Yes, clubs! Much better idea than a single studio. This could work -- the venues need enough reliable bandwidth for one feed to a server farm -- not that hard to come by. The server farm needs hot pipes to handle many connections, but that does not need to be at the club. Then: Time zone shift. It's always midnight *somewhere* -- 24 hours of live music every day by following the setting sun.
Seriously. I've had a lifetime of listening to recordings, and get far too little live music in my life -- and I seek it out and go. This ruling applies to recordings. But... imagine what a grand thing it would be to have an internet feed from a jam studio where musicians came to make *live* music, not Muzak. Where musicians came to make the music live and breath, to make mistakes, to laugh, to improvise meandering, soaring solos -- to share the joy that is true, live music. Why can't we have this? Recordings are so sterile, so frozen in stone. So the same-every-time. Let's have some real music.
Our department consisted of software engineers with development workstations. They needed total control of their own C: drives. The department provided 1) easy to use, backed-up private shares on file servers, 2)team r/w share points, and 3)department-wide r/w non-backed-up "temp" shares where files were only guaranteed to last 72 hours. So, three classes of shares, 3 scopes of access, 2 classes of them backed up. Your C drive was your own responsibility. Management was trained and bought into the idea that workers needed to be personally responsible for putting important stuff on the department shares. Slackers got no sympathy from anybody, because the share points made it soooo easy to be a good boy or girl. The "private" share addressed peoples need (real or imagined) for a place for "their private stuff" -- this is important to getting everybody's buy in.
Do you *know* any Amish? I've lived around them enough that I have no romantic notions of quaint, gentle, fair-minded folk. Their communities are intensly political. Their lifestyle rewards being a manipulative opportunist. This is better than ICANN exactly how? The Amish as a community have all the same heros and villians as any other community -- they differ mainly in their consumer buying habits.
My cube neighbor and I once did an analysis of Everquest character auctions on E-Bay. Our conclusion was that Everquest currency (I forget what it is) pretty much traded (at that time) for a uniform 4 "whatevers" to the $US. This was amazingly constant. I wanted to start a futures pit in Everquest land, but he explained to me that it couldn't be done (I'm not an EQ'er, so pardon the technical cluelessness.)
The GPL does not impact users of the software, only distributors. This isn't strictly true. Software development organizations producing closed-source works need to be very careful about residuals. That is.. they need to prove that no GPL source "leaked" into their code because some programmer saw both some GPL'd utility (or whatever) that they were using and then wrote similar code into the closed-source product. (Note: I did not say cut&paste, I said saw-and-wrote-similar) This is a *huge* worry for some companies, and quite validly so. Plenty of potentially expensive litigation lies down that path.
With todays chip architectures, you can't simply compare 6MB to 8MB and say 8MB is better. Everything needs to be in balance to get max performance. Cache size interacts with cache latency which interacts with main memory latency which interacts with how many caches you have which interacts with how many cache ways you have which interacts with replacement policy which interacts with branch prediction algorithms which interacts with code and data prefetch algorithms which interacts with the compiler's code optimizations which interacts with the compilers data layout optimizations... etc, etc. And then, let's talk aps-- how big is the data footprint? code footprint? tight loops or lots of branchy non-loop code traces? Float intensive? Lock intensive? look-up intensive? decision logic intensive?. Go spend a couple of years learning the basics of benchmarking, then come back and share your wisdom. This is not a defense of Intel... my criticism would be the same no matter who's products you were comparing so simplisticly.
I grant that this is very clever, and gets many tech cool points. However...
Mother cats teach their young to hunt, first by bringing dead animals to the nest, then not-quite-dead animals, and finally injured but fairly lively prey. When the youngters can dispatch a wiggling dinner, they are ready to go on a hunt. What cats are doing when they bring dead or nearly-dead animals to the house is they are trying to teach the slow-witted and lazy humans that they live with to hunt!! We just don't get it.
Never has a cat had a student more resistant to instruction.
But he didn't actually chase any rabbits...
on
Chase the Rabbits
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Very interesting read. What that guy did would waste me. Would waste most of us, I would guess.
But I digress... back in ancient times when I was in high school and the USA was still sending folks to the moon, one of my track team buddies, a distance man, would train by literally chasing rabbits. Until they dropped. Dead. From heat exhaustion. He would simply go out to a back pasture in the farm, scare up a fluffy bunny, and chase him. He claimed it made training runs less boring. Turns out rabbits are quick but can't take long runs because they overheat. So anyway I took the headline a little too literally.
