Maybe Slashdot has some sports fans out there, so here goes.
Sports news in its overbloated, expansive form has just ruined all of professional sports and a healthy portion of amateur athletics. More than any other facet of life, sports receive far more coverage than is necessary. Don't get me wrong, the brand of tearjerker FUD journalism conceived by Barbara Walters and 20/20 and now championed by NBC's Dateline are the most unnecessary sixty minutes of life on any night they air.
Yet night in and night out, a sports fan who wants to get his scores and find out who won and lost has to endure reports on the health of Shaquille O'Neal's left ring finger, how a star running back two time zones away is holding out until his team's general manager "comes correct with the money," and listen to no less than a half dozen talking heads launch in on the virtues of being able to work an at bat to a 3-2 count.
The personalities at ESPN, for example, are fun and often insightful, but when I tune into SportsCenter any more, I usually ask myself at some point in the broadcast what good any of this information is. And the answer is always "nothing."
All this coverage does is inflate our perceptions about these athletes. So much so we often mistake them or heroes and icons. Unfortunately, we as fans are to blame as much as news junkies are to blame for the saturation of cable news channels on the cable dial. Somewhere along the way, we exchanged the boxscores for anecdotes.
I postulate that the less we know about an athlete, but better our appreciation of his skills and achievements will be. The Olympics and NBC's coverage of them are of course the best example of this. Nobody knew anything about the 1980 U.S. hockey team that upset the Soviet Union and won gold. And what a moment and memory that turned out to be. Now, we have to endure a punishing barrage of backstories about how an (American) had to overcome some sort of adversity to get where he is. As if without propping up our athletes on some anecdotal cruch, we won't appreciate their accomplishments. Sad...
This reminds me of an excerpt from Peter Lynch's "Beating the Street:"
The extravagance of any corporate office is directly proportional to management's reluctance to reward the shareholders.
In other words, the better run companies pass on the gaudy office space and letterhead and get down to business. I too worked with a egomanical company a few years back on a contract job to build a web site for a national newspaper (names withheld to protect the guilty). This small, local company was rolling in money because of good networking and a connected CEO. But the CEO couldn't help but spend twice as much money as he was bringing in. Today, his company is an also ran.
It's the type A personality's fait accompli. Always putting the cart before the horse, forgetting the importance of working hard and working smart.
This kind of reminds me of the Dot-Gone art exhibit which had scores of business cards from failed dot-coms. Kind of cool actually, since I wasn't eighty-sixed by one.
There's nothing new about major U.S. corporations exploiting^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^investing in China. You show me a corporation that sneezes at a billion people, and I'll show you a penny stock.
However, I do believe the groundswell of interest in Linux there has the Microsoftians scrambling to develop a business model for Asia. Foreign countries are refreshingly competitive markets for software developers, and OSS has made this possible. There's no open source cola to keep Coke in check, but there's Linux, FreeBSD, etc.
Slashdot poster raises his can of Diet Coke to propose a toast. Here's hoping the Chinese take a tact similar to the Peruvians.
That being said there is another issue - what people call left wing media (CNN ABC, etc) is not really left wing.
You cannot be serious. Here, have a bite of my reality. I'll give you some slack on ABC. Despite Peter Jennings, most of the reporting by ABC is on target. Nightline comes to mind as a standard-bearer for quality journalism.
But CNN, the NY Times, and the Washington Post always strafe left when facts approach. But that's not the point.
The point is that liberal minded media sources are firmly entrenched in large urban areas and scarcely anywhere else. New York, Washington D.C, San Francisco, Chicago. Centers for liberal, urban thought. Facts and honest journalism be damned, media sources in these large cities are going to play to their audiences.
Who cares though? There's facts and there's emotion. If you learn that ten people were shot at a bus stop today, do you really need to know how the victims' family members feel about it? Are you better off for that? Does a reporter waxing poetic at the scene add to or clarify the simple facts of the shooting?
No.
But this is the kind of poppycock journalism that will always play well to a feminine, apathetic audience. Dateline and 20/20 come to mind as the worst proprietors of this kind of FUD journalism. As though heartbreak and loss are undefined variables in the program of life.
Ironically, there's an excellent movie starring Michael Douglas titled Star Chamber that deals with the consequences of vigilante justice. An excellent flick for law students and inquiring minds alike.
