I think the Visicalc people would like a word with you...
I didn't say that 123 was the first spreadsheet program. I said that Excel was Microsoft's answer to 123. That is simply common knowledge.
Anyone know what was the first word processor?
As I said in my earlier comment, it doesn't matter. It's turtles all the way down. The "first" word processor would have been an incremental improvement from something else. There's no such thing as "first". It's an arbitrary line drawn in the sand when somebody says XYZ was "first".
the Open Source community rarely, if ever, really innovates. Linux is a UNIX-alike. StarOffice is an MS-Office-alike. KDE is a Windows-alike...
UNIX is a MULTICS-alike. MS-Office includes a Wordperfect-alike and a 123-alike. Windows is a MacOS-alike.
It's turtles all the way down. Anybody who thinks any of the market players are "innovators" is a naive fool. It's all about imitation and incremental improvement, no matter if you're from FLOSS or otherwise.
It sounds to me like they'd stock up the drives with ripped off games to warrant the $500 price tag. After the modchip, hard disk and cost of the XBOX itself there isn't a lot left from the $500 to go towards games.
You don't need a modchip. It can all be done in software; they're called "softmods". Takes 15 minutes and works on any Xbox version, even the very latest v1.6.
Local stores sell games in their cellophane for $20AUD. That's less than $15USD. Well known titles like Halo are included. So it's certainly possible to legally purchase 15 games for approx $200.
Though I personally don't believe that. I'm fairly sure they were installing illegal copies.
I am a huge proponent of open-source, but... Writing code isn't a trivial process. Writing good code is extremely difficult, and I feel is a skill that should be well compensated for.
I agree. But trade secrets (for that's what closed source is all about) aren't the only way to ensure you are compensated. Many products in the marketplace are there without the benefits of trade secrets, yet their companies are profitable.
Nothing Spolsky says in his essay would have prevented Firefox, nor the better Mozilla codebase. He simply says not to rewrite from scratch. He never says anything about refactoring or improving the existing codebase.
Sometimes it's more difficult to refactor than to just rewrite. Architectural problems can run deep; if you hit a design problem then no amount of refactoring will fix the problem, you simply need to start again.
Spolsky's argument was essentially that the original code has been tested and debugged. There might be 100s of man years worth of testing and debugging (aka "knowledge") buried in that code. So his argument is that starting from scratch is throwing away all that knowledge and effort.
The problem with Spolsky's argument is that the effort was never in the code. The effort was in the 100s of man years of testing and debugging. If you're using code to store your testing and debugging results then you're in trouble already, because code will change. You will need to write new features. You will need to refactor the code. So what happens when you refactor your code and you accidentally break a previous fix? If you've relied on your code to store your debugging and testing knowledge then you're stuffed.
The solution is a suite of unit tests. If you have a comprehensive test suite then it doesn't matter if you rewrite or refactor. The test suite will tell you if you've broken a fringe case or border condition.
Once you make this realisation - that the real value of the software isn't in the code, it's in the test suite - writing software becomes a whole lot easier! The code is just one of many possible implementations. The test suite is what describes what your software does. The test suite is what catches you when you make a mistake. The test suite is what prevents your software from going backwards. The test suite contains all of your 100s of man years of testing and debugging. Not the code.
I think it's very enlightening that not once in Spolsky's argument did he mention the phrases "test suite" or "unit test" or "regression testing".
I just reread that comment. You managed to not understand the point despite it being spelled out for you. I remember dismissing it as the ravings of a crazy person. Now that I know you're fixated on the event, I'm convinced there's something wrong with you.
Was that a lame attempt at a pun? Because I can't comprehend why you're surprised that people have flouros in their living rooms. Compact flourescent light globes are incredibly common. They have lower power consumption, they last longer, and the new ones have a similar light to incandescents. My entire house is fitted with compact flouros.
The CPU is not emulated (it is virtualised) but the hardware most definitely is emulated in VMWare. The bios, video, audio, network and disk is all emulated by VMWare to appear like a PC.
