Hehe, eventually it will reach recursive enlightenment.
It is quite funny, though: Google is too successful for its own good. It's like scientific measures where the measurement affects the results: In the case of Google, they've been so successful at measuring the net (links, etc), that we no longer post links.
Re:Google Cookies
on
Mr Anti-Google
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Google is not a government - it is a search site! They exist to make a profit. They will make money by providing a quality search result, thereby attracting users.
Google has become one of the most important gatekeepers on the net, and they literally can make or break businesses by playing with their database (I wonder if they have checks and balances to ensure that Google workers aren't doing favours, returned by some $, for people by tweaking their rankings). Your claims that they're just some business is about as valid as saying ICANN is just some business that can do what they want. Uh huh.
In any case, the Salon article was pathetic. As much as I might disagree with this guy's opinion that Google sucks because it doesn't rank him highly, there is no doubt that we need to be vigilant that the net isn't usurped by any one group or individual. The Salon article did a classic right winger technique of refuted everyone of this claims with some absurd parallel claim: It's hard to get too upset about search privacy at Google when, all over the Web, other sites are increasingly playing fast and loose with private data....Yahoo, which requires sign-in for portal services, has already announced a plan to e-mail ads to people based on what they've searched for. (The plan, called Yahoo Impulse Mail, is "opt-in.") If you wanted to be a watchdog for the privacy of search, wouldn't you start by attacking that program?... Uh huh. "Well, sorry that the police raped and beat the kids walking down the street...but in Afghanistan they behead them too! Go pay attention to them, there's nothing to see here! {YOINK} (running away)". It's a pathetic, and dangerous, technique of disqualifying a complaint.
And what's with the ridiculous Google-love on here? You'd think that every Slashdotter was a majority shareholder. Google is my search engine of choice, but when Doubleclick tracks what you do there's an outrage on Slashdot. When Google technically has the capability to pull up every search you've ever performed (errr "genital warts"), it's a non-issue? Uh huh.
Who links anymore?
on
Mr Anti-Google
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I'm completely serious: Who posts links anymore? I have a couple of "neat site" links on my personal page, but I'm the exception: Very few people put up "sites I like" link sites, as was the case in the early days of the net where the PageRank system made sense. Indeed, the opposite is true and people intentionally don't link anymore, lest they lose eyeballs.
People no longer need index sites like Yahoo or "The Best Places To Buy Curry Beans in Toronto" because they have google...but google relies on links to do its rankings....you can see the paradox here: With every passing scan by the Google spider, Google's usefulness declines.
I have literally no idea what my doctor is doing with my medical files: I don't control them, he does (even though they're about me). He is constrained by law (such as the corporate secrecy laws which are already in place when people are forwarding internal memos) and professional rules: I can't go and check out his PC to ensure that it is up to my satisfaction.
Yes but the doctor is not using *YOUR* phone, *YOUR* computer and will not be very adverly affected if you happen to use *YOUR* phone to make a call which would bring down the RICO act.
There's a paradox here: Judgements have shown countless times that the more you monitor and control, the more responsible you are. If you, for instance, monitor employee emails, then you'd better act on any sexually harrassing letters or you are instantly, because of policy, entirely culpable for them. This is a rather funny paradox of those who claim that they monitor to protect themselves in case of employee malfeasance, when in reality what they're doing is making themselves personally responsible for every email, web visit, Slashdot posting, etc.
That's a pretty antiquated idea of business relationships nowadays. 30 years ago bosses (who very often were also the owner, and hence had more of a theoretical basis for it) could tyrannize their employees, almost like a parent-child relationship. In the modern era that sort of behaviour is relegated to sweatshops, and instead most "employees" are adults who deal with their bosses in a adult-adult relationship. A better representation of an employee nowadays is that they are businesses offering services to their "employer" (indeed, many companies have simply gone the contractor route, a movement which empowers workers more than most understand). There no longer is such a thing as long term stability or company loyalty (on the flip side there is very little employee loyalty), so classic, outdated notions of the relationship no longer hold true.
