Ok, seriously, how can you lose ~99% of the data from something that is such a HUGE part of history?
Very easily. All sorts of important stuff goes walkies. You'd be amazed how many classic rock albums no longer exists as masters, they just have to take copies from the existing CDs. Equally, it's very common for stuff to be recorded in a format that is no longer readable because the hardware is long since gone. This is a huge and understood problem and people are working on trying to fix it but it's slow and expensive activity. On a smaller level, in the UK years ago the BBC did a 'Domeday Project' which used the BBC Micro and custom laserdisc player and was basically an up to date version of the Domesday book from medieval times recording every city, town and village. School kids all over the country helped compile the data and it was a big thing at the time, available in libraries etc. Then a couple of years ago, someone realised there were no known working players left...
It's not uncommon in the UK (or at least in large corporations) to have at least one (senior level) meeting room configured for standing only. The theory is that people standing tend to be more alert, able to think on their feet (ho ho) and make better quality decisions faster (well, you would, wouldn't you). Equally, others have rooms which only have no furniture, just big coloured cushions so you can seriously slob out and brainstorm to your hearts content.
>There's no blank media tax in the UK as far as I'm aware
If you buy a 'music' CD-R instead of a normal one, you pay a tax, or at least used to. They cost about £1.50 to £2 each instead of 20p last time I looked.
A roll with ham in it? A round bready thing containing sliced processed pig? Or are you just querying the lack of chutney, pickle, mayo etc. in his luncheon choice?
Exactly the same here. I was for years the proverbial early adopter in all areas of tech toys - consoles, PCs, home cinema etc. Now I just look at it and think "what's the point?". I figured it was down to becoming a parent and having A) less disposable cash (OK, no disposable cash) and B) realising there are far more important things in life than shiny stuff. Mmmmm shiny stuff..... Where was I? Oh yes, I also noticed I started to feel *worse* after buying new stuff as it added little to my life except more clutter and left a hole in my pocket making me regret the purchase almost as soon as I walked out the shop.
Or start fixing them for money, like those of us whose IQ measures above that of a stop sign.
You charge friends and family? We just swap favours. Last month I installed XP on my in-laws PC and set up their LAN, last weekend they did some wall repairs for us. Saved me a bundle in builders costs and kept my karma points up. Now, about that IQ issue you have..
Good point. Maybe they ought to do an alternative icon for Firefox that looks like the IE one - that would keep the change-averse users happy. Once fired up, as long as it serves up web pages, I don't suppose they'll much care as long as they have their old shortcuts and moving those over is trivial.
That's pretty good numbers considering the vast majority of web users have never heard of Firefox. All my IT/tech-head friends are on Firefox and have been for some time but pretty much all the 'normal' users, mums, dads, people at work etc. have never heard of it and even when shown it simply don't understand why they would want to change from IEx. Web standards? Reliability? Safety? They just don't care. They fire up their PC and get browsing with IEx. It works for them, that's all they're interested in. They might care more if people like me didn't keep doing a free clean of their machine to remove all the muck they have downloaded every few months.
So, if you want Firefox to flourish, stop fixing friends PCs for free:-)
Do you suppose a penetration engineer has anything to do with computers or is it just a PC (sorry..) term used to describe umm women of loose moral fibre?
The less technical ground Vista has to fight on, the nastier the marketing efforts are going to be.
Probably the wisest thing I've read on/. this year. So many of the headline features such as WinFS have been dropped, what's left is just a prettier XP to most consumers.
Sometimes making progress means saying "sorry, we don't support that; you'll have to upgrade to something newer".
OK to an extent except XP is todays current technology. You could buy a PC up until the end of this year or therabouts and it will still have XP but then find a game that comes out Jan 2007 won't work because it's DX10 only. Even by PC standards, that's a short lifespan for your XP system. Sorry dude, your 4 week old PC's out of date.
Tsk, I thought.net was the future and Microsoft always ate their own dog food. Yet strangely, IE7 is yet another MS product that is written native. Is there a message here perhaps?