Yes, the grandparent wasn't 100% correct, but neither were you. I would have said VMWare is a virtualisation environment that also emulates PC hardware. I'm probably a bit wrong too:-)
Contrast this with UML, Xen, BSD jails and Solaris containers where the PC hardware is not emulated. The guest OS kernel and/or drivers are rewritten for the virtualisation environment instead.
PJ 'blogs' the facts, albeit sometimes with a fierce preserve for open source, but nevertheless, the FACTS.
Well, no, she blogs her opinion. Sometimes she intermixes facts with her opinion. Sometimes she doesn't. Really, it's just a blog. It's not the fount of all wisdom.
Honestly, if you want a site that gives the facts you'd be better off with scofacts.org, especially something like the SCO Score Card. There is also Frank Sorenson's pages. He has all the court documents, not just the ones that PJ can spin into a story. Frank has been responsible for obtaining the majority of court documents hosted on Groklaw.
The other news sites 'report' what they decide is 'news', and that 'news' can be swayed by whatever/whoever is paying them to say it.
Groklaw is no different. You are just biased because Groklaw says what you want to hear.
I heard an eloquent analogy recently. Science starts with the facts and draws a supported conclusion. Creationism starts with a conclusion and tries to find the supporting facts. I think Groklaw is much more like creationism than science. Now before you jump all over me, that's not to say they're wrong. I think they're right. But they're not approaching the problem in a scientific way. They're using a very religious methodology to "prove" their point.
PJ has done the world of 'IANAL' geeks proud - and I would even say without a doubt without PJ and her blog, the SCO FUD would have worked and we would all be in the shit.
Are you trying to claim that without Groklaw, IBM would have just rolled over and said "SCO is right". I don't think so. None of the companies being sued by SCO would have rolled over. Groklaw provides information to a very niche crowd; the overly interested Linux geeks. It has kept us informed of the goings on. I don't think it has had significant influence outside that tiny niche. I don't think it's existence or lack thereof would alter the conclusion of this SCO debacle either way. SCO doesn't have a case. We all know that. Reality would triumph over SCO with or without somebody's written opinion on a blog.
It only took 10 years for all those comments to become irrelevant.... because IBM and others invested millions of dollars into bringing these things to Linux. Had they not done so, Linux would not have been anything close to the enterprise-class system it is now.
Incorrect. Linux had TCP/IP, SMP, journalled filesystems and lots of advanced features before IBM started paying attention. At least 4 years before, in fact.
It was primarily because Linux was so advanced that the big companies started paying attention. They wouldn't have paid attention if Linux was an unusable toy.
But a 3D card? You are going to make a card to run the latest Quake and Doom? Or even release back of the games? Do you realize how much time, how many thousands of man hours go into these cards? The dollar amount for the simulators, the fabs to make the prototypes, etc
I'm sure they do realise this. However I'm their target audience; the 99% of people who don't spend $500 on a video card. I don't need nor want an ATI RadForce 9630 Plus Zero Alpha (+++++) video card. I just want something that runs a 3D screensaver at a decent speed. That's well within the reach of a company that designs and build video cards (look at their products page).
It would be impossible for the Open Source world by itself to build a replacement for MS Office in any reasonable timeframe.
I disagree. The same thing was said about Linux back when it didn't have networking, didn't have SMP support, didn't have a journalled filesystem, etc. It only took 10 years for all those comments to become irrelevant. It turns out that 10 years is a reasonable timeframe.
In the same vein, Abiword and Gnumeric, while admittedly not as good as OpenOffice or Microsoft Office, are well on their way to being decent office applications. The KDE crowd also has their own fully-free office suite (Kword, Kspread, etc). If OpenOffice hadn't been donated then the development effort would have gone into the GNOME and KDE applications and they would be further along then they are currently. They would without doubt have been at the tipping point within 5 years; that sounds reasonable to me.
Sun helped the process along, fast-forwarding us at least 5 years, but they did not solve the "impossible".
I said look it up because it's obvious you hadn't (I'd already read it) and you wouldn't take my word for it.
