I've got a dual core pentium and I'm sorry to say that running two CPU intensive processes simultaneously is in fact slower than running them serially, one after the other. At least that's been my experience and I remember seeing a story about it on Slashdot a few months back. I really wish I had gone with a dual core Athlon instead.
I actually could use a decent dual core because I've usually got several things going. As a software developer on a fairly large system, my compiles can take a while. I usually have movies or TV playing on my second monitor while I work. That doesn't take up a lot, but compiles, receiving mail (because of SpamBayes), and other things can interfere with the playback. How am I supposed to get any work done when my TV show playback is jumpy?
$35 for new releases, $17.50 for older movies? What a bunch of crap. For the less popular new releases, you can buy the DVD for less than $20 and you still get the extra scenes and other junk that comes on the DVD. Why am I going to pay MORE for a lower quality version when I can go buy it cheaper and then rip it to whatever quality I want.
I suspect their argument will go something like this: "See, nobody is buying them. Selling online doesn't work because everyone is pirating it." When I saw the headline I was surprised and optimistic, but then I read the fine print and it all made perfect sense.
Oh well, the MPAA and RIAA are just putting themselves out of business. Too bad for them.
I stand by my comments when this topic first came up (Sorry, I'm not going to pay the subscription fee I apparently need to pay to get my entire comment history, so no link). I argued that if Google refused to pay the extortion, then nobody would and the idea would eventually die. A few days after posting the comment, Google announced they wouldn't pay the extortion. I continue to believe this idea will die on the vine. If access gets slow to Google because of it, all they have to do is add a link to their home page, to a page that explains why. Add in a few links for how to contact the phone companies to complain, and I guarantee you the phone companies will give it up when their support numbers get jammed.
I mean, I hate for this to all come down to one company, but of all the big tech companies out there, I'm glad that Google will be the one to decide. They've shown every sign of being a very socially conscious corporation (I know, it sounds like a contradiction). I'm not going to fret about this issue much.
Of course, I could kill my job, and I did, immediately, but once the SQL side of the job began executing, it was running under the shared SQL account, not mine. That one, I didn't have the authority to kill.
Back in the day, I worked for the World Bank writing software on IBM mainframes. Our department was charged back based on our usage. I worked in the telecommunications division and we, like the IBM division, charged departments for their telephone usage. To do this, we'd load the call logs into SQL and then create the bills from that. Our database contained millions of phone calls over the previous year+ of data.
During development, I made the mistake of doing an unqualified join between the primary call table and the table of departments (of which there were probably a few hundred. Pretty simple math... The result set was somewhere in the hundreds of millions to billions. I realized the problem the moment I submitted the job. Unfortunately, there was no way for me, a lowly user, to kill the job, once it began. By the time we managed to get the job killed, I had squandered thousands of dollars in computing charges. My boss was none too happy. Ah, the good old days...
I've been a programmer, professionally, since about 1990, but like a lot of people on this site, I'm sure, I started programming as a hobby long before then. I've loved it as a career and it's been great. That said, as a software developer, I more or less peaked some time ago. I will never advance much further from where I am now (unless I want to go into management. Been there, done that, don't want to do it). But when it comes down to it, it's simply not what I want to do with the rest of my life.
About 4 years ago, I decided I wanted to change careers and spent that time trying to decide what I wanted to do. Many ideas have come and gone over that time, but one continued to keep popping up and I finally made my decision just a couple of months ago.
I'm going back to school to pick up a few classes that I'm missing and then I'm going to try to get into med school. It's something that I think I could enjoy even more than programming and more importantly, it's a way I can help people in a very fundamental way. It's also something I think I would be really good at.
It's seems very strange, at my age, to be going back to being a full time student, building up student loan debts and starting from scratch. But it's also very exciting and I'm really looking forward to it.
In some ways, I think computer programming has actually helped prepare me for this. I certainly have lots of experience working insane hours on very little sleep. And software development gives you a lot of experience in diagnosis. A different type of diagnosis to be sure, but not entirely unalike. So all-in-all, I think that my experiences in both work and outside of work, over the years, will actually have prepared me quite well for this path. We'll see.
