I've only worked at three different companies (as a programmer, that is). 2 have been small-to-tiny, one was medium-small and growing. Clearly we had no need of ERP software.
Quite probably. Small and medium-sized businesses usually do fine without ERP, although they sometimes buy it anyway, just so that they can brag with it. And it might do them a lot of good when one day they aren't medium-size anymore.
Can anyone tell me what it's really supposed to do. "Enterprise Resource Planning" isn't very descriptive. What do you do, type in the number of employees you have and it calculates how many sodas to buy for the company picnic? (sodas, ERP, get it?)
That would be one application. Another would be to find the ration between sales volume and number of sales-related employees for each of your 42 branches to see who's slacking. Or to automatically register each sold item in each branch, compute how much new stuff you need to order (centrally) and at the same time generate spiffy sales statistics.
Could someone at least explain what the SUPPOSED benefits are?
Less friction, less delay and more control when managing really huge businesses that have tens of thousands of employees.
The other players in that market would look through it and take the good ideas to use them in their own products, that's what would happen, and that would be all. ERP tools are not something hackers have uses for, so you wouldn't find people for an actual OSS development project.
Well, if you actually did use "everything" as your search word, then it might be true, but otherwise it's not. They very probably do give the sites that pay money precedence when in doubt, but they're not compromising the search engine functionality for that.
Now, it might of course take a bit of brains to make your search specific enough so that not every second page on the net fulfillst it, but if you can't do that, then no search engine will ever be useful for you.
Windows does not crash every two seconds and also Linux crashes sometimes.
In my experience, even Windows NT crashes about once a week, and I use it only about 5 hours per week, and not for development work. Linux has crashed on me once in the one and a half years I've been using it (and much more freuqently than NT). Well, I'm not counting the times when I did stuff that will crash any system, like playing with beta drivers. Even then, it would be fewer crashes than with NT.
And even when Windows does not actually crash, too often a reboot is the only solution when something's wrong.
... that can do whatever you need, when you need it, while the Windows user is lost when his narrow GUI doesn't offer a checkbox for what he needs.
.....doesn't care about productivity
What exactly is "productive" about rebooting because your beta app crashed the system or you're not sure whether the app might work after a reboot?
(intellisense, integrated debuggers,
emacs, emacs (if you need it), perhaps kdevelop
debugging a web page, its server side scripts, its client side scripts, and binary server side code simultaneously).
On Unix, you can do as many things simultaneously as your mind can handle, and that is the only barrier.
.....wants to manually create his own MAKE files
... which he then understands and which he can fix if they're broken or recompile too much. The little time spent there is well worth the gain of reliable project management.
....wants to be stuck in a world without a component architecture
What exactly have badly documented system calls to do with a "component architecture"?
what the Linux developer community doesn't get is that Microsoft goes out of its way to take the chore out of programming and allow you to concentrate on the problem you are trying to solve.
More like "allow you to concentrate on paying their license fees, their support contracts, suffering DLL hell and frequent reboots. In what way does Microsof "go out of their way" to do anything except squeeze more money out of their customers?
I see, I really love it how Unix has 10000 text editors. But I'd prefer one that works, and is easy to use. Does XEmacs support intellisense? No, I didn't think so. What's XEmac's goal? To demonstrate bad HCI by having the most deeply nested menus ever seen on the face of the earth.
Well, you just said yourself that Unix has 10000 text editors, so if you don't like XEmacs, don't use it! Use kwrite, whatever.
Seriously, what is the difference between transporting information across borders on a palm pilot and transporting it inside someone's head, apart from the fact that people have much more memory than palm pilots?
Apart from the accessability and copyability of digitally stored information, the key point is that it can be very easily used for cross referencing, and that's the real problem. For example, with enough information gathered on the net, you could relatively easily compile a list of people who're employed at very conservative organizations and yet post regularly on alt.sex.* then do a quick check on the contents of their post and start a little blackmail campaign...