I had read the Slashdot story. I was annoyed by your intellectual laziness, not the validity of the claim itself. How was the reader meant to know "look it up" meant that Slashdot story? Of course, they weren't supposed to know that. It was an attempt on your part to stop discourse, by not letting anybody else know wtf you were talking about.
For example, a refutation in your style would be to claim that the Slashdot article is completely false and if you had "looked it up" you would already know that.
Gee, that was hard.
No really, you're wrong. If you research the problem you'll know that you're wrong. I'm not going to link to the evidence because "gee, it's not hard". Go do it yourself. You're wrong.
As often as not, the people protesting the construction of wind farms aren't actually concerned about the wildlife. They are often local landowners who are concerned about the effect that wind farms may have on their view, on noise, or on their property value.
Ha. You got that one right. There was a recent story on Australian 60 Minutes (I normally never watch it, honest) about locals getting up in arms over windfarms.
Near as I could tell, a sheep farmer permitted several turbines to be built on his land. The sheep didn't seem to mind. The farmer didn't mind. The only people who minded were:
A couple who were bitter that the turbines spoiled their view, that their property value was negatively affected, and that the wsh-wsh from the blades was like "Chinese Water Torture".
Professor Bellamy on his crusade against wind farms. He's convinced they don't work. Uhh, yes they do. They're even economical. Get the fuck out of our country you interfering pom.
Another farmer who was too far away to hear the turbines but was pissed off that his view will be disturbed. "This is where I work, and I don't want to look at these things all day long". Cry me a river. I stare at a brick wall all day long while listening to screeching truck brakes; I'd love to have his view while working, even with the turbines.
None of the naysayers had realistic arguments. They were all selfish arguments. NIMBY taken to the n-th degree. Sure, I wouldn't like one in my backyard either, but I'd recognise that it's a lot better than continuing to pollute the planet with CO2.
To everyone who has offered well-wishes, thank you!
Several of the comments in this story are from people with a similar experience. They had chronic illnesses that weren't recognised by multiple doctors over many years. In one case, it took 27 years before an intern noticed that the guys kidneys were diseased. It really drives home the fact that nobody knows your body better than you do. If you feel sick, then you are sick! Doctors aren't omniscient and they make mistakes. I'd trust your word over theirs, any day of the week.
You hang in there Pat. My best wishes for your quick recovery.
Are you really so completely lacking in compassion, empathy, the ability to understand someone else's problems? Their daughter contracted an essentially 100% fatal illness.
It's only fatal if you don't get the vaccine soon after being bitten. If you do get the vaccine then your chances of survival are fairly good.
Who wants to bet she didn't get the vaccine because her religious parents forbade it.
Is it desperate? Yes. Superstitious? Yes.
Is it hope? Yes.
If you want to sneer at hope, then to hell with you.
I think people sneer at the superstitious part of prayer, not the hopeful part.
there are a huge number of sleezy agents around. At least 80% of them.... swarm of fly-by-night outfits have arise - almost all of them Indian.
I see, it's all those "sleazy foreigners" stealing your money.
Re: training. Bah. I don't think I've ever had training in my time as a contractor.
I guess that's because you already know everything.
The trick though is to get the client to pay you to learn new technologies.
Ahh, my mistake, it's because you're billing your clients for things you know nothing about.
[Re: overtime] Ok - Now you're just flat out lying. Please show me one business which does this.
The one I'm contracting to right now. It's standard practise in Australia.
That's right. I'm in a sane country where we don't work ourselves to death and we don't have 80% of the "sleazy agents" refusing to pay their invoices. Maybe you should step outside your bubble.
The costs for being a contractor are extra, yes. But it's not that big of a deal. And you can minimize it. For me, it's between $10-20K per year, tops.
My superannuation alone is $10-20k. That's before deducting any professional fees (eg, accountants) or special fees (eg, insurances). About 30% of the gross is a writeoff.
Ok. Thanks for establishing yourself as mentally unstable as well.
Thanks for proving my earlier point about you being an arrogant dickhead.
