I'm afraid we're looking at a buyer's market, as far as IT people are concerned. At all levels. There are more programmers these days than there are jobs. There are WAY more web developers than there are jobs. Things will settle over the next few years, but one things is certain; The days of easy money are no more.
No longer will we be able to command an average pay $60,000-$80,000 a year with stock options (who would want them anyway), and the other perks programmers are accustomed to. Programmers are going to become like accountants, at best, in terms of their work environment, and probably salaries and other things as well.
Gone are the wonderful days when we held all the cards. Gone are the days when we got foosball tables and video games in the office.
I'm not bitter. Really, I'm not. I've been without steady work for over 6 months (though I do have several contracting things going on that are keeping me just barely afloat). It's a hard reality, but I think that is the reality. I had never expected it, but it's sinking in.
I've got a lot of experience. I've been programming for 24 years. I'm pretty damn good at it, if I do say so myself. I'm not a prodigy, but I've coded assembly for 3 CPUs, I've programmed in Algol, Cobol, Pascal (even wrote a Pascal compiler years ago), Perl, Modula-2, C, C++, and C# (these days). I've architected and written some really impressive stuff. I'm sure if I'd be willing to relocate to other locations, finding work would be a bit easier.
I've written a book in this field and about 20 articles. And I have trouble finding work. That's not a good sign.
I'm currently looking into other things that interest me a bit more than programming does these days, though. We'll see what pans out. There are some good opportunities for programmers down in Mexico too, and I like living there, so maybe I'll head back there. Who would think people would be going to Mexico for work?
I'm sorry, but I've seen the light and man, it sure it isn't C++. I thought C++ was this great thing, only to be bogged down with stuff like keeping header files in sync with implementation files. Get rid of that, and I might consider returning to C++.
C# is the language for me. Man, it takes all the great stuff of C++ and gets rid of all the hassles. foreach() loops make sense. Multiple inheritance of implementation is a trainwreck. I'll grant there are a few little annoyances with C# (like having to mark members as override, or with new [keywords should only have 1 meaning in my book]). But, C++ has TONS of them. I've coded in C++ for 8 years. I've gotten more done with C# in the past 6 months (including learning the language) than I have in my previous 2 years of C++ coding.
Sorry, but I'm never going back to C++, if I can possibly avoid it. And no, I don't like Microsoft anymore than anyone else here.
I used to write software for wireless (cellular, GSM, CDMA, PCS, etc) network engineers. We sold our software to a company in Estonia that was building out a GSM system.
A little over 7 years ago, I had to go over there for 10 days to do a little customer support for our software. My trip was only supposed to take 3 days, but Fed Ex didn't exactly have next day service there, at least not then.
I was amazed by how far Estonia had come, technologically, in such a short time, and they have continued, obviously, since. They already had pretty excellent wireless phone service and pretty comprehensive coverage.
What I learned while I was there was that the Estonian language is very similar to Finnish, and because of this and other reasons, the Estonians had a very close relationship with Finland. It was through this relationship that they were actually able to grow faster than Lithuania or Latvia (its neighboring Baltic states).
In fact, Estonia is a mere hop from Finland. As I recall, the flight (in a Soviet-era pond hopper, which scared the s@#t out of me) took about 20 minutes from Helsinki. There's also a ferry that moves between the two, and from what I was told, a lot of people went back and forth for business.
My only other recollections of Estonia is that it was freezing cold (I was there in October, and it's roughly as far north as Alaska, in case you're an American and want a reference) and the women were gorgeous. But unfortunately, at least as far as the people I dealt with, I found them to be about as cold as the country.
I think the biggest flaw in his argument actually supports possibility of living in a "matrix" even more. He assumes that the consciousness of 6 billion people in the world are being simulated. Why? What if I'm the only simulation? All the other people in the world could just be representations for me to interact with.
I know you think this is your simulation, but sorry, it's really mine. I'm the "real" on here.