There's already an entry in the Internet Movie Database for the series. IMDB is pretty good at keeping up with movies and TV shows that are still in development, so it'll probably be a good place to check back periodically to monitor progress of who comes onboard.
The site finance.google.com seems to be too plain and looks suspiciously like something quickly hacked together.
Obviously you didn't get past the first page which is thankfully as close to plain as it can be. Here's one very good argument for having a very plain front page: It loads fast. Then you get where you really want to be faster.
Even on the main page there's some technically cool stuff. Hover over the market indexes and the graph changes to the one you're hovering over. They've got that in a few places. Go to the main page for a ticker and hover over individuals listed in Management and it gives you more info. In fact, if you do it on the GOOG ticker, it even shows pictures in the pop-up.
Trying hovering over the graph and it gives you data specific to the day or time that you're hovering over in the upper right. You can scroll the graphs to look back in history instead of having to change the time periods. You can select a fixed time period like Yahoo, or you can drag the start and end of the time period for the graph. This is some cool stuff.
Now, when you call it "plain", what are you comparing it to? Yahoo? Because Yahoo isn't anywhere near this tricked-out. As for the data, it doesn't appear to be any more out of date than Yahoo's data. It has the real time ECN just like Yahoo and the rest of the market data is probably 15-20 minutes delayed just like every other free financial site on the web.
Personally, my first impression is that it's exceptionally well designed. It's a great first cut and barring any major disasters, I suspect I'll switch over to it from Yahoo Finance.
Riiiiight. If you don't mind being shat on for noob questions. If you're not a kernel developer, don't even bother!
Maybe you're hanging out in the wrong newsgroups. Frankly, I've found this issue more prevalent on a lot of development web site forums than usenet newsgroups. That said, I've certainly hit some newsgroups that are pretty much owned by jerks. I either ignore them or I don't go back.
Sourceforge is a pretty good model. It works for a lot of open source software out there. There are a few similar communities out there. I'd start by looking at their features and figure out which ones meet your needs.
As for Q & A, I generally find usenet newsgroups are about the best source for programming questions. Depending on the particular newsgroup and topic, I can usually get answers inside of an hour and when it involves my business, time is usually pretty important.
My only offline resources are my co-workers who fortunately, are all quite talented.
I would suspect that most of what you'll want, code-wise, is probably largely available in parts and can be pieced together.
I used to dabble in electronics and from time to time, companies would simply produce a bad batch of capacitors. Unfortunately, you can't really tell if they're bad (unless they simply don't work at all or have the wrong value) until they fail. I don't know that this is the problem, but this can happen in mid-production, just getting a new batch of capacitors that just happen to be bad. It wouldn't matter if it were an early version or late version in that case.
Again, I don't know that that's the case here, and to be sure, bad batches of capacitors, at least in my experience, aren't terribly common...
Capsaicin is like garlic, or tea. You can't get too much of it and it does great things for you. Capsaicin has several cardiovascular benefits. It's an anti-coagulant and it also lowers cholesterol and triglycerides. It's an analgesic (particularly effective against pain caused by nerve disorders and arthritis). It's also an effective topical analgesic (though I suspect in very weak mixtures, since it burns like hell otherwise).
Capsaicin kills the bacteria responsible for most stomach ulcers thus, contrary to popular opinion, it actually protects against stomach ulcers. As most people might surmise, it's excellent for clearing congestion.
If you need to lose weight, start eating hot sauce. Capsaicin increases the metabolism, thermogenesis, and oxygen consumption.
If you find hot sauce "too hot", then work your way up. Start with mildly hot sauces and slowly increase the heat over time. Most web sites that specialize in selling hot sauces also have the Scoville ratings for those sauces, so you can do be methodical about it if you want. Your body builds up a tolerance for the burning sensation in the mouth and before long, you'll find yourself able to eat sauces you didn't think you could. You just need to be consistent and eat some every day. I try to consume at least 3 teaspoons of 12,000 Scoville salsa a day.