Ofcourse, it's a good thing that there is a lot of choice, but wouldn't it be smarter to put all those devellopers on 1 large project?
No, and that's not what this is about. The point of the common model is that with it, KDE and Gnome applications can interoperate, i.e. you could use drag&drop between them. That's a Good Thing. The point is not to turn them into one big project. For example, the preferences of both will probably remain separate.
It is just you, or, more specifically, your obvious total lock of knwledge about what real security is. Real security is methods that don't depend on the bad guys not knowing them. This concept, known as "security through obscurity" is in fact no security at all, since there are always leaks, and you even can find holes by simple random prodding in many cases (buffer overflows). Real security relies on widely known algorithms that have been tested for years and found to be without holes. Real security is when the key is the only thing that needs to be secret, not the algorithm.
Assuming that you were honest: what you're looking for is impossible. You can either have a prefabricated, eays-to-set-up solution, but then you won't be able to design anything. The more configurability you want, the more deep-down knowledge you need. And Frontpage is nearly certain to break any dynamically generated page.
Correction: Shin Tenchi Muyo (original title of the crappy thing) was not an "end to a long running series". It was a new series all of its own. Storywise, it has nothing at all to do with the other two Tenchi Muyo series (and they don't have anything to do with each other): it just uses the same characters, but with a completely different background.
Well, I disagree fundamentally. IMO a really good surprise ending doesn't really reduce the "replay value" because with the knowledge about the ending, the story can be viewed from en entirely different angle, that of "heck, it was there all along!"... Besides, there's no reason why a story with an unexpected ending could not be "good" in your sense, too.
On the other hand, there is no story, not even the real classics, that I can really review over and over again. After a certain number of replays it does get boring.
A great story is simply a great story, be it in a book, movie, computer game, or wherever.
The problem is that in games, the gameplay tends to distract from the story. Take Final Fantasy 7: really nice story, but it could have been a helluva not better without the need to fight boring or frustrating battles for experience points. On the other hand, if you want to play a game, why should you be forced to sit through half-hour "story" scenes where you can't do anything?
Games naturally lend to this kind of story telling, especially FPS.
You're not seriously claiming that "story" is an issue at all with FPS games???
That's ridiculous, the "story" in virtually all of those is basically nothing but a few paragraphs of atmosphere building that most players will ignore anyway.
No, good stories are very formulaic. In fact, the absence of formula often produces only boredom or confusion in an audience.
No, it's the formula that produces boredom, if it's followed too strictly. Admittedly, not following any kind of formula is likely to produce serious confusion...
This has been true for as long as we have recorded myth and story. Think of the typical Schwarzenegger or Stallone movie. At some point one 'superman' type guy will have to single-handedly kick dozens of bad-guy asses. Realistic? No. Expected? Yes. Satisfying? Yes.
Good storytelling? Hell, no!
IMO the difference between a good story and a bad one is that the good one diverges from the formula, plays with your expectations and stays unpredictable.
The formulaic nature of storytelling, Murray points out, makes it especially suitable for the computer,
Excuse me, but isn't formulaic the last thing a good story should be?
Personally, I think that games of any sort are not fit for storytelling. You can't really have "interactive" stories because you'd quickly run out of place if you made everything possible. At their heart, all adventure and roleplaying games are linear, it's just that some disguise the lack of choice you have better than others. And in the end, solving (often frustratingly arbitrary) puzzles is not something that really makes you enjoy the story better.
I've seen all kinds of articles, books and comics (sluggy freelance, user friedly) assume that any hacker/nerd/cumputer-savy person is automatically a "gamer", and worse, that all they play are FPS.
Now am I the only exception, or is this an unjustified generalization? I mean, there's lots of other stuff "we" do in our free time...
Your description of neural nets is somewhat flawed;
No, it was merely rather compressed, focusing on the end result.
the basic idea is that each neuron receives a stimulus, modifies it according to a well-defined but simple set of rules, and passes it on to further neurons. It gets interesting when you allow the neuron to change its internal rules passed on the data (adaptive neural nets).
