"In this case, Adobe is saying "Hey, that's our format, and you're not allowed to do that". As much as everyone has treated PDF as a 'standard' document interchange format, it still belongs to Adobe. Why should they roll over to allow Microsoft to create them without getting paid? Doing so would basically say "OK Adobe, we've decided that the PDF format is now in the public domain and is too useful not to integrate into Office"."
No, Adobe made it an open standard and put it in the public domain. At that point it did become fair game for anyone, even Microsoft, to use.
This really has quit being a nerd site hasn't it? I don't even bother with a TV. I play everything on my computer. I think most dvd player software pretty much handles the different standards pretty well.
I think you are right in a lot of ways. I really don't get people complaining about the price though. If you miss class you have a few options a) not have the material b) get notes from someone who was there (depending on how they take notes this could be a recording) c) spend extra time reading the material the lecture covered and hope the book has everything the professor talked about or the added option of d) pay a small fee to get a recording of the lecture.
I actually agree that the small cost may increase absenteeism. To use the example of a daycare center you mentioned, that is why the daycares around here charge $5 a minute that they have to keep someone there to watch your child after closing time. When you start realizing that 30 minutes late would have paid for the entire next week, very few parents are late. To be fair if it is honestly only a minute or two they usually let people slide on the fee. If lectures start costing $10-20 a recording very very people will rely on it as a way to not have to show up to class. Personally at $2.50 a lecture, I would get all the recordings from the previous semester and listen to all of them ahead of time. This would help give you a really good idea of what parts the professor thought was important in the class ahead of time to have an edge in getting good grades.
I work for the Army Aviation and Missile Command and I will agree to a point. I know that at least the Army has been pushing more lean approaches the last couple years, and we have gotten rid of a large amount, but not all, of the bloated beurocrasy in our development practices. I can only speak for this specific command, but the Army wide initiatives are what started a lot of it here.
I am not saying that the development process here is nearly as clean and to the point as a lot of small businesses that I have worked for, but with size come beurocrasy. I can just say that it has gotten signifigantly better in the last year or 2. It is still a long way from perfect, but the old processes were truly horrendous.
Right now Microsoft still needs to gain a lot more marketshare in the server market before they can really do that without driving away customers because of licensing issues. Now if M$ ever gets even half the marketshare with servers that they have in the desktop world, then just prepare to get raped by licensing issues.
XP is a perfectly fine operating system. I haven't had any of my boxes crash in years (including my XP box or my wife's XP box). The only crash of a machine I have had in the past several years was my laptop overheating when the fan had to be replaced and that was a hardware failure. For what most people use a computer for Windows does just fine. Do I wish it was cheaper?, YES. Windows tends to have much better product support than other platforms most of the time, finding drivers is not an issue like it can be for linux, and as long as you have a user smart enough to avoid the majority or viruses and spyware XP doesn't crash very often. So yes, XP is a perfectly fine OS. Trust me if most Macs or linux boxes are abused the way the average Windows box with a ID ten T for a user if they would have problems too.
I am not a particular fan of MS; I'm just tired of listening to Mac and linux fanboys all the time.
No, a virtual shooting similar to someone trespassing is just a regular DoS attack. When you go for Distributed DoS attacks its more like a firing squad.
I don't know an exact ratio, but I believe flash uses signifigantly less than half the power a traditional HD uses.
Re:Off on a tangent
on
iPods at War
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Technically if you are an active member of the military (active duty, or guard or reserve that has been called up), you can legally drink at 18 with your military ID.
If you want to manage then look for an MBA, but wait until you get plenty of experience in the area you want to manage. The MS will help get you into the techincal jobs a lot easier to get that experience. If you just have the MBA, but don't have the experience in the technical side of things, any employees you manage will have a much harder time respecting you.
Also the parent is right an MBA is a lot easier degree to get going back to school while working than a MS is.
I know it can be harder, but I definately recommend working your way through your MS if you get one. A lot of people seem to take the stance that it is a choice between getting experience or getting a degree. You can do both at the same time, it just makes it harder. I know I worked full time in IT, was a partner in a small startup, and got my MS all at the same time. I had NO life during that time, and I had to be willing to work a lot of the evening and late night shifts that most people would rather be home during to do it. But I had the hands on experience from working my way through both my degrees, some management experience from the startup I was a partner in, and the degree. In my case I used my MS to focus my attention on software engeneering from the broad focus CS background my undergrad had been, and I was smart enough to take and interest in security and some financial courses along the way. Between trying to keep a business alive and real world project management projects as part of my MS, I went straight into a low level management position in IT. The beautiful thing is that I gained the experience along the way that the people I work with respect my on a techincal level as well, and I have the skills (and the desire) to be down in the trenches getting work done with the people under me.