My personal preference is El Yucateco Salsa Kutbil-ik de. It's a brown Mayan style habanero salsa from the Yucatan. I'm kind of partial to it 'cause I lived in the Yucatan for several years and it's pretty popular there. They also make a red sauce (6000 Scovilles) and a green (9000 Scovilles).
It appears that most of the Slashdot crowd agrees this is bunk and, of course, they are correct.
Our understanding of Physics alone is still so incomplete, that until we know it all (and I suspect that day may never come), there will still be tons of possibilities for the next big things coming out of that field alone.
Computer technology is still in its infancy. Anyone who thinks it's not going to change as drastically in the next 50 years as it has in the past 50, is fooling themselves.
Then there's the cool stuff we all want which, we know is possible and is only a matter of time. Cyborg type stuff, for example (and I'm not talking about the previous article on insects). I'm talking about devices implanted in our bodies to give us additional abilities. Imagine having direct internet access from your brain. There's simply NOTHING that makes this impossible and anyone who thinks it won't be a "Big Thing" simply lacks imagination.
I suspect that's the real problem right there. Mr. Donofrio simply lacks imagination.
There is no fuzzy line between programmers and people that can put together some basic Excel macros. Or more specifically, there's no fuzzy line between Application developers and people that can write macros. Writing a macro, for a real programmer, is trivial. Writing an application, for someone who only knows how to write excel macros, on the other hand, is an impossible feat, for the most part.
Application development isn't just understanding some basic logic and a few commands. It involves understanding a complex process, having an understanding of algorithms and patterns. It's understanding complex interactions between parts of the system. These are not things you learn when you write a few Excel macros now and then. Anyone who thinks otherwise is fooling themselves.
There's a reason colleges and universities offer B.S., M.S. and PhD degrees in Computer Science. Because it takes a long time to learn this stuff and it can't be learned without spending a great deal of time studying it.
Hell, there's not even a fuzzy line between someone who can write little C utility apps and an application developer.
The day when Joe Average can build real applications isn't coming anytime soon. That day won't arrive until computers can actually think for Joe Average and fill in for the huge gap in understanding.
Look, I like Linux in a lot of ways. It's definitely a great server OS. And the desktops have come along way. I love seeing the progress and I love playing with them. But given a choice, despite all my frustrations with Windows, I simply find Windows easier to use in a number of ways.
It doesn't matter which version of Windows you run (okay, not necessarily with '95, '98 or something even more ancient) you can install the same.exe file and run it. On the other hand, with Linux, you usually have to get the executeable for your specific CPU if not your CPU and flavor of Linux. Or, God forbid, you actually have to download the source and build it yourself, which has happened with me with a number of apps because I simply couldn't get the package to install for some reason or another (maybe I couldn't find one of its dependent packages or I couldn't install one of the dependent packages). Installing apps in Linux, especially the less popular ones, can be a very trying experience.
Just to give a single example, something as simple as a CPU temp monitoring app, turned out to be a nightmare. I spent 3 days trying to get a couple of them installed. Never managed to pull it off, despite passing tons of messages back and forth on linuxforums.org
There are other things about Linux that simply aren't ready as well. On the other hand, there are areas where Linux has excelled beyond Windows, and that's terrific, but I generally see the failings in being the areas that affect your non-tech users. Ease of use, ease of finding apps, ease of installing said apps.
These issues need to be addressed and I have no doubt they will be. MS, for all of their faults, have done a pretty good job of making stuff easy to use. It comes, in part, from spending a great deal of time and money doing usability testing of their software.
Another failing in Linux is that, a lot of apps aren't terribly easy to use. Many Linux developers, especially for smaller apps, still have a tendency to focus on command-line apps. MPlayer, for example: An app for watching movies, is command-line. That makes no sense to me. Sure, I can get a front-end for it, but why don't they just include one so I don't go have to find one that: A> I can manage to get installed and B> That doesn't suck? Command-line should be the secondary method, not the primary method.
Most non-tech users don't even know Windows has a command line. They don't need to know. That's a good thing.
