life style user created content work its way into more games.
After getting fed up with an ailing Lexmark and it's freaking ridiculously priced ink cartridges, I started looking around for a replacement. I pick up a Brother HL2170W for $60 on sale at some box store. That's right $60.00. The same cost as the two ink packs for the Crapmark I had been dealing with. It has it's own WAP built in and can auto detect and configure for most modern wireless routers (my Linksys WRT54GL's one-touch config picked up the printer with out me having to do a thing), or you can connect directly using ethernet (maybe even USB, I can't recall)
Anyway, for $60, this thing has performed admirably. I'm not printing off nightly novels, but it fulfills my educational and gaming related printing needs with ease. Time to first print is extremely fast. The only thing that I've heard people complain about is that in order for it to heat the corona wire so quickly, it has to pull 6-8 amps for a few seconds at the start of print jobs. So you'll probably want to put it on a different circuit than your PC.
Any time someone left a machine unlocked in the MC we would pounce on it. It would take less than 2 minutes to get emails out to the appropriate members of the chain of command to volunteer the Marine for every shit duty we could find (and swap his or her desktop background screen saver to something highly entertaining or inappropriate).
I would agree entirely. But one success does not a savior make. I don't even think that much of the unique features of StackOverflow is what makes it great. I think it is the combination of community and marketing that have made it what it is.
If Joel had come up with a completely different design for the site with different functionality, yet still managed the same community activity, that project would have been just as successful.
While I wholey appreciate the community and efforts of people involved in StackOverflow, I believe that Joel is subject to entirely too much fanfair and hero worship. I'd line him up right next to Dvorak in the grouping of "Right about as often as the sun shines on my dog's ass."
I've know a few folks from the classic car scene who have painstakingly restored (frame off, numbers matching) classics just to have them totaled by drunk/idiot drivers on their way to/from car shows. Loving your car does NOT make you impervious to assault. Sure, you'll be a good defensive driver, but let's face it, a 1950's Bel Air handles about as well as a brick on a unicicle. If you take a solid defensive driver, they will almost always perform better in a modern car that has a stiffer frame, better suspension, and less fatigue.
To run with your Aircraft Carrier vs Leaky row boat analogy...
This is more akin to putting a nuclear powered steam turbine engine from an air craft carrier into your leaky row boat.
Sure, it'll make your leaky row boat fast as hell and able to pull huge objects, but your leaky row boat is still leaky, over weight, and now requires a constrant stream of fuel.
The GP's point is in part accurate. CF does indeed increase the exposed surface of IE. If you are willing to live with that risk, do it, if not, don't.
I also find it odd that Google was complaring it to IE6. Isn't that kinda like MS comparing IE8 with Chrome Alpha or Fire Fox 1.0? The only option for IE6, IMO, is to get rid of it. Developers need to abandon support for it, force users to upgrade to IE8, or to switch to FF or Chrome. But comparing their plug-in with an 8 year old browser is disengenuous.
I don't know what the outage was, but why am I reading comments about open source code, routing, and marshaling in the comments about a constitutional overstep by a local municipality in CA?
I'm completely with you on that one. What Joel is effectively lobbying for is what I've long termed "Shit and fix" coding. You write something dirty but quick to meet the minimal needs of the project. You have non-existent testing, inconsistent modularization, and a maintenance nightmare that crops up every 6 weeks as the application breaks or users request a functional change.
After a few years the application is such a mess and original knowledge sources are so far gone (documentation? what's that?) that the only option for the company is to recreate the application from scratch. Blowing tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars on fixing the pile of crap that has been building up.
There is definitely a balance between over engineering and minimal effort. I've seen efforts to go in both directions. If I had a dollar for every time I saw someone put IO operations on the GUI thread in Windows, I'd be a rich man. But at the same time, I've seen people design data abstraction layers that turn a 3-tier application into a 7-tier "solution".
Target, Citibank, and Visa won't lock you up in GITMO, bar your right of Habeas corpus, and let you rot for a decade because you went to Anarchy.com. But they will offer you 10% off of your next Molotov Cocktail purchase of more than $100!
