Well, I'd say software which doesn't generate random passwords and/or facilitates setting the same password for all users has a glitch. I know we all have encountered such systems where something is "brought up" and everyone gets the same password - usually one of "password", "changeme", "setme", or "1234" - but that doesn't change the implementation of such a system from a system failure to a user failure.
Especially something as already-complex as a testing assessment system. I find it hard to believe a simple "randomize all passwords" wasn't built into the system and couldn't have been enforced as the default state of a new user's password. The fact that the software allowed a school IT guy to listen to the "bad angel" on his shoulder and compromise security in this manner is a Very Bad Thing.
IMHO, and I work on software for schools (not a competitor to this product, but still software for school administrators), any software which assumes that an IT administrator at a district or state education office is going to be following accepted "best practices" is going to be filled with software glitches and failures. The "computer guy" at a school is often not trained as such; he just has worked with computers before. In the cases where a district actually hires an IT guy, they tend to choose between hiring a small team of people who accept the lowest possible wages, or hire one "hotshot" IT guy and overload him with the work of ten.
Of course, that doesn't put all the blame on the software system. The system admin should have randomized the passwords from the start. The users should have logged on and changed their passwords the first day. But a well-designed system could have and should have made such human failures impossi -- er, less than likely.
Re:Technical questions.
on
Ask Sid Meier
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· Score: 1
Not to mention the "Terraforming" phase to kick it all off, which would often last 10-15 minutes on my old clunky 386SX.
Re:Technical questions.
on
Ask Sid Meier
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· Score: 1
The PC I had in 1995 (100MHz Pentium) ground to a halt decompressing MP3 files. The PC I had in 1991, on which I played the original Civ (non-Win obviously) didn't stand a chance of decompressing MP3 realtime, both because it was a 386SX-16 and because, to my knowledge, MP3 hadn't been invented yet. Well, at least not "officially" (that didn't happen until 1992 according to mp3-mac.com).
WAV worked quite well, however, on both of those computers (after I added a SoundBlaster to the 386 at least).
The reason you don't charge a different price for a more expensive movie is that the cost per showing is exactly the same regardless of the cost to create it
Not really. You don't charge a different price for different movies showing in the same theater at the same time because it is logistically impractical to segregate the theater and keep the morons buying $2.50 Bigalow tickets from skipping over to the $20 War of the Worlds screening. So, instead, you charge $10 for both and if a guy buys one ticket and sees a different show then all that's lost is book-keeping.
Think about it: it costs just as much to show the movie at 11:20 AM as it does at 7:30 at night. Why is one $6/ticket and the other full price? It also costs just as much to show a movie in a second-run theater (actually more, as the prints are more fragile at that point), yet they can run down towards $3.50/ticket hereabouts, and in other areas even still play at $1-2 per ticket.
Music is not the same thing, here, although the reason for wanting per-movie pricing (you can't very well maximize profits at a fixed per-unit cost) applies there as well, Jobs named it well: greed, and, worse, short-sighted greed. The "long-sighted" part here is the music companies wanting to keep the pie to themselves rather than Apple, but that's a far as they can do in thinking a few years out.
With per-unit music, people will buy a whole lot more if they don't have to "shop around" for the best price. $.99 per song, every single song, every single time, makes things very simple. $13.99 for the CD at Best Buy, and I like two songs and might like up to five of them, and I know for certain that $2-5 is all I need to spend to get that music. I don't have to worry about the record company having deemed the "good songs" worth $5 each, and the "crap songs" at $.50; I know what the price will be by simple math (although the full album price is another story).
Music is a unique market. It is a volume market, which is where the standardized pricing is a major asset. It is also an "art" market, where value is highly subjective. That having been said, the only argument for variable pricing is that the top-dollar acts, which we know will be Britney Spears and Michael Jackson's successors, are making too little money for their efforts and the low-end artists don't make enough. But, in this particular market, non-variable pricing has worked very well in creating a highly classed range of incomes (to the record companies; the artist nets are capricious but variable pricing would exacerbate that instead of fix it), from not-even-close-to-breaking-even all the way to paying-for-a-dozen-record-exec-ferrarris.
People get confused over XP Home versus XP Professional versus 2003 Server.
I think you are giving the human race far too much credit.
No, the vast majority will see 7 "models", hear someone say "The Ultra Pimp edition is da bomb!" and either buy that or the one one step more expensive than it. And the rest will see increasing prices and pick the lowest cost one, then regret their purchase a week later and pay exhorbitant "upgrade" prices to get the features they didn't realize they needed.
The big problem here is that, outside of Slashdot, the differences between the 7 Vista versions are so arbitrary and abstract that the average user has no way to distinguish them. In the car analogy, it's more like $350-2,500 extra for various topcoat paint procedures and $2,000 for the special DMX Optimizer on the front center speaker. It's all just gobbledegook to the average consumer, which means they'll either buy the most expensive, the least expensive, or whatever happens to be most in stock at CostCo that day.