This is really what squid and other proxy caches do for http traffic. eMule has tried to capitalize on that by actually allowing data to be cached by an ISP's http proxy cache and to let users of the ISP get the data from the cache instead of directly from a user on the otherside of the world. Maybe what we need is some more generalized cache systems that ISPs can run and applications can take advantage of.
But this idea only works when people are getting the same data, obviously. It won't work for voice over IP, for example.
Multicast has a number of problems in a global internet which is why ISPs generally don't forward multicast. Furthermore, as another poster pointed out, multicast only works when everyone is getting the same data simultaneously. In other words, it works kind of like TV without a recording device. You have to be watching the channel at the right time to get the data. So it's completely unusable for most apps.
Speaking of people who aren't using critical thinking, there are MORE studies that show it does no damage. Furthermore, anyone with even an inkling of understanding of physics will understand why it's impossible.
Cancer is caused by defects in DNA. Defects could come from two possibilities when dealing with EM radiation. #1 is ionizing radiation. Ionizing radiation is produced in the following ways (the yes/no in parenthesis is whether or not a cell phone has this): Extreme heat (no), radioactive decay (no), nuclear fusion (no), nuclear fission (no), accelerated particles (no). That's it. So, there is NO POSSIBLE WAY, that ionizing radiation is the cause.
That leaves only thermal radiation as a possibility for causing DNA defects. This is impossible as well because there's not enough heat produced from the EM emissions of these devices to raise A SINGLE CELL 1 degree centigrade.
So unless you think cell phones and wireless ethernet devices produce some, as yet, undetected force of nature, that interacts with living cells, I think YOU'RE the one that needs to do some critical thinking and extract some wisdom from the real world.
is a Latin phrase that describes the whole situation of people trying to link cancer to cell phones and other EM emitting devices. It means, "After it, therefore because of it." It's like saying, "I use a cell phone and I got brain cancer. Therefore cell phones cause brain cancer."
In the words of Martin Sheen, who described this expression in an episode of West Wing, "It's not always true. In fact it's rarely true." Who puts these idiots in charge?
I see stuff like this all the time and it makes no sense to me:
measuring in at 7.5 microns, is ten or more times thinner
Okay, I assume this means that paper is roughly 75 microns thick. But to say something is 10 times thinner means that it's 10 x 75 microns thinner. In other words, somehow, 7.5 microns = 75 microns - 750 microns.
1. McDonalds coffee was held at temperatures at 180 degrees, 40-50 degrees higher than normal coffee, which is hot enough to produce a 3rd degree burn in as little as two seconds.
So your contention is that most people keep their coffee at 130-140 degrees? That's luke warm.
I generally keep my coffee between 180 and 200. Basically it goes from boiling water to french press to thermos. I figure it's down to at least 200 when it hits the thermos and slowly cools over the following hours...
If you bother to do a gGogle search on the words: coffee temperature, you'll find that most coffee is brewed at damn close to boiling, if not boiling, which is why the pump in a drip coffee maker is called a "boiling water pump." You think it loses 40-50 degrees before it's done brewing? I doubt it.
Anyone who spills hot coffee on themselves and expects not to get burned is, well, stupid. Anyone that sues someone else because they were dumb enough to spill hot coffee on themselves is stupid. I don't care how old the plaintiff was nor do I care how many other people were stupid enough to spill coffee on themselves. They're still stupid.
Finally, I'd like to reiterate the importance of the responsible disclosure of security issues. We firmly believe that privately disclosing security issues to software vendors is the best way to keep the users of the world secure.
I'm sorry, but I take issue with this, particularly with a product being beta-tested, but really, with any product. Users need to know what exploits are known. If there are serious, known, security flaws in IE, that may very well affect my decision of whether or not I want to install it on my system. THe idea of keeping it hush-hush doesn't really help anyone.
Slashdot Mirror
I've got a dual core pentium and I'm sorry to say that running two CPU intensive processes simultaneously is in fact slower than running them serially, one after the other. At least that's been my experience and I remember seeing a story about it on Slashdot a few months back. I really wish I had gone with a dual core Athlon instead.
