Basicaly in the old country they have a government official who is unprepared to admit radio waves, mobile phones etc, are safe; no matter what the evidence.
What the researcher is saying is the with 235 potential patent violations Linux scores lower then most proprietary software he has looked at.
Incidently nowhere does he say who owns the 235 patents so given the amount of Operating System related patents filed they are more likly to belong to IBM or HP (DEC VAX, Tandem Non Stop etc. etc. ) than microsoft.
For all practical purposes you must buy a Wondows OS when you by a PC. (Geeks can manage it but try getting a cool VIAO or ACER which isnt preloaded with Vista!)
The interesting statistics would be how may PCs sold with Vista have been back-graded to XP?
Judging by the various blogs etc. this would seem to be the only way to get your shiny new box to run as fast as the old one. Google "Vista The long goodbye" Results 1 - 10 of about 907,000
So thats 5% of Vista users hacked off about just one of the Vista bugs enough to blog or cry for help.
In much the same way that script kiddies and east european phishers all know how to hack PCs. All of corporate America knows how to hack congress.
Most hacks require only simple tools: PACs, straight contibutions, that important meeting with the lobbyist that needed to be in the lobby of a Hawian hotel.
Some hacks require more subtle tools: "Where was I gonna site that factory - remind me?", "You know if you ever get tired of congress and want a real job.", "I have absolutly no control over the editors of my newspaper/TV station if they print bad things about you thats tough."
It happens so regularly it doesnt even raise eyebrows anymore. So Bezos will probably lose his patents until congress changes the law so he can get them back.
Wouldnt it be much more efficient and simpler to introduce a "pay per vote" system. Represenitives could auction of votes on e-bay, and, the house seat themselves could be auctioned by the higest bidder. (This is a varation on tax farming which served to Ottoman empire well for 600 years).
The sad thing is that while all this malarky is going on Wolfowitz and Bolten are lecturing the rest of the world about the evils of corruption.
Javascript is all the above. The things it lacks - like a good library of UI functions it lacks because they are not supported in W3C standards.
By only addressing the features provided by a standards complying browser ECMAscript (to give it its real name!) works pretty much everywhere and while the prototype dojo & etc. libraries may seem kludgy at first they do work on any javascript supporting browser.
So a message to SUN -- java had its chance at cross platform browser based apps and blew it. ECMAscript stepped into the gap left and quietly and efficiently achieved everything Applets were meant to do. So it aint broke and no one needs a rerun of the write once crash everywhere fiasco that was java applets.
" I know many who own a magnetron oven for years and are not able to cook with it; they know how to reheat something, and that is all. " -- If you can actually cook you would never use a microwave oven for anything other than warming things up, except maybe some faux "steaming" if you stovetop was maxed out.
PCs are just not consumer ready - only apple comes close to switch it on and it works, even if you do have to wait two minutes. For the majority of the population they just dont do anything that useful. I usually get my news from the TV, talk to people on the telephone occasionally text a message. I travel a lot with work and live a long way from my family so I do use e-mail a lot and and am the world expert at booking flights and hotels online -- but if I lived closer to home I wouldnt need to do that.
You can go on about WEB-2 as much as you want but I prefer to socialise in the pub.
1. Make nice little $200 Laptop. 2. Announce to Geeks around the world "You cant have one". 3. Give Laptop to poor child. 4. Poor child puts laptop on e-bay. 5. Geeks gets kool laptop. 6. Child no longer poor.
I am inclided tofavour the cockup theory of history on this one.
I think microsoft is prevaricating because they dont actualy have the specs!
Hard to believe, well not if youve ever debugged a program with a ActiveX/COM/OLE component inside.
For years the MS development methodoligy of choice seems to have been wrap a new C++ class around the old C++ class and hope it works. Which is sort of OK as it gives you the reuse promised by OO. The downside is that you end up with something like one of those old cannons dug up from the sea bed covered in layers of corrosion,weeds and crustations. You can sort of see its cannon shaped but you cannot see any cannon!
