If you don't feel computers in your soul, if you don't NEED to be near computers as much as possible, you shouldn't be in this industry--If you don't feel a desire to tear through each new technology you come across, just don't bother.
The whole batch of people who came into it for the money just makes my job suck, and I am glad they are gone (Being replaced by consultants from India, but their time is limited as well).
Seriously, to me it's exactly like saying "How do great artists attract more apprentices?". They don't, those who have it in them come to the artists and fight for the position.
Really the best bet for our industry is to spend your time encouraging those who do want to enter--who can't help themselves--and strongly discouraging those who don't.
If you think this analogy sounds silly--you're part of the problem. Get out now and do us all a favor.
It's funny how most engineers seem to lean to the right when it comes to corporations and free market.
I think this comes from a complete lack of ability to empathize with or understand situations that are removed from their own.
Currently you find significant resistance to words like "Union" because it clashes with their free-market faith, but as the market shifts and starts crushing engineers, you'll see them clamoring for restrictions on business and union-style solutions.
This is already starting to become evident--in these days of Indian labor and off-site contracts I'm starting to hear less from the free-marketeers and more from people seeing the problems that always come when you get close to a true free-market (Such as this article).
It would be interesting to see how much went to artists that were already multi-millionaires and those who really could use it. And of those that could use it, how much did they get?
BUT, the exposure probably got a few TV/commercial deals, and most likely increased concert attendance--all of which actually earn artists money. Of course, AllOfMP3 helps with that too.
Of course, the best bet is to just drop commercial-radio crap altogether and support indi music through GarageBand, other indi sites and Podcasts.
It looked to me like "Microsoft competes in Supermarket"
I really hoped to see an article about $25 copies of Windows at the check-out asile--right between the pulp gossip magazines and the kids-eye-level candy.
Seemed like it might be their best marketing scheme ever--skip anyone who knows anything about computers and go straight for small chlidren and people who are impressed with Tabloids.
I'm guessing they sent a Fed with 3 police escorts (like usual). The fed said "Sieze all these computers" as usual--but the police just looked around and said "Fuck this shit" and went out for a beer.
Not a very appropriate comparison, is it? The OS itself is not harmful like a drug, but it is something that you tend to get addicted to, and if it's not a free solution, there will be a cost to the addiction.
To ensure that a developing country has a chance, they should learn on a OS that they won't have to pay a years salary for when they ween themselves from the laptop.
If apple was willing to give free copies to anyone who asked in the future, I'm sure they would reconsider. The only reason for apple to make that offer is the hopes of taking more money from poor developing countries in the future. That's kind of un-apple, isn't it?
I agree, they won't win. What interests me is HOW they won't win. It's possible that the courts will limit the power of EULA's. YAY!
Of course with our brain-dead, corporate-loving system it's just as likely that they will say something useless like "Your spyware is stupid so you don't have any rights" rather than trying to understand how our laws could make such a thing possible in the first place and fix it.
Although his example was arbitrary, you can do some amazing things with smart playlists. It's hard to imagine working without them.
For instance, if I'm listing to a song on my iPod and hear that it's incomplete or bad quality, I can just hit a couple buttons (change the * rating) on the iPod and the next time I sync it's pulled off the iPod in placed in a list of "Music to examine".
When I listen to a podcast, I change the rating to five *'s, the next time I sync it's removed. If I change it to 4 *'s, it's placed in a list of "Podcasts to keep" but removed from the "new podcasts" list.
Apples podcast system completely broke this--you can't set ratings on podcasts any more, so I just continue to use iPodder...
I set all my music to two *'s by default. If It's changed to zero stars, it's put in the "music to examine" list, if I set it to one, it's removed from the iPod but kept in iTunes.
Since most of my songs are two *'s, and I don't have enough room for all my music. I only sync a limited ammount of ** music--usually 20 gig, but sometimes I change the number to 5 gig (very simple change) and resync to clear space for stuff I transfer too and from work. Later I can set it back to 20 gig with just a few clicks/keystrokes.
