It would also decrease unemployment since employers would need to hire more workers.
They tried this in France, and it was a dismal failure. Sure it might work for unskilled labour where everyone is interchangeable. But when all your doctors have done their 35 hour weeks, your unemployed bricklayers can't pick up the rest of the work. And when your doctors can't work, because they've hit their 35 hour cap and there are no more doctors because doctors a) are the cream of the crop intellectually speaking and b) take 7 years to train anyway, your nurses have to stop too, and with no doctors and no nurses your semi- and un-skilled workers like receptionists, porters, janitors have nothing to do either because the entire damn hospital is closed! Meanwhile, the doctors are cooling their heels, unable to treat patients, because the government won't let them, and if you're a patient, you're screwed!
So, basically, it's not only a dumb idea, it's a dumb idea that's been tried and has failed in the real world.
Why haven't open source ERP packages, like compiere (http://www.compiere.org/), taken off???
1) ERP packages are insanely complicated (because they model real-world processes that are themselves insanely complicated). You need a LOT of vendor/consultant support to implement them. In some cases it is easier and cheaper to restructure your business around SAP instead of vice versa, it's that involved.
2) If you have SAP then you do get the source code for it, which your army of overpriced Accenture drones will customize for you. If you don't have SAP then the source code is not really any good for you, because you'd still need said expensive army to implement it, and if you can afford them you can easily afford to just buy it.
3) SAP et al have a critical mass behind them. If SAP AG went out of business tomorrow, there are legions of third-party firms, from giants like Accenture to one-man shops who can perform maintenance and modifications, depending on the scale of what you want. Same with Oracle. Can you guarantee that in 20 years time there'll be a ready supply of Compiere experts around?
... the learn to drive. Seriously, kids have better things to do - like being in the outdoors doing kid stuff - than sitting in front of a computer all day.
Read Clifford Stoll's Silicon Snake Oil. Would you rather kids going on field trips, or clicking on websites (he uses CD-ROMS as an example, the book's a few years old)? It's full of that stuff. Computers are useless, even detrimental in education, between the ages of 5 and 16.
The Western world is facing an epidemic of obesity - most likely because kids are conditioned from an early age that sitting on your ass watching virtual people on screens doing stuff - and I mean basic stuff like walking - is better than doing it themselves.
They just don't bother to fix them in a timely fashion because it's not profitable
They don't fix them because they meant them to be there.
Take the notorious problem with Outlook, that it will execute embedded VBscript in emails and send virii (or trojans or whatever) to the people in your address book. Well Outlook was designed to do that. If you have scriptable email, then you can use Exchange/Outlook as a platform to develop workflow applications. Doing it that way has nowadays been superseded by the web, of course. Now, MS were naive to think that no-one would ever exploit that feature maliciously, no-one's denying that. But they can't simply remove VBscript from Outlook because that would break the platform for people who did use it for application building.
You do know that Switzerland is one of the most heavily armed nations on Earth, has compulsory military service, and (almost) every adult male keeps an assault rifle and three full magazines in their home as a matter of course?
The Swiss have remained neutral for centuries because they are double-hard bastards and no-one - not even Hitler or Stalin at their most megalomaniac - dared to attack them.
Programmers write free software to subvert a system that denies them the protection of their property rights by pricing legal defense of those rights out of their reach.
Maybe some do, but most write simply to win the approval and respect of their peers, or for the pleasure of participating in a group problem-solving exercise. Look up "gift economy". Subverting society probably never even occurs to most people.
RMS has the balls to do the right thing (which is to quit the job because they make you use non-free software). Most of us don't.
RMS has a million dollar grant from the MacArthur Foundation, and permanent facilities at his disposal at MIT, one of the best-equipped universities in the world. He is unmarried and has no children.
He can afford high-handed morals. Regular folks don't have that luxury. And it is a luxury; RMS has the money to live the lifestyle he wants to lead. Real people have real responsibilities.
I mean, fuck. That to me is in such bad taste I'm surprised the guy didn't just punch him and walk out.
It's an entirely reasonable question.
What do you think is paying for the relief effort? Taxes - on profits and salaries - and donations, from people's salaries and investments - in corporations, shock horror! - make it possible. You might say that emergency supplies ought to be made without profit. Well, how to you think the people making those supplies are supposed to feed and clothe their own families, hmm?
On GMTV this morning, the presenter was whinging that some people are so "insensitive" that they took their vacations (in other parts of Thailand) anyway. Well, didn't Guiliani himself say that the best way for the world to help NYC was to come there and spend their tourist dollars? Not to be frightened off by 911?
If the Thai tourism/hospitality industry collapses, they're pretty badly fucked long term. That's a big part of their economy, which is the means by which Joe Thai feeds and clothes his family (etc). If the Sri Lankan exporters all go out of business, then Sri Lanka is pretty badly fucked. These are people like us, they don't want to live on handouts, they want to be self sufficient. Yes it was a disaster but life goes on.