Let's do a reality check. You're working over 2000 hours per year (ridiculous) and 80% of your "sleazy agents" simply don't pay your invoices (amazing). You never do training (arrogant) but you do charge your clients for time you spend learning new things (despicable). Apparently you bill for every hour worked (rorting) which probably explains why 80% of your sleazy agents refuse to pay the invoices. Also you have an incredible ego (it is very unlikely I've used your software; you have no idea what my work involves).
I, on the otherhand, am talking about real work.
The implication being that I don't do real work. Arrogance again.
I've been a contractor for a solid 15 years (with a go
at a startup that didn't make it once), and I'd have to say to disregard
most of this advice. Much of it is flat-out wrong.
...you're doing
something wrong.
Sorry to say it, but you're running your business
wrong.
How kind of you to be so condescending. Let's go into details of how
"much of it is flat-out wrong".
The most I give is net 15 [ed: net 15 = 15 days].
The most I give is net 30 but that's beside the point. I made a
comment about how long it takes to receive payment. Government departments
refuse to pay any earlier than 4 weeks. They would simply laugh at a
net 15. If anything goes wrong (and in government departments that is
inevitable) then it can easily take 2 months to receive payment. That's
nothing to do with "running your business wrong"; it's just a part of
doing contract work for the government.
There are about 2000 working hours per year (assuming
you take a reasonable vacation, and 40 hours per week). If you can't
bill that, you are doing something wrong.
Your claim of 2000 hours at 40 hours per week equates to 50 weeks
a year. That's not sustainable. There are 2 weeks of public holidays
per year to start with (eg, Christmas Day, New Year's Day, Easter,
etc). If you're billing 50 weeks per year then you have no paid leave,
no sick leave, and no leave for training. You're going to burn out.
For what it's worth I budget 2 weeks per year for training, 2 weeks
for public holidays and 4 weeks for paid leave. That leaves 44 working
weeks per year assuming no sick leave (knock on wood). At 40 hours per
week I expect to work 1760 hours per year.
If you have children then even that figure is too high. People with
children can expect a 35 hour week, 40 weeks per year. The little monsters
are always sick, on school holidays, or needing to be picked up from
school for some reason. So expect only 1400 hours per year.
And all of this was with the false assumption that WORKING hours are
the same as BILLABLE hours.
Only the worst workaholic would be billing 2000 hours per year.
If you're not making a lot more money as a contractor,
you're doing something wrong.
The costs of being a contractor are higher. Full-time employees get
free training, free health insurance, free parking, free superannuation,
overtime paid at double and even triple rates. Contractors get none of
these perks. We pay for our own superannuation, for our own training...
we pay for EVERYTHING. If you consider the entire salary package then
full-time employees get a pretty good deal.
--
While I'm doling out the helpful advice, here's some advice for you
Mr Anonymous Coward. Try being less arrogant. You might get away with
making comments like "you're running your business wrong" and "disregard
most of [his] advice" when you're online, but if you'd said that to me
in real-life I'd have broken your nose.
No doubt they're using this contract as an alternative to a probation period. If they don't like you after 6 months then it's easier for them to simply not renew the contract than it would be for them to fire you.
I've been a contractor on/off for nearly a decade now. Here are some helpful hints.
If it's only going to be short term, go through an invoicing company. They will generate invoices, follow through on collection, do the leg-work for your taxes, liabilities, insurance, and give you the remainder as a salary. The fee should be $2-3/hr (that's every hour you work).
If you're going to do it yourself, hire an accountant. After a while you will learn enough from the accountant that you can attempt it yourself, but don't try and learn it on the run. You will make a mistake. It might be a costly mistake.
You're lucky and you're starting a full-time contract with a single employer. You can expect 1500-1800 hours per year of billable work. If you have multiple contracts then that time can drop down to 1200 or even 1000 hours per year.
If you want a $50k/yr salary then charge $50/hour. That's the rule of thumb. You will be surprised how many ways the government has of stripping your money away from you. I consider myself a socialist and I'm still appalled!
