Hehe, a dream scenario. The worst part, though, is that some management plays up such conflicts because they hope to get egos involved, ignoring that over the gross destructivity that it causes over the medium to long term. I directly saw just such a situation, with an individual claiming that he could "easily" do something that another group spend a month doing, but in just a couple of hours. Every night I'd walk by his office and see him working away at his implementation: He literally spent dozens (or even hundreds) of hours afterhours (and probably countless regular working hours while neglecting other projects), all so he could claim that he "finished it in a couple of hours". I truly do believe that it is a problem whose scale is unique in software development because of the lack of reasonable estimation guidelines (and again because so much new ground is treaded upon in many projects).
About 99.999%+ of the primary uses of SSL/TLS out there are for transport encryption, not for site authentity verification, and this does nothing to reduce the security of the transport encryption.
Indeed, the site authentity thing is the way Verisign and friends get away with charging ridiculous amounts to spin off a key pair. I'm not saying that it's a useless service (it is nice to know that I'm talking with my bank versus the incredibly remote scenario that someone hijacked their domain), however that feature is pretty low on most people's importance list.
Ah, how many of those in the food industry, constantly beseiged by petulant complainers who can never be satisfied, who'd probably laugh themself silly reading that perception of customer satisfaction.
A lot of the job disatisfaction in the technology industry, particular software, I am fairly certain is the result of job heroics (at least in talk) by fellow software engineers: i.e. we all cause disatisfaction of each other. While I'm sure this hits other fields as well, I don't think there is any other field where the metrics are so abstract, and there's so much new group pioneered (and hence so little empirical numbers to rely upon).
What do I mean? I know that I've faced situations quite a few times in the industry where I have been presented a problem, and I propose several solutions and timeframes, only to be met by a manager or peer who gloatingly informs me that Jimbo, the programmer over in section C, says that it should only take 2 hours and he could program it in his sleep. Hell, I know that I've made these idiotic off the cuff comments quite a few times. The downside is that whatever you're doing has now been trivialized, and the bar has been set in a manner that you can do nothing but fail: It's just a matter of the scale of the failure. I've spoken to peers and have found that this problem is absolutely rampant.
The easy solution, of course, is to simply say "Well then let Jimbo do it", but due to project partitioning and company lines that just never works. What many end up doing is sniping at Jimbo's projects to undercut him as he so helpfully did to you, and it becomes a perpetual cycle. I worked with one gentlemen who literally could not keep his mouth shut about how trivial every single situation was (yet once you have some experience in the industry you have more of an ability to recognize pitfalls and risks, but senior management doesn't want to hear that: They want to hear the most heroic "I'll have it done tomorrow!" story), yet in the entire time that I worked with him he never, ever, produced a single line of code. It's situations like those that make people want to switch careers.
Every few weeks? WTF man, you think I wanna miss a story if I don't check the site on Tuesday but I'm too dumb to check the archives? I want the entire history of Slashdot to be repeated every single day.
I really don't get how that's so funny. Every year in my area, billions of dollars are spent on highway upkeep and expansion, and that's excluding the necessary police presence and enforcement of the rules of the road (and the billions that people dump into their automobiles and insurance). Car traffic is very very expensive, and it can only be rationalized when people consider it a "given", and "alternative" forms of transport like trains as some sort of crazy luxury. Note that I'm not anti-car, but I realize that it's grossly myopic to say "train costs X billion, therefore it's bad" without knowing and computing all of the factors.
but I am saying that if the situation is so bad that even education is getting cut, which, in general, politicians won't touch, then we sure don't have the money for this train.
That's drawing the line in a very short sighted manner. What if this train offsets billions of dollars of necessary highway construction in the coming years because of reduced road traffic? What if it increases the economic interactions between metropolitans, increases the allure of Florida to global investors, and therefore increases the tax base at many levels state wide? Just saying "because the government isn't doing that then therefore it shouldn't do this" is indeed a logic fallacy.