What's an acceptable failure rate? I mean, going into space is dangerous stuff. Driving a car is pretty dangerous. Do the math. I mean, granted, driving isn't AS dangerous as going into space, but a lot more drivers die each year than astronauts, that's for sure.
Hell, fighter pilots and helicopter pilots in the military die all the time in accidents in peace time. I mean, not every day, but it happens a few times a year, it seems. Should we stop letting pilots fly military jets and helicopters?
I mean hey, let's not get involved in any more wars because 1 loss in 10 (or whatever) is NOT acceptable. Let's not have people work in steel mills anymore because 1 death in 1000 (or whatever) is NOT acceptable.
People die doing dangerous things. Astronauts aren't ignorant of the dangers. They know them better than any of us will ever know, and yet they choose to do it. Hell, if I had the opportunity, I'd do it. I don't consider myself brave or foolhardy. I simly consider the value of the program to far outweigh the few lives that have been lost to it.
As far as I'm concerned the only politicians that are qualified to decide if the shuttles should be grounded, are former astronauts. Unfortunately, I don't think we have any former astronauts in congress anymore.
Wish I had known about this before. I have "Utils" directory that I've hauled around from computer to computer since, at least, 1986, when I added DIRERASE.EXE to my utilities (09/09/1986). The second oldest is a shareware editor written by a friend of mine entitled, simply "E" that I used for a long time (07/06/1987).
The oldest commercial apps I have are FASTBACK.EXE (a backup program, I think it was commercial), dated 08/17/1988. And SPINRITE (a great tool for setting the interleave of your MFM or RLL hard drive (10/12/1989). It doesn't seem to want to work under Win2K... Strange.
And then the all important CORETEST.EXE, a hard drive benchmark app that was great (04/23/1990).
You know, it seems only a few years back, some crazy animal huggers were complaining about the clubbing of baby seals. See what happens when you let 'em grow up? I say we go back to clubbing the baby wing seals.
I was recently using Kazaa to download a lot of music. It occurred to me: What would happen if they decided to raid me (okay, I'm paranoid sometimes)?
Well, first of all, they'd discover that most, if not all of the songs I downloaded, I also have on CD, so they'd have to go compare those hundreds of songs against the hundreds of CDs I have. Why did I download instead of make my own MP3s? Convenience. Plain and simple.
Next, they'd have to prove that I never bought the songs I downloaded. What if I lost the CD? I'm entitled to a back-up. Prove I've never owned it before! You can't.
Finally, there's the whole point of CD sales. I'll grant that I haven't bought a single CD since the lawsuit against Napster. But that is just as much due to the fact that I haven't found much music that I like since then as anything else.
Frankly, I think it would be hard to prove that any individual doesn't have rights to the music they download because you're allowed to make copies. The fact that you don't have the original or proof of purchase of the original does not constitute proof that you copied illegally.
Anyway, just my opinion, but I doubt they'd be able to mount much of a case against me, and in the meantime, they'd be spending a lot of time and money trying to reconcile my collection of CDs against my collection of MP3s to prove that I've broken the law.
I was recently trying to get M.U.L.E. to work on my Atari emulator, but ran into problems. I didn't have any interest in the game when I had Ataris in the old days, and now that I'm interested, I can't get it to run in the emulator. ARGH.
This is the last step I needed in my Java trojan I've been writing. Now all I need to do is go to everyone's house with my x-ray machine, and I'm in like Flint!
...one of the inventors of Smalltalk, one of the fathers of object oriented programming, conceiver of the laptop computer, inventor of much of the modern windowing GUI.
Translation: He's one of the guys who innovates. Not to be confused with one of the mega-corporations that gets rich from his ideas.
I mean, he may make a good living, but he's certainly not in Bill Gates' territory, financially, and yet he is one of the true innovators. Sad.