The main PIA comes when you serialise the object, Every enclosed class gets involved in this, and, its very hard to work out whats going on.
As far as I have been able to work out MS never seems to formally specifiy actual file formats whatever the C++ serialize method spits out IS the file format. As long as you use the same class to read it back in there is no problem.
Ven some naasty judge wif a ooroopeean akzent arks you vor the vormats zen you aveing a problum.
Local government in the UK is not famous for big salaries or sexy projects. Although they do have really good pension schemes. So they are gonna be full of livewire employees who are seriously into the latest software?
Re:Joel has capacity to speak his mind
on
You Call This Agile?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The whole point of the "stick to the plan" and "no interuptions" rules is to focus project leaders on stopping trivial interuptions of the " who knows how to load paper " and " could you check over my presentation" type which will happen 10 times a day if there was no rule.
Worse the avergage program will load the paper or check the presentation thus reinforcing the "its ok to interupt these guys there only programmers" attitude. If you have a rule and a fancy methodoligy its easier for the project leader to field interuptions without appearing rude and unhelpful.
I used to go to the secure telecoms room when I had serious stuff to do as hardley anyone had access, nearly always got a chill from the AC though.
I mean how many people buy the National Enquirer believing its a newspaper? How many people watch Fox news thinking its just the same as CBS used to be? Eric von Danikens chariot of the Gods was a best seller. People believe George W Bush is just folks from Texas.
These results are pretty good compared with the results for old media.
The problem is it won't scale to the worlds largest health organisation. The NHS is the primary care organisation for 80% of the UK population (and quite a few visting South Americans and Easten Europeans!) and the primary care organisation for 99% of the population who are liable to get ill (Private medical insurance in the UK being geared up to middle class , less than middle aged people with no medical history).
IT in the NHS was always underfunded (probably rightly so- upgrade a couple of thousand PCs or get a new brain scanner whats a doctor to choose!). The problem started when the unemploeyed PR men and business consultants Blair seems to think of as technical advisors though "a massive IT modernisation project" had a winning quality in the soundbite department plus they could keep some of thier ex-collieges in work.
Blair is just as big a disaster as Bush -- but he's a better looking more eloquent disaster.
Re:Keywords: Government. Health Care. Disaster
on
Biggest IT Disaster Ever?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
England is probably the best place in the world to have a heart attack, should you choose to have one.
If you keel over in London you should get a paramedic equiped with defibrilator within 10 minutes, quite often an actual doctor will be traveling with the paramedics. If its serious and traffic is bad you get a chopper to the hospital where serious case are treated immediatly.
You can get to the operating table within an hour.
And all this without a single check for medical insurance or endless calls to your HMO to get the treatemnt approved.
And its extaordinarily cost effective. The UK spends less per head on medical expenses than any other G8 economy. %50 less than the US for eqivalent service.
The major problem with the NHS is because people are treated according to clinical priority (rather than money or quality of insurance) if you have an ingrowing toe nail there is always someone worse off than you who gets treated first.
Gotta be better than the mess in the USA!
P.S. If you are going to hospital I would recommend Denmark. absolutely the best medical care money cant buy. Its free.
Well C was written as a readable assembly language and there has been 20 plus years of optimisation going on there, so, you have got to be a shit hot assembly programer to beat pure C on speed. C++ is considerably slower and harder to read ( flambait;-).
The interesting thing is that well written Pyhon applications run about the same speed as well written Java.
The key phrase here is "well written" and you really do have to be aware of what pyhon is doing the classic being
python " for x in range(1,1000)"
is not the same as C "for (x=1;x1000;x++)"
The python statment actually means
" build a list consisting of all the numbers from 1 to 1000
then for each entry in the list assign it to 'x' and do the
loop body " This is obviously going to be slow compared with a classic for loop and I have seen this statement used in many a brain dead performance comparision.
Also note that in real life C and C++ solutions can actually be slower than Python because its just to complicated to code stuff like a dictionaty of functions which is all built into python.
So write it in Python and if you have a performance problem write better Python and if you still have a performance problem write it in C.