[Apple's Sound Check]'s a compressor. That's what compressors do--they boost the quiet parts and cut back during the loud parts.
Are you sure about that? Because that's not what Sound Check does in iTunes (it normalizes and sets a relative volume for each track, hence the step of finding peak levels when you add a bunch of songs to iTunes), and I've noticed that my iPod uses the Sound Check information from iTunes if I take a track and pump it's relative volume way up or way down.
I searched for Sound Check docs and they're pretty scarce. This one's about the best I could find:
And it explicitly says that Sound Check does a simple peak-volume normalization, and that their product does a volume compression/gain step (which they call "Octivated", which knocks the document a solid step down on the authority scale, but still this it the best I see anywhere).
You and the other respondees seem pretty well convinced Apple's using a compressor instead, but that just doesn't appear to be the case. I suppose they could be using the peak level to locate the optimum compression level, but that just seems silly. I'm a bit confused here.
Maybe you are confused because Sound Check does definitely act as a macro-scale compressor on a full album, boosting the "quiet" songs and cutting down the "loud" songs, but that's because it does per-track normalization, not per-album normalization. Or maybe not. Any chance you can clarify a little?
All of these things jumble together to make the "someone who pays more" concept so untestable that it's hard to measure.
So, you take a system with n unknowns and make it n-1 unknowns (because now "pay" is a known).
If you're honest with yourself and do some research, then you can get to know the various "gotchas" in there, and weigh them honestly. Is it better to work for a schmuck boss next to star engineers, or to work for a star boss next to schmuck engineers? I don't know the answer to that, but I'd guess that mine has about a 50% chance of being the opposite of yours (of course, my real answer would be that if you're being given that kind of a choice then you've either been looking in the wrong places or have too low of an opinion of others).
This is, in fact, exactly why the "go see what other offers you can get" approach is so much better than the "look at the results of some survey" approach. With the former, you actually have discoverable answers to the other "n-1" variables besides pay; with the latter there's no way to know that the place that skewed the results by paying their engineers 2x the area average offers no health care and requires all employees to either be shackled to their desk or wear an ankle bracelet which emits a high-pitched scream once the employee has left a 1-mile radius area around the data center.
On the other hand, going out for interviews and bringing that to the "so, make me an offer" stage also sucks, both for you and for the company whose offer you don't intend on taking (I've been on both sides of that, and know that people that do this tend to get blacklisted pretty quickly).
Actually, the better solution is the one your college counselor doubtless let you in on: network. Build up a web of friends. Talk openly about how much you make, what kind of job conditions you enjoy or hate, etc. Where I work we tend to see entire networks come in at once, which is both good for the first guy (employee referral bonus) and for the other guys after him (they don't have to figure out if the guy interviewing them is giving them a snow-job about how great the company is and how easy it is to take a few weeks off every year, etc). Also, it's great for the employer, because not only do these guys work well together, they all can vouch for the others' capabilities.
And filling in NOT NULLS is also handy for the same reason.... if you REALLY need the logic to reject things like blank inputs in web forms then you should be doing that in your application logic anyway.... or if you really don't care all that much you probably just want to accept the submission quietly.
Okay, but isn't a user putting no input in an input field a blank string, not an unspecified field on insert? While some DBs equate the two, I'd say they're rather different. And while it's great that MySQL will allow the insert to put a blank value in a not-null text field, it's not great at all that if the bonehead web designer forgets to put the "First Name" field on the page or in his application logic that the database silently "corrects" his oversight.
The ideal web app is highly forgiving of user input, but thoroughly unforgiving of developer misconduct. See compiler vs runtime errors as a rough analogy.
Truncating varchars is handy for webforms... you don't want to reject the data... but usually the data isn't important enough (like a slashdot post) to really care if a couple words get chopped off by accident (in case you didn't set the character limit on your textbox to match the database).
Again, here I'd want an error. I'd rather have one user get an "Unknown error in database; please contact site admin" style message as well as a logged message server-side just in case they don't call it in when they put 1025 chars into a name field and properly fix the error than for a thousand users to come across the fact that anything after 1024 chars is silently truncated. It's thoroughly unprofessional, IMHO.
Again, I'd want the database to tell the web page designer he's a bonehead rather than whisper it quietly to every user of the site. The fact that the database prefers gossip over direct constructive criticism might be considered rude in some circles.
First of all, let's get the Lexmark thing out of the way: they're not demanding that the cartridges be thrown away after one use. That would be retarded. They are demanding that the purchaser of the cartridge comply with the terms of the contract to which they agreed by opening the package, and return the empty cartridge after a single use, so that Lexmark can recycle the damn thing, not throw it in a landfill. Nothing is being wasted, and no one's hand is being forced. Consumers are free to choose not to buy Lexmark's cartridges if they don't agree to the terms of sale.
Sorry, but if Lexmark was trying to encourage recycling then they would put the incentive on returning the used cartridge, not on removing all recycling options but one for the end user.