Okay, well, I've got 6 Ataris (some 800xls, a 1200xl, and some 130xes). Let's see, if I cluster them together, I'd have a total of 6 * 1.79, 10.74mhz at my command. Don't get jealous guys. Wipe away the drool. That's right baby, I'm gonna be crunching some SETI@home units today...
Isn't this Slashdot? Isn't this news for nerds? Everyone knows nerds don't become rock stars, Peter Gabriel and Herbie Hancock being possible exceptions. So, why is this news for nerds?
Hasn't this been covered before? I think about a year ago, maybe more, Slashdot posted a link to an article by Courtney Love that made a similar analysis with similar results.
Is anyone actually going to go see Episode 3? I mean, Lucas is directing it, right? At least he had the sense to let Kershner and Marquand direct "Empire" and "Return". The acting was significantly better because of it.
I saw Episode 2 recently because a friend told me it was good (I will no longer trust his judgement in movies) and because I had heard there was less Jarjar in it. The acting was so flat and emotionless, this from some really good actors too. It was pathetic. When one good actor does poorly in a movie, you can blame the actor. When all the good actors in a movie do poorly, there's only one person to blame: The director.
Lucas created an amazing story, and made a huge breakthrough with Star Wars. When he handed the director's chair over in Episodes 5 and 6, it only got better. Then, for reasons I'll never understand, he decided to sabotage his masterpiece by taking back the director's chair.
Look, Lucas did a great job with American Graffiti. That was the one and only movie where he ever did a good job directing actors, though. And now his direction of CGI generated characters is even worse. George: Get out of the director's chair. Produce, write, but please, for the love of God, Don't Direct!
Personally, I think we could do a great deal to slow down spam if we stuck SMTP honeypots on port 25 and checked out mail from a different port.
Spammers would sit there an send all their mail to the honeypots with no idea that it's really going into oblivion and in the meantime, we'd be able to send out our mail (with some authentication, yes, please!).
I've actually been writing my own personal SMTP honeypot for this very purpose. I don't imagine I'll have much trouble getting friends to run it.
Great way to create a geek.
on
Uncle Tungsten
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I had chemistry sets as a child and they definitely helped to turn me on to science. While I wasn't much of a chemist (though I did major in it for 1 year), it has very appealing aspects for children. It's something real that you can touch, see, and sometimes to the chagrin of parents, smell.
I don't even know if you can buy the types of chemistry sets I had as a child. I nearly blinded myself bending glass tubes (don't cool them in water!!!) I can understand why companies would be hesitant to market these in our modern society. After all, the American dream has become, "Sue someone for a million dollars."
My interest in chemistry led to an interest in astronomy and even electronics, so I'm very thankful for the opportunity I had as a child and only hope I can give my child the same opportunity to learn. Hopefully without blinding him/her.
Aren't estimates supposed to improve with time? I mean, for years they've been saying between 13 and 15 billion, and now they're saying 11.5-20 billion. Well, hell, I liked the old estimate. Sounded like they actually knew what they were talking about. Now it sounds like they're less sure. And frankly, 95% between 11.5 and 20 billion doesn't sound all that accurate, though I don't know how accurate the 13-15 range was.
Well, let's go ahead and start a pool. Put me in for 14,493,323,583 years old.
Oh thanks. And...
on
New Phrack
·
· Score: 3, Offtopic
A new issue of the Phrack Magazine, #60 has been released today
And the latest Computer Shopper is on the newstands. Just wanted to make sure no slashdotter let that one get by them.
Language develops independently of visual memories. Visual memories don't require any language skills. The fact that you don't remember the languages you mentioned probably means that you didn't speak them fluently and often at the age of about 12, when language memories tend to get locked in (neural pathways for language tend to get set or discarded depending on usage at the time).
My earliest memories are from 2 and 3 years old. The fact that yours are so much later is unusual, but I only have 3 or 4 real memories from this period.
I don't really know what the mechanisms are for visual memories, but I would imagine it's conceivable to have them earlier than this.