By the way, to do this I ABSOLUTELY need a star rating and the number of times played--I set the selection criteria for the ** songs so that the least played are the ones loaded on the iPod.
Three-five stars are always kept on the iPod, so if I'm listening to some ** music and like it, I raise the raiting--then it's always available.
Your inability to imagine a use for the flexibility of smart playlists either indicates that you were spouting about something you really didn't understand, or you have a very limited imagination. Either way, I recomend you look into it.
State income tax is strange. The laws are--well like if you live in california for two weeks and work as a waiter and then you move to washington where there is no tax and work as a CEO for the rest of the year, california gets full tax of your CEO job.
But if washington had a tax, they split it based on how long/how much money you made in one place or the other.
Sure it can. I nest playlists all the time. You build up two anded playlists and or them together, or is it the other way around. Anyway it works fine.
Really? Well, how about pointing me to this giant cache of experienced java programmers with network management experience in the Spokane area.
In some areas there is definitly a lack of any available talent.
As long as I'm at it, if anyone is really expert at Google Earth (specifically, serving sets of locations from a web server) and willing to travel to spokane, wa for a few months consulting, please respond to my profile.
Re:how many people actually _like_ windows?
on
Pepping Up Windows
·
· Score: 1
I don't like windows a whole lot, but it does quite a few things that Linux can't come close to.
Sharing the same set of libraries across all applicaitons. If you upgrade a single DLL, it fixes all the apps that use that library. Also breaks them sometimes.
Allows applicaitons to integrate at a very close level without knowing anything about each other at build time (most importantly, imbedding an app inside word so that it's display becomes part of your document, and the data is actually saved in your document file)
The main thing about windows is that it's not Unix. Unix developers are, in general, bad at interfaces. Period. Every time I work with an app where the develoeprs came from a unix background, I'm unhappy with it.
This doesn't mean I hate every open source app, but the concept that command lines are okay or necessary, that you need to give every option to the user, that you need to allow serious configurability, all falicies.
Apple developers go too far in the other directon.
Windows is a fair balance actually.
So I suppose what I like about windows is windows developers. Got a problem with that?
Front page of todays WSJ had a great article on MSFT. It's a tale of two or three individuals that are making a change in the way MSFT develops software. There is some great stuff in there.
They are trying to consolidate the platform into a small core with more of an add-in technology--it looks like they are starting over with a different core based on an enterprise-only version of NT.
They also had some great new procedures like continual builds and automated testing. (Can you imagine that those are NEW in Microsoft??? What kind of stupid kid-games have they been playing???)
One concept I really liked was BUG-Jail. When too many bugs are found from a single developer, that developer is not allowed to write code for a while. They didn't say what they did with 'em, but I think an appropriate task would be to put them on the QA team for 6 months.
I wonder if some of the changes mentioned in this article are more a result of this restructuring...
No, on this case they had deliberately considered the possibility of riots weeks before hand and had decided that the proper action was to "Let the niggers kill each other" (Actual line picked up from a police scanner).
I remember quite a bit of talk about it on the radio though, those riots didn't surprise anyone, so the response was calculated.
Actually that's been my feeling for a while. Not in a selfish bullshit way, but seriously--80% of the population of the US aren't going to take this seriously until it's obvious.
This means it WILL happen, there is no question. Maybe less damage (overall) will be done if whatever is going to happen happens sooner than later.
Or maybe I'm wrong and polluting faster will make things worse. I can't guess what actions are going to be good and what are going to be bad so I just don't try.
The only person who is absolutely wrong about the future is one who is certain of it.
> But you need to spend capital (money, time, effort) in order to advance things and reduce their costs. If you don't, then it will remain $100m forever (plus the cost of inflation/deflation). Things do not magically decrease in price so that high school kids can do "science."
Of course! In some cases money is spent in parallel since existing products that are similar get improved and the techniques reduce the cost of other products.
In other cases it should be government funded (All of us getting together to solve a common problem, exactly what a government is for!).
Nobody looked at an 8086 and said "Hmm, this needs to be 3ghz! We took small steps and produced products along the way that funded further efficiency improvements.
