What you mean is that it would not be habitable by us.
Yeah, instead of it being inhabited by little green mean, you'd have large muscular green mean with nasty dispositions (unless you happen to be a hot chick in trouble - hmm doesn't that apply to all guys?).
Re:"At this PC convention.." What/Where?
on
Is Linux Dead?
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· Score: 2
It's labeled 'Tech PC Expo' in multiple places.
Is that REALLY the name, or just another generic term? So it's a Technology Personal Computer Exposition? Duh.;)
Maybe we're just stupid here in the midwest for giving things meaningful, non-generic names.:)
I forget sometimes when it snows an inch on the east coast all of a sudden the whole country is in peril. I guess I should have known it was THE Tech PC Expo. It's in NY, of course.:P
I used to have Excel timesheets submitted to me using OpenOffice. Yes, they're readable but some of the formatting is wrong or borders missing or other little bits and pieces.
Ever get a document from SPS Commerce? I don't know what they do to them, but Even MS Word viewer doesn't display it right..
"At this PC convention.." What/Where?
on
Is Linux Dead?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Umm I keep seeing references to some PC convention in NY, but I never saw what the hell convention he was even referring to..
Like this:
"At PC conventions like this one, Microsoft's Windows operating system still rules, with some 94 percent of the operating system market for desktops and laptop PCs, according to IDC. Despite its growing popularity among computer professionals, it's still not completely 'user friendly'."
Where is this guy? That's like me walking to SOME BUILDING SOMEHERE, and saying "At business like this one, X rules". It's one thing if there's a TV camera recording the event, you might know what kinds of business use 'X'.
It an opinion piece, with no real supporting facts, other than 'at conventions like this one'. It could be Rummage-O-Rama as far as we know..
Previous suggestions to senior management that myself and other developers would feel better with a technical person running projects have been dismissed.
Been there, done that. Depending on the political climate, you have have screwed yourself because you spoke out. Done that too.:(
In my case the following occured when I realized we were lead by the unititiated, and for YEARS tried to make change:
I was offered a false management position (which never materialized)
I created an outline for a security department, which gave 'roaming' resources a home, and put myself in as Manager. I was told it was a good idea, but they wanted a Director of Security. A couple months later the telecom guy was named Security Manager. They could have at least hired someone who knows MORE than me.
I tried to move into programming (I was in Networking) on my own. I wrote a web app that the CEO wanted (Status info for Sales Offices), but that 'move' stalled almost immediately.
Essentially, by speaking my mind, and giving my opinion what which way the IT area should be headed, I got labeled Anti-Microsoft (when in reality, the guy in charge would want anything MS even if it didn't really fit the need. An NBM-er.) What they really wanted was lackeys. I left within 6 months of receiving a 'Dedication to Excellence' (or something) award.
My suggestion is to write down all the positives and negatives of your current boss, and if you were boss.
If it seems to make sense, and management's decisions fly in the face of logic, just leave.
Maybe that's why...
on
Version Fatigue
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· Score: 3, Insightful
..Users think 'Usability' really refers to how much like the LAST product this new product behaves..
Who's to say the 'repair' wasn't just a cover to get out of the ring
Isn't this where the 'machine logic' usually turns the robot into a killer?
THIS UNIT is programmed to survive. ORGANIC CARBON UNITS force THIS UNIT to engage in activities which threaten to destroy THIS UNIT and therefore ORGANIC CARBON UNITS threaten the survival of THIS UNIT. THIS UNIT must destroy all ORGANIC CARBON UNITS to guarentee survival.
Ahhh You must live with me in the U.S. I don't think in England they teach 'destroy anything that's unlike you'.
Instead, they teach 'Run Away!' (Remember: "You don't frighten me with your silly knees bent, running around, advancing behaviour. I fart in your general direction.
Now go away, or I shall taunt you a second time!")
The small unit, called Gaak, was one of 12 taking part in a "survival of the fittest" test at the Magna science centre in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, which has been running since March.
If he was in the survival of the fittest competition (got knocked out), and LEFT THE BUILDING to survive, I'd say he won.
Who's to say the 'repair' wasn't just a cover to get out of the ring;)
Remember, these people couldn't even promote THIER OWN operating system
Having worked at Best Buy when both OS/2 Warp and then Win95 came out, I can say it wasn't just IBM marketing.
Our store manager didn't even want to put up the OS/2 stuff. Is that because he wasn't won over by the marketing, or was it HIS boss that wasn't won over?
In any case, there are VERY many people who didn't see marketing materials because of just a few people. I still have that nice heavy 3'x5' Warp poster at home.