Animal lovers will probably now start a flame war on this thread. But I'm just a reporter here. I don't endorse it. Gramps is going back to his rocking chair now.
Unfortunatly, they tend to be a distraction because of their entertaining and wide-ranging conversation. And of course, now with Slashdot they can be a world-wide distraction:-)
Yes. I have personally worked with a highly productive (and higly respected) programmer who for months had high negative KLOC numbers because his job was replacing kludgy cruft with clean code that actually worked. It was a standing department joke.
I want to add another angle... I managed validation. I viewed our job as reducing 1-800 support calls to zero. In the end, support costs need to be rolled into productivity numbers for develpers also. A couple of support calls from a single user can easily make the gross margin for the sale to that user negative. (And for you "free beer" programmers -- same thing applies, wouldn't you rather write code than spend time supporting users?)
And a closing note: A wise manager once said: "Obviously you want smart, productive people on your project. Note that dumb, unproductive people are relatively harmless, because they are not productive enough to cause much damage. What you need to watch out for are dumb, productive people."
Yes, and in fact such things are necessary. Like a phone number that a mortgage broker can call to verify employment, so that a CIA employee can actually buy a house. Among others.
OK, so this is only marginally on topic, but I think the experimental result was interesting.
The other day I played with the Google advertising generator, just to see how much an ad would cost and how it worked, not with any intention of advertising. (Check it out, it's fun.) Anyway, I pretended to be advertising a local special-interest club where I am a member. By the time I had picked the advertising keywords that gave me the ad traffic that I wanted, those very same words typed into the search box brought up the club's web site as the third link on page one.
I would advertise why, exactly?
Re:User input could solve problems
on
Google Juice
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· Score: 1
liberals might use it too.... oh, i'm being redundant.
Right you are. When I was a young techno-nerd kid, the nearest radio shack was 45 miles away. The nearest welder was a short walk to the farm shop. I learned to fix my electronic gizmos myself, 'cuz that was the only option. The poll result is just the current generation's manifestation of the "shade tree tractor mechanic" -- and the mentality that you fix it with what you've got because a day of down time means the crops get rained on instead of put in the bin.
Mod this parent up.
Its a derivitive work.
on
Abusing the GPL?
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· Score: 2, Redundant
Here are a couple of data points. IANALBIAMTO -- I am not a laywer, but I am married to one -- who just happens to have practiced in the area of software licensing for 10+ years. And I have worked with a couple of other software licensening attorneys over the years on open source issues. All three of these folks (with probably comibined 40+ years experience in the area) would have a consistent answer for anyone who suggested this: "What you are doing is a derivitive work, clearly covered by the GPL. It is clearly not allowed by the terms of the license. Now stand still while I whack you with my clue-stick."
Well, consider that *perhaps* a clueless reviewer exists in the world. A company might at least want a phone call so that any totally-dead-wrong misperceptions can be corrected before the bafoon publishes slop that damages a good product. In the case of Oracle, very few people are even *capable* of running a TPC benchmark. TPC is extremely expensive and difficult to run and interpret. Oracle, quite simply, wants to head off bafoons. I assert without proof that bafoons are abundant... can you prove me wrong? Everyone that markets software soon learns of the bafoonery of overworked, inexpert reviewers on a deadline, and either learns to manage them or dies.
1. Beta license is different from product license and specifically addresses this issue. Testers do not get any IP rights. And among other stuff: License terminates at end of beta program. Beta issues need their own license terms -- look into it.
2. Customers that "need" to own IP rights more than they need to beta the product so that they can influence it through their feedback do not need to be part of the beta program. Find other testers. Smile benignly and tell them when the full product will be available, and of course thank them for their business.
... I saw exploding chips in sophomore EE lab. The best one had bits of ceramic package and chip leads in every corner of the room. "Let me show you again how to set the current limit on that power supply." says the prof.
I recently picked up two very nice chairs from Sam Clar -- almost unused, full warrantee, half price. Seems they used to have a nice business renting furniture to dot-coms. Now they have a lot of chairs in inventory that local store managers are instructed to move out at what they can get for them. Notice how sitting is this chair help speling and gramaticly correctly my slash dot postings. Comfy, though.
This may sound silly, but bear with me. In the food industry, certain words and phrases *must* indicate that products meet certain standards. Like "food product", "meat", "all beef", "chocolate", etc. Think "pasturized cheese food product". It is big-time illegal to sell food products that do not meet the "standard of identity" indicated by these key phrases if they are so labeled. So... there is a well defined standard for audio CD's. Why the heck don't we just get the force of law behind it? It's just simple consumer protection. Heck, this can start without the law makers. Somebody just needs to trademark the "good bit-keeping seal of approval" or some such, and license the right to use the logo on compliant products.