Generally, Subversion's interface to a particular feature is similar to CVS's, except where there's a compelling reason to do otherwise.
How about this for a compelling reason; CVS's interface is HORRENDOUS!
Look, CVS has fantastic features, to be sure. But it has a horrible interface that's far more complex than it needs to be. I haven't even found a GUI front-end that can make it easy to use.
It's great to have powerful features, but not everyone needs all that power. 9 times out of 10, all I need is simple check-in and check-out with revision control. I don't need encryption. I don't need a million options for checking in and checking out.
I just find all this other stuff gets in the way. I'm a firm believe that if you want to use software at it's simplest levels, it should be simple to use. As you get to more advanced features, it's okay for it to get more difficult to use. But to make it difficult to do the most basic things just doesn't make sense.
I don't mean to slam CVS, but I'd just really like to see a simple to use alternative to it. Too many times I've gotten lost with CVS wondering exactly what the hell I had done.
would it really be all that useful? Don't get me wrong, it's veyr cool. I just can't see what good this thing would have been. It has about as much potential as those jet packs from the 70's and 80's, which isn't much.
Would I want to fly in one? Sure, who wouldn't. Frankly, I think DARPA's money could be going to more useful things, though. Sorry if that bothers anyone.
I've been boycotting the RIAA since they first went after Napster. What took you guys so long? The only CD's I've purchased in the last 2 years have been from indie labels. Not that my small boycott will make much difference, but I was kinda hoping the idea would catch on eventually.
Why should I fix it? I'm not the one making a living off of this web site. Taco and the rest are. If the bitching bothers them enough they should fix it. If they don't care, that's fine too. I don't recall bitching. I recall providing a suggested fix to an obvious problem.
Come on Taco, you guys can code. Simply write a routine to do some sort of word comparison between the story you're publishing, and say the last week's worth of stories. Any stories with a number of matches above a certain threshold would show you the list of "similar" articles. You could then probably tell from the headline alone if the story you're posting is a duplicate or not. How tough would that be?
Slashdot Mirror
Don't write TCP/IP stacks and web servers in Basic!
I'm afraid we're looking at a buyer's market, as far as IT people are concerned. At all levels. There are more programmers these days than there are jobs. There are WAY more web developers than there are jobs. Things will settle over the next few years, but one things is certain; The days of easy money are no more.
No longer will we be able to command an average pay $60,000-$80,000 a year with stock options (who would want them anyway), and the other perks programmers are accustomed to. Programmers are going to become like accountants, at best, in terms of their work environment, and probably salaries and other things as well.
Gone are the wonderful days when we held all the cards. Gone are the days when we got foosball tables and video games in the office.
I'm not bitter. Really, I'm not. I've been without steady work for over 6 months (though I do have several contracting things going on that are keeping me just barely afloat). It's a hard reality, but I think that is the reality. I had never expected it, but it's sinking in.
I've got a lot of experience. I've been programming for 24 years. I'm pretty damn good at it, if I do say so myself. I'm not a prodigy, but I've coded assembly for 3 CPUs, I've programmed in Algol, Cobol, Pascal (even wrote a Pascal compiler years ago), Perl, Modula-2, C, C++, and C# (these days). I've architected and written some really impressive stuff. I'm sure if I'd be willing to relocate to other locations, finding work would be a bit easier.
I've written a book in this field and about 20 articles. And I have trouble finding work. That's not a good sign.
I'm currently looking into other things that interest me a bit more than programming does these days, though. We'll see what pans out. There are some good opportunities for programmers down in Mexico too, and I like living there, so maybe I'll head back there. Who would think people would be going to Mexico for work?
I'm sorry, but I've seen the light and man, it sure it isn't C++. I thought C++ was this great thing, only to be bogged down with stuff like keeping header files in sync with implementation files. Get rid of that, and I might consider returning to C++.