Invoices take between 4-12 weeks to get paid out, if you're lucky. Build up a cash reserve to cope with long delays in receiving payment. The rule of thumb is 6 months salary in reserve.
If you're doing this long-term then get your accountant to incorporate your business. Then your company can pay you a salary. This gives you both financial stability and reduced liability. It also makes tax-time significantly easier.
Wear a suit. The problem with being a contractor is that you have to appeal to both sides of the fence; techies and non-techies. The non-techies are impressed by well-dressed people and they're the ones who renew your contract. The techies will give you shit but if you dazzle them with your brilliance then they'll get over it.
Last piece of advice. Do not think you will make more money out of being a contractor. You might. You probably won't. You will receive all sorts of shit from permanents who think you're raking in a million dollars. In reality, you're likely to be making as much as they are when all is said and done.
I cannot get my modem to work. Please help! Linux is broken. I need a Slashdot frontpage story too.
Sheesh.
Re:Comparing UML to N1 Grid Containers? Ridiculous
on
Sun-isms Debunked
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Could you please elaborate? I haven't had much luck about finding howw Grid containers are actually implemented. A FreeBSD jail still uses the systems main kernel. UML doesn't. Do Containers?
There is plenty of information at BigAdmin, including technical whitepapers and tutorials. I can't imagine you looked very hard if you couldn't find this information.
I'll give you the 60 second summary. Containers are zones plus resource managers. Zones are very similar to BSD jails. A single kernel is shared by all zones. There are potentially 1000s of zones per server. Each zone has its own copy of Solaris userspace including applications. All zones sit inside the "global zone"; the Solaris running on the hardware. Upgrading the global zone (eg, with patches) will automatically upgrade all the other zones. Resource managers can limit the resources used by a zone; think CPU and memory quotas for zones. Zones can use multiple CPUs, or part of a single CPU, or whatever.
UML isn't nearly as good; UML runs a whole new kernel per instance. Completely unlike VMware; VMware runs a whole new virtual PC per instance! Jails are the closest equivalent but still not exactly.
How many times does this have to be brought up? NVIDIA can't release all the information because they don't own it.
Do you mean, how many times does that nonsense argument have to be brought up?
They could release the information they do own. We don't need "all the information". We just need the basics like opcodes and register addresses. That information is not patentable (they're just numbers) and is not copyrightable (not creative). That information is simply a trade secret that nvidia CHOOSES to not give us, presumably because they're *ssholes. Nvidia can keep their precious licensed code; that's not the stuff we need to write our own driver.
Instead, nvidia chooses to release NOTHING and hide behind this furphy of "we don't own the information". What's worse is that people such as yourself are now repeating nvidia's furphy, saving them the effort of having to lie directly to us! Goebbels spirit lives.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't say that 123 was the first spreadsheet program. I said that Excel was Microsoft's answer to 123. That is simply common knowledge.
As I said in my earlier comment, it doesn't matter. It's turtles all the way down. The "first" word processor would have been an incremental improvement from something else. There's no such thing as "first". It's an arbitrary line drawn in the sand when somebody says XYZ was "first".
UNIX is a MULTICS-alike. MS-Office includes a Wordperfect-alike and a 123-alike. Windows is a MacOS-alike.
It's turtles all the way down. Anybody who thinks any of the market players are "innovators" is a naive fool. It's all about imitation and incremental improvement, no matter if you're from FLOSS or otherwise.
You don't need a modchip. It can all be done in software; they're called "softmods". Takes 15 minutes and works on any Xbox version, even the very latest v1.6.
Local stores sell games in their cellophane for $20AUD. That's less than $15USD. Well known titles like Halo are included. So it's certainly possible to legally purchase 15 games for approx $200.
Though I personally don't believe that. I'm fairly sure they were installing illegal copies.
AIX? Maybe. HP/UX? You're deluded.
I agree. But trade secrets (for that's what closed source is all about) aren't the only way to ensure you are compensated. Many products in the marketplace are there without the benefits of trade secrets, yet their companies are profitable.