I should note that I am an employer, and indeed I've actually argued on BEHALF of employer rights in many discussions in the past: I have the right to block whatever websites that I want, or to bar people from installing whatever OS they want, or from having admin priviledges. These things I do when I feel that there is a credible, reasonable, quantifiable risk to my organization. I will say, though, that most monitoring tactics have nothing to do with that, but rather it has to do with "putting employees in line". It's the same out outdated in-your-face method of "ensuring" employee productivity that has failed for generations, but there remains a contingent of people who still believe that if they just capture weblogs and read people's email, somehow that'll make them more productive. I treat all of the people who do work for me as businesses, and the control that I have is that I can cease requiring their business when the net detriment to me outweighs the benefit.
Yet, when a doctor, or lawyer, or any other professional service performs "hours" (I put it in quote because everyone knows that they generally grossly overstate their hours), I don't have the right to monitor their PC during the hours that they are working for me. I find it an interesting paradox that so many people will proclaim the "Yeah, well if you're doing the hours for them!" when so many other examples show that to not be how it works.
If an employee isn't pulling their weight, warn them and then fire them. It's as simple as that. I understand corporations getting a little annoyed by weenies forwarding internal emails (which is reprehensible and they should be punished), but most justifications are for pathetic, over the shoulder monitoring.
Internet Explorer and Opera are based on the original NCSA Mosaic browsers
Opera was written from scratch and has, to the best of my knowledge, no origins in Mosaic apart from inspiration. I feel reasonably certain that absolutely 0% of IE 5 or greater has any origin in Mosaic (which was a brutally simplistic application, and is credited in the about for niceness licensing reasons: i.e. MS trying to avoid monopoly charges. The idea that Microsoft is relying upon the trivial Mosaic code for a tremendously complex application like IE6 is just a riot), and at best the original IE was perhaps
NT's TCP/IP Stack is mostly 'embraced and extended(corrupted)' BSD (open source) code.
I just referenced this in another posting, unaware that there was a hilarious post referencing it just down the page. Microsoft used Berkeley _STYLE_ sockets, just like Linux, just like Solaris, just like Apple. If you use TCP/IP, you almost certainly use BSD sockets. Berkeley Sockets != "they stole the IP stack", yet that particular anti-MS myth just keeps carrying on. If someone has proof, or even a reasonable assertion, that they did then I'd be fascinated to hear it, but if it's the same old tired misunderstanding, unintentionally or intentionally, then it's time to put it to bed.
Without open source, Bill gates wouldn't have ben able to program his way out of a router.
Uh huh.... So the relatively recent open source kick off of Linux ripping off a open sourced commercial product (BSD) travelled back in the past, and engineered all of Microsoft's products that made them the biggest software companies in the world. How absurd. Of course this sort of FUD goes by unquestioned on here.
Do you have proof of this? The open source community likes to pat itself on the back and make vast, unproven claims of widespread thievery of their brilliance, yet usually their examples are horribly incorrect (for instance the common claim that Microsoft stole BSD's IP stack because people misunderstand what a "Berkeley Socket" is and what a standard it is). Oh, right, Sigma Software borrowed some code from an open source project (which people DID discover), therefore it's widespread.
Big boys=companies that HP generally relied upon as very important suppliers of hardware and software (ex. Intel, Microsoft, etc). Traditionally in the computer market people would go to great lengths not to piss either of these suppliers off, but recently it seems that the tables are turning.
Includes Microsoft Word version 2002, the latest version also included in Microsoft Office XP. You can use Smart Tags, voice recognition, and helpful document recovery features. Read more about Word 2002.
HP also just became the first big VAR to base "business" PCs around AMD's processors. HP is busy kicking sand in the faces of the big boys. Then again with Compaq HP isn't no small player itself.
It really is remarkable though: It seems that Microsoft was their own worst enemy, and they've pissed off so many of their large corporate partners that they have very few allies, and absolutely no one trusts them. I doubt that Microsoft is going anywhere for years to come, but these are fascinating twists that would never have been considered but a few years ago.
