I woke up for the Leonids this year. First time I've EVER woken up in the middle of the night to see a meteor shower. Supposedly the BEST of this century. I saw stars. Didn't see a single falling one. I stood out there in the freezing $@#%ing cold, and couldn't get back to sleep for two hours, making me a mess at work the next day.
So, I think it's fair to say I'll pass on this one.
shows that Gail Cooke is likely the same Gail Cooke that writes book reviews for Dallas-Fort Worth, TX papers. Possibly not, but my guess is she's one in the same.
Isn't that the old saying? I see banner advertisements. I actually read them. Seeing them doesn't mean I'm going to click on them.
If there's a product I like, I'm happy to click on a banner. Truth be told, if I find the advertisement offensively large, I won't, out of principal. I'll go directly to the site bypassing the ad. I've done it before, and I'll continue to do it if ads continue to get larger and more annoying.
Wow, how appropriate that this came up today. I have a directory called "Utils" that I keep a bunch of dos programs that I've hauled around from computer to computer, job to job, for quite some time. I was going through it today looking for a program and started noticing dates on some of these. I've managed to haul this directory around since 1986!!
My oldest program is from Sept. 9, 1986 - DIRERASE.EXE I also have a DOS editor that a buddy of mine wrote and I still use called, simple "E.EXE". 3/21/1987. I have a dos de-tar (as in the unix tar utility) program from 1988. And, anyone remember this: Spinrite.com. It allows you to adjust the interleave on your hard drive. Well, it doesn't seem to work too well under Windows 2000:-(
It also goes a bit into some of Turing's predictions of what computers would be like by the year 2000
I initially misread this line thinking the article was making predictions about what computers would be like in the year 2000. Damn, I knew I was going to get some karma for the jokes I had ready to go.
Put it on a web page, make sure Google caches it, and voila, a back-up you don't have to maintain and it'll probably last longer than a tape drive or any given hard drive. Also slightly faster than the hammer and chisel method suggested by others.
Truth be told, I've thought and thought and thought about how to back up data reliably over long term and I have yet to find a good solution. I used to think CDs were great until I moved to Mexico and had my CDs eaten by a fungus. Now I don't trust them at all.
I also encountered a mold that attacked VHS tapes and I'm sure it attacks other types of tapes, so they're of no use.
Short of storing your media in a vacuum, I have no idea how you store stuff long-term without risk of loss.
I just don't see how this could work. There appear to be too many technical issues involved, not least of which is implementation. First of all, you have to assume there will some "e-token standard." Next, you have to assume Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, and all the other free-email services will support it. You can do a proxy server on the clients for other mail packages, but anything web-based will have to be adapted to it.
Next you need to somehow distribute the tokens to these different systems. This seems to require some sort of integration between the token provider(s) and the e-mail systems and web-based e-mail services.
I just don't see it happening to fix something that can be handled pretty well through filtering. The fact is, e-mail filtering software is making great headway these days. Baysian filters, collective filters like Cloudmark's SpamNet, and so forth.
One idea I had was for a white-list proxy. The first time someone sent you an e-mail, it would hold it in a queue. It would send them back a message asking them if they're sure they want to deliver the message (99% of spammers won't get past this point). As the recipient, you would would be notified of their intent to e-mail you and then validate whether or not you wanted to allow mail from this new sender in the future.
It has problems as well, but it's infinitely more implementable than the idea this paper proposes.
Not really. I mean, in Galileo's trial, everyone understood the issues involved. They simply refused to believe them. Maybe I'm wrong, but it's not like Johansen is tried to prove something that people didn't believe. He may be convicted because the courts don't understand the issues. That's a different animal, I believe.
So he goes to jail for a couple of years. It'll probably teach him to be a better member of society and not to do such criminal things as try to view copyrighted material on open source operating systems.
It occurs to me that having trials where the judge, prosecution, or defense are so technologically behind, how is one to get a fair trial?