If you bought a Lexmark cartridge under this "contract", then you are "obligated" to return it to Lexmark when done with it. In reality, though, that's a bunch of work for nothing. You already got your "cheaper" cartridge. You can get another "cheaper" cartridge by going to the store and buying it. You would love to recycle this cartridge if it saved you money, by sending it in to a third-party refiller and getting it refilled for significantly less than the new cartridge, but Lexmark will put any third-party refiller which accepts your cartridge out of business, so they don't accept your cartridge.
Consumer has two choices:
* Make extra effort to find out how exactly they are supposed to send this cartridge in to Lexmark, then buy a new one at the store.
* Deposit used cartridge in the office trash can, then buy a new one at the store.
Gee, I wonder which will happen?
Again, if Lexmark wanted to both encourage recycling AND discourage (to some extent) third-party refilling, they'd offer the rebate at time of cartridge return. This would be significantly easier to enforce, and also see significantly higher utilization. The landfill loses out in this scenario, as ALL cartridges either end up back with Lexmark or they end up at third-party refillers.
The only conclusion is that the distinguishing characteristic of the current model - that ALL third-party refilling goes away by means of being breach of contract and/or knowing support of breach of contract - is more appealing to Lexmark than the likelihood of full recycling.
Again, Lexmark has clearly defined their objective here as eliminating third-party refilling rather than eliminating landfill consumption.
It's actually an attempt to kill the recycling companies by red-tape-burial.
Oh, you're recycling a Lexmark cartridge. Can you please prove that it was not under contract to be returned to Lexmark? Oh, we'll check our records for you. Please simply fill out this form describing the serial number and physical characteristics of the cartridge and we'll look it up in our system. Oh, and if it was supposed to be returned to us, you're obligated to contact the user who sent it to you and return it to them.
One form per cartridge == dead business model for recycling companies.
I can walk to Blockbuster, the grocery store, and two (yes, two) drug stores; riding a bike to them itself would be a bit of overkill. Still, it's just as easy to stop in their parking lots on the way home except in the very rare cases where we need something in an emergency (sick child, absolutely positively have to get a movie tonight). Focusing on movie nights, I tend to stop by to get a pizza and sodas on the same trip home when we're getting a movie or two.
In fact, were four out of five Blockbusters to close their doors, I'd still be doing things this way, as I pass six of them altogether on my way home (a couple are a little down side-streets or taking alternate routes, but not overly so).
For me, there's not much advantage getting the movie over cable and still having to drive out to pick up a pizza and drinks. The current system doesn't cost me in gas directly (although it of course costs Blockbuster in general to keep and man so many storefronts).
I would have rpefered Apple going with AMD opteron's or contracting one of their other beefy 64 bit chips. Why intel?
1. Because Intel can bankroll transition costs to a large degree, as they benefit greatly from it.
2. Because people know Intel, not so much AMD. If you're going to say you're going to industry-standard chips, it makes sense to say you're going to the industry-leading (in terms of sales and marketing, not necessarily current performance) vendor.
3. Because Intel has a full spectrum of chip solutions, from XScale to high-end Pentium "5" architecture.
4. Because if Intel doesn't deliver then Apple can shift over to AMD quite quickly and easily.
On another note, people keep wondering why they should upgrade to another version of Word, since there are no new compelling features. Word seems to be, for a vast majority of users "done".
Word is hardly "done" from a quality perspective. Users just have a really hard time paying for an "upgrade" when all they will get out of that upgrade is that the features they thought they had bought a few releases back actually work without the one-in-ten chance of causing the app to "unexpectedly" quit.
I think quality, not feature infusion, is what the original poster was talking about.
So, for the record and benefit of those of us without Vista in front of us, you are saying that Vista search occurs as you type, without having to hit the enter key or press a search button? And, by extension, that Paul Thurrott was hallucinating or just plain mistaken when he wrote that it does otherwise (hey, wouldn't be the first time)?
Considering the subject of this comment bank is the article, saying "Or did you just read about it somewhere?" with that sniff of superiority is kinda silly. Of course he bloody well read about it "somewhere"!
But anyway, please confirm that you have your facts correct.
One thing that really caught me off guard (other than the bizarre inconsistencies in tiger that I havn't noticed) is the comment reguarding spotlight's searching as you type being counter-productive? I have a Powerbook G4 (so obviously not the most powerful mac available currently), and I have noticed absolutely no lag in performance when typing in a spotlight search. Actually you can often see the document you need in spotlight as you type, so by finding it before you even finish typing your search query wouldn't you actually be slightly (although unnoticably) more productive? Unless of course the moving text in the spotlight box is just so confusing and hypnotizing that he cannot continue typing.
That bugged me in the article too. I absolutely LOVE typing something like "TPS Report PDF for Fourth Quarter by Pinhead Boss", getting to "TPS R" and noticing that the one I wanted is already sitting there at the top.
Saves me significantly more of my time typing than it costs my CPU to think, and I value my time more than its cycles anyway!