The phone company can intercept all calls to your number with a live operator that will ask "Good morning. What party are you trying to reach?" and route it accordingly. The do it for important customers. Have Radio Shack pay for this service for you until they sort it out. Or, have them pay a temp agency for a receptionist to sit by your phone all day until they fix the problem.
Anyone with any practical experience at doing things with RF (I only have 30 years of experience with it, so those of more years and more engineering degrees, feel free to argue with me) knows that spread spectrum is very bad at spectrum sharing with anything else. Spread spectrum has the effect of raising the noise floor for everyone on the frequency. This reduces noise margin. So what? Well here's what:
1. TV fringe reception goes from usable to unusable, so fewer pops, so fewer advertising dollars, so less profit for TV stations (who are already hurting by the way). Thats a direct to the bottom of the GDP spreadsheet example of why UWB is bad.
2. How about instrument landing systems. Gee.... when do they have the least noise margin: in bad weather, close to the ground. Gee... what would UWB wipe out? How many planes do you want UWB to crash?
These are only two examples. Advocates for UWB need to go through the math service by services (and there are 100's) and show that they don't kill people or rob people. They ain't done that yet.
This was done on the ETA 10. The circuit board was submerged in refrigerant. The magic is not the coolant, but the circuit board technology. You have to be able to insert/remove the circuit board without the different thermal expansions rates of the various materials causing the circuit board to de-laminate and the components to sproing all over the place. (Now I feel old -- this is a ridiculously old technology... and I worked on a *predecessor* computer.. sheesh. "Gramps, over and out.")
Ah ha! You've discovered the one real opensource business model that has been proven to work -- the ugly underbelly of opensource software, so to speak. Cygnus was successful because they did exactly this. They charged multiple companies big $$ for the same patch. Hell, they even charged different divisions of the same large company big $$ for the same patch (divisions that didn't talk to each other much, obviously). They *never* did *thing 1* that was not precisely spelled out in the contract. They threw incoming free lance patches on the floor. They hoarded patches as *loooooong* as they possibly could, in order to extract patch fees from as many multiple customers as possible before releasing to the open code tree.
I'm sure this post will be labeled a troll... so be it. It is not intended as such. It is a report of my experience watching an employer write multiple 5 and 6 figure checks for exactly such "services" (in the Will Rogers sense of the word).
I love the OpenSource ideal. I hate seeing Cygnus held up as an example of how to be successful, it sickens me. It saddens me to see SF go the same way, but this has been a long time coming, and is no surprise to me. It started happening about a month after SF went live. VA tried to sell me exactly such *services* when my employer explored bringing SF inside (a few weeks after SF went public). The open code tree at that time sucked. Building a successfull SF behind your own firewall at that time required either putting up with the marginal packages that were released, or signing up for consulting.
Let's hope OpenSource doesn't disintregrate into a band of rich pretenders taking advantage of a community of naive idealists.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, clubs! Much better idea than a single studio. This could work -- the venues need enough reliable bandwidth for one feed to a server farm -- not that hard to come by. The server farm needs hot pipes to handle many connections, but that does not need to be at the club. Then: Time zone shift. It's always midnight *somewhere* -- 24 hours of live music every day by following the setting sun.
Seriously. I've had a lifetime of listening to recordings, and get far too little live music in my life -- and I seek it out and go. This ruling applies to recordings. But... imagine what a grand thing it would be to have an internet feed from a jam studio where musicians came to make *live* music, not Muzak. Where musicians came to make the music live and breath, to make mistakes, to laugh, to improvise meandering, soaring solos -- to share the joy that is true, live music. Why can't we have this? Recordings are so sterile, so frozen in stone. So the same-every-time. Let's have some real music.
Our department consisted of software engineers with development workstations. They needed total control of their own C: drives. The department provided 1) easy to use, backed-up private shares on file servers, 2)team r/w share points, and 3)department-wide r/w non-backed-up "temp" shares where files were only guaranteed to last 72 hours. So, three classes of shares, 3 scopes of access, 2 classes of them backed up. Your C drive was your own responsibility. Management was trained and bought into the idea that workers needed to be personally responsible for putting important stuff on the department shares. Slackers got no sympathy from anybody, because the share points made it soooo easy to be a good boy or girl. The "private" share addressed peoples need (real or imagined) for a place for "their private stuff" -- this is important to getting everybody's buy in.