The 2-front 1-rear three wheeler design is vastly supervisor to the 1-front 2-rear. But the big problem I see with the Dynamaxion is three fold:
1) In an emergency situation, people react by crushing the break pedal. In a front wheel steering car this increases the down force on the steering wheels, improving traction, and gives the driver more control over the car. In a rear wheel steering vehicle, when the breaks are applied hard, weight still transfers from the rear axle to the front. But that means less down-force on the rear wheel and less steering control.
2) The cab forward design of the body put the majority of the vehicle's weight over the front axle already making the vehicle steer and handle worth a crap even under only moderate breaking.
3) The accident that kill the driver was the other vehicle's driver's fault. But that driver was guilty of following too close. When the driver of the Dynamaxion hit the breaks (transferring weight to the front axle, and the person following too close hit the REAR of the Dynamaxion, the vehicle flipped forward. Even though it was the other drivers fault, it was the incredibly poor design of the vehicle that allowed it to roll in such a manor.
There were amazing technological feats to this car, but the single rear wheel steering combined with the cab forward body was absolutely 100% retarded.
I'm surprised that a mechanical sleeve would not suffice. A cheap easily replaceable heat conductive barrier between the internal system coolant and the salt water. Sure, it would raise the design and operational costs slightly, but if it allows for a more ecological solution in areas that currently forbid such activity, it might still be well worth it.
I would venture a guess that significantly more admins (or IT folks in general) quit due to personality and political conflicts than technological decision conflicts.
Until about 3 years ago I worked in a shop that had surpassed 100% turnover in 3 years. Of all of the employees that were there when I started, only 1 non-management employee was still there when I left. Everyone else had been replaced (some twice) or had left a vacant seat. All but 1 of those departures cited personal conflicts with a specific supervisor and extremely poor leadership and management.
In my current position, we have lost some people. But not a single one that I know of has quit over the conversion to Notes, or the adoption of any of the significant 3rd party apps or hardware solutions we have. Sure, people bitch and moan about Support Works (aka "Crap Works") and Notes, or when we heard about the price tag the previous network management paid for the NAS... but no one has left for those reasons.
If you hem employees into a technology that is not inline with their career goals, they will likely be more willing to move if they see a good opportunity. But if you have a hostile work place, skilled employees will flee.
Nope, a few years back, before my time here, the decision was made to unify the US and EU networks on a single system. The US had been using Outlook/Exchange, Ireland and the EU locations had been using Notes. Seeing as how the corporate office was in Ireland and they didn't want to bother with converting to Exchange/Outlook, all of the locations converted to Notes 7.
The Notes scheduling system (well, pretty much the entirety of Notes) can be summed up in two words:
In my office building we have 9+ conference rooms. Booking a room is often a challenge given how many people are trying to get into them. And sometime, you just need a room for a few minutes for a conference call. Every morning the receptionists have to print out schedules and walk to each room to post their schedules. If those schedules change at all, it's highly unlikely that the sheets will get updated.
If, for less than $500 in materials and a day of labor we could have digital displays and an easy way to update each of outputs from the receptionist desk, it could save quite a lot of hassle.
Even with out the POE, I might still pitch the idea to my boss.
Don't go raging on Diesel. I get better performance and efficiency out of mine than any gasoline engine and most hybreads, and I don't have to completely re-engineer the engine to switch to 100% bio fuels.
Assuming $0.20/kWh, 6 hours of lighting a day 365 days a year, 19 years service form the new LED and 7 years (warranty span) on a typical 13W CFL.
Your annual total cost of ownership favors the LED light by about $0.50/year.
Even if you drop the LED to 18 years and push the CFL for 10 years, you're still right at roughly the same total annual cost. But the longer you leave the light on each day or the more expensive electricity is, the more of an advantage the LED gains.
For low usage bulbs, it doesn't make sense to switch. But for high usage bulbs, these new LED lights are pure gold!
#1 means that even if people want to target Mono, they might develop in VS.NET anyway, which is a bunch of VS.NET and Windows sales for Microsoft.