Sometimes it's more difficult to refactor than to just rewrite. Architectural problems can run deep; if you hit a design problem then no amount of refactoring will fix the problem, you simply need to start again.
Spolsky's argument was essentially that the original code has been tested and debugged. There might be 100s of man years worth of testing and debugging (aka "knowledge") buried in that code. So his argument is that starting from scratch is throwing away all that knowledge and effort.
The problem with Spolsky's argument is that the effort was never in the code. The effort was in the 100s of man years of testing and debugging. If you're using code to store your testing and debugging results then you're in trouble already, because code will change. You will need to write new features. You will need to refactor the code. So what happens when you refactor your code and you accidentally break a previous fix? If you've relied on your code to store your debugging and testing knowledge then you're stuffed.
The solution is a suite of unit tests. If you have a comprehensive test suite then it doesn't matter if you rewrite or refactor. The test suite will tell you if you've broken a fringe case or border condition.
Once you make this realisation - that the real value of the software isn't in the code, it's in the test suite - writing software becomes a whole lot easier! The code is just one of many possible implementations. The test suite is what describes what your software does. The test suite is what catches you when you make a mistake. The test suite is what prevents your software from going backwards. The test suite contains all of your 100s of man years of testing and debugging. Not the code.
I think it's very enlightening that not once in Spolsky's argument did he mention the phrases "test suite" or "unit test" or "regression testing".
Huh, are you stalking me?
I just reread that comment. You managed to not understand the point despite it being spelled out for you. I remember dismissing it as the ravings of a crazy person. Now that I know you're fixated on the event, I'm convinced there's something wrong with you.
Was that a lame attempt at a pun? Because I can't comprehend why you're surprised that people have flouros in their living rooms. Compact flourescent light globes are incredibly common. They have lower power consumption, they last longer, and the new ones have a similar light to incandescents. My entire house is fitted with compact flouros.
The CPU is not emulated (it is virtualised) but the hardware most definitely is emulated in VMWare. The bios, video, audio, network and disk is all emulated by VMWare to appear like a PC.
Yes, the grandparent wasn't 100% correct, but neither were you. I would have said VMWare is a virtualisation environment that also emulates PC hardware. I'm probably a bit wrong too :-)
Contrast this with UML, Xen, BSD jails and Solaris containers where the PC hardware is not emulated. The guest OS kernel and/or drivers are rewritten for the virtualisation environment instead.
Well, no, she blogs her opinion. Sometimes she intermixes facts with her opinion. Sometimes she doesn't. Really, it's just a blog. It's not the fount of all wisdom.
Honestly, if you want a site that gives the facts you'd be better off with scofacts.org, especially something like the SCO Score Card. There is also Frank Sorenson's pages. He has all the court documents, not just the ones that PJ can spin into a story. Frank has been responsible for obtaining the majority of court documents hosted on Groklaw.
Groklaw is no different. You are just biased because Groklaw says what you want to hear.
I heard an eloquent analogy recently. Science starts with the facts and draws a supported conclusion. Creationism starts with a conclusion and tries to find the supporting facts. I think Groklaw is much more like creationism than science. Now before you jump all over me, that's not to say they're wrong. I think they're right. But they're not approaching the problem in a scientific way. They're using a very religious methodology to "prove" their point.
Are you trying to claim that without Groklaw, IBM would have just rolled over and said "SCO is right". I don't think so. None of the companies being sued by SCO would have rolled over. Groklaw provides information to a very niche crowd; the overly interested Linux geeks. It has kept us informed of the goings on. I don't think it has had significant influence outside that tiny niche. I don't think it's existence or lack thereof would alter the conclusion of this SCO debacle either way. SCO doesn't have a case. We all know that. Reality would triumph over SCO with or without somebody's written opinion on a blog.
Incorrect. Linux had TCP/IP, SMP, journalled filesystems and lots of advanced features before IBM started paying attention. At least 4 years before, in fact.
It was primarily because Linux was so advanced that the big companies started paying attention. They wouldn't have paid attention if Linux was an unusable toy.