Divx was one of those most horrible names for a video format that they could ever have come up with. For those in the DVD market in the early days, there was the Circuit City competitor that is the combination of just about every Slashdot DCMA-style nightmare, then suddenly some genius comes along with a video standard, often used for ripping DVDs, and calls it Divx...incredibly confusing for those who had finally gotten the public to associate the Circuit City divx with the dark side.
Of course going from one lossy to another lossy format introduces even more errors, degrading the signal further. I doubt this is an option for you, but if you wanted to go the ogg route, I'd recommend that you re-rip from the original CDs. You did originally rip from CDs, right?
After much hair pulling, I recently ripped much of my CD collection, and after quite a lot of listening tests, I went with 128Kbps WMA (egads!:-) I hardly expect to get support for that here), with the "song protection" licensing BS turned off. I personally found that 128Kbps WMA sounded better than either OGG or MP3. I gave MP3Pro a listen, but it seems to be only intended for low bitrates, and player support is limited.
There is definitely an element of truth to that: The net has lost a lot of its joy. Between watching hilarious ads on AdCritic (sidenote: I submitted an article today mentioning http://www.ads.com, which almost fills in for AdCritic, but the story was rejected in a record 10 seconds), reading hilarious articles on http://www.suck.com (which had absolutely brilliant writing, and defined the earlier Internet), laughing to Mirsky's Worst of the Web (this was back when I had a little ecommerce sites on Turnpike Emporium, a host I chose because it was Mirsky's host. My little computer configurator was, some 7 years ago, more advanced than most computer store configuration utilities today), hell even reading sites like Old Man Murray. Other great sites like Quarter to Three simply stopped updating (though if you read the Shoot Club archives, you'll see that it was some great stuff).
I still believe that the ideas I presented in this article (which was linked by a Slashdot story some time over a year ago) still hold true now more than ever.
While I will willingly concur that there are lots of software developers who will overstate the complexity, I have found that it is far (at least 8x) more common for software developers to be "heroic" and grossly understate the complexity of a task. I've been in meetings where I've watched gunslingers low ball each other, each trying to show their eliteness by the speed with which they can supposedly perform tasks. The flip side, though, is that they never (and I mean NEVER) actually hit these low ball targets: There is always some exceptional reason, perhaps it's that damn Microsoft, or a quirk in Apache, or Jimmy the guy in the other department who doesn't reply to emails quickly enough, that justifies why they overshoot their mark by many multiples. That's why I'm wary of anyone who makes outside-of-the-norm claims (especially when the "norm" is a highly skilled group of individuals).
You comment regarding a "15 year old doing the same in half the time" is just ridiculous. The gap between working, full scale, well designed systems, and the beginnings of a test site that a kid put together, are the difference between shooting off a model rocket and then claiming that you can go to the moon for half the cost of NASA: Cheap words. I've worked with so many clients that have a pot pourri of absolute garbage systems put together by people with just such an attitude.
Very true, and in this case the submitter sounds like any of the dozens of student interns that I've worked with over the years: To them every task, no matter how potentially risky, is an easy task that they could finish on a weekend (again because they have yet to learn the wisdom of what risk is, and how seemingly innocent tasks turn into demons of complexity). The submitter makes it more obvious when they casually mention that they finished 50% in "8 hours". An old joke about software development, that history has shown me to be absolutely true, is that the first 90% of the development tasks but 10% of the time (the point being, for the slow, that software developers grossly underestimate the finalization tasks, and that "hiccup" task that'll take tremendous amounts of time. Always it'll be explained away as an exception situation, something which becomes hard to understand when it happens in project after project after project).
ASP isn't a lanugage, it's a hosting environment. ASP hosts, by default, JScript (pretty close to ECMAScript, formerly known as JavaScript) and VBScript, but additionally can host JScript.Net, C#, PHP, Perlscript, Python, etc.