C# is the language for me. Man, it takes all the great stuff of C++ and gets rid of all the hassles. foreach() loops make sense. Multiple inheritance of implementation is a trainwreck. I'll grant there are a few little annoyances with C# (like having to mark members as override, or with new [keywords should only have 1 meaning in my book]). But, C++ has TONS of them. I've coded in C++ for 8 years. I've gotten more done with C# in the past 6 months (including learning the language) than I have in my previous 2 years of C++ coding.
Sorry, but I'm never going back to C++, if I can possibly avoid it. And no, I don't like Microsoft anymore than anyone else here.
I used to write software for wireless (cellular, GSM, CDMA, PCS, etc) network engineers. We sold our software to a company in Estonia that was building out a GSM system.
A little over 7 years ago, I had to go over there for 10 days to do a little customer support for our software. My trip was only supposed to take 3 days, but Fed Ex didn't exactly have next day service there, at least not then.
I was amazed by how far Estonia had come, technologically, in such a short time, and they have continued, obviously, since. They already had pretty excellent wireless phone service and pretty comprehensive coverage.
What I learned while I was there was that the Estonian language is very similar to Finnish, and because of this and other reasons, the Estonians had a very close relationship with Finland. It was through this relationship that they were actually able to grow faster than Lithuania or Latvia (its neighboring Baltic states).
In fact, Estonia is a mere hop from Finland. As I recall, the flight (in a Soviet-era pond hopper, which scared the s@#t out of me) took about 20 minutes from Helsinki. There's also a ferry that moves between the two, and from what I was told, a lot of people went back and forth for business.
My only other recollections of Estonia is that it was freezing cold (I was there in October, and it's roughly as far north as Alaska, in case you're an American and want a reference) and the women were gorgeous. But unfortunately, at least as far as the people I dealt with, I found them to be about as cold as the country.
I think the biggest flaw in his argument actually supports possibility of living in a "matrix" even more. He assumes that the consciousness of 6 billion people in the world are being simulated. Why? What if I'm the only simulation? All the other people in the world could just be representations for me to interact with.
I know you think this is your simulation, but sorry, it's really mine. I'm the "real" on here.
What's an acceptable failure rate? I mean, going into space is dangerous stuff. Driving a car is pretty dangerous. Do the math. I mean, granted, driving isn't AS dangerous as going into space, but a lot more drivers die each year than astronauts, that's for sure.
Hell, fighter pilots and helicopter pilots in the military die all the time in accidents in peace time. I mean, not every day, but it happens a few times a year, it seems. Should we stop letting pilots fly military jets and helicopters?
I mean hey, let's not get involved in any more wars because 1 loss in 10 (or whatever) is NOT acceptable. Let's not have people work in steel mills anymore because 1 death in 1000 (or whatever) is NOT acceptable.
People die doing dangerous things. Astronauts aren't ignorant of the dangers. They know them better than any of us will ever know, and yet they choose to do it. Hell, if I had the opportunity, I'd do it. I don't consider myself brave or foolhardy. I simly consider the value of the program to far outweigh the few lives that have been lost to it.
As far as I'm concerned the only politicians that are qualified to decide if the shuttles should be grounded, are former astronauts. Unfortunately, I don't think we have any former astronauts in congress anymore.
Wish I had known about this before. I have "Utils" directory that I've hauled around from computer to computer since, at least, 1986, when I added DIRERASE.EXE to my utilities (09/09/1986). The second oldest is a shareware editor written by a friend of mine entitled, simply "E" that I used for a long time (07/06/1987).
The oldest commercial apps I have are FASTBACK.EXE (a backup program, I think it was commercial), dated 08/17/1988. And SPINRITE (a great tool for setting the interleave of your MFM or RLL hard drive (10/12/1989). It doesn't seem to want to work under Win2K... Strange.
And then the all important CORETEST.EXE, a hard drive benchmark app that was great (04/23/1990).