I actually could use a decent dual core because I've usually got several things going. As a software developer on a fairly large system, my compiles can take a while. I usually have movies or TV playing on my second monitor while I work. That doesn't take up a lot, but compiles, receiving mail (because of SpamBayes), and other things can interfere with the playback. How am I supposed to get any work done when my TV show playback is jumpy?
$35 for new releases, $17.50 for older movies? What a bunch of crap. For the less popular new releases, you can buy the DVD for less than $20 and you still get the extra scenes and other junk that comes on the DVD. Why am I going to pay MORE for a lower quality version when I can go buy it cheaper and then rip it to whatever quality I want.
I suspect their argument will go something like this: "See, nobody is buying them. Selling online doesn't work because everyone is pirating it." When I saw the headline I was surprised and optimistic, but then I read the fine print and it all made perfect sense.
Oh well, the MPAA and RIAA are just putting themselves out of business. Too bad for them.
I stand by my comments when this topic first came up (Sorry, I'm not going to pay the subscription fee I apparently need to pay to get my entire comment history, so no link). I argued that if Google refused to pay the extortion, then nobody would and the idea would eventually die. A few days after posting the comment, Google announced they wouldn't pay the extortion. I continue to believe this idea will die on the vine. If access gets slow to Google because of it, all they have to do is add a link to their home page, to a page that explains why. Add in a few links for how to contact the phone companies to complain, and I guarantee you the phone companies will give it up when their support numbers get jammed.
I mean, I hate for this to all come down to one company, but of all the big tech companies out there, I'm glad that Google will be the one to decide. They've shown every sign of being a very socially conscious corporation (I know, it sounds like a contradiction). I'm not going to fret about this issue much.
You didn't have authority to cancel your own job?
Of course, I could kill my job, and I did, immediately, but once the SQL side of the job began executing, it was running under the shared SQL account, not mine. That one, I didn't have the authority to kill.
Back in the day, I worked for the World Bank writing software on IBM mainframes. Our department was charged back based on our usage. I worked in the telecommunications division and we, like the IBM division, charged departments for their telephone usage. To do this, we'd load the call logs into SQL and then create the bills from that. Our database contained millions of phone calls over the previous year+ of data.
During development, I made the mistake of doing an unqualified join between the primary call table and the table of departments (of which there were probably a few hundred. Pretty simple math... The result set was somewhere in the hundreds of millions to billions. I realized the problem the moment I submitted the job. Unfortunately, there was no way for me, a lowly user, to kill the job, once it began. By the time we managed to get the job killed, I had squandered thousands of dollars in computing charges. My boss was none too happy. Ah, the good old days...
I've been a programmer, professionally, since about 1990, but like a lot of people on this site, I'm sure, I started programming as a hobby long before then. I've loved it as a career and it's been great. That said, as a software developer, I more or less peaked some time ago. I will never advance much further from where I am now (unless I want to go into management. Been there, done that, don't want to do it). But when it comes down to it, it's simply not what I want to do with the rest of my life.
About 4 years ago, I decided I wanted to change careers and spent that time trying to decide what I wanted to do. Many ideas have come and gone over that time, but one continued to keep popping up and I finally made my decision just a couple of months ago.
I'm going back to school to pick up a few classes that I'm missing and then I'm going to try to get into med school. It's something that I think I could enjoy even more than programming and more importantly, it's a way I can help people in a very fundamental way. It's also something I think I would be really good at.
It's seems very strange, at my age, to be going back to being a full time student, building up student loan debts and starting from scratch. But it's also very exciting and I'm really looking forward to it.
In some ways, I think computer programming has actually helped prepare me for this. I certainly have lots of experience working insane hours on very little sleep. And software development gives you a lot of experience in diagnosis. A different type of diagnosis to be sure, but not entirely unalike. So all-in-all, I think that my experiences in both work and outside of work, over the years, will actually have prepared me quite well for this path. We'll see.