Are we talking about stuff like back propagation? isn't that terribly slow?
This isn't strictly what is happening in this case. The inputs to the neurons are light beams, and their effect is to influence the likelihood of that neuron being chosen as a step of the path through the net. So, the system settles out with one path (hopefully the optimum) being chosen.
Nothing new to me in all that...
One reason why it's better than traditional methods is that it's a lot faster (there's no computation at each node of the path, because it relies on a physical effect).
AFAIK most adaption methods are real speed killers.
Another problem I see is that you can't make any sort of guarantees that the result will ne what you desire. What if your adaptive neural network adapts itself into a particularly bad position? Neural networks have been known to produce very unexpected results now and then.
Dogma to you maybe, but I think it should be pretty self-evident to anyone that has not been brainwashed by the atheists into believing that God is a lie.
Nope, it's only self-evident for those who have been brainwashed by christian fundamentalists that the bible is literal truth, along with a load of nonsense that said fundamentalists basically just made up.
The only lie is that of atheism, a lie which convinces you there is no God and so it is alright to lie, cheat, murder and rape since there is no punishment after death.
Really ethical behaviour should not come from fear of punishment, but from tolerance and friendship towards one's fellow humans.
This is why crime rates have been so much worse since our once great country spurned the Lord's path.
Care to explain how the crime rates of some explicitily non-christian countries are actually lower?
Including the rule about worshipping no other God? If you aren't Christian you are failing that straight away.
Nope. Atheists don't fail that.
To be saved, you have to believe in and worship the Lord, which counts out false religions and cults like Islam, Catholicism and Buddihism straight away.
Just for the record: what freak cult do you belong to? (Please don't bother pointing out that your belief system is not a cult but the Real Truth)
If you aren't a Christian, you cannot be ethical. This is simple logic - since God has laid down ethical rules for us to follow through the Bible, anyone who is not a Christian does not follow these rules and cannot help but be immoral and unethical and indeed destined for Hell.
That's not logic, that's dogma, and stupidly interpreted dogma, too. Now even if we assume for a moment that the bible lays down the only valid set of ethical rules (which it does not, as it's inconsistent and self-contradicting as hell), there's quite obviously nothing that prevents someone to follow these rules without being a christian...
Not bad. Arrogance, obscenity, are you as stupid IRL?
AC, let me introduce you to something called a "mirror"...
The neural technique is simply a means of choosing the optimum non-blocking configuration. Go and read a textbook on comms theory and come back when you understand why an M x N non-blocking switch is a hard problem.
I'm not going to read a textbook to understand an article such as this. And that's the key flaw of the article: I do have solid background knowledge in computers and networks, but I'm not a specialist in that particular field. Now, it may be correct that neural networks are a good thing in that context, but the article totally failed to explain anything.
Seriously, I'm a CS major, and I did attend the odd lecture about neural networks. From what I've heard there, neural networks are a tool to implement rules the exact details of which you can't specify very well, i.e. image recognition. I fail to see, on a very basic level, why they should be better than a good, solid priority queue for traffic scheduling.
Slashdot Mirror
Quite probably. Small and medium-sized businesses usually do fine without ERP, although they sometimes buy it anyway, just so that they can brag with it. And it might do them a lot of good when one day they aren't medium-size anymore.
Can anyone tell me what it's really supposed to do. "Enterprise Resource Planning" isn't very descriptive. What do you do, type in the number of employees you have and it calculates how many sodas to buy for the company picnic? (sodas, ERP, get it?)
That would be one application. Another would be to find the ration between sales volume and number of sales-related employees for each of your 42 branches to see who's slacking. Or to automatically register each sold item in each branch, compute how much new stuff you need to order (centrally) and at the same time generate spiffy sales statistics.
Could someone at least explain what the SUPPOSED benefits are?
Less friction, less delay and more control when managing really huge businesses that have tens of thousands of employees.