A wider issue is that we over protect our kids. We cover them in pads to ride a bike, we don't let them out of our sight and so on. It is an important part of growing up to get hurt and for it to be our own fault we got hurt. That's how we develop risk analysis and a sense of what is a sensible thing to do. If they've never had to deal with being dumb and getting hurt, how can we expect them to know how to behave when a real threat aka nasty pervert enters the picture?
Another issue which no-one seems to have considered is that the age of consent varies from country to country. Are MySpace expected to track every single user and cross match to their alleged home country and that countries current rules?
Even then, the reality in each country is quite different to what the law states. Some will turn a blind eye to e.g. a 15yo and a 16yo having sex even though it's technically illegal but will go after a 34yo sleeping with a 15yo no matter how consensual.
Another wrinkle is different ages of consent for same sex couples compared to straight.
Of course not as they would take her to the cleaners by exposing her on the front page (well the british papers would).
Trouble is, she'd then get offered interviews, TV spots, free invites to film premiers etc and become seriously rich for being an idiot. That's the way it works here -look at that guy that got dragged on to TV for being Guy Kewney. He's now been made offers in excess of GBP 1m for his story, features etc.
It's certainly true that programming these days is way harder than it ever used to be. The number of APIs, formats, interoperability options and even the number of languages a single project might encompass is truly bad for the brain of anyone that doesn't spend 24/7 keeping up with it all. Anyone that can push for simplicity gets my vote.
FWIW, any time I find it all overwhelming, I reach for my trusty copy of 'Programmers at Work' by Susan Lammers. Many of the great programmers are here along with the stories of how they created much of the basic building blocks we take for granted these days. Almost without exception, their ability to convey ideas in a clear and concise way is inspiring and after reading a few sections, I'm all fired up again and ready to cut code.
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Ok, seriously, how can you lose ~99% of the data from something that is such a HUGE part of history?
Very easily. All sorts of important stuff goes walkies. You'd be amazed how many classic rock albums no longer exists as masters, they just have to take copies from the existing CDs. Equally, it's very common for stuff to be recorded in a format that is no longer readable because the hardware is long since gone. This is a huge and understood problem and people are working on trying to fix it but it's slow and expensive activity. On a smaller level, in the UK years ago the BBC did a 'Domeday Project' which used the BBC Micro and custom laserdisc player and was basically an up to date version of the Domesday book from medieval times recording every city, town and village. School kids all over the country helped compile the data and it was a big thing at the time, available in libraries etc. Then a couple of years ago, someone realised there were no known working players left...
It's not uncommon in the UK (or at least in large corporations) to have at least one (senior level) meeting room configured for standing only. The theory is that people standing tend to be more alert, able to think on their feet (ho ho) and make better quality decisions faster (well, you would, wouldn't you). Equally, others have rooms which only have no furniture, just big coloured cushions so you can seriously slob out and brainstorm to your hearts content.
So what do the other 98% of the eggs become, if not crabs?
It's not often you see these two words together but 'scary omlette'.
Nah, just tell the Japanese they're funny looking whales. (the crabs, not the Japanese).
I'll just try that again with a break..
>they found an old DAT tape from three years ago, restored it
No DAT tape from 3 years ago restores. I call bluff!
>they found an old DAT tape from three years ago, restored it No DAT tape from 3 years ago restores. I call bluff!
>There's no blank media tax in the UK as far as I'm aware If you buy a 'music' CD-R instead of a normal one, you pay a tax, or at least used to. They cost about £1.50 to £2 each instead of 20p last time I looked.
Actually, now you mention it, it does sound a bit suspect ;-)
"ham roll" = ???
A roll with ham in it? A round bready thing containing sliced processed pig? Or are you just querying the lack of chutney, pickle, mayo etc. in his luncheon choice?
Exactly the same here. I was for years the proverbial early adopter in all areas of tech toys - consoles, PCs, home cinema etc. Now I just look at it and think "what's the point?". I figured it was down to becoming a parent and having A) less disposable cash (OK, no disposable cash) and B) realising there are far more important things in life than shiny stuff. Mmmmm shiny stuff..... Where was I? Oh yes, I also noticed I started to feel *worse* after buying new stuff as it added little to my life except more clutter and left a hole in my pocket making me regret the purchase almost as soon as I walked out the shop.