For sure there are still colour problems with many LCDs (though I believe that plasmas are better): i.e. they still haven't mastered an equal response for R, G, and B, so if you create colour bands side by side, they often fade out at different rates. For contrast LCDs are pretty similar to CRTs (though I find that hard to believe: I find that a LCD can display a bright aside a dark segment much better), but plasma screens have dramatically better contrast (some 3000:1). Plasma also has better color purity than LCDs.
Yup, very true. Indeed, perhaps I'm misreading, but the screen that I linked to seems to only consume about 8W...I find it hard to believe it could be that efficient.
Aha...was just thinking about it and it's Nethack, right? I remember when a local BBS got a gopher net connection, and I gophered to a site that would email you files : I got Nethack as quite a few emails that I had to manually cat together to uudecode them. Ah, the fun old times.
Though, I could never understand why it was called "Net"hack when it seemed to be entirely single player.
The HTTP protocol, a brutally simple evolution of gopher, was indeed "invented" by Tim Berners Lee. I would hope that he feels a little bit embarrassed everytime he's given credit for it though.
Virtually every videocard sold today has a DVI connector (usually via a dongle), so this seems to be a rather odd Ask Slashdot. Of course the resolution being requested (~1366x768) is well within the range of any semi-modern video card, again making one wonder why this was accepted as an Ask Slashdot. I suspect someone wants to gloat about their 50" plasma screen.:-)
A 50" CRT? I don't believe such a thing is even made, and if it were the weight would be monstrous, not to mention that it'd be huge not only diagonally, but depthwise, consuming a huge portion of the room.
Plasma screens, on the other hand, can be made 3.8" deep, and the power consumption (and hence heat dissipation) of plasma (& LCD) screens is dramatically lowered. Most LCDs and Plasma offer much better contrast than CRTs, and the only real critique of them is ghosting in some lower cost models, but that's mostly a complaint of yesteryear.
Here in Ontario we have a newer toll highway (the 407), and because they charge absurdly high amounts they could afford to put photo license reading equipment on every onramp and offramp, and you get mailed a bill the month following. Of course, all they've proven is that a particular car drove on that highway, not that a particular driver drove on that highway.
Personally I see no privacy invasion from this whatsoever : Cars are licensed equipment, and it seems fair to me that they can track where your car (note: Not you, your car) went on the roadway system. If you're concerned about getting caught on a booty call, then let your friends borrow your car for a while for some deniability.
Given that I'm not a fan, you're entirely correct that I haven't seen much: It only took seeing a few titles, invariably with apparently adolescent girls in very high cut school uniform skirts, also invariably swooning over a male hero (usually seeming to be an adult), to give an impression of what it's all about.
Why is Worldcom being allowed to write off 50 billion dollars (as mentioned earlier) in addition to the 7 billion they already stole?
Because most of the "value" of a publicly traded company is ethereal: If company A buys company B for a stock swap or equity issue of $100 billion, then theoretically company A's value increases by $100 million. Of course in actual assets, company B might contribute maybe $10 million, at most. If company A totally fubars company B (cough..cough...HP...Compaq...) and they don't integrate well, and things like goodwill are lost (like when a well known company is absorbed and has its name changed, etc. The "Good will" of the company is largely evaporated): At some point company A has to reassess the book value versus the real world value, and that's when you get these massive write downs.
It really is ridiculous, and criminal, the way many big businesses operate. The whole business world goes through cycles, probably about 8 year cycles, where they merge, and then they divest, then they merge, then they divest. The purpose, of course, is because CEOs and their board pad their pockets during every phase in the cycle, yet down the line INVARIABLY they are writing off tens of billions of dollars of shareholder value. The one bright point of this whole fiasco is that maybe, just perhaps, the investment community will have wisened up and won't tolerate this is the future. Of course, it's more likely that the robber barons will be back at in in a few years, after our short memories have gotten the best of us.
Wow, it sounds like you really have a need to justify your Apex purchase. I really don't get how you surmised that the prior poster was "16" because they stated that APEX players have questionable quality: Sounds like a fair statement to me (though I am not substantiating it: I know no one with an APEX).