Is this something new to computers? Are there cases in the past (like 20+ years ago) where technology or something else causing a major lack of understanding, has caused difficulties in providing fair trials?
we have companies complaining because their businesses are suffering due to their lack of vision. Since they can't figure out how to make money with new technology, they slam everyone else who provides the services they are perfectly capable of providing.
Why a PVR is nothing like Napster, the issue is more or less the same. The RIAA and associated companies have completely failed to provide online music at a reasonable price and distribution format, so they bitch about people using whatever they can find.
Personally I have no sympathy for any of them. The movie companies had teh same complaint when VCRs came out. They talked about how piracy was going to kill the movie industry. Then the rental market became a huge source of revenue. If they'd spend even a perecentage of what they spend on complaining and sueing, and put that towards figuring out where the markets are, and capitalizing on it, they could actually make more money. Unfortunately, they have knee-jerk reactions and commit themselves to that reaction.
I could get one of these, a 15" flat panel screen, keyboard and mouse, and be more comfortable, and it could all fit in my laptop case. Don't get me wrong, I like my laptop, as laptops go. I haul a full-sized USB keyboard around sometimes since I type better with it. I just think this may be a better set-up.
I'm curious. These guys spent 5 years writing the software and then used some 400 hours of computer time on this supercomputer to calculate it. Is there really any advantage besides getting into Guiness to justify this expense? I'm not bashing it, I just don't know. Seems kind of wasteful to me, personally.
IDC says factors other than software acquisition cost--particularly staffing and downtime
Let me see if I understand this. Linux has MORE downtime cost than 2000? I don't think so. Ever try to install software on Windows? Ever manage to do it without having to reboot? Especially an MS app? I don't remember the last time I had to reboot my Linux machine, but it was most likely due to power issues or hardware failure than anything else. This goes for every Linux server I've ever managed.
As for NT and 2000 servers, every time I install or upgrade a package, I get down-time. Not to mention, 2000 servers generally take longer to reboot than Linux servers.
Sorry, I don't buy the downtime side of that article at all, which makes me skeptical about the rest.
This sounds like a lot of trouble to go through to buy music. All these problems can be solved simply by purchasing your music through Gnutella. Not to mention, it's much cheaper.
Software is like any sort of engineering, really. If you spend the time designing properly, prototyping what you don't know, and document everything carefully, you'll get the same result as people who do the same building a bridge or a tank.
This assumes however, that requirements don't change. The sad fact is, in software, requirements change a lot. Unless that changes, software will always take longer than people want/expect.
To give an equivalent engineering task, look at the Bradley Fighting Vehicle that the U.S. Army "designed" and built. Watch "The Pentagon Wars" with Kelsey Grammer. Great movie, BTW. The requirements for the Bradley were changed over and over again through its many, many, many, years of development. It's an armored car for God's sake. At least that's what it was supposed to be.
It took them something like 15 or 20 years to get to production to build what amounts to a tank that's as fragile as a Pinto. Fortunately it's been improved since then.
Anyway, if your requirements remain static, then doing software "quickly" using any of the many modern tools and processes available today is quite acheivable. Quickly being a relative term and all, but compared to the old days.
This guy doesn't really know what he's talking about and it's clearly more than he deserves to even mention his site on Slashdot. For one thing, he's got all this useless "code" for keeping people from seeing image links or right-clicking on the page to, say, view the page source. Of course, all I had to do in IE was go to View/Page Source instead of right click, and the page source comes right up, along with the address of all the images... Am I missing something? Do I just not understand something?
This guy's argument is that bypassing pop-ups and such means bypassing his only way to make money on what I'm sure are pretty pathetic web sites anyway.
The fatal flaw in his argument though, is people using pop-up stoppers aren't EVER going to intentionally click on a pop-up, even if thye're forced to see it. So, he's not really losing money. These are people who proactively know they don't want to see nor click on pop-ups.