You know, it seems only a few years back, some crazy animal huggers were complaining about the clubbing of baby seals. See what happens when you let 'em grow up? I say we go back to clubbing the baby wing seals.
I was recently using Kazaa to download a lot of music. It occurred to me: What would happen if they decided to raid me (okay, I'm paranoid sometimes)?
Well, first of all, they'd discover that most, if not all of the songs I downloaded, I also have on CD, so they'd have to go compare those hundreds of songs against the hundreds of CDs I have. Why did I download instead of make my own MP3s? Convenience. Plain and simple.
Next, they'd have to prove that I never bought the songs I downloaded. What if I lost the CD? I'm entitled to a back-up. Prove I've never owned it before! You can't.
Finally, there's the whole point of CD sales. I'll grant that I haven't bought a single CD since the lawsuit against Napster. But that is just as much due to the fact that I haven't found much music that I like since then as anything else.
Frankly, I think it would be hard to prove that any individual doesn't have rights to the music they download because you're allowed to make copies. The fact that you don't have the original or proof of purchase of the original does not constitute proof that you copied illegally.
Anyway, just my opinion, but I doubt they'd be able to mount much of a case against me, and in the meantime, they'd be spending a lot of time and money trying to reconcile my collection of CDs against my collection of MP3s to prove that I've broken the law.
I was recently trying to get M.U.L.E. to work on my Atari emulator, but ran into problems. I didn't have any interest in the game when I had Ataris in the old days, and now that I'm interested, I can't get it to run in the emulator. ARGH.
This is the last step I needed in my Java trojan I've been writing. Now all I need to do is go to everyone's house with my x-ray machine, and I'm in like Flint!
Translation: He's one of the guys who innovates. Not to be confused with one of the mega-corporations that gets rich from his ideas.
I mean, he may make a good living, but he's certainly not in Bill Gates' territory, financially, and yet he is one of the true innovators. Sad.
Okay, well, I've got 6 Ataris (some 800xls, a 1200xl, and some 130xes). Let's see, if I cluster them together, I'd have a total of 6 * 1.79, 10.74mhz at my command. Don't get jealous guys. Wipe away the drool. That's right baby, I'm gonna be crunching some SETI@home units today...
Isn't this Slashdot? Isn't this news for nerds? Everyone knows nerds don't become rock stars, Peter Gabriel and Herbie Hancock being possible exceptions. So, why is this news for nerds?
Hasn't this been covered before? I think about a year ago, maybe more, Slashdot posted a link to an article by Courtney Love that made a similar analysis with similar results.
Is anyone actually going to go see Episode 3? I mean, Lucas is directing it, right? At least he had the sense to let Kershner and Marquand direct "Empire" and "Return". The acting was significantly better because of it.
I saw Episode 2 recently because a friend told me it was good (I will no longer trust his judgement in movies) and because I had heard there was less Jarjar in it. The acting was so flat and emotionless, this from some really good actors too. It was pathetic. When one good actor does poorly in a movie, you can blame the actor. When all the good actors in a movie do poorly, there's only one person to blame: The director.
Lucas created an amazing story, and made a huge breakthrough with Star Wars. When he handed the director's chair over in Episodes 5 and 6, it only got better. Then, for reasons I'll never understand, he decided to sabotage his masterpiece by taking back the director's chair.
Look, Lucas did a great job with American Graffiti. That was the one and only movie where he ever did a good job directing actors, though. And now his direction of CGI generated characters is even worse. George: Get out of the director's chair. Produce, write, but please, for the love of God, Don't Direct!
Personally, I think we could do a great deal to slow down spam if we stuck SMTP honeypots on port 25 and checked out mail from a different port.
Spammers would sit there an send all their mail to the honeypots with no idea that it's really going into oblivion and in the meantime, we'd be able to send out our mail (with some authentication, yes, please!).