The sad part is that I always wanted to avoid management. I'm a bithead. I like looking at the project and figuring out how to make it work. But where I ended up is great for me. I'm high enough on the food chain to get good pay and low enough to still be involved in a lot of the technical aspects. I'm usually not the guy cranking out the majority of the code (although I still do some coding from time to time), but I'm the one helping the customer figure out what they want, how much of that they need vs. what is just fluff, and designing a working solution to the problem. Half the time I'm the one building the prototype as I figure out a good design for the system, and then doing a lot of the testing after the pure programmers under me do a lot of the grunt work. I don't call it grunt work as an insult, I work with some really good programmers who can crank out code much faster than I once they have a basic design of the system to follow. It's just that pure coding to a spec and actually being able to solve the problem to create that spec (and in my case still do some of the coding) are two different skill sets.
Also if you ever get to be in a management position, remember that you are nothing without the guys actually doing the majority of the work. Your job is to make sure they can do thier job and help give them the direction and the resources they need to do it. A lot of managers sometimes forget that.
Yeah, but SP2 broke a lot of backwards compatability to Win9x. Some programs that were still being supported released patches for this, but a lot of companies either never patched, or the software wasn't being supposrted anymore.
As a project lead for the Army at an installation that does a lot of R&D, when we patent something 1 of 3 things happen to it.
1) We grant rights to the patent to someone in industry to produce the produce on a large scale for us.
2) (more common) We just transfer the patent to the company that will produce the product for the military. Personally I think #1 is a better option, but #2 happens a lot.
3) The patent becomes public domain, and the military never has to worry about being sued over licensing issues from someone else developing the technology.
Well they could make SURE they only have one shot and just execute anyone caught cheating. (OK end of sarcasm)
Yes these people want something better, most people do. That is just part of human nature. When all else fails there are always universities in other countries willing to accept international students by the barrel. Yes, that costs money, and if the families had that much money to begin with they could probably bribe the kid's way into a school.
Personally I prefer allofmp3.com. The prices are roughly the same as emusic(depending on the quality of the file you select (I usually go for about 256K/s files) and for my tastes they had a much better catelog than emusic. Either site is a lot cheaper than $1 a track. I downloaded 2 complete albums plus about 15-20 individual tracks this weekend for less than about 5 bucks.
As you hinted to, LOC varies greatly from language to language for the same functionality. Windows is written mostly in C (found this out interviewing with Redmond a year or two ago). The point the article made was they average 1000 LOC/year on Vista + x LOC/year on 64-bit XP + y LOC/year on hotfixes (Im guessing that one is a big number).
From what I have seen on Vista so far, I have no interest in running it. I'm not a fanboy of M$ by any means, but yes I run XP as on my main machine and at work (and Solaris, and Unix, and Server 2003 on servers I have to interact with), but my desktop is a Windows machine. It does what I need it to do, and thats all I ask from an OS.
To me a computer is just a tool to do a job. I want 3 things from an OS: 1- support of the applications I need, 2-stability (and I have never had stability issues with XP, but I'm not going to start that flame war), and 3- at least consistent UI (preferably actually user friendly, but I'll settle for consistent). Honestly the only reasons I run Windows at home are for compatability with work I bring home and the occasional game.
I could care less about new features in a new version of Windows. I just want them to fix the problems with what is already there. And i mean fix not apply 50,000 bandages. I know the only way for them to really do that is to redesign the system from scratch and have at. I doubt this will ever happen, but we can hope.
NO, if you want to make a military aircraft reliable you do it the way the A-10 did. Electrical systems for everything, backed up by hydraulic systems for everything in case of electrical failure, and then physical cables hooked to the controls incase the hydraulics were hit. Most pilots only had the physical strength to operate it via hard cable long enough for an emergency landing, but at least they had control. They didn't even rely on electronics for targeting, had marks in the cockpit where the pilot could gauge based on speed and altitude which mark a target had to be lined up with in line of sight to accurately hit it with a bomb. Suprisingly, the A-10 had a better
hit miss ratio and planes with computer controlled targeting systems.
Of course when a subsonic, low altitude plane is designed as a tank and fortification destroyer, you build it to take damage. The thing had about the same amount of armor as a light to medium tank. The things were known on several occasions to return from a mission with basketball sized holes in them, half the wing span missing, and missing an engine and still land (not crash).
The mechanics used to joke that it was proof the large enough engines could make a brick fly.
It's just a shame the we don't build all systems that have human life in the line with that much redunancy.
No, ME was not Morons Edition. Although that fits nicely. What myself and everyone I used to work tech support with refered to it as was Much Evil, we are talking about M$ after all.