Anyway, as others have said, it will take developers roughly 10 minutes to come up with a work-around for this guy's tools. Such as allowing the pop-up window and killing it a second or two after it pops up. Duh, how tough is that?
He saved money using free software instead of commercial software? How's that? Can someone explain the math to me? Duh...
It's about a lot more than the up front costs. His pricing is simplistic and the writeup, pardon me for saying, but sophmoric, at best and doesn't apply to a number of other real-life situatins.
How much is support going to cost? Are you going to have in-house experts? How much are they going to cost compared to the people who don't have to be as smart to run the equivalent Windows software?
There are a lot of other fringe areas that need to be considered to come up with a true lifetime cost for software, and this doesn't even scratch the surface.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for Open Source. I love my Open Office and I'm having a blast with Linux. But I'm a geek.
Someone else mentioned the fact that most real-world companies use commercial software and these kids won't have experience with it. Good point.
Sorry, but this is hardly a booster for Open Source. This is like saying, "People save money by shopping during a sale." Not exactly news.
Yeah, let's get started on this right away. I mean with NASA's knock-out record, they'll take an asteroid that isn't even close to hitting us and slam it smack dab in the middle of the U.S.
Well, some kind of phone is useful. Given the choice between having a standard land-line and a cell phone (I could have had both, I suppose, but what a waste), I took the cell phone option and never got a land-line.
The only real disadvantage is that I need to be fairly close to the sliding glass door to my balcony to get decent reception.
The advantage, which makes it more than worthwhile, is that I have never even once gotten a call from a telemarketer. Man, I don't miss that at all! The only calls I get are from people who I've given my number to and the once every few months wrong number. I can live with that.
Slashdot Mirror
...most scientists don't read the papers they cite. This means that if one paper misreads a work the misreading propagates.
If they're not reading the papers, why would it propagate?
I woke up for the Leonids this year. First time I've EVER woken up in the middle of the night to see a meteor shower. Supposedly the BEST of this century. I saw stars. Didn't see a single falling one. I stood out there in the freezing $@#%ing cold, and couldn't get back to sleep for two hours, making me a mess at work the next day.
So, I think it's fair to say I'll pass on this one.
Send me your address, and I'll e-mail you a book on sarcasm and how to identify it.
1. Against eBay rules for selling, and 2. Stupid.
Yeah, but what do you expect? He's a Mac user. (go ahead, mod me down)...
shows that Gail Cooke is likely the same Gail Cooke that writes book reviews for Dallas-Fort Worth, TX papers. Possibly not, but my guess is she's one in the same.
Isn't that the old saying? I see banner advertisements. I actually read them. Seeing them doesn't mean I'm going to click on them.
If there's a product I like, I'm happy to click on a banner. Truth be told, if I find the advertisement offensively large, I won't, out of principal. I'll go directly to the site bypassing the ad. I've done it before, and I'll continue to do it if ads continue to get larger and more annoying.
But that's just me.
Wow, how appropriate that this came up today. I have a directory called "Utils" that I keep a bunch of dos programs that I've hauled around from computer to computer, job to job, for quite some time. I was going through it today looking for a program and started noticing dates on some of these. I've managed to haul this directory around since 1986!!
:-(
My oldest program is from Sept. 9, 1986 - DIRERASE.EXE
I also have a DOS editor that a buddy of mine wrote and I still use called, simple "E.EXE". 3/21/1987.
I have a dos de-tar (as in the unix tar utility) program from 1988. And, anyone remember this: Spinrite.com. It allows you to adjust the interleave on your hard drive. Well, it doesn't seem to work too well under Windows 2000
Funny that I just noticed all this today.
It also goes a bit into some of Turing's predictions of what computers would be like by the year 2000
I initially misread this line thinking the article was making predictions about what computers would be like in the year 2000. Damn, I knew I was going to get some karma for the jokes I had ready to go.