I've actually been writing my own personal SMTP honeypot for this very purpose. I don't imagine I'll have much trouble getting friends to run it.
I had chemistry sets as a child and they definitely helped to turn me on to science. While I wasn't much of a chemist (though I did major in it for 1 year), it has very appealing aspects for children. It's something real that you can touch, see, and sometimes to the chagrin of parents, smell.
I don't even know if you can buy the types of chemistry sets I had as a child. I nearly blinded myself bending glass tubes (don't cool them in water!!!) I can understand why companies would be hesitant to market these in our modern society. After all, the American dream has become, "Sue someone for a million dollars."
My interest in chemistry led to an interest in astronomy and even electronics, so I'm very thankful for the opportunity I had as a child and only hope I can give my child the same opportunity to learn. Hopefully without blinding him/her.
Aren't estimates supposed to improve with time? I mean, for years they've been saying between 13 and 15 billion, and now they're saying 11.5-20 billion. Well, hell, I liked the old estimate. Sounded like they actually knew what they were talking about. Now it sounds like they're less sure. And frankly, 95% between 11.5 and 20 billion doesn't sound all that accurate, though I don't know how accurate the 13-15 range was.
Well, let's go ahead and start a pool. Put me in for 14,493,323,583 years old.
A new issue of the Phrack Magazine, #60 has been released today
And the latest Computer Shopper is on the newstands. Just wanted to make sure no slashdotter let that one get by them.
Language develops independently of visual memories. Visual memories don't require any language skills. The fact that you don't remember the languages you mentioned probably means that you didn't speak them fluently and often at the age of about 12, when language memories tend to get locked in (neural pathways for language tend to get set or discarded depending on usage at the time).
My earliest memories are from 2 and 3 years old. The fact that yours are so much later is unusual, but I only have 3 or 4 real memories from this period.
I don't really know what the mechanisms are for visual memories, but I would imagine it's conceivable to have them earlier than this.
Generally, Subversion's interface to a particular feature is similar to CVS's, except where there's a compelling reason to do otherwise.
How about this for a compelling reason; CVS's interface is HORRENDOUS!
Look, CVS has fantastic features, to be sure. But it has a horrible interface that's far more complex than it needs to be. I haven't even found a GUI front-end that can make it easy to use.
It's great to have powerful features, but not everyone needs all that power. 9 times out of 10, all I need is simple check-in and check-out with revision control. I don't need encryption. I don't need a million options for checking in and checking out.
I just find all this other stuff gets in the way. I'm a firm believe that if you want to use software at it's simplest levels, it should be simple to use. As you get to more advanced features, it's okay for it to get more difficult to use. But to make it difficult to do the most basic things just doesn't make sense.
I don't mean to slam CVS, but I'd just really like to see a simple to use alternative to it. Too many times I've gotten lost with CVS wondering exactly what the hell I had done.
would it really be all that useful? Don't get me wrong, it's veyr cool. I just can't see what good this thing would have been. It has about as much potential as those jet packs from the 70's and 80's, which isn't much.
Would I want to fly in one? Sure, who wouldn't. Frankly, I think DARPA's money could be going to more useful things, though. Sorry if that bothers anyone.
I've been boycotting the RIAA since they first went after Napster. What took you guys so long? The only CD's I've purchased in the last 2 years have been from indie labels. Not that my small boycott will make much difference, but I was kinda hoping the idea would catch on eventually.
Why should I fix it? I'm not the one making a living off of this web site. Taco and the rest are. If the bitching bothers them enough they should fix it. If they don't care, that's fine too. I don't recall bitching. I recall providing a suggested fix to an obvious problem.
Come on Taco, you guys can code. Simply write a routine to do some sort of word comparison between the story you're publishing, and say the last week's worth of stories. Any stories with a number of matches above a certain threshold would show you the list of "similar" articles. You could then probably tell from the headline alone if the story you're posting is a duplicate or not. How tough would that be?