Now, to convert your entire userbase to Netscape will mean a significant portion of sites will no longer look correct or will cease to work entirely. Your customers don't understand browser compliance, they merely know that they could visit sites with AOL 7, but not AOL 8. Is the deluge of customer support phone calls and email really worth the hassle?
That (and the fact that IE just sucks) is the reason I replaced IE with Opera on the President's PC. She came to me the other day and said "You know, I never really realized how bad some of these sites are designed, that they only worked with IE."
So I showed her our site that I'm currently building, and the one LITTLE thing that doesn't match up between the browsers (IE/Opera/Mozilla).
I explained why that happens, what's happening with AOL, and how people with short attention spans will just go somewhere else.
Everything here is hunky-dory. As soon as companies realize web browsing is EXACTLY like window shopping in a Ferrari, we'll see some compliant websites. It's not that hard to do (of course, our site is PHP, written in VI - no 'tools' to muck things up.)
http://www.sophos.com/virusinfo/articles/perrun.ht ml
Picture this: a virus in a JPEG Sophos advises on threat posed by new.JPG virus, and urges anti-virus companies to exercise restraint Sophos, a world leader in corporate anti-virus protection, today called for the anti-virus industry to act responsibly in light of the discovery of the first virus capable of infecting JPEG graphic files. The virus, known as W32/Perrun-A, was sent directly to the anti-virus community by its author and is considered to be a "proof of concept". It spreads in the form of a traditional Win32 executable virus (usually called proof.exe), making changes to the Registry to mean that JPEG (.JPG) graphic files are examined by an extractor (called EXTRK.EXE) before they can be viewed. If the extractor finds viral code inside the graphic file it is executed. "Some anti-virus vendors may be tempted to predict the end of the world as we know it, or warn of an impending era when all graphic files should be treated with suspicion. Such experts should be ashamed of themselves," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos Anti-Virus. "Not only is this virus not in the wild, but also graphic files infected by this virus are completely and utterly harmless, unless they can find an already infected machine to assist them. It's like a cold only being capable of making people who already have runny noses feel ill." "The virus relies entirely upon you running an infected EXE file, which is hardly rocket science," said Paul Ducklin, Head of Global Support for Sophos Anti-Virus. "Yet we are already seeing reports suggesting that this virus could spread via websites containing so-called 'infectious' images. This sounds like scare-mongering about image files to me." Sophos has issued protection against W32/Perrun-A to customers concerned by the media reports and alerts from other anti-virus vendors.
But Italy's Green Party said it was ridiculous to spend such astronomic sums on the bridge when many Sicilians remained without a proper water supply and the island's roads are badly in need of modernisation.
Ok.. I can MAYBE see the water supply issue, but ROADS? Come on. It seems like there isn't much traffic NOW going to Sicily, why would they need to spend money on making nice roads?
Now, if the bridge is built, Sicily could easily attract weekend tourism, would would bring in more money, that would pay for the new roads.
We were driving home to Wisconsin from Las Vegas on Saturday, May 25th and we drove past that thing. It was in Nebraska around 3pm.
I swear, besides the NECAR logo it said something about "Nitrogen / electric", but I couldn't find anything about Nitrogen on their web site. I figure going past it at 85mph was enough to blur it.
There was another minivan ahead of me that was passing it at the same time. Imagine my surprise when this guy opened up the back hatch of his minivan on I80 to start filming. (yes it was an actual crew.)
Anyway, these figures are spurious: I occasionally submit bug reports, fixes and enhancements to dev team on sourceforge projects, but I don't join the teams, because I can't commit the effort. But I did review the code, there's just no metrics that capture it.
Damn straight. I think what the author wanted was a quick and easy way to get at some 'real' numbers. Unfortunately due to the nature of the 'community', that just doesn't exist. The author would have to spend months looking through mailing list logs to see who submitted what, and how much weight to give that 'code author', based on what his/her patch did for the project.
Personally, I've done the same as a lot of people here. I've submitted patches to projects, though only one of those is on SF (photoseek), and that one is VERY inactive. The other projects are NOT on SF, and in some cases my patches havn't been accepted, or were overridden because the original author did it better. Motion - motion.technolust.cx, is what comes to mind. The authors implementation of muliple cameras is much better than my hack. (though it wasn't a patch to an app per-say, just an 'external' solution)
Should I be counted because my 'fix', wasn't (rightly) accepted into the project, though it did solve some peoples problems? Or would my Photoseek submission only be accepted, though it was quite small, and the project is quite inactive?
In fact, everyone who downloads, compiles and runs the source is testing the code to some extent.