There's already an entry in the Internet Movie Database for the series. IMDB is pretty good at keeping up with movies and TV shows that are still in development, so it'll probably be a good place to check back periodically to monitor progress of who comes onboard.
The site finance.google.com seems to be too plain and looks suspiciously like something quickly hacked together.
Obviously you didn't get past the first page which is thankfully as close to plain as it can be. Here's one very good argument for having a very plain front page: It loads fast. Then you get where you really want to be faster.
Even on the main page there's some technically cool stuff. Hover over the market indexes and the graph changes to the one you're hovering over. They've got that in a few places. Go to the main page for a ticker and hover over individuals listed in Management and it gives you more info. In fact, if you do it on the GOOG ticker, it even shows pictures in the pop-up.
Trying hovering over the graph and it gives you data specific to the day or time that you're hovering over in the upper right. You can scroll the graphs to look back in history instead of having to change the time periods. You can select a fixed time period like Yahoo, or you can drag the start and end of the time period for the graph. This is some cool stuff.
Now, when you call it "plain", what are you comparing it to? Yahoo? Because Yahoo isn't anywhere near this tricked-out. As for the data, it doesn't appear to be any more out of date than Yahoo's data. It has the real time ECN just like Yahoo and the rest of the market data is probably 15-20 minutes delayed just like every other free financial site on the web.
Personally, my first impression is that it's exceptionally well designed. It's a great first cut and barring any major disasters, I suspect I'll switch over to it from Yahoo Finance.
Riiiiight. If you don't mind being shat on for noob questions. If you're not a kernel developer, don't even bother!
Maybe you're hanging out in the wrong newsgroups. Frankly, I've found this issue more prevalent on a lot of development web site forums than usenet newsgroups. That said, I've certainly hit some newsgroups that are pretty much owned by jerks. I either ignore them or I don't go back.
Sourceforge is a pretty good model. It works for a lot of open source software out there. There are a few similar communities out there. I'd start by looking at their features and figure out which ones meet your needs.
As for Q & A, I generally find usenet newsgroups are about the best source for programming questions. Depending on the particular newsgroup and topic, I can usually get answers inside of an hour and when it involves my business, time is usually pretty important.
My only offline resources are my co-workers who fortunately, are all quite talented.
I would suspect that most of what you'll want, code-wise, is probably largely available in parts and can be pieced together.
Doesn't Thomas Edison have a trademark on DC? And I think God has a trademark on Marvel.
I used to dabble in electronics and from time to time, companies would simply produce a bad batch of capacitors. Unfortunately, you can't really tell if they're bad (unless they simply don't work at all or have the wrong value) until they fail. I don't know that this is the problem, but this can happen in mid-production, just getting a new batch of capacitors that just happen to be bad. It wouldn't matter if it were an early version or late version in that case.
Again, I don't know that that's the case here, and to be sure, bad batches of capacitors, at least in my experience, aren't terribly common...
Capsaicin is like garlic, or tea. You can't get too much of it and it does great things for you. Capsaicin has several cardiovascular benefits. It's an anti-coagulant and it also lowers cholesterol and triglycerides. It's an analgesic (particularly effective against pain caused by nerve disorders and arthritis). It's also an effective topical analgesic (though I suspect in very weak mixtures, since it burns like hell otherwise).
Capsaicin kills the bacteria responsible for most stomach ulcers thus, contrary to popular opinion, it actually protects against stomach ulcers. As most people might surmise, it's excellent for clearing congestion.
If you need to lose weight, start eating hot sauce. Capsaicin increases the metabolism, thermogenesis, and oxygen consumption.
If you find hot sauce "too hot", then work your way up. Start with mildly hot sauces and slowly increase the heat over time. Most web sites that specialize in selling hot sauces also have the Scoville ratings for those sauces, so you can do be methodical about it if you want. Your body builds up a tolerance for the burning sensation in the mouth and before long, you'll find yourself able to eat sauces you didn't think you could. You just need to be consistent and eat some every day. I try to consume at least 3 teaspoons of 12,000 Scoville salsa a day.