If I was selling a piece of hardware or an application and, to facilitate the use of my product, offered a free copy of Windows XX what would happen? After all... giving away Windows isn't diminishing the availablity of Windows, or its quality. And considering Windows is already given away with the purchase of other products, I'm not really affecting the value of Windows either. And I'm helping proliferate Windows as a standard!
But they are not comparable situations. On the one hand you have the GPL community that surrounds itself in a aura of moral superiority (one need only read the laboured, several thousand words justifying-the-cause GPL), while Microsoft is very straightforward: We make software, you pay for it. It's very honest and forthright, whereas people like Stallman are busy talking about whether things are free as in beer, etc.
The GPL is a very selfish license. Note that I'm not saying that selfishness is bad (the whole idea of capitalism, a system I support, is based on selfishness), but it is something that, as a general premise, is not admitted to by most GPL advocates.
That question goes either way: While one could rant about the tyranny requesting that they look presentable in the workplace, on the flip side what exactly are they hoping to achieve through their look? Let's face it: Most people pursue a certain look because they want to be stereotyped-> Wear gangland outfits to be perceived as "tough" and not to be messed with, and grow a big beard and forsake things like bathing and you'll be a "Unix guru", regardless of actual knowledge of skill.
I have no doubt that John is a very talented individual, but at the same time one has to wonder if, at least partially, his extreme expertise is the result of a luxury that very few of us have: The ability to focus singularily on one specific aspect of gameplay (the graphics engine) for years and years on end. John is in the very rare position of still doing the same thing, pretty much, that he was doing years ago, yet no one is berating him or pushing him to climb the corporate ladder, etc, and every day he gets a little more clever, and adds another couple of tricks to his grab bag.
I played a DIKU MUD called "Sanctuary" (named Tysth), and it absolutely rocked. I was a member of the Dragon guild, sworn enemies of the Foresaken. Of course there was one prick on their side, clearly heavily propped up by his guild, who would not fail to portal to me whenever I left the safe zone and kill me, despite being about two levels below me. I'd say that that was the day that I gave up MUDding.
When you get onto an airplane you slow down in time. To say this simply. The faster you go, the slower time moves around you. This was confirmed back in the 1970's using atomic clocks. Although this isn't exactly time travel it's called time dilation which is a product of the general theory of relativity.
One thing I've never understood regarding this involves motion, and what is "absolute zero" in regards to motion. Right now, for instance, the Earth is spinning me around at 1,040mph. At the same time, the Earth is spinning around the sun at 67,000 mph. Our solar system is moving away from nearby stars at the speed of 45,000 mph. My point is that our primitive concept of "speed" is based around the premise of an "absolute zero", but as far as I can tell there is absolutely no way for us to know how fast we are currently moving: All measurements of speed are merely relative-> I drive my car at X speed relative to the surface of the Earth, etc. For all we know, as far as I know (and I'm not a physics buff), the known universe is sliding sideways at 100,000miles per second, and we're totally unaware because it's all relative.
The point of all of this is the correlation between time and speed seems simplified if it quantifies speed as an absolute metric when as far as I can determine there is no such things: There are only relative speeds.
Blah, I'm blabbering. There is a point in there somewhere.
They do appear to have made the source code available anyways. Much ado about nothing. That'll teach them to allow their employees to have any interactions with GPL code in the future, as now their own code has been infected.:-) Okay, that was just a troll, but there is a kernel of truth in it.
While it's reprehensible that a programmer there (at SD) apparently copy/pasted some GPL code in, Sigma made the codec a free product, and of course the existence of the Sigma codec in no way diminishes the availability or quality of the xvid codec (which, I admit, is the same redundant argument used to shoot down the bizarre logic of GPL crusaders when they admonish the BSD license). I just don't get how they're the evil villains in this case: All they're trying to do is proliferate the MPEG-4 standard.
On a sidenote: Anyone have any experience with the XCard? I'm thinking of building my own media convergence device, and this will be central for DVD playback. Any opinions?