Do you *know* any Amish? I've lived around them enough that I have no romantic notions of quaint, gentle, fair-minded folk. Their communities are intensly political. Their lifestyle rewards being a manipulative opportunist. This is better than ICANN exactly how? The Amish as a community have all the same heros and villians as any other community -- they differ mainly in their consumer buying habits.
My cube neighbor and I once did an analysis of Everquest character auctions on E-Bay. Our conclusion was that Everquest currency (I forget what it is) pretty much traded (at that time) for a uniform 4 "whatevers" to the $US. This was amazingly constant. I wanted to start a futures pit in Everquest land, but he explained to me that it couldn't be done (I'm not an EQ'er, so pardon the technical cluelessness.)
The GPL does not impact users of the software, only distributors. This isn't strictly true. Software development organizations producing closed-source works need to be very careful about residuals. That is.. they need to prove that no GPL source "leaked" into their code because some programmer saw both some GPL'd utility (or whatever) that they were using and then wrote similar code into the closed-source product. (Note: I did not say cut&paste, I said saw-and-wrote-similar) This is a *huge* worry for some companies, and quite validly so. Plenty of potentially expensive litigation lies down that path.
With todays chip architectures, you can't simply compare 6MB to 8MB and say 8MB is better. Everything needs to be in balance to get max performance. Cache size interacts with cache latency which interacts with main memory latency which interacts with how many caches you have which interacts with how many cache ways you have which interacts with replacement policy which interacts with branch prediction algorithms which interacts with code and data prefetch algorithms which interacts with the compiler's code optimizations which interacts with the compilers data layout optimizations... etc, etc. And then, let's talk aps-- how big is the data footprint? code footprint? tight loops or lots of branchy non-loop code traces? Float intensive? Lock intensive? look-up intensive? decision logic intensive?. Go spend a couple of years learning the basics of benchmarking, then come back and share your wisdom. This is not a defense of Intel... my criticism would be the same no matter who's products you were comparing so simplisticly.
Mother cats teach their young to hunt, first by bringing dead animals to the nest, then not-quite-dead animals, and finally injured but fairly lively prey. When the youngters can dispatch a wiggling dinner, they are ready to go on a hunt. What cats are doing when they bring dead or nearly-dead animals to the house is they are trying to teach the slow-witted and lazy humans that they live with to hunt!! We just don't get it.
Never has a cat had a student more resistant to instruction.
But I digress... back in ancient times when I was in high school and the USA was still sending folks to the moon, one of my track team buddies, a distance man, would train by literally chasing rabbits. Until they dropped. Dead. From heat exhaustion. He would simply go out to a back pasture in the farm, scare up a fluffy bunny, and chase him. He claimed it made training runs less boring. Turns out rabbits are quick but can't take long runs because they overheat. So anyway I took the headline a little too literally.
Animal lovers will probably now start a flame war on this thread. But I'm just a reporter here. I don't endorse it. Gramps is going back to his rocking chair now.
Unfortunatly, they tend to be a distraction because of their entertaining and wide-ranging conversation. And of course, now with Slashdot they can be a world-wide distraction :-)
I want to add another angle... I managed validation. I viewed our job as reducing 1-800 support calls to zero. In the end, support costs need to be rolled into productivity numbers for develpers also. A couple of support calls from a single user can easily make the gross margin for the sale to that user negative. (And for you "free beer" programmers -- same thing applies, wouldn't you rather write code than spend time supporting users?)
And a closing note: A wise manager once said: "Obviously you want smart, productive people on your project. Note that dumb, unproductive people are relatively harmless, because they are not productive enough to cause much damage. What you need to watch out for are dumb, productive people."
Yes, and in fact such things are necessary. Like a phone number that a mortgage broker can call to verify employment, so that a CIA employee can actually buy a house. Among others.
The other day I played with the Google advertising generator, just to see how much an ad would cost and how it worked, not with any intention of advertising. (Check it out, it's fun.) Anyway, I pretended to be advertising a local special-interest club where I am a member. By the time I had picked the advertising keywords that gave me the ad traffic that I wanted, those very same words typed into the search box brought up the club's web site as the third link on page one.
I would advertise why, exactly?
liberals might use it too.... oh, i'm being redundant.
Mod this parent up.
This is not legal advice. You need some.
Well, consider that *perhaps* a clueless reviewer exists in the world. A company might at least want a phone call so that any totally-dead-wrong misperceptions can be corrected before the bafoon publishes slop that damages a good product. In the case of Oracle, very few people are even *capable* of running a TPC benchmark. TPC is extremely expensive and difficult to run and interpret. Oracle, quite simply, wants to head off bafoons. I assert without proof that bafoons are abundant... can you prove me wrong? Everyone that markets software soon learns of the bafoonery of overworked, inexpert reviewers on a deadline, and either learns to manage them or dies.