The idea of splitting up into separate "programs" (processes) is that each is isolated by hardware from others. So an error (bug) will disturb one but not others.
Interesting perspective. My view is that overall convenience and simplicity is more important than the possibility of a crash in one window causing another window to go away. Do I save often? Well, if I'm using an app that's crashed on me before, ever, yes, I save constantly in every window, 'cause I don't want to lose the data in the window that caused the crash lost either! If I haven't had a crash in the app I still generally save fairly often, and if I'm not doing it then the autosave functions generally do it for me. I can't remember the last time an app crash cost me more than a minute or two of work.
As for code pages being shared... I wasn't aware that Windows did this, unless you were using a DLL mechanism. Are you sure that this is accurate?
The transparent terminals are a feature to die for.
Somewhat off-topic, but I just never got the appeal of transparency. Just makes both the foreground and the background illegible to me. Thurrot even blasts Windows Vista for over-use of transparency in the article. To each his own, I suppose.
You are confused because you are confusing "Application Instance" with "Window". I have Safari open once. I have... [counts] four windows open. This one, my "time waster" window, has three Slashdot tabs and the article tab open.
This is one instance of Safari.
Downside? Session-based login sites are moderately harder to debug (you only have one session because it's one process, so you can only log in once), but developers should be able to use the two brain cells required to get a second instance of Safari up and running pretty easily.
Upside? It's immediately obvious which of my windows when I am debugging such a site are for the current login; they're the ones that show up when I Expose the current app windows, and the other session's windows are those that come up when I alt-tab over to the other Safari instance and Expose current app windows. On Windows I end up with ten IE windows and no way to tell which share the original login session and which sit in a separate process.
Again, as your parent said, I don't see how this is causing you to change your browsing habits.
Inconsistencies in the Mac UI? The most obvious one is that you double click to launch applications from the finder but single click them from the dock. Double click isn't always safe, because sometimes it'll launch two copies.
I agree on the inconsistency... but launching two copies? Not via Finder or the Dock! Heck, if you want to launch more than one copy of an application, you need to either launch the executable from the command line or use something like QuickSilver (nice and handy "Launch Another Copy" option for apps) OR use the method just about everyone I have seen needing to launch multiple copies of a single app does: physically copy the app itself and launch both the original and the copy.
As for documents... well, if you're talking about a well-behaved OS X application, it shouldn't bring up two windows on the same document via the "Open" Apple Event (what happens when you double-click a file in Finder or single-click in Dock).
I just double clicked a few apps and a few documents in my Dock. Nothing came up twice. Where are you seeing this being a problem?
I tend to agree. Finding files is easy if you put them away in the right place to start with. Kind of like getting a piece of paper from your boss and filing it in your filing cab in the folder marked From_Boss_2005 vs. throughing it on your desk and hoping that you remember to read it before your boss is expecting an answer.
OR, maybe, put that file your boss gave you wherever it makes the most sense (and will still make sense a year from now when you're looking at all the information you ever got about Project X), AND add a "needs action" tag so that it shows up in your "DO THIS BEFORE YOU GO HOME!" smart folder sitting on your desktop and pops up in a Growl reminder window periodically throughout the day...
But, I'm sure, just putting it in a folder full of everything else your boss ever gave you this year will definitely ensure that it gets proper attention in your highly-organized life. 'Cause, surely, a single hierarchal tree of concepts is sufficient to reflect where any particular document sits in the simple universe of your life.
Hopefully patents like this will start making the government realise just how flawed the system is.
I'd be a rich man if had a nickel for every time I heard this.
Dude! Anyone have the patent on complaining about stupid patents yet? Between that and my pending patent for nodding and sounding interested while listening to complaints about stupid patents, and I'll be, like, a gazillionaire once those licensing fees start kicking in!
Why don't you RTFA before posting. The cruise control designed by GM can actually steer.
Not to mention it also mentions how some pieces of the proposed system (cruise control including braking control, using radar/laser distancing controls, alarms on lane drift) occur in some cars, but not all of them together.
In other words, had he RTFA, he'd just pretty much be moderated -1, redundant.
Apple didn't blunder, but in all likelihood took the correct position that a displayed representation of a heirarchical filesystem was unpatentable. After all, tree-style directory display utilities have been around since MS-DOS 2.0 (and probably much earlier).
A key part of the patent is that a single entity lives at multiple "leaves" of the tree, and that it is automatically placed at the proper "leaves" based on meta data.
Not exactly the same as a DOS FAT tree representation. I'd agree that there is prior art, but it's not that obvious.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I'd say software which doesn't generate random passwords and/or facilitates setting the same password for all users has a glitch. I know we all have encountered such systems where something is "brought up" and everyone gets the same password - usually one of "password", "changeme", "setme", or "1234" - but that doesn't change the implementation of such a system from a system failure to a user failure.