Every year the evidence for global warming gets more convincing. The scientific evidence just builds and builds. And when youve just gone through a summer in northern europe when the tempreture never went below 30c for 8 weeks who needs scientists.
The really scary bit is this: The classic argument against global warming is that the climate has always varied wildly -- sometimes it gets warmer sometimes it gets colder, shit happens. However historians have been patiently examining all the cool spells and they all correlate to drop offs in human activity. The last really big dip in temperature happened just after the Black Death when approx. one third of humanity died.
CA never bothered much with marketing as they were hated by said same executives!
They just but up smaller but undercapitalised companies with a locked in user base and made thier products profitable by hiking up the license fees and dropping all product development.
This was a paticular headache in the ye olde worlde mainframe worlde. There was this nice little security product called TopSecret which was aquired by CA. After a year or two of price hikes and no support the client site I was working at decided to switch. They chose a rival product ACF after an expensive and incredibly disruptive conversion the new system went in. About two months later the IT manager picked up his computer weekly to find "CA buys ACF" on page 4. He filed for early retirement. His succesor embarked on an exepensive and incerdibly.........
Slashdot Mirror
" There sure as hell won't be any Fibonacci Martel Williams Fourier Johnsons on any of these database lists! "
There is now! Hell never work on this planet again.
Here
Basicaly in the old country they have a government official who is unprepared to admit radio waves, mobile phones etc, are safe; no matter what the evidence.
Here
What the researcher is saying is the with 235 potential patent violations
Linux scores lower then most proprietary software he has looked at.
Incidently nowhere does he say who owns the 235 patents so given the amount of
Operating System related patents filed they are more likly to belong to IBM or HP
(DEC VAX, Tandem Non Stop etc. etc. ) than microsoft.
Pure FUD!
For all practical purposes you must buy a Wondows OS when you by a PC.
(Geeks can manage it but try getting a cool VIAO or ACER which isnt preloaded with Vista!)
The interesting statistics would be how may PCs sold with Vista have been back-graded to XP?
Judging by the various blogs etc. this would seem to be the only way to get your shiny
new box to run as fast as the old one.
Google "Vista The long goodbye" Results 1 - 10 of about 907,000
So thats 5% of Vista users hacked off about just one of the Vista bugs enough to blog or cry for help.
"one dollar, one vote" wouldnt work because previous succesful hacks
mean Bill Gates et al; dont pay any taxes.
"1000 dollars market cap. - one vote" might more accuratly reflect the current situation.
In much the same way that script kiddies and east european phishers all know how to hack PCs. All of corporate America knows how to hack congress.
Most hacks require only simple tools: PACs, straight contibutions, that important meeting with the lobbyist that needed to be in the lobby of a Hawian hotel.
Some hacks require more subtle tools: "Where was I gonna site that factory - remind me?", "You know if you ever get tired of congress and want a real job.", "I have absolutly no control over the editors of my newspaper/TV station if they print bad things about you thats tough."
It happens so regularly it doesnt even raise eyebrows anymore. So Bezos will probably lose his patents until congress changes the law so he can get them back.
Wouldnt it be much more efficient and simpler to introduce a "pay per vote" system. Represenitives could auction of votes on e-bay, and, the house seat themselves could be auctioned by the higest bidder. (This is a varation on tax farming which served to Ottoman empire well for 600 years).
The sad thing is that while all this malarky is going on Wolfowitz and Bolten are lecturing the rest of the world about the evils of corruption.
Javascript is all the above.
The things it lacks - like a good library of UI functions
it lacks because they are not supported in W3C standards.
By only addressing the features provided by a standards complying
browser ECMAscript (to give it its real name!) works pretty much everywhere
and while the prototype dojo & etc. libraries may seem kludgy at first
they do work on any javascript supporting browser.
So a message to SUN -- java had its chance at cross platform browser based apps
and blew it. ECMAscript stepped into the gap left and quietly and efficiently
achieved everything Applets were meant to do. So it aint broke and no one needs
a rerun of the write once crash everywhere fiasco that was java applets.