In fact, what made computers advance so fast was IBMs inability to prevent others from copying their design, this revolutionized everything.
If IBM had been as "Smart" as apple about trying to recoup their costs by making their firmware uncopyable, we'd be running on dozens of completely incompatible PC brands now--probably at a 386 speed eqivilent. Or worse yet, there would be few PCs outside offices (Since IBM would have never let the price drop like it has).
That which costs $100m today will cost $10m in 5 years, and could be done by highschool kids in the garage in 10.
Not that this is an absolute law or anything, but as knowledge and tools are refined, the whole process becomes less expensive.
If science were slowed down a little bit, it wouldn't really bother me much at all, in fact I might encourage it.
People who lose relatives, government and people with some degree of empathy will continue to fund research in areas like cancer, aids, etc. This is what taxes should go for, this is a great way to do this kind of work.
At this point, using private research to build a product based mostly on people and work who have come before you and given freely to build a drug that you use to monopolize a type of health care is borderline criminal.
I've got an old Ultimate TV box and I have yet to see a pvr (including TIVO) that comes anywhere near it.
The menus are much simplier to navigate, the +30/-7 second skip is perfect, the keyboard has a nice layout (A little bulky, but comes in handy for searches). Nothing else comes close.
Ummm, I just threw a towel over my hands and used typing tutor for a week. After that I went from 40ish wpm to 80ish and never looked at my fingers again. Saved $80 too aparently.
Slashdot Mirror
If you don't feel computers in your soul, if you don't NEED to be near computers as much as possible, you shouldn't be in this industry--If you don't feel a desire to tear through each new technology you come across, just don't bother.
The whole batch of people who came into it for the money just makes my job suck, and I am glad they are gone (Being replaced by consultants from India, but their time is limited as well).
Seriously, to me it's exactly like saying "How do great artists attract more apprentices?". They don't, those who have it in them come to the artists and fight for the position.
Really the best bet for our industry is to spend your time encouraging those who do want to enter--who can't help themselves--and strongly discouraging those who don't.
If you think this analogy sounds silly--you're part of the problem. Get out now and do us all a favor.
It's funny how most engineers seem to lean to the right when it comes to corporations and free market.
I think this comes from a complete lack of ability to empathize with or understand situations that are removed from their own.
Currently you find significant resistance to words like "Union" because it clashes with their free-market faith, but as the market shifts and starts crushing engineers, you'll see them clamoring for restrictions on business and union-style solutions.
This is already starting to become evident--in these days of Indian labor and off-site contracts I'm starting to hear less from the free-marketeers and more from people seeing the problems that always come when you get close to a true free-market (Such as this article).
keep your eyes open, you'll see more soon.
It would be interesting to see how much went to artists that were already multi-millionaires and those who really could use it. And of those that could use it, how much did they get?
BUT, the exposure probably got a few TV/commercial deals, and most likely increased concert attendance--all of which actually earn artists money. Of course, AllOfMP3 helps with that too.
Of course, the best bet is to just drop commercial-radio crap altogether and support indi music through GarageBand, other indi sites and Podcasts.
It looked to me like "Microsoft competes in Supermarket"
I really hoped to see an article about $25 copies of Windows at the check-out asile--right between the pulp gossip magazines and the kids-eye-level candy.
Seemed like it might be their best marketing scheme ever--skip anyone who knows anything about computers and go straight for small chlidren and people who are impressed with Tabloids.
I'm guessing they sent a Fed with 3 police escorts (like usual). The fed said "Sieze all these computers" as usual--but the police just looked around and said "Fuck this shit" and went out for a beer.
Well, that's how I THINK it went.
Not a very appropriate comparison, is it? The OS itself is not harmful like a drug, but it is something that you tend to get addicted to, and if it's not a free solution, there will be a cost to the addiction.
To ensure that a developing country has a chance, they should learn on a OS that they won't have to pay a years salary for when they ween themselves from the laptop.