My personal preference is El Yucateco Salsa Kutbil-ik de. It's a brown Mayan style habanero salsa from the Yucatan. I'm kind of partial to it 'cause I lived in the Yucatan for several years and it's pretty popular there. They also make a red sauce (6000 Scovilles) and a green (9000 Scovilles).
It appears that most of the Slashdot crowd agrees this is bunk and, of course, they are correct.
Our understanding of Physics alone is still so incomplete, that until we know it all (and I suspect that day may never come), there will still be tons of possibilities for the next big things coming out of that field alone.
Computer technology is still in its infancy. Anyone who thinks it's not going to change as drastically in the next 50 years as it has in the past 50, is fooling themselves.
Then there's the cool stuff we all want which, we know is possible and is only a matter of time. Cyborg type stuff, for example (and I'm not talking about the previous article on insects). I'm talking about devices implanted in our bodies to give us additional abilities. Imagine having direct internet access from your brain. There's simply NOTHING that makes this impossible and anyone who thinks it won't be a "Big Thing" simply lacks imagination.
I suspect that's the real problem right there. Mr. Donofrio simply lacks imagination.
Cool. They're building a death star!
There is no fuzzy line between programmers and people that can put together some basic Excel macros. Or more specifically, there's no fuzzy line between Application developers and people that can write macros. Writing a macro, for a real programmer, is trivial. Writing an application, for someone who only knows how to write excel macros, on the other hand, is an impossible feat, for the most part.
Application development isn't just understanding some basic logic and a few commands. It involves understanding a complex process, having an understanding of algorithms and patterns. It's understanding complex interactions between parts of the system. These are not things you learn when you write a few Excel macros now and then. Anyone who thinks otherwise is fooling themselves.
There's a reason colleges and universities offer B.S., M.S. and PhD degrees in Computer Science. Because it takes a long time to learn this stuff and it can't be learned without spending a great deal of time studying it.
Hell, there's not even a fuzzy line between someone who can write little C utility apps and an application developer.
The day when Joe Average can build real applications isn't coming anytime soon. That day won't arrive until computers can actually think for Joe Average and fill in for the huge gap in understanding.
Look, I like Linux in a lot of ways. It's definitely a great server OS. And the desktops have come along way. I love seeing the progress and I love playing with them. But given a choice, despite all my frustrations with Windows, I simply find Windows easier to use in a number of ways.
.exe file and run it. On the other hand, with Linux, you usually have to get the executeable for your specific CPU if not your CPU and flavor of Linux. Or, God forbid, you actually have to download the source and build it yourself, which has happened with me with a number of apps because I simply couldn't get the package to install for some reason or another (maybe I couldn't find one of its dependent packages or I couldn't install one of the dependent packages). Installing apps in Linux, especially the less popular ones, can be a very trying experience.
It doesn't matter which version of Windows you run (okay, not necessarily with '95, '98 or something even more ancient) you can install the same
Just to give a single example, something as simple as a CPU temp monitoring app, turned out to be a nightmare. I spent 3 days trying to get a couple of them installed. Never managed to pull it off, despite passing tons of messages back and forth on linuxforums.org
There are other things about Linux that simply aren't ready as well. On the other hand, there are areas where Linux has excelled beyond Windows, and that's terrific, but I generally see the failings in being the areas that affect your non-tech users. Ease of use, ease of finding apps, ease of installing said apps.
These issues need to be addressed and I have no doubt they will be. MS, for all of their faults, have done a pretty good job of making stuff easy to use. It comes, in part, from spending a great deal of time and money doing usability testing of their software.
Another failing in Linux is that, a lot of apps aren't terribly easy to use. Many Linux developers, especially for smaller apps, still have a tendency to focus on command-line apps. MPlayer, for example: An app for watching movies, is command-line. That makes no sense to me. Sure, I can get a front-end for it, but why don't they just include one so I don't go have to find one that: A> I can manage to get installed and B> That doesn't suck? Command-line should be the secondary method, not the primary method.
Most non-tech users don't even know Windows has a command line. They don't need to know. That's a good thing.