Especially something as already-complex as a testing assessment system. I find it hard to believe a simple "randomize all passwords" wasn't built into the system and couldn't have been enforced as the default state of a new user's password. The fact that the software allowed a school IT guy to listen to the "bad angel" on his shoulder and compromise security in this manner is a Very Bad Thing.
IMHO, and I work on software for schools (not a competitor to this product, but still software for school administrators), any software which assumes that an IT administrator at a district or state education office is going to be following accepted "best practices" is going to be filled with software glitches and failures. The "computer guy" at a school is often not trained as such; he just has worked with computers before. In the cases where a district actually hires an IT guy, they tend to choose between hiring a small team of people who accept the lowest possible wages, or hire one "hotshot" IT guy and overload him with the work of ten.
Of course, that doesn't put all the blame on the software system. The system admin should have randomized the passwords from the start. The users should have logged on and changed their passwords the first day. But a well-designed system could have and should have made such human failures impossi -- er, less than likely.
Not to mention the "Terraforming" phase to kick it all off, which would often last 10-15 minutes on my old clunky 386SX.
The PC I had in 1995 (100MHz Pentium) ground to a halt decompressing MP3 files. The PC I had in 1991, on which I played the original Civ (non-Win obviously) didn't stand a chance of decompressing MP3 realtime, both because it was a 386SX-16 and because, to my knowledge, MP3 hadn't been invented yet. Well, at least not "officially" (that didn't happen until 1992 according to mp3-mac.com).
WAV worked quite well, however, on both of those computers (after I added a SoundBlaster to the 386 at least).
Jobs: Record execs are greedy.
Record Exec: We are not greedy, we just want money for what we produce. And we need a cut of iPod sales.
Jobs: QED
The reason you don't charge a different price for a more expensive movie is that the cost per showing is exactly the same regardless of the cost to create it
Not really. You don't charge a different price for different movies showing in the same theater at the same time because it is logistically impractical to segregate the theater and keep the morons buying $2.50 Bigalow tickets from skipping over to the $20 War of the Worlds screening. So, instead, you charge $10 for both and if a guy buys one ticket and sees a different show then all that's lost is book-keeping.
Think about it: it costs just as much to show the movie at 11:20 AM as it does at 7:30 at night. Why is one $6/ticket and the other full price? It also costs just as much to show a movie in a second-run theater (actually more, as the prints are more fragile at that point), yet they can run down towards $3.50/ticket hereabouts, and in other areas even still play at $1-2 per ticket.
Music is not the same thing, here, although the reason for wanting per-movie pricing (you can't very well maximize profits at a fixed per-unit cost) applies there as well, Jobs named it well: greed, and, worse, short-sighted greed. The "long-sighted" part here is the music companies wanting to keep the pie to themselves rather than Apple, but that's a far as they can do in thinking a few years out.
With per-unit music, people will buy a whole lot more if they don't have to "shop around" for the best price. $.99 per song, every single song, every single time, makes things very simple. $13.99 for the CD at Best Buy, and I like two songs and might like up to five of them, and I know for certain that $2-5 is all I need to spend to get that music. I don't have to worry about the record company having deemed the "good songs" worth $5 each, and the "crap songs" at $.50; I know what the price will be by simple math (although the full album price is another story).
Music is a unique market. It is a volume market, which is where the standardized pricing is a major asset. It is also an "art" market, where value is highly subjective. That having been said, the only argument for variable pricing is that the top-dollar acts, which we know will be Britney Spears and Michael Jackson's successors, are making too little money for their efforts and the low-end artists don't make enough. But, in this particular market, non-variable pricing has worked very well in creating a highly classed range of incomes (to the record companies; the artist nets are capricious but variable pricing would exacerbate that instead of fix it), from not-even-close-to-breaking-even all the way to paying-for-a-dozen-record-exec-ferrarris.
Yeah, but maybe Jarbo is like a big transformer, you know, and can fend him off!
... but who will play Haggar?
What a geek.
And it's Voltron, not Transformers.
So which one's Commander Keith in the black lion? Obviously Gates is Zarkon and Ballmer Lotor
But I don't know that, 'cause that would be really geeky.
People get confused over XP Home versus XP Professional versus 2003 Server.
I think you are giving the human race far too much credit.
No, the vast majority will see 7 "models", hear someone say "The Ultra Pimp edition is da bomb!" and either buy that or the one one step more expensive than it. And the rest will see increasing prices and pick the lowest cost one, then regret their purchase a week later and pay exhorbitant "upgrade" prices to get the features they didn't realize they needed.
The big problem here is that, outside of Slashdot, the differences between the 7 Vista versions are so arbitrary and abstract that the average user has no way to distinguish them. In the car analogy, it's more like $350-2,500 extra for various topcoat paint procedures and $2,000 for the special DMX Optimizer on the front center speaker. It's all just gobbledegook to the average consumer, which means they'll either buy the most expensive, the least expensive, or whatever happens to be most in stock at CostCo that day.