Slashdot Mirror
"In this case, Adobe is saying "Hey, that's our format, and you're not allowed to do that". As much as everyone has treated PDF as a 'standard' document interchange format, it still belongs to Adobe. Why should they roll over to allow Microsoft to create them without getting paid? Doing so would basically say "OK Adobe, we've decided that the PDF format is now in the public domain and is too useful not to integrate into Office"." No, Adobe made it an open standard and put it in the public domain. At that point it did become fair game for anyone, even Microsoft, to use.
This really has quit being a nerd site hasn't it? I don't even bother with a TV. I play everything on my computer. I think most dvd player software pretty much handles the different standards pretty well.
Because US politicians seem to think the entire internet is in teh jurisdiction of the US courts.
I think you are right in a lot of ways. I really don't get people complaining about the price though. If you miss class you have a few options
a) not have the material
b) get notes from someone who was there (depending on how they take notes this could be a recording)
c) spend extra time reading the material the lecture covered and hope the book has everything the professor talked about
or the added option of
d) pay a small fee to get a recording of the lecture.
I actually agree that the small cost may increase absenteeism. To use the example of a daycare center you mentioned, that is why the daycares around here charge $5 a minute that they have to keep someone there to watch your child after closing time. When you start realizing that 30 minutes late would have paid for the entire next week, very few parents are late. To be fair if it is honestly only a minute or two they usually let people slide on the fee. If lectures start costing $10-20 a recording very very people will rely on it as a way to not have to show up to class. Personally at $2.50 a lecture, I would get all the recordings from the previous semester and listen to all of them ahead of time. This would help give you a really good idea of what parts the professor thought was important in the class ahead of time to have an edge in getting good grades.
I work for the Army Aviation and Missile Command and I will agree to a point. I know that at least the Army has been pushing more lean approaches the last couple years, and we have gotten rid of a large amount, but not all, of the bloated beurocrasy in our development practices. I can only speak for this specific command, but the Army wide initiatives are what started a lot of it here. I am not saying that the development process here is nearly as clean and to the point as a lot of small businesses that I have worked for, but with size come beurocrasy. I can just say that it has gotten signifigantly better in the last year or 2. It is still a long way from perfect, but the old processes were truly horrendous.
Right now Microsoft still needs to gain a lot more marketshare in the server market before they can really do that without driving away customers because of licensing issues. Now if M$ ever gets even half the marketshare with servers that they have in the desktop world, then just prepare to get raped by licensing issues.
XP is a perfectly fine operating system. I haven't had any of my boxes crash in years (including my XP box or my wife's XP box). The only crash of a machine I have had in the past several years was my laptop overheating when the fan had to be replaced and that was a hardware failure. For what most people use a computer for Windows does just fine. Do I wish it was cheaper?, YES. Windows tends to have much better product support than other platforms most of the time, finding drivers is not an issue like it can be for linux, and as long as you have a user smart enough to avoid the majority or viruses and spyware XP doesn't crash very often. So yes, XP is a perfectly fine OS. Trust me if most Macs or linux boxes are abused the way the average Windows box with a ID ten T for a user if they would have problems too. I am not a particular fan of MS; I'm just tired of listening to Mac and linux fanboys all the time.
No, a virtual shooting similar to someone trespassing is just a regular DoS attack. When you go for Distributed DoS attacks its more like a firing squad.
I don't know an exact ratio, but I believe flash uses signifigantly less than half the power a traditional HD uses.
Technically if you are an active member of the military (active duty, or guard or reserve that has been called up), you can legally drink at 18 with your military ID.
If you want to manage then look for an MBA, but wait until you get plenty of experience in the area you want to manage. The MS will help get you into the techincal jobs a lot easier to get that experience. If you just have the MBA, but don't have the experience in the technical side of things, any employees you manage will have a much harder time respecting you. Also the parent is right an MBA is a lot easier degree to get going back to school while working than a MS is. I know it can be harder, but I definately recommend working your way through your MS if you get one. A lot of people seem to take the stance that it is a choice between getting experience or getting a degree. You can do both at the same time, it just makes it harder. I know I worked full time in IT, was a partner in a small startup, and got my MS all at the same time. I had NO life during that time, and I had to be willing to work a lot of the evening and late night shifts that most people would rather be home during to do it. But I had the hands on experience from working my way through both my degrees, some management experience from the startup I was a partner in, and the degree. In my case I used my MS to focus my attention on software engeneering from the broad focus CS background my undergrad had been, and I was smart enough to take and interest in security and some financial courses along the way. Between trying to keep a business alive and real world project management projects as part of my MS, I went straight into a low level management position in IT. The beautiful thing is that I gained the experience along the way that the people I work with respect my on a techincal level as well, and I have the skills (and the desire) to be down in the trenches getting work done with the people under me. The sad part is that I always wanted to avoid management. I'm a bithead. I like looking at the project and figuring out how to make it work. But where I ended up is great for me. I'm high enough on the food chain to get good pay and low enough to still be involved in a lot of the technical aspects. I'm usually not the guy cranking out the majority of the code (although I still do some coding from time to time), but I'm the one helping the customer figure out what they want, how much of that they need vs. what is just fluff, and designing a working solution to the problem. Half the time I'm the one building the prototype as I figure out a good design for the system, and then doing a lot of the testing after the pure programmers under me do a lot of the grunt work. I don't call it grunt work as an insult, I work with some really good programmers who can crank out code much faster than I once they have a basic design of the system to follow. It's just that pure coding to a spec and actually being able to solve the problem to create that spec (and in my case still do some of the coding) are two different skill sets. Also if you ever get to be in a management position, remember that you are nothing without the guys actually doing the majority of the work. Your job is to make sure they can do thier job and help give them the direction and the resources they need to do it. A lot of managers sometimes forget that.