No kidding, how could the author include individual bug reports? He'd have to assign some kind of weight to them, and hope he could sort a project-bug mailing list by author:) I can't count the number of times I've seen a good bug report directly influence a patch on wine-devel. Does only one 'developer' get credit then?
IMHO, it's definately a good idea to try and quantify things, but I think the author could make things worse by not spending the right amount of time on it.
If Nader declares "Americans should never dress up like Carmen Miranda in public", you'd start seeing fruit salads over every Republican's head.
Hehe that wasn't what I was expecting in the post, and kinda invalidates my argument, BUT, as much as it doesn't seem like people listen to Nader (I don't), I do know this: The squeaky wheel gets the grease. (That sentence inspired by Douglas Adams.)
Whether or not your loudest most obnosious user is correct, management dictates that their gripes will be taken care of, whether you really can or not.
At some point, some of what he says will make sense, and action will be taken (purchase caps on proprietary software is a nifty idea.)
Re:Big Blue Gone in 10 - No chance
on
IBM Spins Down
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Yes, IBM does (has done) great research. But research is expensive and I don't see anything in particular that IBM has been able to capitalize on coming out of IBM research for a while.
Umm. IBM has a PATENT division/business, in and of itself. All that arm does is collect royalties, and sign licensing deals.
That alone should be enough to keep IBM in business for decades.
Also note: Certain IBM HDD operations are not included in the deal.
I would suspect this is the research area that is working on the next-generation HDD stuff. I don't think IBM would transfer any existing patents it hasn't already milked all the royalties out of.
Now, I have to think: what if they take my tounge-and-cheek hacking posts on/. as real and start screwing with my life?? I now have 147 posts on/. as my permanent record and have often opposed government action or suggested software projects that might facilitate anonymous music piracy. Should I be worred? I Don't think so. But I do have empathy for those organize or participate in anti-globalization protests. They will have more difficult lives b/c of their political beliefs. Or those that buy falafels using their Safeway Card and protest...
May I say, Excellent reply. In short, I do have some concerns over some people getting 'too enthusiastic' about their jobs. But if we don't trust in human nature, what are we to do?
I know what you mean about the tongue-in-cheek posts.. Personally, I'm more worried about my kids finding some of my posts:P
Sheep usually demonstrate the same kind of behaviour.
That's a bit excessive. I'd consider myself normal (black lab), while you have ADD (dense puppy - tongue hagning out, chasing anything that moves). There's a reason there are so many "Nothing to see here, move along" comments..there really isn't anything of value.
Actually, most alive beings (including humans) cannot focus on things they fail to evaluate or understand.
Recognizing futility doesn't have anything to do with lack of understanding, in fact, it's just the opposite. I merely manage my time better by setting worthwhile attainable goals. (Again, to counter you knee-jerk reaction, an attainable goal is not necessarily an easy, empty goal.)
There's nothing like the poor old guy who spent his whole life looking at the ground to find money. All he got out of it was $86, and sever saw the stars. Be aware, but don't waste your time, you really do need it.
I suppose you don't realize that fluctuations occur throughout time. Remember McCarthyism? Remember Communist witchhunts? The balance of power SHIFTS. At some point, it will shift back, and you guys will whine about not having access to something because someone values their privacy more than giving that info away.
It's like, you guys want your privacy, but you also want full disclosure of everyone else.
Get on with it. Polititians are like lawyers, it doesn't matter who wins, or who is in power, they will still be making a profit off your fears and complaints.
Have you guys ever noticed that polititians do the opposite of what they say? So why waste your time voting based on what you find out? Just vote for who you DON'T agree with, and get on with life. Besides, all the elections are rigged, or have some sort of cheating in them anyways.
I'm surprised you guys don't all have ulcers and hemherroids from constant worrying. The rest of the country just goes back to whatever they were doing the day before.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, instead of it being inhabited by little green mean, you'd have large muscular green mean with nasty dispositions (unless you happen to be a hot chick in trouble - hmm doesn't that apply to all guys?).
Is that REALLY the name, or just another generic term? So it's a Technology Personal Computer Exposition? Duh. ;)
Maybe we're just stupid here in the midwest for giving things meaningful, non-generic names. :) :P
I forget sometimes when it snows an inch on the east coast all of a sudden the whole country is in peril. I guess I should have known it was THE Tech PC Expo. It's in NY, of course.
Ever get a document from SPS Commerce? I don't know what they do to them, but Even MS Word viewer doesn't display it right..