What I wouldn't do to be able to take the money deducted from my paycheck in the name of Social Security and 1) put it in a savings account, 2) invest it, or 3) a combination thereof. I would clearly be better off. Instead, my government is getting off on me all of my natural working life.
At some point in the not too distance future, I will be at odds with my government and its eighty-year grandfather clause. Maybe I'll try and take a case before the Supreme Court and tear it all down.
Until then, there is one rule we all can live by. Do not trust any one entity with all of your cash, resources, etc. Not the federal government. Not a multinational. Not even your local bank.
For instance, take the filesystem. MS is going after a database filesystem with 500 people on the code. Look at BeOS, 2-4 people worked on the team with Giampaolo at the lead. It wasn't a true Database FS but it did a remarkable job of looking and fucntioning as one. Want to bet that the MS DBFS is going to be top heavy and over engineered and buggy as hell? Or look at security, a tightly knit group of volunteers have made one of the most secure OS's in the world - OpenBSD. And here we have a giant struggling with years of accumulated bad practices- more holes than all of the cheeses in Switzerland. Or look at Quartz and Quartz Extreme from Apple. The core group is less than 15 people led by Mike Paquette have developed a graphics subsystem that has not been matched by the 100+ strong DirectX/3d team from MS.
Indeed, it is for this reason that I am hopeful that Microsoft is never split into smaller, more focused, more manageable companies. Either by force (antitrust cases) or by executive decisions. The only thing keeping Microsoft on IT managers' radar screens is marketing/FUD. Okay, that and perhaps a viable alternative on the desktop (Linux ain't there yet, folks). It sure isn't quality or pricing.
Forget all above posts about consulting your lawyer. Just implement the damn thing. How is your previous employer going to know what you're doing at your current gig? Obviously, I don't know how sensitive or widespread your project is, but I do know that projects guided by legal and marketing departments become crap.
The ETA to a 1.0 release is approximately one year.
Unfortunately, I find this a little optimistic. I've been waiting on Icecast 2 with Vorbis streaming for a long time, and I'm still waiting. (Redirect "build from CVS" replies to/dev/null)
It's my experience that you have to be able to serve/stream this stuff for it to really take off. Sure you can download your pr0n AVIs, MPEGs, ASFs, and WMVs, but where the Ogg and open source movement can make headway is against the streaming servers, namely RealServer.
Don't get me wrong, I think the end results will be good, but they, like most open source projects, will be slow to develop.
I think you have a really compelling idea here. I'm trying to think of how this could possibly take off and where an amateur/hobbyist broadcaster can get started with this. Maybe it doesn't have to be a jam studio. While you're kind of tethered to your Internet pipe, I think it would be really cool if you can go out "into the field" to some local clubs and wrap a show around some live performances. This might be something a club owner could do to generate some publicity for his establishment, and the bands can get some cheap/free publicity doing gigs at such places. Kind of like a poor man's House of Blues, perhaps?
Is there an industry out there that doesn't have at least one corporation under investigation for some sort of heavy-handed business practices? I know, I know, this is Slashdot where we rattle our sabres at the big corporations. Still, I'm just curious to know if there are companies on the level trying to make a buck. When does this kind of story cease being news and become a red flag that we do something about?
I am a fan of capitalism. Yet, it seems the folks in the wheelhouses of our fleet are lost at sea. Competition = capitalism. Squelching competition = fascism.
Suggestion to corporate officers who would listen: forget the quarter to quarter BS, figure out what your companies are in business to do, lay out a plan to do that well for no less than a couple of years, and do only that. In the end you may not be the titan you dreamed of, but you sure as hell won't be testifying before a Congressional committee or holding penny stocks either.
Often times, managers will encourage employees to pretend that an item is out of stock in order to prevent a sale when the customer expressed their intention to NOT buy a PSP.
I can't tell you how many times I've gone to Best Buy's computer department to buy something like Ethernet cables, printer cables, etc. and went away empty because they were "out of stock."
Knowing this I decided last year to take my business elsewhere while looking for a 21" monitor, but I decided to drop in on Best Buy to check their prices. Lo and behold, they had what I wanted and I inquired about buying it. Out of stock. We hadn't even gotten down to PSPs or anything yet either!
Perhaps it varies from store to store, but the one here in Lexington, KY is so pitiful you'd think the world supply of copper and silicon was completely expended.