" I know many who own a magnetron oven for years and are not able to cook with it; they know how to reheat something, and that is all. " -- If you can actually cook you would never use a microwave oven for anything other than warming things up, except maybe some faux "steaming" if you stovetop was maxed out.
PCs are just not consumer ready - only apple comes close to switch it on and it works, even if you do have to wait two minutes.
For the majority of the population they just dont do anything that useful. I usually get my news from the TV, talk to people on the telephone occasionally text a message. I travel a lot with work and live a long way from my family so I do use e-mail a lot and and am the world expert at booking flights and hotels online -- but if I lived closer to home I wouldnt need to do that.
You can go on about WEB-2 as much as you want but I prefer to socialise in the pub.
"nerds act just like cats" except when cats do it, its cool!
Melissa also needs needs a new T-Shirt:--
"My husband spent $6,000,000,000 and all I got was this loosy OS"
I spent $6,000,000,000 and all I got was this loosy OS.
Which would be nice, except, thats not whats happening here.
The US government is enforcing a monopoly for US based companies to
make large profits from people gambling away thier mortgage/foof/rent
money.
1. Make nice little $200 Laptop.
2. Announce to Geeks around the world "You cant have one".
3. Give Laptop to poor child.
4. Poor child puts laptop on e-bay.
5. Geeks gets kool laptop.
6. Child no longer poor.
I am inclided tofavour the cockup theory of history on this one.
I think microsoft is prevaricating because they dont actualy have the specs!
Hard to believe, well not if youve ever debugged a program with a ActiveX/COM/OLE
component inside.
For years the MS development methodoligy of choice seems to have been wrap a new C++
class around the old C++ class and hope it works. Which is sort of OK as it gives
you the reuse promised by OO. The downside is that you end up with something like
one of those old cannons dug up from the sea bed covered in layers of corrosion,weeds and
crustations. You can sort of see its cannon shaped but you cannot see any cannon!
The main PIA comes when you serialise the object, Every enclosed class gets involved in
this, and, its very hard to work out whats going on.
As far as I have been able to work out MS never seems to formally specifiy actual file formats
whatever the C++ serialize method spits out IS the file format.
As long as you use the same class to read it back in there is no problem.
Ven some naasty judge wif a ooroopeean akzent arks you vor the vormats zen you aveing a problum.
Local government in the UK is not famous for big salaries or sexy projects.
Although they do have really good pension schemes.
So they are gonna be full of livewire employees who are seriously into the latest software?
The whole point of the "stick to the plan" and "no interuptions" rules
is to focus project leaders on stopping trivial interuptions of the
" who knows how to load paper " and " could you check over my presentation"
type which will happen 10 times a day if there was no rule.
Worse the avergage program will load the paper or check the presentation
thus reinforcing the "its ok to interupt these guys there only programmers"
attitude.
If you have a rule and a fancy methodoligy its easier for the project
leader to field interuptions without appearing rude and unhelpful.
I used to go to the secure telecoms room when I had serious stuff to do
as hardley anyone had access, nearly always got a chill from the AC though.
have standardised on powerpoint as thier development platform.
and are unlikly to recommend anything other than SAP or Peoplesoft
to thier clients.
If they recommended something sensible and easy to implement how would
they be able to justify 50 man eons in billing?
I mean how many people buy the National Enquirer believing its a newspaper?
How many people watch Fox news thinking its just the same as CBS used to be?
Eric von Danikens chariot of the Gods was a best seller.
People believe George W Bush is just folks from Texas.
These results are pretty good compared with the results for old media.
No project which employed more than 20 techies ever really worked.
Which may seem a strange comment from someone who has been involved
in 500 plus people projects that came in.
This was entirely due to project managers who picked the 20 best
techies and worked them to death while giving the other 480 busy
work.
Obviusly given that EDS, Accenture etc. are involved the top
0.1% in this project just werent good enough.