Regarding your ridiculous pro-Apex claims, I have a 4 year old Pioneer deck that plays VCDs, and has no problem with CD-Rs or CD-RWs. Virtually any desk sold in the past year plays MP3s. I have never, ever had the need to play a non-region 1 DVD (I'm not really a fan of Japanimation : It all seems a tad too pedophilic), so I really don't see the value there. My upcoming purchase of a replacement will be a Toshiba progressive scan player with every feature (including Windows Media playback, though I know that that feature won't go over well on Slashdot) for ~$168 US : I really don't see the value in going with a hack shop.
I, for one also, had a Trident 8900 board in my oldie 486 computer, and boy did it suck. It was so slow and disgusting and, and..
Of course, it's all relative. The trident 8900, like all of it Cirrus Logic competitors, were nothing more than a frame buffer that it was up to your CPU to fill : There was virtually no difference between the speed of these unaccelerated cards, and the limit was often the ISA bus (hence why Carmageddon ran that much better on a VL-Bus system).
Well, I would never consider using a tiny cell phone a realistic use of wireless data, but instead I'm talking about hooking the phone to your PC. For the vast majority of uses, 80Kbps is absolutely functional, and the reality is that there is still a majority of internet users using dial-up at 40Kbps right now, and they seem to be getting by just fine. Of course you'd have to use some common sense: i.e. Download that 80MB service pack in the office, but for general browsing, emailing, etc, 80Kbps is absolutely adequate.
My firewall is blustering along using a ISA Trident 8900 : You can't fault them for making low quality products.
Having said that, this preview has no hardware, and hence no benchmarks or qualitative/quantitative reviews. This is nothing more than market fluff at this point.
Well, I do have a compression algorithm that can compress any sized file into a single byte (it just can't decompress : I'm working on that part), so compression wise I do have the technology:-), however I had intended to say GPRS. Mea culpa.
Slashdot Mirror
Hehe, a dream scenario. The worst part, though, is that some management plays up such conflicts because they hope to get egos involved, ignoring that over the gross destructivity that it causes over the medium to long term. I directly saw just such a situation, with an individual claiming that he could "easily" do something that another group spend a month doing, but in just a couple of hours. Every night I'd walk by his office and see him working away at his implementation: He literally spent dozens (or even hundreds) of hours afterhours (and probably countless regular working hours while neglecting other projects), all so he could claim that he "finished it in a couple of hours". I truly do believe that it is a problem whose scale is unique in software development because of the lack of reasonable estimation guidelines (and again because so much new ground is treaded upon in many projects).
About 99.999%+ of the primary uses of SSL/TLS out there are for transport encryption, not for site authentity verification, and this does nothing to reduce the security of the transport encryption.
Indeed, the site authentity thing is the way Verisign and friends get away with charging ridiculous amounts to spin off a key pair. I'm not saying that it's a useless service (it is nice to know that I'm talking with my bank versus the incredibly remote scenario that someone hijacked their domain), however that feature is pretty low on most people's importance list.
Ah, how many of those in the food industry, constantly beseiged by petulant complainers who can never be satisfied, who'd probably laugh themself silly reading that perception of customer satisfaction.
A lot of the job disatisfaction in the technology industry, particular software, I am fairly certain is the result of job heroics (at least in talk) by fellow software engineers: i.e. we all cause disatisfaction of each other. While I'm sure this hits other fields as well, I don't think there is any other field where the metrics are so abstract, and there's so much new group pioneered (and hence so little empirical numbers to rely upon).
What do I mean? I know that I've faced situations quite a few times in the industry where I have been presented a problem, and I propose several solutions and timeframes, only to be met by a manager or peer who gloatingly informs me that Jimbo, the programmer over in section C, says that it should only take 2 hours and he could program it in his sleep. Hell, I know that I've made these idiotic off the cuff comments quite a few times. The downside is that whatever you're doing has now been trivialized, and the bar has been set in a manner that you can do nothing but fail: It's just a matter of the scale of the failure. I've spoken to peers and have found that this problem is absolutely rampant.