MS has the "express" versions of Visual Studio available for free (as in beer). They aren't all-in-one products like Visual Studio Enterprise, but they do contain all of the functionality you would need to develop and release production quality code.
Sharp Dev has also come a long way and is not a bad tool, especially if your primary development platform is Linux.
#2 means that anyone who doesn't deliberately target Mono is probably going to call a bunch of native win32 code, just because it's so trivially easy to do so.
In the case of the iPhone, they are likely using the compact framework, which greatly limits access to native functionality in both Mono and.Net.
Honestly, there is a lot of crazy FUD going on in this thread. I know it's/. and we're all suppose to HATE all things MS has ever touched. But really.Net is one of MS's shining stars, and Mono is a great OPEN SOURCE implementation of it that could use more developers to get it caught up with the current version of.Net.
When I was in the Marine Corps, the office building at HQ was set up this way and it was awesome. The network support team never left their desks unless it was for a printer jam or hardware failure. Everything else was managed through remote imaging and network tools.
That said, I had never before (even in the military) and definately never since (in the public and private sectors) seen a network that is truely as smooth running or similar to your description. Especially never a CEO's PC.
Slashdot Mirror
Literally, this thing blows... in a vacuum...
-Rick
(She recovered, and is doing fine, if you care.)
Good to hear, but more importantly, is she still using Lotus Notes?
-Rick
Lotus Notes is closer to Shit on a Shingle than it is a service.
-Rick
I don't wholey agree with you. I was heavily active in the DAoC mod community on a project (Dark Mod of Camelot) designed to allow player to replace 3-d models from the game with new models created by players. I worked with others on free shards coming up with scripting blocks that were used for machima videos. There are people out there who are very interested in introducing new player developed content into video games.
While 3-d modeling may be a bit above most players heads, things like player created housing and cities have been big successes. And other games have flirted with the idea of player created roads based on traffic patterns (run from point a to point b enough times and a path will appear, keep running and it will improve).
I think in the short term we are going to continue to see improvements in player controlled content (housing, city building, roads, etc...) while long term we will likely see some of the 2nd life style user created content work its way into more games.
-Rick
After getting fed up with an ailing Lexmark and it's freaking ridiculously priced ink cartridges, I started looking around for a replacement. I pick up a Brother HL2170W for $60 on sale at some box store. That's right $60.00. The same cost as the two ink packs for the Crapmark I had been dealing with. It has it's own WAP built in and can auto detect and configure for most modern wireless routers (my Linksys WRT54GL's one-touch config picked up the printer with out me having to do a thing), or you can connect directly using ethernet (maybe even USB, I can't recall)
Anyway, for $60, this thing has performed admirably. I'm not printing off nightly novels, but it fulfills my educational and gaming related printing needs with ease. Time to first print is extremely fast. The only thing that I've heard people complain about is that in order for it to heat the corona wire so quickly, it has to pull 6-8 amps for a few seconds at the start of print jobs. So you'll probably want to put it on a different circuit than your PC.
And if it breaks, it's only $60...
-Rick
Heh, that was a project of mine from highschool. Things were a lot easier to spoof in the days of DOS and ASCII.
By the time I dropped to the fleet, pretty much everyone was on NT. And I worked in desktop apps and web units, so no green-screen crap for me.
-Rick
Any time someone left a machine unlocked in the MC we would pounce on it. It would take less than 2 minutes to get emails out to the appropriate members of the chain of command to volunteer the Marine for every shit duty we could find (and swap his or her desktop background screen saver to something highly entertaining or inappropriate).
-Rick
Come for the stories. Stay for the comments!
-Rick
I would agree entirely. But one success does not a savior make. I don't even think that much of the unique features of StackOverflow is what makes it great. I think it is the combination of community and marketing that have made it what it is.
If Joel had come up with a completely different design for the site with different functionality, yet still managed the same community activity, that project would have been just as successful.
-Rick
While I wholey appreciate the community and efforts of people involved in StackOverflow, I believe that Joel is subject to entirely too much fanfair and hero worship. I'd line him up right next to Dvorak in the grouping of "Right about as often as the sun shines on my dog's ass."