The other players in that market would look through it and take the good ideas to use them in their own products, that's what would happen, and that would be all. ERP tools are not something hackers have uses for, so you wouldn't find people for an actual OSS development project.
Now, it might of course take a bit of brains to make your search specific enough so that not every second page on the net fulfillst it, but if you can't do that, then no search engine will ever be useful for you.
In my experience, even Windows NT crashes about once a week, and I use it only about 5 hours per week, and not for development work. Linux has crashed on me once in the one and a half years I've been using it (and much more freuqently than NT). Well, I'm not counting the times when I did stuff that will crash any system, like playing with beta drivers. Even then, it would be fewer crashes than with NT.
And even when Windows does not actually crash, too often a reboot is the only solution when something's wrong.
What exactly is "productive" about rebooting because your beta app crashed the system or you're not sure whether the app might work after a reboot?
(intellisense, integrated debuggers,
emacs, emacs (if you need it), perhaps kdevelop
debugging a web page, its server side scripts, its client side scripts, and binary server side code simultaneously).
On Unix, you can do as many things simultaneously as your mind can handle, and that is the only barrier.
What exactly have badly documented system calls to do with a "component architecture"?
what the Linux developer community doesn't get is that Microsoft goes out of its way to take the chore out of programming and allow you to concentrate on the problem you are trying to solve.
More like "allow you to concentrate on paying their license fees, their support contracts, suffering DLL hell and frequent reboots. In what way does Microsof "go out of their way" to do anything except squeeze more money out of their customers?
Well, you just said yourself that Unix has 10000 text editors, so if you don't like XEmacs, don't use it! Use kwrite, whatever.
Apart from the accessability and copyability of digitally stored information, the key point is that it can be very easily used for cross referencing, and that's the real problem. For example, with enough information gathered on the net, you could relatively easily compile a list of people who're employed at very conservative organizations and yet post regularly on alt.sex.* then do a quick check on the contents of their post and start a little blackmail campaign...
No, and that's not what this is about. The point of the common model is that with it, KDE and Gnome applications can interoperate, i.e. you could use drag&drop between them. That's a Good Thing. The point is not to turn them into one big project. For example, the preferences of both will probably remain separate.
It is just you, or, more specifically, your obvious total lock of knwledge about what real security is. Real security is methods that don't depend on the bad guys not knowing them. This concept, known as "security through obscurity" is in fact no security at all, since there are always leaks, and you even can find holes by simple random prodding in many cases (buffer overflows). Real security relies on widely known algorithms that have been tested for years and found to be without holes. Real security is when the key is the only thing that needs to be secret, not the algorithm.
... the band range the licenses for which the German government is about to auction off with an expected profit of $50,000,000,000 ?
Assuming that you were honest: what you're looking for is impossible. You can either have a prefabricated, eays-to-set-up solution, but then you won't be able to design anything. The more configurability you want, the more deep-down knowledge you need. And Frontpage is nearly certain to break any dynamically generated page.
Correction: Shin Tenchi Muyo (original title of the crappy thing) was not an "end to a long running series". It was a new series all of its own. Storywise, it has nothing at all to do with the other two Tenchi Muyo series (and they don't have anything to do with each other): it just uses the same characters, but with a completely different background.
On the other hand, there is no story, not even the real classics, that I can really review over and over again. After a certain number of replays it does get boring.
The problem is that in games, the gameplay tends to distract from the story. Take Final Fantasy 7: really nice story, but it could have been a helluva not better without the need to fight boring or frustrating battles for experience points. On the other hand, if you want to play a game, why should you be forced to sit through half-hour "story" scenes where you can't do anything?
You're not seriously claiming that "story" is an issue at all with FPS games???
That's ridiculous, the "story" in virtually all of those is basically nothing but a few paragraphs of atmosphere building that most players will ignore anyway.
No, it's the formula that produces boredom, if it's followed too strictly. Admittedly, not following any kind of formula is likely to produce serious confusion...