[Apple's Sound Check]'s a compressor. That's what compressors do--they boost the quiet parts and cut back during the loud parts.
c k.pdf
Are you sure about that? Because that's not what Sound Check does in iTunes (it normalizes and sets a relative volume for each track, hence the step of finding peak levels when you add a bunch of songs to iTunes), and I've noticed that my iPod uses the Sound Check information from iTunes if I take a track and pump it's relative volume way up or way down.
I searched for Sound Check docs and they're pretty scarce. This one's about the best I could find:
http://www.octiv.com/pdf/VolumeLogic_and_SoundChe
And it explicitly says that Sound Check does a simple peak-volume normalization, and that their product does a volume compression/gain step (which they call "Octivated", which knocks the document a solid step down on the authority scale, but still this it the best I see anywhere).
You and the other respondees seem pretty well convinced Apple's using a compressor instead, but that just doesn't appear to be the case. I suppose they could be using the peak level to locate the optimum compression level, but that just seems silly. I'm a bit confused here.
Maybe you are confused because Sound Check does definitely act as a macro-scale compressor on a full album, boosting the "quiet" songs and cutting down the "loud" songs, but that's because it does per-track normalization, not per-album normalization. Or maybe not. Any chance you can clarify a little?
All of these things jumble together to make the "someone who pays more" concept so untestable that it's hard to measure.
So, you take a system with n unknowns and make it n-1 unknowns (because now "pay" is a known).
If you're honest with yourself and do some research, then you can get to know the various "gotchas" in there, and weigh them honestly. Is it better to work for a schmuck boss next to star engineers, or to work for a star boss next to schmuck engineers? I don't know the answer to that, but I'd guess that mine has about a 50% chance of being the opposite of yours (of course, my real answer would be that if you're being given that kind of a choice then you've either been looking in the wrong places or have too low of an opinion of others).
This is, in fact, exactly why the "go see what other offers you can get" approach is so much better than the "look at the results of some survey" approach. With the former, you actually have discoverable answers to the other "n-1" variables besides pay; with the latter there's no way to know that the place that skewed the results by paying their engineers 2x the area average offers no health care and requires all employees to either be shackled to their desk or wear an ankle bracelet which emits a high-pitched scream once the employee has left a 1-mile radius area around the data center.
On the other hand, going out for interviews and bringing that to the "so, make me an offer" stage also sucks, both for you and for the company whose offer you don't intend on taking (I've been on both sides of that, and know that people that do this tend to get blacklisted pretty quickly).
Actually, the better solution is the one your college counselor doubtless let you in on: network. Build up a web of friends. Talk openly about how much you make, what kind of job conditions you enjoy or hate, etc. Where I work we tend to see entire networks come in at once, which is both good for the first guy (employee referral bonus) and for the other guys after him (they don't have to figure out if the guy interviewing them is giving them a snow-job about how great the company is and how easy it is to take a few weeks off every year, etc). Also, it's great for the employer, because not only do these guys work well together, they all can vouch for the others' capabilities.
And filling in NOT NULLS is also handy for the same reason.... if you REALLY need the logic to reject things like blank inputs in web forms then you should be doing that in your application logic anyway.... or if you really don't care all that much you probably just want to accept the submission quietly.
Okay, but isn't a user putting no input in an input field a blank string, not an unspecified field on insert? While some DBs equate the two, I'd say they're rather different. And while it's great that MySQL will allow the insert to put a blank value in a not-null text field, it's not great at all that if the bonehead web designer forgets to put the "First Name" field on the page or in his application logic that the database silently "corrects" his oversight.
The ideal web app is highly forgiving of user input, but thoroughly unforgiving of developer misconduct. See compiler vs runtime errors as a rough analogy.
Truncating varchars is handy for webforms... you don't want to reject the data... but usually the data isn't important enough (like a slashdot post) to really care if a couple words get chopped off by accident (in case you didn't set the character limit on your textbox to match the database).
Again, here I'd want an error. I'd rather have one user get an "Unknown error in database; please contact site admin" style message as well as a logged message server-side just in case they don't call it in when they put 1025 chars into a name field and properly fix the error than for a thousand users to come across the fact that anything after 1024 chars is silently truncated. It's thoroughly unprofessional, IMHO.
Again, I'd want the database to tell the web page designer he's a bonehead rather than whisper it quietly to every user of the site. The fact that the database prefers gossip over direct constructive criticism might be considered rude in some circles.
First of all, let's get the Lexmark thing out of the way: they're not demanding that the cartridges be thrown away after one use. That would be retarded. They are demanding that the purchaser of the cartridge comply with the terms of the contract to which they agreed by opening the package, and return the empty cartridge after a single use, so that Lexmark can recycle the damn thing, not throw it in a landfill. Nothing is being wasted, and no one's hand is being forced. Consumers are free to choose not to buy Lexmark's cartridges if they don't agree to the terms of sale.
Sorry, but if Lexmark was trying to encourage recycling then they would put the incentive on returning the used cartridge, not on removing all recycling options but one for the end user.