Yeah, but SP2 broke a lot of backwards compatability to Win9x. Some programs that were still being supported released patches for this, but a lot of companies either never patched, or the software wasn't being supposrted anymore.
As a project lead for the Army at an installation that does a lot of R&D, when we patent something 1 of 3 things happen to it. 1) We grant rights to the patent to someone in industry to produce the produce on a large scale for us. 2) (more common) We just transfer the patent to the company that will produce the product for the military. Personally I think #1 is a better option, but #2 happens a lot. 3) The patent becomes public domain, and the military never has to worry about being sued over licensing issues from someone else developing the technology.
Well they could make SURE they only have one shot and just execute anyone caught cheating. (OK end of sarcasm) Yes these people want something better, most people do. That is just part of human nature. When all else fails there are always universities in other countries willing to accept international students by the barrel. Yes, that costs money, and if the families had that much money to begin with they could probably bribe the kid's way into a school.
Personally I prefer allofmp3.com. The prices are roughly the same as emusic(depending on the quality of the file you select (I usually go for about 256K/s files) and for my tastes they had a much better catelog than emusic. Either site is a lot cheaper than $1 a track. I downloaded 2 complete albums plus about 15-20 individual tracks this weekend for less than about 5 bucks.
As you hinted to, LOC varies greatly from language to language for the same functionality. Windows is written mostly in C (found this out interviewing with Redmond a year or two ago). The point the article made was they average 1000 LOC/year on Vista + x LOC/year on 64-bit XP + y LOC/year on hotfixes (Im guessing that one is a big number). From what I have seen on Vista so far, I have no interest in running it. I'm not a fanboy of M$ by any means, but yes I run XP as on my main machine and at work (and Solaris, and Unix, and Server 2003 on servers I have to interact with), but my desktop is a Windows machine. It does what I need it to do, and thats all I ask from an OS. To me a computer is just a tool to do a job. I want 3 things from an OS: 1- support of the applications I need, 2-stability (and I have never had stability issues with XP, but I'm not going to start that flame war), and 3- at least consistent UI (preferably actually user friendly, but I'll settle for consistent). Honestly the only reasons I run Windows at home are for compatability with work I bring home and the occasional game. I could care less about new features in a new version of Windows. I just want them to fix the problems with what is already there. And i mean fix not apply 50,000 bandages. I know the only way for them to really do that is to redesign the system from scratch and have at. I doubt this will ever happen, but we can hope.
NO, if you want to make a military aircraft reliable you do it the way the A-10 did. Electrical systems for everything, backed up by hydraulic systems for everything in case of electrical failure, and then physical cables hooked to the controls incase the hydraulics were hit. Most pilots only had the physical strength to operate it via hard cable long enough for an emergency landing, but at least they had control. They didn't even rely on electronics for targeting, had marks in the cockpit where the pilot could gauge based on speed and altitude which mark a target had to be lined up with in line of sight to accurately hit it with a bomb. Suprisingly, the A-10 had a better hit miss ratio and planes with computer controlled targeting systems. Of course when a subsonic, low altitude plane is designed as a tank and fortification destroyer, you build it to take damage. The thing had about the same amount of armor as a light to medium tank. The things were known on several occasions to return from a mission with basketball sized holes in them, half the wing span missing, and missing an engine and still land (not crash). The mechanics used to joke that it was proof the large enough engines could make a brick fly. It's just a shame the we don't build all systems that have human life in the line with that much redunancy.
No, ME was not Morons Edition. Although that fits nicely. What myself and everyone I used to work tech support with refered to it as was Much Evil, we are talking about M$ after all.