If apple was willing to give free copies to anyone who asked in the future, I'm sure they would reconsider. The only reason for apple to make that offer is the hopes of taking more money from poor developing countries in the future. That's kind of un-apple, isn't it?
The right choice was made.
If you are willing to live like the average person, then yes--you could make a months salary here stretch to a few years in a developing country.
That involves living in the country (not the city which may be MORE expensive than here) and not shopping.
On the other hand, it may also include a small staff of servants (People will often work for $2-5 a month).
I'm considering it since America is being raped and mutilated by the Retarded Right--this won't be a very fun place to live in a decade or two.
Good point I think. Actually don't know--too busy laughing at "wankware". I have GOT to use that in a sentence today.
I agree, they won't win. What interests me is HOW they won't win. It's possible that the courts will limit the power of EULA's. YAY!
Of course with our brain-dead, corporate-loving system it's just as likely that they will say something useless like "Your spyware is stupid so you don't have any rights" rather than trying to understand how our laws could make such a thing possible in the first place and fix it.
Although his example was arbitrary, you can do some amazing things with smart playlists. It's hard to imagine working without them.
For instance, if I'm listing to a song on my iPod and hear that it's incomplete or bad quality, I can just hit a couple buttons (change the * rating) on the iPod and the next time I sync it's pulled off the iPod in placed in a list of "Music to examine".
When I listen to a podcast, I change the rating to five *'s, the next time I sync it's removed. If I change it to 4 *'s, it's placed in a list of "Podcasts to keep" but removed from the "new podcasts" list.
Apples podcast system completely broke this--you can't set ratings on podcasts any more, so I just continue to use iPodder...
I set all my music to two *'s by default. If It's changed to zero stars, it's put in the "music to examine" list, if I set it to one, it's removed from the iPod but kept in iTunes.
Since most of my songs are two *'s, and I don't have enough room for all my music. I only sync a limited ammount of ** music--usually 20 gig, but sometimes I change the number to 5 gig (very simple change) and resync to clear space for stuff I transfer too and from work. Later I can set it back to 20 gig with just a few clicks/keystrokes.
By the way, to do this I ABSOLUTELY need a star rating and the number of times played--I set the selection criteria for the ** songs so that the least played are the ones loaded on the iPod.
Three-five stars are always kept on the iPod, so if I'm listening to some ** music and like it, I raise the raiting--then it's always available.
Your inability to imagine a use for the flexibility of smart playlists either indicates that you were spouting about something you really didn't understand, or you have a very limited imagination. Either way, I recomend you look into it.
State income tax is strange. The laws are--well like if you live in california for two weeks and work as a waiter and then you move to washington where there is no tax and work as a CEO for the rest of the year, california gets full tax of your CEO job.
But if washington had a tax, they split it based on how long/how much money you made in one place or the other.
Sure it can. I nest playlists all the time. You build up two anded playlists and or them together, or is it the other way around. Anyway it works fine.
Hmm... C# is really just a bunch of Java concepts that MS stole. If you want to give props, give 'em where they are due.
There is very little in C# that wasn't in java, and what is new to C# probably should have been left out.
Really? Well, how about pointing me to this giant cache of experienced java programmers with network management experience in the Spokane area.
In some areas there is definitly a lack of any available talent.
As long as I'm at it, if anyone is really expert at Google Earth (specifically, serving sets of locations from a web server) and willing to travel to spokane, wa for a few months consulting, please respond to my profile.
I don't like windows a whole lot, but it does quite a few things that Linux can't come close to.
Sharing the same set of libraries across all applicaitons. If you upgrade a single DLL, it fixes all the apps that use that library. Also breaks them sometimes.
Allows applicaitons to integrate at a very close level without knowing anything about each other at build time (most importantly, imbedding an app inside word so that it's display becomes part of your document, and the data is actually saved in your document file)
The main thing about windows is that it's not Unix. Unix developers are, in general, bad at interfaces. Period. Every time I work with an app where the develoeprs came from a unix background, I'm unhappy with it.
This doesn't mean I hate every open source app, but the concept that command lines are okay or necessary, that you need to give every option to the user, that you need to allow serious configurability, all falicies.