-Rick
I've know a few folks from the classic car scene who have painstakingly restored (frame off, numbers matching) classics just to have them totaled by drunk/idiot drivers on their way to/from car shows. Loving your car does NOT make you impervious to assault. Sure, you'll be a good defensive driver, but let's face it, a 1950's Bel Air handles about as well as a brick on a unicicle. If you take a solid defensive driver, they will almost always perform better in a modern car that has a stiffer frame, better suspension, and less fatigue.
-Rick
To run with your Aircraft Carrier vs Leaky row boat analogy...
This is more akin to putting a nuclear powered steam turbine engine from an air craft carrier into your leaky row boat.
Sure, it'll make your leaky row boat fast as hell and able to pull huge objects, but your leaky row boat is still leaky, over weight, and now requires a constrant stream of fuel.
The GP's point is in part accurate. CF does indeed increase the exposed surface of IE. If you are willing to live with that risk, do it, if not, don't.
I also find it odd that Google was complaring it to IE6. Isn't that kinda like MS comparing IE8 with Chrome Alpha or Fire Fox 1.0? The only option for IE6, IMO, is to get rid of it. Developers need to abandon support for it, force users to upgrade to IE8, or to switch to FF or Chrome. But comparing their plug-in with an 8 year old browser is disengenuous.
-Rick
I don't know what the outage was, but why am I reading comments about open source code, routing, and marshaling in the comments about a constitutional overstep by a local municipality in CA?
-Rick
I'm completely with you on that one. What Joel is effectively lobbying for is what I've long termed "Shit and fix" coding. You write something dirty but quick to meet the minimal needs of the project. You have non-existent testing, inconsistent modularization, and a maintenance nightmare that crops up every 6 weeks as the application breaks or users request a functional change.
After a few years the application is such a mess and original knowledge sources are so far gone (documentation? what's that?) that the only option for the company is to recreate the application from scratch. Blowing tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars on fixing the pile of crap that has been building up.
There is definitely a balance between over engineering and minimal effort. I've seen efforts to go in both directions. If I had a dollar for every time I saw someone put IO operations on the GUI thread in Windows, I'd be a rich man. But at the same time, I've seen people design data abstraction layers that turn a 3-tier application into a 7-tier "solution".
-Rick
Target, Citibank, and Visa won't lock you up in GITMO, bar your right of Habeas corpus, and let you rot for a decade because you went to Anarchy.com. But they will offer you 10% off of your next Molotov Cocktail purchase of more than $100!
-Rick
The 2-front 1-rear three wheeler design is vastly supervisor to the 1-front 2-rear. But the big problem I see with the Dynamaxion is three fold:
1) In an emergency situation, people react by crushing the break pedal. In a front wheel steering car this increases the down force on the steering wheels, improving traction, and gives the driver more control over the car. In a rear wheel steering vehicle, when the breaks are applied hard, weight still transfers from the rear axle to the front. But that means less down-force on the rear wheel and less steering control.
2) The cab forward design of the body put the majority of the vehicle's weight over the front axle already making the vehicle steer and handle worth a crap even under only moderate breaking.
3) The accident that kill the driver was the other vehicle's driver's fault. But that driver was guilty of following too close. When the driver of the Dynamaxion hit the breaks (transferring weight to the front axle, and the person following too close hit the REAR of the Dynamaxion, the vehicle flipped forward. Even though it was the other drivers fault, it was the incredibly poor design of the vehicle that allowed it to roll in such a manor.
There were amazing technological feats to this car, but the single rear wheel steering combined with the cab forward body was absolutely 100% retarded.
If you want to see the pinnacle of 3-wheeler technology, look into the T-Rex http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-Rex_(automobile) And Aptera http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptera_2e or some of the tilt-steering prototypes.
-Rick
I'm surprised that a mechanical sleeve would not suffice. A cheap easily replaceable heat conductive barrier between the internal system coolant and the salt water. Sure, it would raise the design and operational costs slightly, but if it allows for a more ecological solution in areas that currently forbid such activity, it might still be well worth it.