If you bought a Lexmark cartridge under this "contract", then you are "obligated" to return it to Lexmark when done with it. In reality, though, that's a bunch of work for nothing. You already got your "cheaper" cartridge. You can get another "cheaper" cartridge by going to the store and buying it. You would love to recycle this cartridge if it saved you money, by sending it in to a third-party refiller and getting it refilled for significantly less than the new cartridge, but Lexmark will put any third-party refiller which accepts your cartridge out of business, so they don't accept your cartridge.
Consumer has two choices:
* Make extra effort to find out how exactly they are supposed to send this cartridge in to Lexmark, then buy a new one at the store.
* Deposit used cartridge in the office trash can, then buy a new one at the store.
Gee, I wonder which will happen?
Again, if Lexmark wanted to both encourage recycling AND discourage (to some extent) third-party refilling, they'd offer the rebate at time of cartridge return. This would be significantly easier to enforce, and also see significantly higher utilization. The landfill loses out in this scenario, as ALL cartridges either end up back with Lexmark or they end up at third-party refillers.
The only conclusion is that the distinguishing characteristic of the current model - that ALL third-party refilling goes away by means of being breach of contract and/or knowing support of breach of contract - is more appealing to Lexmark than the likelihood of full recycling.
Again, Lexmark has clearly defined their objective here as eliminating third-party refilling rather than eliminating landfill consumption.
It's actually an attempt to kill the recycling companies by red-tape-burial.
Oh, you're recycling a Lexmark cartridge. Can you please prove that it was not under contract to be returned to Lexmark? Oh, we'll check our records for you. Please simply fill out this form describing the serial number and physical characteristics of the cartridge and we'll look it up in our system. Oh, and if it was supposed to be returned to us, you're obligated to contact the user who sent it to you and return it to them.
One form per cartridge == dead business model for recycling companies.
Hence the worldwide revolt against Macrovision and CSS.
I can walk to Blockbuster, the grocery store, and two (yes, two) drug stores; riding a bike to them itself would be a bit of overkill. Still, it's just as easy to stop in their parking lots on the way home except in the very rare cases where we need something in an emergency (sick child, absolutely positively have to get a movie tonight). Focusing on movie nights, I tend to stop by to get a pizza and sodas on the same trip home when we're getting a movie or two.
In fact, were four out of five Blockbusters to close their doors, I'd still be doing things this way, as I pass six of them altogether on my way home (a couple are a little down side-streets or taking alternate routes, but not overly so).
For me, there's not much advantage getting the movie over cable and still having to drive out to pick up a pizza and drinks. The current system doesn't cost me in gas directly (although it of course costs Blockbuster in general to keep and man so many storefronts).
I would have rpefered Apple going with AMD opteron's or contracting one of their other beefy 64 bit chips. Why intel?
1. Because Intel can bankroll transition costs to a large degree, as they benefit greatly from it.
2. Because people know Intel, not so much AMD. If you're going to say you're going to industry-standard chips, it makes sense to say you're going to the industry-leading (in terms of sales and marketing, not necessarily current performance) vendor.
3. Because Intel has a full spectrum of chip solutions, from XScale to high-end Pentium "5" architecture.
4. Because if Intel doesn't deliver then Apple can shift over to AMD quite quickly and easily.
On another note, people keep wondering why they should upgrade to another version of Word, since there are no new compelling features. Word seems to be, for a vast majority of users "done".
Word is hardly "done" from a quality perspective. Users just have a really hard time paying for an "upgrade" when all they will get out of that upgrade is that the features they thought they had bought a few releases back actually work without the one-in-ten chance of causing the app to "unexpectedly" quit.
I think quality, not feature infusion, is what the original poster was talking about.
So, for the record and benefit of those of us without Vista in front of us, you are saying that Vista search occurs as you type, without having to hit the enter key or press a search button? And, by extension, that Paul Thurrott was hallucinating or just plain mistaken when he wrote that it does otherwise (hey, wouldn't be the first time)?
b 1_vs_tiger_06.jpg appears to demonstrate the necessity of hitting "search" after you've assembled your various search criteria. Is there another search interface which maybe Thurrott missed?
Considering the subject of this comment bank is the article, saying "Or did you just read about it somewhere?" with that sniff of superiority is kinda silly. Of course he bloody well read about it "somewhere"!
But anyway, please confirm that you have your facts correct.
The screenshot at http://www.winsupersite.com/images/showcase/vista
One thing that really caught me off guard (other than the bizarre inconsistencies in tiger that I havn't noticed) is the comment reguarding spotlight's searching as you type being counter-productive? I have a Powerbook G4 (so obviously not the most powerful mac available currently), and I have noticed absolutely no lag in performance when typing in a spotlight search. Actually you can often see the document you need in spotlight as you type, so by finding it before you even finish typing your search query wouldn't you actually be slightly (although unnoticably) more productive? Unless of course the moving text in the spotlight box is just so confusing and hypnotizing that he cannot continue typing.