Props to the Apache team for a quick and thorough fix. Now this, THIS is what I call quality control and customer service. This outruns and outguns Microsoft's see no evil, speak no evil policy on security hotfixes. Hands down.
The Wolf Book is one of if not the best algorithms book going even if you don't like Perl. The language is very accessible, something most college texts on the subject of algorithms are not.
I consider Bruce Eckel's Thinking in Java to be the standard-bearer of Java programming books and one of the better overall programming books. He also wrote Thinking in C++. Very worth your time if your a Java neophyte.
In other engineering disciplines, there is little room for error and your mistakes are readily apparent -- you screw up, and you'll probably wreck a few million dollars worth of equipment during testing or kill someone when the product ships. Software engineering, on the other hand, allows the mediocre on the team to hide behind truly talented individuals.
What a bunch of self-congratulatory, arrogant bullshit. Only a student can come up with this kind of geocentric philosophy on programming. You are not a unique snow flake. You are part of the same rotting, organic, compost heap that makes up the rest of nature. Can I get you a cup of hot cocoa to make it feel better?
If you think the intellectual pyramid of programming is bottom heavy in college, wait until you cash your first paycheck. One of two things will happen at that point in your life: 1) You have an epiphany that no matter how skilled you are, other people, far too deep into the fog to know what a binary tree is, will determine how well your work actually turns out, or 2) You will cast yourself as an agent of change, lay down stringent guidelines for how things should be done, and everyone else will ignore you in order to meet deadlines.
Either way, you will be miserable and burn out in no less than 2 years after graduation.
This, folks, is why colleges need to implement tougher CS curriculums. This is why you need to be able to write code on paper.
If you want to spend time trying to out do Dijkstra or develop the better finite state machine, stay where you are. Academia is for you, more than you know. If, however, you want to create solutions to problems, other people's problems, their business problems, then sit down at the table and have some humble pie.
Episode II, seismic missles in space?
on
Physics in the Movies
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
While I liked the sound effects of those seismic missles used in Episode II: Attack of the Clones in the asteroid belt, I immediately began to wonder if that would actually be possible since space is a vacuum. There's nothing for a seismic or concussive blast to move through, right? No air, water, or anything with mass.
If you set off some sort of explosion outside the space shuttle for example, would the force of the explosion move through the shuttle?
If you trust your boss or whoever offered the counter-offer, and I mean *trust*, to keep salaries and such discrete, then I don't see there being a problem accepting a counter-offer.
If, however, you work for a politically charged, highly structured company, then you're begging to become a corporate pariah. Someone in the chain of command will find out you're "holding them up for more money" and will do one of three things: 1) make your salary requirements public domain, 2) demand that you take on twice the responsibilities you previously had, or 3) begin a festering passive-aggressive campaign to make your life thoroughly miserable.
Personally, you're selling your time and abilities for a price, and if you aren't looking to maximize your take-home $, then you're probably not getting enough out of your job and capitalism on the whole.
I think Perl shines in a web application development environment because you can use it back-end to front-end. I'm running a mod_perl enabled Apache server with a MySQL DBMS with great success. I write my Apache modules in Perl, add a few PerlModules lines in my httpd.conf config file, and embed Perl directives in my HTML template pages with HTML::Embperl.
One language glues together a web server and a database nicely. You could do something similar with Java using Jakarta and Tomcat if you are prefer Java. Both ways are terrific ways to expand your content delivery.
Slashdot Mirror
Sports news in its overbloated, expansive form has just ruined all of professional sports and a healthy portion of amateur athletics. More than any other facet of life, sports receive far more coverage than is necessary. Don't get me wrong, the brand of tearjerker FUD journalism conceived by Barbara Walters and 20/20 and now championed by NBC's Dateline are the most unnecessary sixty minutes of life on any night they air.
Yet night in and night out, a sports fan who wants to get his scores and find out who won and lost has to endure reports on the health of Shaquille O'Neal's left ring finger, how a star running back two time zones away is holding out until his team's general manager "comes correct with the money," and listen to no less than a half dozen talking heads launch in on the virtues of being able to work an at bat to a 3-2 count.
The personalities at ESPN, for example, are fun and often insightful, but when I tune into SportsCenter any more, I usually ask myself at some point in the broadcast what good any of this information is. And the answer is always "nothing."