Like this:
"At PC conventions like this one, Microsoft's Windows operating system still rules, with some 94 percent of the operating system market for desktops and laptop PCs, according to IDC. Despite its growing popularity among computer professionals, it's still not completely 'user friendly'."
Where is this guy? That's like me walking to SOME BUILDING SOMEHERE, and saying "At business like this one, X rules". It's one thing if there's a TV camera recording the event, you might know what kinds of business use 'X'.
It an opinion piece, with no real supporting facts, other than 'at conventions like this one'. It could be Rummage-O-Rama as far as we know..
Been there, done that. Depending on the political climate, you have have screwed yourself because you spoke out. Done that too. :(
In my case the following occured when I realized we were lead by the unititiated, and for YEARS tried to make change:
Essentially, by speaking my mind, and giving my opinion what which way the IT area should be headed, I got labeled Anti-Microsoft (when in reality, the guy in charge would want anything MS even if it didn't really fit the need. An NBM-er.) What they really wanted was lackeys. I left within 6 months of receiving a 'Dedication to Excellence' (or something) award.
My suggestion is to write down all the positives and negatives of your current boss, and if you were boss. If it seems to make sense, and management's decisions fly in the face of logic, just leave.
Isn't this where the 'machine logic' usually turns the robot into a killer? THIS UNIT is programmed to survive. ORGANIC CARBON UNITS force THIS UNIT to engage in activities which threaten to destroy THIS UNIT and therefore ORGANIC CARBON UNITS threaten the survival of THIS UNIT. THIS UNIT must destroy all ORGANIC CARBON UNITS to guarentee survival.
Ahhh You must live with me in the U.S. I don't think in England they teach 'destroy anything that's unlike you'.
Instead, they teach 'Run Away!' (Remember: "You don't frighten me with your silly knees bent, running around, advancing behaviour. I fart in your general direction. Now go away, or I shall taunt you a second time!")
The small unit, called Gaak, was one of 12 taking part in a "survival of the fittest" test at the Magna science centre in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, which has been running since March. If he was in the survival of the fittest competition (got knocked out), and LEFT THE BUILDING to survive, I'd say he won. Who's to say the 'repair' wasn't just a cover to get out of the ring ;)
Having worked at Best Buy when both OS/2 Warp and then Win95 came out, I can say it wasn't just IBM marketing.
Our store manager didn't even want to put up the OS/2 stuff. Is that because he wasn't won over by the marketing, or was it HIS boss that wasn't won over?
In any case, there are VERY many people who didn't see marketing materials because of just a few people. I still have that nice heavy 3'x5' Warp poster at home.
That (and the fact that IE just sucks) is the reason I replaced IE with Opera on the President's PC. She came to me the other day and said "You know, I never really realized how bad some of these sites are designed, that they only worked with IE."
So I showed her our site that I'm currently building, and the one LITTLE thing that doesn't match up between the browsers (IE/Opera/Mozilla).
I explained why that happens, what's happening with AOL, and how people with short attention spans will just go somewhere else.
Everything here is hunky-dory. As soon as companies realize web browsing is EXACTLY like window shopping in a Ferrari, we'll see some compliant websites. It's not that hard to do (of course, our site is PHP, written in VI - no 'tools' to muck things up.)
http://www.sophos.com/virusinfo/articles/perrun.ht ml
.JPG virus, and urges anti-virus companies to exercise restraint
Picture this: a virus in a JPEG
Sophos advises on threat posed by new
Sophos, a world leader in corporate anti-virus protection, today called for the anti-virus industry to act responsibly in light of the discovery of the first virus capable of infecting JPEG graphic files.
The virus, known as W32/Perrun-A, was sent directly to the anti-virus community by its author and is considered to be a "proof of concept". It spreads in the form of a traditional Win32 executable virus (usually called proof.exe), making changes to the Registry to mean that JPEG (.JPG) graphic files are examined by an extractor (called EXTRK.EXE) before they can be viewed. If the extractor finds viral code inside the graphic file it is executed.
"Some anti-virus vendors may be tempted to predict the end of the world as we know it, or warn of an impending era when all graphic files should be treated with suspicion. Such experts should be ashamed of themselves," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos Anti-Virus. "Not only is this virus not in the wild, but also graphic files infected by this virus are completely and utterly harmless, unless they can find an already infected machine to assist them. It's like a cold only being capable of making people who already have runny noses feel ill."
"The virus relies entirely upon you running an infected EXE file, which is hardly rocket science," said Paul Ducklin, Head of Global Support for Sophos Anti-Virus. "Yet we are already seeing reports suggesting that this virus could spread via websites containing so-called 'infectious' images. This sounds like scare-mongering about image files to me."