-Rick
I would venture a guess that significantly more admins (or IT folks in general) quit due to personality and political conflicts than technological decision conflicts.
Until about 3 years ago I worked in a shop that had surpassed 100% turnover in 3 years. Of all of the employees that were there when I started, only 1 non-management employee was still there when I left. Everyone else had been replaced (some twice) or had left a vacant seat. All but 1 of those departures cited personal conflicts with a specific supervisor and extremely poor leadership and management.
In my current position, we have lost some people. But not a single one that I know of has quit over the conversion to Notes, or the adoption of any of the significant 3rd party apps or hardware solutions we have. Sure, people bitch and moan about Support Works (aka "Crap Works") and Notes, or when we heard about the price tag the previous network management paid for the NAS... but no one has left for those reasons.
If you hem employees into a technology that is not inline with their career goals, they will likely be more willing to move if they see a good opportunity. But if you have a hostile work place, skilled employees will flee.
-Rick
Don't I wish.
Nope, a few years back, before my time here, the decision was made to unify the US and EU networks on a single system. The US had been using Outlook/Exchange, Ireland and the EU locations had been using Notes. Seeing as how the corporate office was in Ireland and they didn't want to bother with converting to Exchange/Outlook, all of the locations converted to Notes 7.
The Notes scheduling system (well, pretty much the entirety of Notes) can be summed up in two words:
Donkey Balls.
-Rick
If only they were POE.
In my office building we have 9+ conference rooms. Booking a room is often a challenge given how many people are trying to get into them. And sometime, you just need a room for a few minutes for a conference call. Every morning the receptionists have to print out schedules and walk to each room to post their schedules. If those schedules change at all, it's highly unlikely that the sheets will get updated.
If, for less than $500 in materials and a day of labor we could have digital displays and an easy way to update each of outputs from the receptionist desk, it could save quite a lot of hassle.
Even with out the POE, I might still pitch the idea to my boss.
-Rick
Don't go raging on Diesel. I get better performance and efficiency out of mine than any gasoline engine and most hybreads, and I don't have to completely re-engineer the engine to switch to 100% bio fuels.
-Rick
Assuming $0.20/kWh, 6 hours of lighting a day 365 days a year, 19 years service form the new LED and 7 years (warranty span) on a typical 13W CFL.
Your annual total cost of ownership favors the LED light by about $0.50/year.
Even if you drop the LED to 18 years and push the CFL for 10 years, you're still right at roughly the same total annual cost. But the longer you leave the light on each day or the more expensive electricity is, the more of an advantage the LED gains.
For low usage bulbs, it doesn't make sense to switch. But for high usage bulbs, these new LED lights are pure gold!
-Rick
#1 means that even if people want to target Mono, they might develop in VS.NET anyway, which is a bunch of VS.NET and Windows sales for Microsoft.
MS has the "express" versions of Visual Studio available for free (as in beer). They aren't all-in-one products like Visual Studio Enterprise, but they do contain all of the functionality you would need to develop and release production quality code.
Sharp Dev has also come a long way and is not a bad tool, especially if your primary development platform is Linux.
#2 means that anyone who doesn't deliberately target Mono is probably going to call a bunch of native win32 code, just because it's so trivially easy to do so.
In the case of the iPhone, they are likely using the compact framework, which greatly limits access to native functionality in both Mono and .Net.
Honestly, there is a lot of crazy FUD going on in this thread. I know it's /. and we're all suppose to HATE all things MS has ever touched. But really .Net is one of MS's shining stars, and Mono is a great OPEN SOURCE implementation of it that could use more developers to get it caught up with the current version of .Net.
-Rick
When I was in the Marine Corps, the office building at HQ was set up this way and it was awesome. The network support team never left their desks unless it was for a printer jam or hardware failure. Everything else was managed through remote imaging and network tools.
That said, I had never before (even in the military) and definately never since (in the public and private sectors) seen a network that is truely as smooth running or similar to your description. Especially never a CEO's PC.
-Rick
<span style="font-size:tiny; color:ReallyLightGray;"> I see what you mean! </span>
-Rick