Slashdot Mirror
Hehe, eventually it will reach recursive enlightenment.
It is quite funny, though: Google is too successful for its own good. It's like scientific measures where the measurement affects the results: In the case of Google, they've been so successful at measuring the net (links, etc), that we no longer post links.
Google is not a government - it is a search site! They exist to make a profit. They will make money by providing a quality search result, thereby attracting users.
Google has become one of the most important gatekeepers on the net, and they literally can make or break businesses by playing with their database (I wonder if they have checks and balances to ensure that Google workers aren't doing favours, returned by some $, for people by tweaking their rankings). Your claims that they're just some business is about as valid as saying ICANN is just some business that can do what they want. Uh huh.
In any case, the Salon article was pathetic. As much as I might disagree with this guy's opinion that Google sucks because it doesn't rank him highly, there is no doubt that we need to be vigilant that the net isn't usurped by any one group or individual. The Salon article did a classic right winger technique of refuted everyone of this claims with some absurd parallel claim: It's hard to get too upset about search privacy at Google when, all over the Web, other sites are increasingly playing fast and loose with private data....Yahoo, which requires sign-in for portal services, has already announced a plan to e-mail ads to people based on what they've searched for. (The plan, called Yahoo Impulse Mail, is "opt-in.") If you wanted to be a watchdog for the privacy of search, wouldn't you start by attacking that program?... Uh huh. "Well, sorry that the police raped and beat the kids walking down the street...but in Afghanistan they behead them too! Go pay attention to them, there's nothing to see here! {YOINK} (running away)". It's a pathetic, and dangerous, technique of disqualifying a complaint.
And what's with the ridiculous Google-love on here? You'd think that every Slashdotter was a majority shareholder. Google is my search engine of choice, but when Doubleclick tracks what you do there's an outrage on Slashdot. When Google technically has the capability to pull up every search you've ever performed (errr "genital warts"), it's a non-issue? Uh huh.
I'm completely serious: Who posts links anymore? I have a couple of "neat site" links on my personal page, but I'm the exception: Very few people put up "sites I like" link sites, as was the case in the early days of the net where the PageRank system made sense. Indeed, the opposite is true and people intentionally don't link anymore, lest they lose eyeballs.
People no longer need index sites like Yahoo or "The Best Places To Buy Curry Beans in Toronto" because they have google...but google relies on links to do its rankings....you can see the paradox here: With every passing scan by the Google spider, Google's usefulness declines.
I have literally no idea what my doctor is doing with my medical files: I don't control them, he does (even though they're about me). He is constrained by law (such as the corporate secrecy laws which are already in place when people are forwarding internal memos) and professional rules: I can't go and check out his PC to ensure that it is up to my satisfaction.
Yes but the doctor is not using *YOUR* phone, *YOUR* computer and will not be very adverly affected if you happen to use *YOUR* phone to make a call which would bring down the RICO act.
There's a paradox here: Judgements have shown countless times that the more you monitor and control, the more responsible you are. If you, for instance, monitor employee emails, then you'd better act on any sexually harrassing letters or you are instantly, because of policy, entirely culpable for them. This is a rather funny paradox of those who claim that they monitor to protect themselves in case of employee malfeasance, when in reality what they're doing is making themselves personally responsible for every email, web visit, Slashdot posting, etc.
In business, there are employers and employees
That's a pretty antiquated idea of business relationships nowadays. 30 years ago bosses (who very often were also the owner, and hence had more of a theoretical basis for it) could tyrannize their employees, almost like a parent-child relationship. In the modern era that sort of behaviour is relegated to sweatshops, and instead most "employees" are adults who deal with their bosses in a adult-adult relationship. A better representation of an employee nowadays is that they are businesses offering services to their "employer" (indeed, many companies have simply gone the contractor route, a movement which empowers workers more than most understand). There no longer is such a thing as long term stability or company loyalty (on the flip side there is very little employee loyalty), so classic, outdated notions of the relationship no longer hold true.