All this coverage does is inflate our perceptions about these athletes. So much so we often mistake them or heroes and icons. Unfortunately, we as fans are to blame as much as news junkies are to blame for the saturation of cable news channels on the cable dial. Somewhere along the way, we exchanged the boxscores for anecdotes.
I postulate that the less we know about an athlete, but better our appreciation of his skills and achievements will be. The Olympics and NBC's coverage of them are of course the best example of this. Nobody knew anything about the 1980 U.S. hockey team that upset the Soviet Union and won gold. And what a moment and memory that turned out to be. Now, we have to endure a punishing barrage of backstories about how an (American) had to overcome some sort of adversity to get where he is. As if without propping up our athletes on some anecdotal cruch, we won't appreciate their accomplishments. Sad...
Any Slashdot sports fans out there feel the same?
The extravagance of any corporate office is directly proportional to management's reluctance to reward the shareholders.
In other words, the better run companies pass on the gaudy office space and letterhead and get down to business. I too worked with a egomanical company a few years back on a contract job to build a web site for a national newspaper (names withheld to protect the guilty). This small, local company was rolling in money because of good networking and a connected CEO. But the CEO couldn't help but spend twice as much money as he was bringing in. Today, his company is an also ran.It's the type A personality's fait accompli. Always putting the cart before the horse, forgetting the importance of working hard and working smart.
This kind of reminds me of the Dot-Gone art exhibit which had scores of business cards from failed dot-coms. Kind of cool actually, since I wasn't eighty-sixed by one.
I see from your musical taste (WEBN, aka "The Frog") and overt racism (black guy and his rap) that you are from Cincinnati. Gosh, I miss my home...
KHAN!!!!!
However, I do believe the groundswell of interest in Linux there has the Microsoftians scrambling to develop a business model for Asia. Foreign countries are refreshingly competitive markets for software developers, and OSS has made this possible. There's no open source cola to keep Coke in check, but there's Linux, FreeBSD, etc.
Slashdot poster raises his can of Diet Coke to propose a toast. Here's hoping the Chinese take a tact similar to the Peruvians.
You cannot be serious. Here, have a bite of my reality. I'll give you some slack on ABC. Despite Peter Jennings, most of the reporting by ABC is on target. Nightline comes to mind as a standard-bearer for quality journalism.
But CNN, the NY Times, and the Washington Post always strafe left when facts approach. But that's not the point.
The point is that liberal minded media sources are firmly entrenched in large urban areas and scarcely anywhere else. New York, Washington D.C, San Francisco, Chicago. Centers for liberal, urban thought. Facts and honest journalism be damned, media sources in these large cities are going to play to their audiences.
Who cares though? There's facts and there's emotion. If you learn that ten people were shot at a bus stop today, do you really need to know how the victims' family members feel about it? Are you better off for that? Does a reporter waxing poetic at the scene add to or clarify the simple facts of the shooting?
No.
But this is the kind of poppycock journalism that will always play well to a feminine, apathetic audience. Dateline and 20/20 come to mind as the worst proprietors of this kind of FUD journalism. As though heartbreak and loss are undefined variables in the program of life.
Ironically, there's an excellent movie starring Michael Douglas titled Star Chamber that deals with the consequences of vigilante justice. An excellent flick for law students and inquiring minds alike.
At some point in the not too distance future, I will be at odds with my government and its eighty-year grandfather clause. Maybe I'll try and take a case before the Supreme Court and tear it all down.
Until then, there is one rule we all can live by. Do not trust any one entity with all of your cash, resources, etc. Not the federal government. Not a multinational. Not even your local bank.
Indeed, it is for this reason that I am hopeful that Microsoft is never split into smaller, more focused, more manageable companies. Either by force (antitrust cases) or by executive decisions. The only thing keeping Microsoft on IT managers' radar screens is marketing/FUD. Okay, that and perhaps a viable alternative on the desktop (Linux ain't there yet, folks). It sure isn't quality or pricing.
Forget all above posts about consulting your lawyer. Just implement the damn thing. How is your previous employer going to know what you're doing at your current gig? Obviously, I don't know how sensitive or widespread your project is, but I do know that projects guided by legal and marketing departments become crap.
Scientists discovered five brown rings around Uranus.
We no longer have to settle for that Microsoft contraband now that the Penguins are producing some quality shit.