The easy solution, of course, is to simply say "Well then let Jimbo do it", but due to project partitioning and company lines that just never works. What many end up doing is sniping at Jimbo's projects to undercut him as he so helpfully did to you, and it becomes a perpetual cycle. I worked with one gentlemen who literally could not keep his mouth shut about how trivial every single situation was (yet once you have some experience in the industry you have more of an ability to recognize pitfalls and risks, but senior management doesn't want to hear that: They want to hear the most heroic "I'll have it done tomorrow!" story), yet in the entire time that I worked with him he never, ever, produced a single line of code. It's situations like those that make people want to switch careers.
Every few weeks? WTF man, you think I wanna miss a story if I don't check the site on Tuesday but I'm too dumb to check the archives? I want the entire history of Slashdot to be repeated every single day.
BTW: Cable modems roxxor ADSL!
I really don't get how that's so funny. Every year in my area, billions of dollars are spent on highway upkeep and expansion, and that's excluding the necessary police presence and enforcement of the rules of the road (and the billions that people dump into their automobiles and insurance). Car traffic is very very expensive, and it can only be rationalized when people consider it a "given", and "alternative" forms of transport like trains as some sort of crazy luxury. Note that I'm not anti-car, but I realize that it's grossly myopic to say "train costs X billion, therefore it's bad" without knowing and computing all of the factors.
but I am saying that if the situation is so bad that even education is getting cut, which, in general, politicians won't touch, then we sure don't have the money for this train.
That's drawing the line in a very short sighted manner. What if this train offsets billions of dollars of necessary highway construction in the coming years because of reduced road traffic? What if it increases the economic interactions between metropolitans, increases the allure of Florida to global investors, and therefore increases the tax base at many levels state wide? Just saying "because the government isn't doing that then therefore it shouldn't do this" is indeed a logic fallacy.
For sure there are still colour problems with many LCDs (though I believe that plasmas are better): i.e. they still haven't mastered an equal response for R, G, and B, so if you create colour bands side by side, they often fade out at different rates. For contrast LCDs are pretty similar to CRTs (though I find that hard to believe: I find that a LCD can display a bright aside a dark segment much better), but plasma screens have dramatically better contrast (some 3000:1). Plasma also has better color purity than LCDs.
Yup, very true. Indeed, perhaps I'm misreading, but the screen that I linked to seems to only consume about 8W...I find it hard to believe it could be that efficient.
Electric Current Consumption 0.8A (DC9.3V)
Aha...was just thinking about it and it's Nethack, right? I remember when a local BBS got a gopher net connection, and I gophered to a site that would email you files : I got Nethack as quite a few emails that I had to manually cat together to uudecode them. Ah, the fun old times.
Though, I could never understand why it was called "Net"hack when it seemed to be entirely single player.
Ulch - that meat was tainted! You feel deathly sick.
That really rings a bell...Zork?
The HTTP protocol, a brutally simple evolution of gopher, was indeed "invented" by Tim Berners Lee. I would hope that he feels a little bit embarrassed everytime he's given credit for it though.
1360x768 is otherwise known as "Wide XGA", and it would be the computer "native" resolution for that screen.
Virtually every videocard sold today has a DVI connector (usually via a dongle), so this seems to be a rather odd Ask Slashdot. Of course the resolution being requested (~1366x768) is well within the range of any semi-modern video card, again making one wonder why this was accepted as an Ask Slashdot. I suspect someone wants to gloat about their 50" plasma screen. :-)
A 50" CRT? I don't believe such a thing is even made, and if it were the weight would be monstrous, not to mention that it'd be huge not only diagonally, but depthwise, consuming a huge portion of the room.
Plasma screens, on the other hand, can be made 3.8" deep, and the power consumption (and hence heat dissipation) of plasma (& LCD) screens is dramatically lowered. Most LCDs and Plasma offer much better contrast than CRTs, and the only real critique of them is ghosting in some lower cost models, but that's mostly a complaint of yesteryear.
Here in Ontario we have a newer toll highway (the 407), and because they charge absurdly high amounts they could afford to put photo license reading equipment on every onramp and offramp, and you get mailed a bill the month following. Of course, all they've proven is that a particular car drove on that highway, not that a particular driver drove on that highway.