That bugged me in the article too. I absolutely LOVE typing something like "TPS Report PDF for Fourth Quarter by Pinhead Boss", getting to "TPS R" and noticing that the one I wanted is already sitting there at the top.
Saves me significantly more of my time typing than it costs my CPU to think, and I value my time more than its cycles anyway!
The idea of splitting up into separate "programs" (processes) is that each is isolated by hardware from others. So an error (bug) will disturb one but not others.
... I wasn't aware that Windows did this, unless you were using a DLL mechanism. Are you sure that this is accurate?
Interesting perspective. My view is that overall convenience and simplicity is more important than the possibility of a crash in one window causing another window to go away. Do I save often? Well, if I'm using an app that's crashed on me before, ever, yes, I save constantly in every window, 'cause I don't want to lose the data in the window that caused the crash lost either! If I haven't had a crash in the app I still generally save fairly often, and if I'm not doing it then the autosave functions generally do it for me. I can't remember the last time an app crash cost me more than a minute or two of work.
As for code pages being shared
The transparent terminals are a feature to die for.
Somewhat off-topic, but I just never got the appeal of transparency. Just makes both the foreground and the background illegible to me. Thurrot even blasts Windows Vista for over-use of transparency in the article. To each his own, I suppose.
You are confused because you are confusing "Application Instance" with "Window". I have Safari open once. I have ... [counts] four windows open. This one, my "time waster" window, has three Slashdot tabs and the article tab open.
This is one instance of Safari.
Downside? Session-based login sites are moderately harder to debug (you only have one session because it's one process, so you can only log in once), but developers should be able to use the two brain cells required to get a second instance of Safari up and running pretty easily.
Upside? It's immediately obvious which of my windows when I am debugging such a site are for the current login; they're the ones that show up when I Expose the current app windows, and the other session's windows are those that come up when I alt-tab over to the other Safari instance and Expose current app windows. On Windows I end up with ten IE windows and no way to tell which share the original login session and which sit in a separate process.
Again, as your parent said, I don't see how this is causing you to change your browsing habits.
Inconsistencies in the Mac UI? The most obvious one is that you double click to launch applications from the finder but single click them from the dock. Double click isn't always safe, because sometimes it'll launch two copies.
... but launching two copies? Not via Finder or the Dock! Heck, if you want to launch more than one copy of an application, you need to either launch the executable from the command line or use something like QuickSilver (nice and handy "Launch Another Copy" option for apps) OR use the method just about everyone I have seen needing to launch multiple copies of a single app does: physically copy the app itself and launch both the original and the copy.
... well, if you're talking about a well-behaved OS X application, it shouldn't bring up two windows on the same document via the "Open" Apple Event (what happens when you double-click a file in Finder or single-click in Dock).
I agree on the inconsistency
As for documents
I just double clicked a few apps and a few documents in my Dock. Nothing came up twice. Where are you seeing this being a problem?
I tend to agree. Finding files is easy if you put them away in the right place to start with. Kind of like getting a piece of paper from your boss and filing it in your filing cab in the folder marked From_Boss_2005 vs. throughing it on your desk and hoping that you remember to read it before your boss is expecting an answer.
...
OR, maybe, put that file your boss gave you wherever it makes the most sense (and will still make sense a year from now when you're looking at all the information you ever got about Project X), AND add a "needs action" tag so that it shows up in your "DO THIS BEFORE YOU GO HOME!" smart folder sitting on your desktop and pops up in a Growl reminder window periodically throughout the day
But, I'm sure, just putting it in a folder full of everything else your boss ever gave you this year will definitely ensure that it gets proper attention in your highly-organized life. 'Cause, surely, a single hierarchal tree of concepts is sufficient to reflect where any particular document sits in the simple universe of your life.
Hopefully patents like this will start making the government realise just how flawed the system is.
I'd be a rich man if had a nickel for every time I heard this.
Dude! Anyone have the patent on complaining about stupid patents yet? Between that and my pending patent for nodding and sounding interested while listening to complaints about stupid patents, and I'll be, like, a gazillionaire once those licensing fees start kicking in!
Dibs!
Why don't you RTFA before posting. The cruise control designed by GM can actually steer.
Not to mention it also mentions how some pieces of the proposed system (cruise control including braking control, using radar/laser distancing controls, alarms on lane drift) occur in some cars, but not all of them together.
In other words, had he RTFA, he'd just pretty much be moderated -1, redundant.
Apple didn't blunder, but in all likelihood took the correct position that a displayed representation of a heirarchical filesystem was unpatentable. After all, tree-style directory display utilities have been around since MS-DOS 2.0 (and probably much earlier).
A key part of the patent is that a single entity lives at multiple "leaves" of the tree, and that it is automatically placed at the proper "leaves" based on meta data.
Not exactly the same as a DOS FAT tree representation. I'd agree that there is prior art, but it's not that obvious.