This is really what squid and other proxy caches do for http traffic. eMule has tried to capitalize on that by actually allowing data to be cached by an ISP's http proxy cache and to let users of the ISP get the data from the cache instead of directly from a user on the otherside of the world. Maybe what we need is some more generalized cache systems that ISPs can run and applications can take advantage of.
But this idea only works when people are getting the same data, obviously. It won't work for voice over IP, for example.
Multicast has a number of problems in a global internet which is why ISPs generally don't forward multicast. Furthermore, as another poster pointed out, multicast only works when everyone is getting the same data simultaneously. In other words, it works kind of like TV without a recording device. You have to be watching the channel at the right time to get the data. So it's completely unusable for most apps.
Speaking of people who aren't using critical thinking, there are MORE studies that show it does no damage. Furthermore, anyone with even an inkling of understanding of physics will understand why it's impossible.
Cancer is caused by defects in DNA. Defects could come from two possibilities when dealing with EM radiation. #1 is ionizing radiation. Ionizing radiation is produced in the following ways (the yes/no in parenthesis is whether or not a cell phone has this): Extreme heat (no), radioactive decay (no), nuclear fusion (no), nuclear fission (no), accelerated particles (no). That's it. So, there is NO POSSIBLE WAY, that ionizing radiation is the cause.
That leaves only thermal radiation as a possibility for causing DNA defects. This is impossible as well because there's not enough heat produced from the EM emissions of these devices to raise A SINGLE CELL 1 degree centigrade.
So unless you think cell phones and wireless ethernet devices produce some, as yet, undetected force of nature, that interacts with living cells, I think YOU'RE the one that needs to do some critical thinking and extract some wisdom from the real world.
is a Latin phrase that describes the whole situation of people trying to link cancer to cell phones and other EM emitting devices. It means, "After it, therefore because of it." It's like saying, "I use a cell phone and I got brain cancer. Therefore cell phones cause brain cancer."
In the words of Martin Sheen, who described this expression in an episode of West Wing, "It's not always true. In fact it's rarely true." Who puts these idiots in charge?
No, 2 times smaller would be newBudgetDeficit = oldBudgetDeficit - (oldBudgetDeficit * 2). Or in other words, newBudgetDeficit = -oldBudgetDeficit.
I see stuff like this all the time and it makes no sense to me:
measuring in at 7.5 microns, is ten or more times thinner
Okay, I assume this means that paper is roughly 75 microns thick. But to say something is 10 times thinner means that it's 10 x 75 microns thinner. In other words, somehow, 7.5 microns = 75 microns - 750 microns.
1. McDonalds coffee was held at temperatures at 180 degrees, 40-50 degrees higher than normal coffee, which is hot enough to produce a 3rd degree burn in as little as two seconds.
So your contention is that most people keep their coffee at 130-140 degrees? That's luke warm.
I generally keep my coffee between 180 and 200. Basically it goes from boiling water to french press to thermos. I figure it's down to at least 200 when it hits the thermos and slowly cools over the following hours...
If you bother to do a gGogle search on the words: coffee temperature, you'll find that most coffee is brewed at damn close to boiling, if not boiling, which is why the pump in a drip coffee maker is called a "boiling water pump." You think it loses 40-50 degrees before it's done brewing? I doubt it.
Anyone who spills hot coffee on themselves and expects not to get burned is, well, stupid. Anyone that sues someone else because they were dumb enough to spill hot coffee on themselves is stupid. I don't care how old the plaintiff was nor do I care how many other people were stupid enough to spill coffee on themselves. They're still stupid.
Finally, I'd like to reiterate the importance of the responsible disclosure of security issues. We firmly believe that privately disclosing security issues to software vendors is the best way to keep the users of the world secure.
I'm sorry, but I take issue with this, particularly with a product being beta-tested, but really, with any product. Users need to know what exploits are known. If there are serious, known, security flaws in IE, that may very well affect my decision of whether or not I want to install it on my system. THe idea of keeping it hush-hush doesn't really help anyone.