Personally I see no privacy invasion from this whatsoever : Cars are licensed equipment, and it seems fair to me that they can track where your car (note: Not you, your car) went on the roadway system. If you're concerned about getting caught on a booty call, then let your friends borrow your car for a while for some deniability.
Um, no, I meant "alternately", meaning Serving or used in place of another; substitute: an alternate plan.".
Given that I'm not a fan, you're entirely correct that I haven't seen much: It only took seeing a few titles, invariably with apparently adolescent girls in very high cut school uniform skirts, also invariably swooning over a male hero (usually seeming to be an adult), to give an impression of what it's all about.
Doh...please read the first "billion" as "million", or alternately all millions as billions. :-)
Why is Worldcom being allowed to write off 50 billion dollars (as mentioned earlier) in addition to the 7 billion they already stole?
Because most of the "value" of a publicly traded company is ethereal: If company A buys company B for a stock swap or equity issue of $100 billion, then theoretically company A's value increases by $100 million. Of course in actual assets, company B might contribute maybe $10 million, at most. If company A totally fubars company B (cough..cough...HP...Compaq...) and they don't integrate well, and things like goodwill are lost (like when a well known company is absorbed and has its name changed, etc. The "Good will" of the company is largely evaporated): At some point company A has to reassess the book value versus the real world value, and that's when you get these massive write downs.
It really is ridiculous, and criminal, the way many big businesses operate. The whole business world goes through cycles, probably about 8 year cycles, where they merge, and then they divest, then they merge, then they divest. The purpose, of course, is because CEOs and their board pad their pockets during every phase in the cycle, yet down the line INVARIABLY they are writing off tens of billions of dollars of shareholder value. The one bright point of this whole fiasco is that maybe, just perhaps, the investment community will have wisened up and won't tolerate this is the future. Of course, it's more likely that the robber barons will be back at in in a few years, after our short memories have gotten the best of us.
Wow, it sounds like you really have a need to justify your Apex purchase. I really don't get how you surmised that the prior poster was "16" because they stated that APEX players have questionable quality: Sounds like a fair statement to me (though I am not substantiating it: I know no one with an APEX).
Regarding your ridiculous pro-Apex claims, I have a 4 year old Pioneer deck that plays VCDs, and has no problem with CD-Rs or CD-RWs. Virtually any desk sold in the past year plays MP3s. I have never, ever had the need to play a non-region 1 DVD (I'm not really a fan of Japanimation : It all seems a tad too pedophilic), so I really don't see the value there. My upcoming purchase of a replacement will be a Toshiba progressive scan player with every feature (including Windows Media playback, though I know that that feature won't go over well on Slashdot) for ~$168 US : I really don't see the value in going with a hack shop.
I, for one also, had a Trident 8900 board in my oldie 486 computer, and boy did it suck. It was so slow and disgusting and, and..
Of course, it's all relative. The trident 8900, like all of it Cirrus Logic competitors, were nothing more than a frame buffer that it was up to your CPU to fill : There was virtually no difference between the speed of these unaccelerated cards, and the limit was often the ISA bus (hence why Carmageddon ran that much better on a VL-Bus system).
Well, I would never consider using a tiny cell phone a realistic use of wireless data, but instead I'm talking about hooking the phone to your PC. For the vast majority of uses, 80Kbps is absolutely functional, and the reality is that there is still a majority of internet users using dial-up at 40Kbps right now, and they seem to be getting by just fine. Of course you'd have to use some common sense: i.e. Download that 80MB service pack in the office, but for general browsing, emailing, etc, 80Kbps is absolutely adequate.
My firewall is blustering along using a ISA Trident 8900 : You can't fault them for making low quality products.
Having said that, this preview has no hardware, and hence no benchmarks or qualitative/quantitative reviews. This is nothing more than market fluff at this point.
Well, I do have a compression algorithm that can compress any sized file into a single byte (it just can't decompress : I'm working on that part), so compression wise I do have the technology :-), however I had intended to say GPRS. Mea culpa.