Or start fixing them for money, like those of us whose IQ measures above that of a stop sign.
You charge friends and family? We just swap favours. Last month I installed XP on my in-laws PC and set up their LAN, last weekend they did some wall repairs for us. Saved me a bundle in builders costs and kept my karma points up. Now, about that IQ issue you have..
Good point. Maybe they ought to do an alternative icon for Firefox that looks like the IE one - that would keep the change-averse users happy. Once fired up, as long as it serves up web pages, I don't suppose they'll much care as long as they have their old shortcuts and moving those over is trivial.
That's pretty good numbers considering the vast majority of web users have never heard of Firefox. All my IT/tech-head friends are on Firefox and have been for some time but pretty much all the 'normal' users, mums, dads, people at work etc. have never heard of it and even when shown it simply don't understand why they would want to change from IEx. Web standards? Reliability? Safety? They just don't care. They fire up their PC and get browsing with IEx. It works for them, that's all they're interested in. They might care more if people like me didn't keep doing a free clean of their machine to remove all the muck they have downloaded every few months.
:-)
So, if you want Firefox to flourish, stop fixing friends PCs for free
Do you suppose a penetration engineer has anything to do with computers or is it just a PC (sorry..) term used to describe umm women of loose moral fibre?
Might I suggest, If an employer asks you "are you in league with the devil?" you don't reply with "its mostly private time stuff."
The less technical ground Vista has to fight on, the nastier the marketing efforts are going to be.
/. this year. So many of the headline features such as WinFS have been dropped, what's left is just a prettier XP to most consumers.
Probably the wisest thing I've read on
Sometimes making progress means saying "sorry, we don't support that; you'll have to upgrade to something newer".
OK to an extent except XP is todays current technology. You could buy a PC up until the end of this year or therabouts and it will still have XP but then find a game that comes out Jan 2007 won't work because it's DX10 only. Even by PC standards, that's a short lifespan for your XP system. Sorry dude, your 4 week old PC's out of date.
It' not *that* hard unless that's an AOL UK only feature..
In corporate newspeak, all nouns are considered fair game for conversion to verbs.
Or 'verbalizing' as it's known.
Tsk, I thought .net was the future and Microsoft always ate their own dog food. Yet strangely, IE7 is yet another MS product that is written native. Is there a message here perhaps?
A wider issue is that we over protect our kids. We cover them in pads to ride a bike, we don't let them out of our sight and so on. It is an important part of growing up to get hurt and for it to be our own fault we got hurt. That's how we develop risk analysis and a sense of what is a sensible thing to do. If they've never had to deal with being dumb and getting hurt, how can we expect them to know how to behave when a real threat aka nasty pervert enters the picture?
Another issue which no-one seems to have considered is that the age of consent varies from country to country. Are MySpace expected to track every single user and cross match to their alleged home country and that countries current rules?
Even then, the reality in each country is quite different to what the law states. Some will turn a blind eye to e.g. a 15yo and a 16yo having sex even though it's technically illegal but will go after a 34yo sleeping with a 15yo no matter how consensual.
Another wrinkle is different ages of consent for same sex couples compared to straight.
Of course not as they would take her to the cleaners by exposing her on the front page (well the british papers would).
Trouble is, she'd then get offered interviews, TV spots, free invites to film premiers etc and become seriously rich for being an idiot. That's the way it works here -look at that guy that got dragged on to TV for being Guy Kewney. He's now been made offers in excess of GBP 1m for his story, features etc.
It's certainly true that programming these days is way harder than it ever used to be. The number of APIs, formats, interoperability options and even the number of languages a single project might encompass is truly bad for the brain of anyone that doesn't spend 24/7 keeping up with it all. Anyone that can push for simplicity gets my vote.
FWIW, any time I find it all overwhelming, I reach for my trusty copy of 'Programmers at Work' by Susan Lammers. Many of the great programmers are here along with the stories of how they created much of the basic building blocks we take for granted these days. Almost without exception, their ability to convey ideas in a clear and concise way is inspiring and after reading a few sections, I'm all fired up again and ready to cut code.
Just for confirmation that you are wrong yourself.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_video_game _consoles_(sixth_generation)