Learn your history.
I'm sure they do realise this. However I'm their target audience; the 99% of people who don't spend $500 on a video card. I don't need nor want an ATI RadForce 9630 Plus Zero Alpha (+++++) video card. I just want something that runs a 3D screensaver at a decent speed. That's well within the reach of a company that designs and build video cards (look at their products page).
I disagree. The same thing was said about Linux back when it didn't have networking, didn't have SMP support, didn't have a journalled filesystem, etc. It only took 10 years for all those comments to become irrelevant. It turns out that 10 years is a reasonable timeframe.
In the same vein, Abiword and Gnumeric, while admittedly not as good as OpenOffice or Microsoft Office, are well on their way to being decent office applications. The KDE crowd also has their own fully-free office suite (Kword, Kspread, etc). If OpenOffice hadn't been donated then the development effort would have gone into the GNOME and KDE applications and they would be further along then they are currently. They would without doubt have been at the tipping point within 5 years; that sounds reasonable to me.
Sun helped the process along, fast-forwarding us at least 5 years, but they did not solve the "impossible".
I had read the Slashdot story. I was annoyed by your intellectual laziness, not the validity of the claim itself. How was the reader meant to know "look it up" meant that Slashdot story? Of course, they weren't supposed to know that. It was an attempt on your part to stop discourse, by not letting anybody else know wtf you were talking about.
For example, a refutation in your style would be to claim that the Slashdot article is completely false and if you had "looked it up" you would already know that.
No really, you're wrong. If you research the problem you'll know that you're wrong. I'm not going to link to the evidence because "gee, it's not hard". Go do it yourself. You're wrong.
Do you understand the point being made?
I looked it up. You're wrong.
You have opposing facts that support your claim? Then link to them you lazy bastard. "Look it up", indeed.
Ha. You got that one right. There was a recent story on Australian 60 Minutes (I normally never watch it, honest) about locals getting up in arms over windfarms.
Near as I could tell, a sheep farmer permitted several turbines to be built on his land. The sheep didn't seem to mind. The farmer didn't mind. The only people who minded were:
None of the naysayers had realistic arguments. They were all selfish arguments. NIMBY taken to the n-th degree. Sure, I wouldn't like one in my backyard either, but I'd recognise that it's a lot better than continuing to pollute the planet with CO2.
Several of the comments in this story are from people with a similar experience. They had chronic illnesses that weren't recognised by multiple doctors over many years. In one case, it took 27 years before an intern noticed that the guys kidneys were diseased. It really drives home the fact that nobody knows your body better than you do. If you feel sick, then you are sick! Doctors aren't omniscient and they make mistakes. I'd trust your word over theirs, any day of the week.
You hang in there Pat. My best wishes for your quick recovery.
It's only fatal if you don't get the vaccine soon after being bitten. If you do get the vaccine then your chances of survival are fairly good.
Who wants to bet she didn't get the vaccine because her religious parents forbade it.
I think people sneer at the superstitious part of prayer, not the hopeful part.
I see, it's all those "sleazy foreigners" stealing your money.
I guess that's because you already know everything.
Ahh, my mistake, it's because you're billing your clients for things you know nothing about.
The one I'm contracting to right now. It's standard practise in Australia.
That's right. I'm in a sane country where we don't work ourselves to death and we don't have 80% of the "sleazy agents" refusing to pay their invoices. Maybe you should step outside your bubble.
My superannuation alone is $10-20k. That's before deducting any professional fees (eg, accountants) or special fees (eg, insurances). About 30% of the gross is a writeoff.
Thanks for proving my earlier point about you being an arrogant dickhead.
Let's do a reality check. You're working over 2000 hours per year (ridiculous) and 80% of your "sleazy agents" simply don't pay your invoices (amazing). You never do training (arrogant) but you do charge your clients for time you spend learning new things (despicable). Apparently you bill for every hour worked (rorting) which probably explains why 80% of your sleazy agents refuse to pay the invoices. Also you have an incredible ego (it is very unlikely I've used your software; you have no idea what my work involves).