Unfortunately, I find this a little optimistic. I've been waiting on Icecast 2 with Vorbis streaming for a long time, and I'm still waiting. (Redirect "build from CVS" replies to /dev/null)
It's my experience that you have to be able to serve/stream this stuff for it to really take off. Sure you can download your pr0n AVIs, MPEGs, ASFs, and WMVs, but where the Ogg and open source movement can make headway is against the streaming servers, namely RealServer.
Don't get me wrong, I think the end results will be good, but they, like most open source projects, will be slow to develop.
I think you have a really compelling idea here. I'm trying to think of how this could possibly take off and where an amateur/hobbyist broadcaster can get started with this. Maybe it doesn't have to be a jam studio. While you're kind of tethered to your Internet pipe, I think it would be really cool if you can go out "into the field" to some local clubs and wrap a show around some live performances. This might be something a club owner could do to generate some publicity for his establishment, and the bands can get some cheap/free publicity doing gigs at such places. Kind of like a poor man's House of Blues, perhaps?
I am a fan of capitalism. Yet, it seems the folks in the wheelhouses of our fleet are lost at sea. Competition = capitalism. Squelching competition = fascism.
Suggestion to corporate officers who would listen: forget the quarter to quarter BS, figure out what your companies are in business to do, lay out a plan to do that well for no less than a couple of years, and do only that. In the end you may not be the titan you dreamed of, but you sure as hell won't be testifying before a Congressional committee or holding penny stocks either.
I can't tell you how many times I've gone to Best Buy's computer department to buy something like Ethernet cables, printer cables, etc. and went away empty because they were "out of stock."
Knowing this I decided last year to take my business elsewhere while looking for a 21" monitor, but I decided to drop in on Best Buy to check their prices. Lo and behold, they had what I wanted and I inquired about buying it. Out of stock. We hadn't even gotten down to PSPs or anything yet either!
Perhaps it varies from store to store, but the one here in Lexington, KY is so pitiful you'd think the world supply of copper and silicon was completely expended.
Props to the Apache team for a quick and thorough fix. Now this, THIS is what I call quality control and customer service. This outruns and outguns Microsoft's see no evil, speak no evil policy on security hotfixes. Hands down.
As part of their "agreement" Sun requires Microsoft to put that verbage about nuclear reactors, etc. into their license.
The Wolf Book is one of if not the best algorithms book going even if you don't like Perl. The language is very accessible, something most college texts on the subject of algorithms are not.
I consider Bruce Eckel's Thinking in Java to be the standard-bearer of Java programming books and one of the better overall programming books. He also wrote Thinking in C++. Very worth your time if your a Java neophyte.
What a bunch of self-congratulatory, arrogant bullshit. Only a student can come up with this kind of geocentric philosophy on programming. You are not a unique snow flake. You are part of the same rotting, organic, compost heap that makes up the rest of nature. Can I get you a cup of hot cocoa to make it feel better?
If you think the intellectual pyramid of programming is bottom heavy in college, wait until you cash your first paycheck. One of two things will happen at that point in your life: 1) You have an epiphany that no matter how skilled you are, other people, far too deep into the fog to know what a binary tree is, will determine how well your work actually turns out, or 2) You will cast yourself as an agent of change, lay down stringent guidelines for how things should be done, and everyone else will ignore you in order to meet deadlines.
Either way, you will be miserable and burn out in no less than 2 years after graduation.
This, folks, is why colleges need to implement tougher CS curriculums. This is why you need to be able to write code on paper.
If you want to spend time trying to out do Dijkstra or develop the better finite state machine, stay where you are. Academia is for you, more than you know. If, however, you want to create solutions to problems, other people's problems, their business problems, then sit down at the table and have some humble pie.
If you set off some sort of explosion outside the space shuttle for example, would the force of the explosion move through the shuttle?
If, however, you work for a politically charged, highly structured company, then you're begging to become a corporate pariah. Someone in the chain of command will find out you're "holding them up for more money" and will do one of three things: 1) make your salary requirements public domain, 2) demand that you take on twice the responsibilities you previously had, or 3) begin a festering passive-aggressive campaign to make your life thoroughly miserable.
Personally, you're selling your time and abilities for a price, and if you aren't looking to maximize your take-home $, then you're probably not getting enough out of your job and capitalism on the whole.
One language glues together a web server and a database nicely. You could do something similar with Java using Jakarta and Tomcat if you are prefer Java. Both ways are terrific ways to expand your content delivery.