Put it on a web page, make sure Google caches it, and voila, a back-up you don't have to maintain and it'll probably last longer than a tape drive or any given hard drive. Also slightly faster than the hammer and chisel method suggested by others.
Truth be told, I've thought and thought and thought about how to back up data reliably over long term and I have yet to find a good solution. I used to think CDs were great until I moved to Mexico and had my CDs eaten by a fungus. Now I don't trust them at all.
I also encountered a mold that attacked VHS tapes and I'm sure it attacks other types of tapes, so they're of no use.
Short of storing your media in a vacuum, I have no idea how you store stuff long-term without risk of loss.
I just don't see how this could work. There appear to be too many technical issues involved, not least of which is implementation. First of all, you have to assume there will some "e-token standard." Next, you have to assume Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, and all the other free-email services will support it. You can do a proxy server on the clients for other mail packages, but anything web-based will have to be adapted to it.
Next you need to somehow distribute the tokens to these different systems. This seems to require some sort of integration between the token provider(s) and the e-mail systems and web-based e-mail services.
I just don't see it happening to fix something that can be handled pretty well through filtering. The fact is, e-mail filtering software is making great headway these days. Baysian filters, collective filters like Cloudmark's SpamNet, and so forth.
One idea I had was for a white-list proxy. The first time someone sent you an e-mail, it would hold it in a queue. It would send them back a message asking them if they're sure they want to deliver the message (99% of spammers won't get past this point). As the recipient, you would would be notified of their intent to e-mail you and then validate whether or not you wanted to allow mail from this new sender in the future.
It has problems as well, but it's infinitely more implementable than the idea this paper proposes.
How about Galileo's trial?
Not really. I mean, in Galileo's trial, everyone understood the issues involved. They simply refused to believe them. Maybe I'm wrong, but it's not like Johansen is tried to prove something that people didn't believe. He may be convicted because the courts don't understand the issues. That's a different animal, I believe.
So he goes to jail for a couple of years. It'll probably teach him to be a better member of society and not to do such criminal things as try to view copyrighted material on open source operating systems.
It occurs to me that having trials where the judge, prosecution, or defense are so technologically behind, how is one to get a fair trial?
Is this something new to computers? Are there cases in the past (like 20+ years ago) where technology or something else causing a major lack of understanding, has caused difficulties in providing fair trials?
we have companies complaining because their businesses are suffering due to their lack of vision. Since they can't figure out how to make money with new technology, they slam everyone else who provides the services they are perfectly capable of providing.
Why a PVR is nothing like Napster, the issue is more or less the same. The RIAA and associated companies have completely failed to provide online music at a reasonable price and distribution format, so they bitch about people using whatever they can find.
Personally I have no sympathy for any of them. The movie companies had teh same complaint when VCRs came out. They talked about how piracy was going to kill the movie industry. Then the rental market became a huge source of revenue. If they'd spend even a perecentage of what they spend on complaining and sueing, and put that towards figuring out where the markets are, and capitalizing on it, they could actually make more money. Unfortunately, they have knee-jerk reactions and commit themselves to that reaction.
I could get one of these, a 15" flat panel screen, keyboard and mouse, and be more comfortable, and it could all fit in my laptop case. Don't get me wrong, I like my laptop, as laptops go. I haul a full-sized USB keyboard around sometimes since I type better with it. I just think this may be a better set-up.
I'm curious. These guys spent 5 years writing the software and then used some 400 hours of computer time on this supercomputer to calculate it. Is there really any advantage besides getting into Guiness to justify this expense? I'm not bashing it, I just don't know. Seems kind of wasteful to me, personally.
IDC says factors other than software acquisition cost--particularly staffing and downtime
Let me see if I understand this. Linux has MORE downtime cost than 2000? I don't think so. Ever try to install software on Windows? Ever manage to do it without having to reboot? Especially an MS app? I don't remember the last time I had to reboot my Linux machine, but it was most likely due to power issues or hardware failure than anything else. This goes for every Linux server I've ever managed.