The implication being that I don't do real work. Arrogance again.
And OSDL and RedHat. Was the submitter trying to imply complicity between Sun and Microsoft by omitting those other members from that list?
How kind of you to be so condescending. Let's go into details of how "much of it is flat-out wrong".
The most I give is net 30 but that's beside the point. I made a comment about how long it takes to receive payment. Government departments refuse to pay any earlier than 4 weeks. They would simply laugh at a net 15. If anything goes wrong (and in government departments that is inevitable) then it can easily take 2 months to receive payment. That's nothing to do with "running your business wrong"; it's just a part of doing contract work for the government.
Your claim of 2000 hours at 40 hours per week equates to 50 weeks a year. That's not sustainable. There are 2 weeks of public holidays per year to start with (eg, Christmas Day, New Year's Day, Easter, etc). If you're billing 50 weeks per year then you have no paid leave, no sick leave, and no leave for training. You're going to burn out.
For what it's worth I budget 2 weeks per year for training, 2 weeks for public holidays and 4 weeks for paid leave. That leaves 44 working weeks per year assuming no sick leave (knock on wood). At 40 hours per week I expect to work 1760 hours per year.
If you have children then even that figure is too high. People with children can expect a 35 hour week, 40 weeks per year. The little monsters are always sick, on school holidays, or needing to be picked up from school for some reason. So expect only 1400 hours per year.
And all of this was with the false assumption that WORKING hours are the same as BILLABLE hours.
Only the worst workaholic would be billing 2000 hours per year.
The costs of being a contractor are higher. Full-time employees get free training, free health insurance, free parking, free superannuation, overtime paid at double and even triple rates. Contractors get none of these perks. We pay for our own superannuation, for our own training... we pay for EVERYTHING. If you consider the entire salary package then full-time employees get a pretty good deal.
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While I'm doling out the helpful advice, here's some advice for you Mr Anonymous Coward. Try being less arrogant. You might get away with making comments like "you're running your business wrong" and "disregard most of [his] advice" when you're online, but if you'd said that to me in real-life I'd have broken your nose.
No doubt they're using this contract as an alternative to a probation period. If they don't like you after 6 months then it's easier for them to simply not renew the contract than it would be for them to fire you.
I've been a contractor on/off for nearly a decade now. Here are some helpful hints.
Last piece of advice. Do not think you will make more money out of being a contractor. You might. You probably won't. You will receive all sorts of shit from permanents who think you're raking in a million dollars. In reality, you're likely to be making as much as they are when all is said and done.
Sheesh.
There is plenty of information at BigAdmin, including technical whitepapers and tutorials. I can't imagine you looked very hard if you couldn't find this information.
I'll give you the 60 second summary. Containers are zones plus resource managers. Zones are very similar to BSD jails. A single kernel is shared by all zones. There are potentially 1000s of zones per server. Each zone has its own copy of Solaris userspace including applications. All zones sit inside the "global zone"; the Solaris running on the hardware. Upgrading the global zone (eg, with patches) will automatically upgrade all the other zones. Resource managers can limit the resources used by a zone; think CPU and memory quotas for zones. Zones can use multiple CPUs, or part of a single CPU, or whatever.
UML isn't nearly as good; UML runs a whole new kernel per instance. Completely unlike VMware; VMware runs a whole new virtual PC per instance! Jails are the closest equivalent but still not exactly.
Do you mean, how many times does that nonsense argument have to be brought up?
They could release the information they do own. We don't need "all the information". We just need the basics like opcodes and register addresses. That information is not patentable (they're just numbers) and is not copyrightable (not creative). That information is simply a trade secret that nvidia CHOOSES to not give us, presumably because they're *ssholes. Nvidia can keep their precious licensed code; that's not the stuff we need to write our own driver.
Instead, nvidia chooses to release NOTHING and hide behind this furphy of "we don't own the information". What's worse is that people such as yourself are now repeating nvidia's furphy, saving them the effort of having to lie directly to us! Goebbels spirit lives.