The problem is it won't scale to the worlds largest health
organisation. The NHS is the primary care organisation for
80% of the UK population (and quite a few visting South Americans and
Easten Europeans!) and the primary care organisation for 99%
of the population who are liable to get ill (Private medical
insurance in the UK being geared up to middle class , less than
middle aged people with no medical history).
IT in the NHS was always underfunded (probably rightly so-
upgrade a couple of thousand PCs or get a new brain scanner
whats a doctor to choose!). The problem started when the
unemploeyed PR men and business consultants Blair seems to
think of as technical advisors though "a massive IT modernisation
project" had a winning quality in the soundbite department plus
they could keep some of thier ex-collieges in work.
Blair is just as big a disaster as Bush -- but he's a better
looking more eloquent disaster.
England is probably the best place in the world to have a heart attack,
should you choose to have one.
If you keel over in London you should get a paramedic equiped
with defibrilator within 10 minutes, quite often an actual doctor
will be traveling with the paramedics. If its serious and traffic is bad you
get a chopper to the hospital where serious case are treated immediatly.
You can get to the operating table within an hour.
And all this without a single check for medical insurance or endless
calls to your HMO to get the treatemnt approved.
And its extaordinarily cost effective. The UK spends less per
head on medical expenses than any other G8 economy. %50 less than
the US for eqivalent service.
The major problem with the NHS is because people are treated according
to clinical priority (rather than money or quality of insurance) if you
have an ingrowing toe nail there is always someone worse off than you
who gets treated first.
Gotta be better than the mess in the USA!
P.S. If you are going to hospital I would recommend Denmark.
absolutely the best medical care money cant buy. Its free.
I second that.
Too many IT guys present proposals like
"We need the ACME 3000 discombobulator to prevent DOR attacks,with a TOC of only $30,000".
Instead we sould be saying
"Mr Rumsfeld these Denail Of Reality attacks may cost you
8% points at the polls we could prevent them for only $300,000".
See how much better it sounds.
Buy the "The Bullshit proposal language" (The boy cow book) from O'Really tommorow.
Well C was written as a readable assembly language and there ;-).
has been 20 plus years of optimisation going on there, so,
you have got to be a shit hot assembly programer to beat pure
C on speed.
C++ is considerably slower and harder to read ( flambait
The interesting thing is that well written Pyhon applications
run about the same speed as well written Java.
The key phrase here is "well written" and you really do have to
be aware of what pyhon is doing the classic being
python " for x in range(1,1000)"
is not the same as C "for (x=1;x1000;x++)"
The python statment actually means
" build a list consisting of all the numbers from 1 to 1000
then for each entry in the list assign it to 'x' and do the
loop body "
This is obviously going to be slow compared with a classic for loop
and I have seen this statement used in many a brain dead performance
comparision.
Also note that in real life C and C++ solutions can actually be
slower than Python because its just to complicated to code stuff
like a dictionaty of functions which is all built into python.
So write it in Python and if you have a performance problem
write better Python and if you still have a performance problem
write it in C.
Every year the evidence for global warming gets more convincing.
The scientific evidence just builds and builds.
And when youve just gone through a summer in northern europe
when the tempreture never went below 30c for 8 weeks who needs
scientists.
The really scary bit is this:
The classic argument against global warming is that the climate
has always varied wildly -- sometimes it gets warmer sometimes
it gets colder, shit happens.
However historians have been patiently examining all the cool
spells and they all correlate to drop offs in human activity.
The last really big dip in temperature happened just after the
Black Death when approx. one third of humanity died.
CA never bothered much with marketing as they were hated by said same executives!
.........
They just but up smaller but undercapitalised companies with a locked in user base
and made thier products profitable by hiking up the license fees and dropping all
product development.
This was a paticular headache in the ye olde worlde mainframe worlde.
There was this nice little security product called TopSecret which was aquired by
CA. After a year or two of price hikes and no support the client site I was working
at decided to switch. They chose a rival product ACF after an expensive and
incredibly disruptive conversion the new system went in. About two months later
the IT manager picked up his computer weekly to find "CA buys ACF" on page 4.
He filed for early retirement. His succesor embarked on an exepensive and incerdibly