Sophos has issued protection against W32/Perrun-A to customers concerned by the media reports and alerts from other anti-virus vendors.
Now, if the bridge is built, Sicily could easily attract weekend tourism, would would bring in more money, that would pay for the new roads.
They'd also need the clean water..
I swear, besides the NECAR logo it said something about "Nitrogen / electric", but I couldn't find anything about Nitrogen on their web site. I figure going past it at 85mph was enough to blur it.
There was another minivan ahead of me that was passing it at the same time. Imagine my surprise when this guy opened up the back hatch of his minivan on I80 to start filming. (yes it was an actual crew.)
Damn straight. I think what the author wanted was a quick and easy way to get at some 'real' numbers. Unfortunately due to the nature of the 'community', that just doesn't exist. The author would have to spend months looking through mailing list logs to see who submitted what, and how much weight to give that 'code author', based on what his/her patch did for the project.
Personally, I've done the same as a lot of people here. I've submitted patches to projects, though only one of those is on SF (photoseek), and that one is VERY inactive. The other projects are NOT on SF, and in some cases my patches havn't been accepted, or were overridden because the original author did it better. Motion - motion.technolust.cx, is what comes to mind. The authors implementation of muliple cameras is much better than my hack. (though it wasn't a patch to an app per-say, just an 'external' solution)
Should I be counted because my 'fix', wasn't (rightly) accepted into the project, though it did solve some peoples problems? Or would my Photoseek submission only be accepted, though it was quite small, and the project is quite inactive?
In fact, everyone who downloads, compiles and runs the source is testing the code to some extent.
No kidding, how could the author include individual bug reports? He'd have to assign some kind of weight to them, and hope he could sort a project-bug mailing list by author :) I can't count the number of times I've seen a good bug report directly influence a patch on wine-devel. Does only one 'developer' get credit then?
IMHO, it's definately a good idea to try and quantify things, but I think the author could make things worse by not spending the right amount of time on it.
Hehe that wasn't what I was expecting in the post, and kinda invalidates my argument, BUT, as much as it doesn't seem like people listen to Nader (I don't), I do know this: The squeaky wheel gets the grease. (That sentence inspired by Douglas Adams.)
Whether or not your loudest most obnosious user is correct, management dictates that their gripes will be taken care of, whether you really can or not.
At some point, some of what he says will make sense, and action will be taken (purchase caps on proprietary software is a nifty idea.)
Umm. IBM has a PATENT division/business, in and of itself. All that arm does is collect royalties, and sign licensing deals.
That alone should be enough to keep IBM in business for decades.
Also note: Certain IBM HDD operations are not included in the deal.
I would suspect this is the research area that is working on the next-generation HDD stuff. I don't think IBM would transfer any existing patents it hasn't already milked all the royalties out of.
May I say, Excellent reply. In short, I do have some concerns over some people getting 'too enthusiastic' about their jobs. But if we don't trust in human nature, what are we to do?
I know what you mean about the tongue-in-cheek posts.. Personally, I'm more worried about my kids finding some of my posts :P
That's a bit excessive. I'd consider myself normal (black lab), while you have ADD (dense puppy - tongue hagning out, chasing anything that moves). There's a reason there are so many "Nothing to see here, move along" comments..there really isn't anything of value.
Actually, most alive beings (including humans) cannot focus on things they fail to evaluate or understand.
Recognizing futility doesn't have anything to do with lack of understanding, in fact, it's just the opposite. I merely manage my time better by setting worthwhile attainable goals. (Again, to counter you knee-jerk reaction, an attainable goal is not necessarily an easy, empty goal.)
There's nothing like the poor old guy who spent his whole life looking at the ground to find money. All he got out of it was $86, and sever saw the stars. Be aware, but don't waste your time, you really do need it.
It's like, you guys want your privacy, but you also want full disclosure of everyone else.
Get on with it. Polititians are like lawyers, it doesn't matter who wins, or who is in power, they will still be making a profit off your fears and complaints.
Have you guys ever noticed that polititians do the opposite of what they say? So why waste your time voting based on what you find out? Just vote for who you DON'T agree with, and get on with life. Besides, all the elections are rigged, or have some sort of cheating in them anyways.
I'm surprised you guys don't all have ulcers and hemherroids from constant worrying. The rest of the country just goes back to whatever they were doing the day before.
And it tastes like fucking soap.
HAHA. At least it keeps you from sucking it all out :P
YEAH! The other guys really meant candoms :P
Obviously, you don't get what you pay for.
Doesn't work.. Trust me.