I should note that I am an employer, and indeed I've actually argued on BEHALF of employer rights in many discussions in the past: I have the right to block whatever websites that I want, or to bar people from installing whatever OS they want, or from having admin priviledges. These things I do when I feel that there is a credible, reasonable, quantifiable risk to my organization. I will say, though, that most monitoring tactics have nothing to do with that, but rather it has to do with "putting employees in line". It's the same out outdated in-your-face method of "ensuring" employee productivity that has failed for generations, but there remains a contingent of people who still believe that if they just capture weblogs and read people's email, somehow that'll make them more productive. I treat all of the people who do work for me as businesses, and the control that I have is that I can cease requiring their business when the net detriment to me outweighs the benefit.
Yet, when a doctor, or lawyer, or any other professional service performs "hours" (I put it in quote because everyone knows that they generally grossly overstate their hours), I don't have the right to monitor their PC during the hours that they are working for me. I find it an interesting paradox that so many people will proclaim the "Yeah, well if you're doing the hours for them!" when so many other examples show that to not be how it works.
If an employee isn't pulling their weight, warn them and then fire them. It's as simple as that. I understand corporations getting a little annoyed by weenies forwarding internal emails (which is reprehensible and they should be punished), but most justifications are for pathetic, over the shoulder monitoring.
The header files define the Berkeley socket standard contract (i.e. defines for choosing socket types, etc), they don't implement the stack.
Internet Explorer and Opera are based on the original NCSA Mosaic browsers
Opera was written from scratch and has, to the best of my knowledge, no origins in Mosaic apart from inspiration. I feel reasonably certain that absolutely 0% of IE 5 or greater has any origin in Mosaic (which was a brutally simplistic application, and is credited in the about for niceness licensing reasons: i.e. MS trying to avoid monopoly charges. The idea that Microsoft is relying upon the trivial Mosaic code for a tremendously complex application like IE6 is just a riot), and at best the original IE was perhaps
NT's TCP/IP Stack is mostly 'embraced and extended(corrupted)' BSD (open source) code.
I just referenced this in another posting, unaware that there was a hilarious post referencing it just down the page. Microsoft used Berkeley _STYLE_ sockets, just like Linux, just like Solaris, just like Apple. If you use TCP/IP, you almost certainly use BSD sockets. Berkeley Sockets != "they stole the IP stack", yet that particular anti-MS myth just keeps carrying on. If someone has proof, or even a reasonable assertion, that they did then I'd be fascinated to hear it, but if it's the same old tired misunderstanding, unintentionally or intentionally, then it's time to put it to bed.
Without open source, Bill gates wouldn't have ben able to program his way out of a router.
Uh huh.... So the relatively recent open source kick off of Linux ripping off a open sourced commercial product (BSD) travelled back in the past, and engineered all of Microsoft's products that made them the biggest software companies in the world. How absurd. Of course this sort of FUD goes by unquestioned on here.
Do you have proof of this? The open source community likes to pat itself on the back and make vast, unproven claims of widespread thievery of their brilliance, yet usually their examples are horribly incorrect (for instance the common claim that Microsoft stole BSD's IP stack because people misunderstand what a "Berkeley Socket" is and what a standard it is). Oh, right, Sigma Software borrowed some code from an open source project (which people DID discover), therefore it's widespread.
Big boys=companies that HP generally relied upon as very important suppliers of hardware and software (ex. Intel, Microsoft, etc). Traditionally in the computer market people would go to great lengths not to piss either of these suppliers off, but recently it seems that the tables are turning.
HP also just became the first big VAR to base "business" PCs around AMD's processors. HP is busy kicking sand in the faces of the big boys. Then again with Compaq HP isn't no small player itself.
It really is remarkable though: It seems that Microsoft was their own worst enemy, and they've pissed off so many of their large corporate partners that they have very few allies, and absolutely no one trusts them. I doubt that Microsoft is going anywhere for years to come, but these are fascinating twists that would never have been considered but a few years ago.