Apple developers go too far in the other directon.
Windows is a fair balance actually.
So I suppose what I like about windows is windows developers. Got a problem with that?
Front page of todays WSJ had a great article on MSFT. It's a tale of two or three individuals that are making a change in the way MSFT develops software. There is some great stuff in there.
They are trying to consolidate the platform into a small core with more of an add-in technology--it looks like they are starting over with a different core based on an enterprise-only version of NT.
They also had some great new procedures like continual builds and automated testing. (Can you imagine that those are NEW in Microsoft??? What kind of stupid kid-games have they been playing???)
One concept I really liked was BUG-Jail. When too many bugs are found from a single developer, that developer is not allowed to write code for a while. They didn't say what they did with 'em, but I think an appropriate task would be to put them on the QA team for 6 months.
I wonder if some of the changes mentioned in this article are more a result of this restructuring...
No, on this case they had deliberately considered the possibility of riots weeks before hand and had decided that the proper action was to "Let the niggers kill each other" (Actual line picked up from a police scanner).
I remember quite a bit of talk about it on the radio though, those riots didn't surprise anyone, so the response was calculated.
>...I came really close to getting fired on my current job for creating a batch file...
Ummm, no. What happened wasn't that you got corrupted by MS, it's that you have been joining ridiculously crappy companies ever since.
Actually that's been my feeling for a while. Not in a selfish bullshit way, but seriously--80% of the population of the US aren't going to take this seriously until it's obvious.
This means it WILL happen, there is no question. Maybe less damage (overall) will be done if whatever is going to happen happens sooner than later.
Or maybe I'm wrong and polluting faster will make things worse. I can't guess what actions are going to be good and what are going to be bad so I just don't try.
The only person who is absolutely wrong about the future is one who is certain of it.
> But you need to spend capital (money, time, effort) in order to advance things and reduce their costs. If you don't, then it will remain $100m forever (plus the cost of inflation/deflation). Things do not magically decrease in price so that high school kids can do "science."
Of course! In some cases money is spent in parallel since existing products that are similar get improved and the techniques reduce the cost of other products.
In other cases it should be government funded (All of us getting together to solve a common problem, exactly what a government is for!).
Nobody looked at an 8086 and said "Hmm, this needs to be 3ghz! We took small steps and produced products along the way that funded further efficiency improvements.
In fact, what made computers advance so fast was IBMs inability to prevent others from copying their design, this revolutionized everything.
If IBM had been as "Smart" as apple about trying to recoup their costs by making their firmware uncopyable, we'd be running on dozens of completely incompatible PC brands now--probably at a 386 speed eqivilent. Or worse yet, there would be few PCs outside offices (Since IBM would have never let the price drop like it has).
That which costs $100m today will cost $10m in 5 years, and could be done by highschool kids in the garage in 10.
Not that this is an absolute law or anything, but as knowledge and tools are refined, the whole process becomes less expensive.
If science were slowed down a little bit, it wouldn't really bother me much at all, in fact I might encourage it.
People who lose relatives, government and people with some degree of empathy will continue to fund research in areas like cancer, aids, etc. This is what taxes should go for, this is a great way to do this kind of work.
At this point, using private research to build a product based mostly on people and work who have come before you and given freely to build a drug that you use to monopolize a type of health care is borderline criminal.
I've got an old Ultimate TV box and I have yet to see a pvr (including TIVO) that comes anywhere near it.
The menus are much simplier to navigate, the +30/-7 second skip is perfect, the keyboard has a nice layout (A little bulky, but comes in handy for searches). Nothing else comes close.
Maybe it's just that we like what we are used to?
Windows is still five years away from being a reliable and safe platform.
We expect this to be the case for at least the next ten years.
Ummm, I just threw a towel over my hands and used typing tutor for a week. After that I went from 40ish wpm to 80ish and never looked at my fingers again. Saved $80 too aparently.
A slashdot article this week (yesterday?) said that the JPG stuff was, in general, haxored.
Fingerprints anyone?