This has been true for as long as we have recorded myth and story. Think of the typical Schwarzenegger or Stallone movie. At some point one 'superman' type guy will have to single-handedly kick dozens of bad-guy asses. Realistic? No. Expected? Yes. Satisfying? Yes.
Good storytelling? Hell, no!
IMO the difference between a good story and a bad one is that the good one diverges from the formula, plays with your expectations and stays unpredictable.
Me, I was raised on Amiga, but somewhere along the way, I mostly lost interest in games...
Excuse me, but isn't formulaic the last thing a good story should be?
Personally, I think that games of any sort are not fit for storytelling. You can't really have "interactive" stories because you'd quickly run out of place if you made everything possible. At their heart, all adventure and roleplaying games are linear, it's just that some disguise the lack of choice you have better than others. And in the end, solving (often frustratingly arbitrary) puzzles is not something that really makes you enjoy the story better.
Now am I the only exception, or is this an unjustified generalization? I mean, there's lots of other stuff "we" do in our free time...
No, it was merely rather compressed, focusing on the end result.
the basic idea is that each neuron receives a stimulus, modifies it according to a well-defined but simple set of rules, and passes it on to further neurons. It gets interesting when you allow the neuron to change its internal rules passed on the data (adaptive neural nets).
Are we talking about stuff like back propagation? isn't that terribly slow?
This isn't strictly what is happening in this case. The inputs to the neurons are light beams, and their effect is to influence the likelihood of that neuron being chosen as a step of the path through the net. So, the system settles out with one path (hopefully the optimum) being chosen.
Nothing new to me in all that...
One reason why it's better than traditional methods is that it's a lot faster (there's no computation at each node of the path, because it relies on a physical effect).
AFAIK most adaption methods are real speed killers.
Another problem I see is that you can't make any sort of guarantees that the result will ne what you desire. What if your adaptive neural network adapts itself into a particularly bad position? Neural networks have been known to produce very unexpected results now and then.
Nope, it's only self-evident for those who have been brainwashed by christian fundamentalists that the bible is literal truth, along with a load of nonsense that said fundamentalists basically just made up.
The only lie is that of atheism, a lie which convinces you there is no God and so it is alright to lie, cheat, murder and rape since there is no punishment after death.
Really ethical behaviour should not come from fear of punishment, but from tolerance and friendship towards one's fellow humans.
This is why crime rates have been so much worse since our once great country spurned the Lord's path.
Care to explain how the crime rates of some explicitily non-christian countries are actually lower?
Including the rule about worshipping no other God? If you aren't Christian you are failing that straight away.
Nope. Atheists don't fail that.
To be saved, you have to believe in and worship the Lord, which counts out false religions and cults like Islam, Catholicism and Buddihism straight away.
Just for the record: what freak cult do you belong to? (Please don't bother pointing out that your belief system is not a cult but the Real Truth)
That's not logic, that's dogma, and stupidly interpreted dogma, too. Now even if we assume for a moment that the bible lays down the only valid set of ethical rules (which it does not, as it's inconsistent and self-contradicting as hell), there's quite obviously nothing that prevents someone to follow these rules without being a christian...
Ah, so in your opinion, Airplanes are blasphemous for they work by imitating birds' wings?
AC, let me introduce you to something called a "mirror"...
The neural technique is simply a means of choosing the optimum non-blocking configuration. Go and read a textbook on comms theory and come back when you understand why an M x N non-blocking switch is a hard problem.
I'm not going to read a textbook to understand an article such as this. And that's the key flaw of the article: I do have solid background knowledge in computers and networks, but I'm not a specialist in that particular field. Now, it may be correct that neural networks are a good thing in that context, but the article totally failed to explain anything.Seriously, I'm a CS major, and I did attend the odd lecture about neural networks. From what I've heard there, neural networks are a tool to implement rules the exact details of which you can't specify very well, i.e. image recognition. I fail to see, on a very basic level, why they should be better than a good, solid priority queue for traffic scheduling.
What frigging' noise, for christ's sake?? What "noise" is there in a big load of network packets wanting to be delivered?