As for NT and 2000 servers, every time I install or upgrade a package, I get down-time. Not to mention, 2000 servers generally take longer to reboot than Linux servers.
Sorry, I don't buy the downtime side of that article at all, which makes me skeptical about the rest.
This sounds like a lot of trouble to go through to buy music. All these problems can be solved simply by purchasing your music through Gnutella. Not to mention, it's much cheaper.
Software is like any sort of engineering, really. If you spend the time designing properly, prototyping what you don't know, and document everything carefully, you'll get the same result as people who do the same building a bridge or a tank.
This assumes however, that requirements don't change. The sad fact is, in software, requirements change a lot. Unless that changes, software will always take longer than people want/expect.
To give an equivalent engineering task, look at the Bradley Fighting Vehicle that the U.S. Army "designed" and built. Watch "The Pentagon Wars" with Kelsey Grammer. Great movie, BTW. The requirements for the Bradley were changed over and over again through its many, many, many, years of development. It's an armored car for God's sake. At least that's what it was supposed to be.
It took them something like 15 or 20 years to get to production to build what amounts to a tank that's as fragile as a Pinto. Fortunately it's been improved since then.
Anyway, if your requirements remain static, then doing software "quickly" using any of the many modern tools and processes available today is quite acheivable. Quickly being a relative term and all, but compared to the old days.
Try Dutch. I haven't seen any Dutch translators out there, though.
I don't recall last time this topic came up, but I know I got modded up to 5, so let's just assume I said that again and mod me up again, please.
This guy doesn't really know what he's talking about and it's clearly more than he deserves to even mention his site on Slashdot. For one thing, he's got all this useless "code" for keeping people from seeing image links or right-clicking on the page to, say, view the page source. Of course, all I had to do in IE was go to View/Page Source instead of right click, and the page source comes right up, along with the address of all the images... Am I missing something? Do I just not understand something?
This guy's argument is that bypassing pop-ups and such means bypassing his only way to make money on what I'm sure are pretty pathetic web sites anyway.
The fatal flaw in his argument though, is people using pop-up stoppers aren't EVER going to intentionally click on a pop-up, even if thye're forced to see it. So, he's not really losing money. These are people who proactively know they don't want to see nor click on pop-ups.
Anyway, as others have said, it will take developers roughly 10 minutes to come up with a work-around for this guy's tools. Such as allowing the pop-up window and killing it a second or two after it pops up. Duh, how tough is that?
He saved money using free software instead of commercial software? How's that? Can someone explain the math to me? Duh...
It's about a lot more than the up front costs. His pricing is simplistic and the writeup, pardon me for saying, but sophmoric, at best and doesn't apply to a number of other real-life situatins.
How much is support going to cost? Are you going to have in-house experts? How much are they going to cost compared to the people who don't have to be as smart to run the equivalent Windows software?
There are a lot of other fringe areas that need to be considered to come up with a true lifetime cost for software, and this doesn't even scratch the surface.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for Open Source. I love my Open Office and I'm having a blast with Linux. But I'm a geek.
Someone else mentioned the fact that most real-world companies use commercial software and these kids won't have experience with it. Good point.
Sorry, but this is hardly a booster for Open Source. This is like saying, "People save money by shopping during a sale." Not exactly news.
Yeah, let's get started on this right away. I mean with NASA's knock-out record, they'll take an asteroid that isn't even close to hitting us and slam it smack dab in the middle of the U.S.
Well, some kind of phone is useful. Given the choice between having a standard land-line and a cell phone (I could have had both, I suppose, but what a waste), I took the cell phone option and never got a land-line.
The only real disadvantage is that I need to be fairly close to the sliding glass door to my balcony to get decent reception.
The advantage, which makes it more than worthwhile, is that I have never even once gotten a call from a telemarketer. Man, I don't miss that at all! The only calls I get are from people who I've given my number to and the once every few months wrong number. I can live with that.