1. Beta license is different from product license and specifically addresses this issue. Testers do not get any IP rights. And among other stuff: License terminates at end of beta program. Beta issues need their own license terms -- look into it.
2. Customers that "need" to own IP rights more than they need to beta the product so that they can influence it through their feedback do not need to be part of the beta program. Find other testers. Smile benignly and tell them when the full product will be available, and of course thank them for their business.
... I saw exploding chips in sophomore EE lab. The best one had bits of ceramic package and chip leads in every corner of the room. "Let me show you again how to set the current limit on that power supply." says the prof.
I recently picked up two very nice chairs from Sam Clar -- almost unused, full warrantee, half price. Seems they used to have a nice business renting furniture to dot-coms. Now they have a lot of chairs in inventory that local store managers are instructed to move out at what they can get for them. Notice how sitting is this chair help speling and gramaticly correctly my slash dot postings. Comfy, though.
This may sound silly, but bear with me. In the food industry, certain words and phrases *must* indicate that products meet certain standards. Like "food product", "meat", "all beef", "chocolate", etc. Think "pasturized cheese food product". It is big-time illegal to sell food products that do not meet the "standard of identity" indicated by these key phrases if they are so labeled. So... there is a well defined standard for audio CD's. Why the heck don't we just get the force of law behind it? It's just simple consumer protection. Heck, this can start without the law makers. Somebody just needs to trademark the "good bit-keeping seal of approval" or some such, and license the right to use the logo on compliant products.
The phone company can intercept all calls to your number with a live operator that will ask "Good morning. What party are you trying to reach?" and route it accordingly. The do it for important customers. Have Radio Shack pay for this service for you until they sort it out. Or, have them pay a temp agency for a receptionist to sit by your phone all day until they fix the problem.
Anyone with any practical experience at doing things with RF (I only have 30 years of experience with it, so those of more years and more engineering degrees, feel free to argue with me) knows that spread spectrum is very bad at spectrum sharing with anything else. Spread spectrum has the effect of raising the noise floor for everyone on the frequency. This reduces noise margin. So what? Well here's what:
1. TV fringe reception goes from usable to unusable, so fewer pops, so fewer advertising dollars, so less profit for TV stations (who are already hurting by the way). Thats a direct to the bottom of the GDP spreadsheet example of why UWB is bad.
2. How about instrument landing systems. Gee.... when do they have the least noise margin: in bad weather, close to the ground. Gee... what would UWB wipe out? How many planes do you want UWB to crash?
These are only two examples. Advocates for UWB need to go through the math service by services (and there are 100's) and show that they don't kill people or rob people. They ain't done that yet.
This was done on the ETA 10. The circuit board was submerged in refrigerant. The magic is not the coolant, but the circuit board technology. You have to be able to insert/remove the circuit board without the different thermal expansions rates of the various materials causing the circuit board to de-laminate and the components to sproing all over the place. (Now I feel old -- this is a ridiculously old technology... and I worked on a *predecessor* computer.. sheesh. "Gramps, over and out.")
Ah ha! You've discovered the one real opensource business model that has been proven to work -- the ugly underbelly of opensource software, so to speak. Cygnus was successful because they did exactly this. They charged multiple companies big $$ for the same patch. Hell, they even charged different divisions of the same large company big $$ for the same patch (divisions that didn't talk to each other much, obviously). They *never* did *thing 1* that was not precisely spelled out in the contract. They threw incoming free lance patches on the floor. They hoarded patches as *loooooong* as they possibly could, in order to extract patch fees from as many multiple customers as possible before releasing to the open code tree.
I'm sure this post will be labeled a troll... so be it. It is not intended as such. It is a report of my experience watching an employer write multiple 5 and 6 figure checks for exactly such "services" (in the Will Rogers sense of the word).
I love the OpenSource ideal. I hate seeing Cygnus held up as an example of how to be successful, it sickens me. It saddens me to see SF go the same way, but this has been a long time coming, and is no surprise to me. It started happening about a month after SF went live. VA tried to sell me exactly such *services* when my employer explored bringing SF inside (a few weeks after SF went public). The open code tree at that time sucked. Building a successfull SF behind your own firewall at that time required either putting up with the marginal packages that were released, or signing up for consulting.
Let's hope OpenSource doesn't disintregrate into a band of rich pretenders taking advantage of a community of naive idealists.
(note to self: next time, remember the tags)