Divx was one of those most horrible names for a video format that they could ever have come up with. For those in the DVD market in the early days, there was the Circuit City competitor that is the combination of just about every Slashdot DCMA-style nightmare, then suddenly some genius comes along with a video standard, often used for ripping DVDs, and calls it Divx...incredibly confusing for those who had finally gotten the public to associate the Circuit City divx with the dark side.
Of course going from one lossy to another lossy format introduces even more errors, degrading the signal further. I doubt this is an option for you, but if you wanted to go the ogg route, I'd recommend that you re-rip from the original CDs. You did originally rip from CDs, right?
:-) I hardly expect to get support for that here), with the "song protection" licensing BS turned off. I personally found that 128Kbps WMA sounded better than either OGG or MP3. I gave MP3Pro a listen, but it seems to be only intended for low bitrates, and player support is limited.
After much hair pulling, I recently ripped much of my CD collection, and after quite a lot of listening tests, I went with 128Kbps WMA (egads!
There is definitely an element of truth to that: The net has lost a lot of its joy. Between watching hilarious ads on AdCritic (sidenote: I submitted an article today mentioning http://www.ads.com, which almost fills in for AdCritic, but the story was rejected in a record 10 seconds), reading hilarious articles on http://www.suck.com (which had absolutely brilliant writing, and defined the earlier Internet), laughing to Mirsky's Worst of the Web (this was back when I had a little ecommerce sites on Turnpike Emporium, a host I chose because it was Mirsky's host. My little computer configurator was, some 7 years ago, more advanced than most computer store configuration utilities today), hell even reading sites like Old Man Murray. Other great sites like Quarter to Three simply stopped updating (though if you read the Shoot Club archives, you'll see that it was some great stuff).
I still believe that the ideas I presented in this article (which was linked by a Slashdot story some time over a year ago) still hold true now more than ever.
While I will willingly concur that there are lots of software developers who will overstate the complexity, I have found that it is far (at least 8x) more common for software developers to be "heroic" and grossly understate the complexity of a task. I've been in meetings where I've watched gunslingers low ball each other, each trying to show their eliteness by the speed with which they can supposedly perform tasks. The flip side, though, is that they never (and I mean NEVER) actually hit these low ball targets: There is always some exceptional reason, perhaps it's that damn Microsoft, or a quirk in Apache, or Jimmy the guy in the other department who doesn't reply to emails quickly enough, that justifies why they overshoot their mark by many multiples. That's why I'm wary of anyone who makes outside-of-the-norm claims (especially when the "norm" is a highly skilled group of individuals).
You comment regarding a "15 year old doing the same in half the time" is just ridiculous. The gap between working, full scale, well designed systems, and the beginnings of a test site that a kid put together, are the difference between shooting off a model rocket and then claiming that you can go to the moon for half the cost of NASA: Cheap words. I've worked with so many clients that have a pot pourri of absolute garbage systems put together by people with just such an attitude.
Very true, and in this case the submitter sounds like any of the dozens of student interns that I've worked with over the years: To them every task, no matter how potentially risky, is an easy task that they could finish on a weekend (again because they have yet to learn the wisdom of what risk is, and how seemingly innocent tasks turn into demons of complexity). The submitter makes it more obvious when they casually mention that they finished 50% in "8 hours". An old joke about software development, that history has shown me to be absolutely true, is that the first 90% of the development tasks but 10% of the time (the point being, for the slow, that software developers grossly underestimate the finalization tasks, and that "hiccup" task that'll take tremendous amounts of time. Always it'll be explained away as an exception situation, something which becomes hard to understand when it happens in project after project after project).
ASP isn't a lanugage, it's a hosting environment. ASP hosts, by default, JScript (pretty close to ECMAScript, formerly known as JavaScript) and VBScript, but additionally can host JScript.Net, C#, PHP, Perlscript, Python, etc.
If I was selling a piece of hardware or an application and, to facilitate the use of my product, offered a free copy of Windows XX what would happen? After all... giving away Windows isn't diminishing the availablity of Windows, or its quality. And considering Windows is already given away with the purchase of other products, I'm not really affecting the value of Windows either. And I'm helping proliferate Windows as a standard!
But they are not comparable situations. On the one hand you have the GPL community that surrounds itself in a aura of moral superiority (one need only read the laboured, several thousand words justifying-the-cause GPL), while Microsoft is very straightforward: We make software, you pay for it. It's very honest and forthright, whereas people like Stallman are busy talking about whether things are free as in beer, etc.
The GPL is a very selfish license. Note that I'm not saying that selfishness is bad (the whole idea of capitalism, a system I support, is based on selfishness), but it is something that, as a general premise, is not admitted to by most GPL advocates.
What does the lenght of hair to do with respect?
That question goes either way: While one could rant about the tyranny requesting that they look presentable in the workplace, on the flip side what exactly are they hoping to achieve through their look? Let's face it: Most people pursue a certain look because they want to be stereotyped-> Wear gangland outfits to be perceived as "tough" and not to be messed with, and grow a big beard and forsake things like bathing and you'll be a "Unix guru", regardless of actual knowledge of skill.
I have no doubt that John is a very talented individual, but at the same time one has to wonder if, at least partially, his extreme expertise is the result of a luxury that very few of us have: The ability to focus singularily on one specific aspect of gameplay (the graphics engine) for years and years on end. John is in the very rare position of still doing the same thing, pretty much, that he was doing years ago, yet no one is berating him or pushing him to climb the corporate ladder, etc, and every day he gets a little more clever, and adds another couple of tricks to his grab bag.
I played a DIKU MUD called "Sanctuary" (named Tysth), and it absolutely rocked. I was a member of the Dragon guild, sworn enemies of the Foresaken. Of course there was one prick on their side, clearly heavily propped up by his guild, who would not fail to portal to me whenever I left the safe zone and kill me, despite being about two levels below me. I'd say that that was the day that I gave up MUDding.
When you get onto an airplane you slow down in time. To say this simply. The faster you go, the slower time moves around you. This was confirmed back in the 1970's using atomic clocks. Although this isn't exactly time travel it's called time dilation which is a product of the general theory of relativity.
One thing I've never understood regarding this involves motion, and what is "absolute zero" in regards to motion. Right now, for instance, the Earth is spinning me around at 1,040mph. At the same time, the Earth is spinning around the sun at 67,000 mph. Our solar system is moving away from nearby stars at the speed of 45,000 mph. My point is that our primitive concept of "speed" is based around the premise of an "absolute zero", but as far as I can tell there is absolutely no way for us to know how fast we are currently moving: All measurements of speed are merely relative-> I drive my car at X speed relative to the surface of the Earth, etc. For all we know, as far as I know (and I'm not a physics buff), the known universe is sliding sideways at 100,000miles per second, and we're totally unaware because it's all relative.
The point of all of this is the correlation between time and speed seems simplified if it quantifies speed as an absolute metric when as far as I can determine there is no such things: There are only relative speeds.
Blah, I'm blabbering. There is a point in there somewhere.
They do appear to have made the source code available anyways. Much ado about nothing. That'll teach them to allow their employees to have any interactions with GPL code in the future, as now their own code has been infected. :-) Okay, that was just a troll, but there is a kernel of truth in it.
While it's reprehensible that a programmer there (at SD) apparently copy/pasted some GPL code in, Sigma made the codec a free product, and of course the existence of the Sigma codec in no way diminishes the availability or quality of the xvid codec (which, I admit, is the same redundant argument used to shoot down the bizarre logic of GPL crusaders when they admonish the BSD license). I just don't get how they're the evil villains in this case: All they're trying to do is proliferate the MPEG-4 standard.
On a sidenote: Anyone have any experience with the XCard? I'm thinking of building my own media convergence device, and this will be central for DVD playback. Any opinions?