Thank god bleeding hearts like you have no real power in the world, leave it up to us hard-nosed capitalists, because we get stuff done, and we pay for it all, not because of you but despite you.
I think you are underestimating how small a subset of Oracle features most client applications use.
Possibly, but just knowing the options are there if needed is one of Oracle's major selling points. For example, just the other day, one of our DBAs enable PGA Aggregate Target on one of our Oracle 9i servers. It's not the sort of thing you would even think about until you need something like it, but now we find it very useful. Oracle is full of stuff like that, you think you need something, go to the docs (or better yet a Tom Kyte book) and there'll be a parameter for it. People buy Oracle even for small installations because they are confident that it'll grow with them.
Also, it simply isn't going to take nearly as much to develop products that are highly SQL language and library call compliant with products like Oracle and SQL Server compared to the effort that has gone into Wine.
I don't think you understand what a high-end database is. Oracle, for example, almost completely abstracts the underlying operating system. Oracle has its own thread scheduling subsystem, for example, with finer-grained quotas and priorities that most Unixes. It's the only way it can offer its whole feature set on the 90-odd platforms it runs on. It has its own authentication mechanisms and name resolution system, independant of NIS, LDAP, DNS, etc. It has its own filesystem - you can point Oracle at unformatted disks if you want, it will manage them just fine even if your OS can't mount them. It has several of its own interprocess communication mechanisms, including one with guaranteed delivery (or guaranteed notification of failure, either way nothing gets lost). It has its own networking subsystem, TNS - Oracle clients and servers don't care if your network is TCP/IP, DECNet, AppleTalk, whatever, they manage that themselves. And I've barely scratched the surface. Oracle is a good deal more complex than most of the operating systems it runs on - it would not be an exaggeration to say that Oracle is more complex than all of a Linux distribution. SQL is to Oracle as shell script is to Unix, just a very very small part of the whole.
This enables you to use whatever database is on sale this week and even change your mind mid-stream.
I've said this before and doubtless I'll say it again it doesn't work like that in the real world.
Tell me how your app handles concurrency, if you've thought about it. An application optimized for performance with Sybase style locking will be crippled on Oracle and vice versa. Want to be completely generic? OK, accept that your performance will suck everywhere, and that your end users won't get a fraction of the value they paid for their database - and their hardware - and their developer's time.
People who pursue database independence are on a wild goose chase, and that's the truth.
you still need people back at home making the decisions. I'll become one of those.
You're funny. Y'see, Western managers think "hey, why are we paying for expensive programmers in our own country when we could get them cheap in India?"
And that works, until the Indians realize "hang on, we know this business now, why are we supporting Western managers in their luxury offices? Why don't we just start our own company, manage it ourselves?"
Western management is going the way of Western programming, and if you can't see that, your MBA isn't worth the paper it's printed on.
I've done significant work in a dozen languages over my 15-year career.
Oh yeah, I've used as many languages myself. But having used lots of languages in the past is not what I'm bringing to the table, but the ability to solve problems using appropriate tools as within time and budget as possible. Having used a bunch of languages and having the ability to learn new ones is taken for granted these days.
These people are listing HTML and LOGO on their CVs, just to pad out the list...
They are afraid when they see a resume with 20 different programming languages on it.
That is so true, I see CVs all the time in which people have listed every lanuage they've every used, sometimes it's MORE than 20.
These CVs I toss in the bin, not because I'm afraid that they aren't specialized enough, but because I recognize when someone's trying to just drop buzzwords in lieu of having actual achievements. You're better off putting no languages at all on your CV and just talking about the projects you've worked on.
There was a big old truck (F350) relatively new stopped at a light in front of me. The bed was empty except for a full size american flag that was tied to a broomstick which was attached to rear corner of the truck.
It is impossible to drive an unneccessarily large vehicle AND be a patriot. Oil money is a major driver of global instability. SUVs are fine for folk who live out in rural Maine and Colorado, but not in cities. Anyone who drives an SUV purely for vanity is more traitor than patriot, no matter what flags they fly.
Old-school FORTRAN types often refer to single-purpose batch programs, like FEA jobs, as "codes". If you look in engineering magazines, HPC vendors often promise to run your "codes" faster than ever, etc.
and continue the "Archaeologist vs. Nazi" saga in there.
It's been done to death, Nazis are such a cliche now. Let's see Indy trying to whisk some Chinese artefacts out from under the nose of the Cultural Revolution in China, or rescue some Buddhist stuff from the forefathers of the Taliban. Remember the Nazis in Indiana Jones wanted the stuff for themselves; the Chinese and the Taliban were hell-bent on just destroying history, the films would be darker and more intense, what a modern audience wants.
Slashdot Mirror
It would also decrease unemployment since employers would need to hire more workers.
They tried this in France, and it was a dismal failure. Sure it might work for unskilled labour where everyone is interchangeable. But when all your doctors have done their 35 hour weeks, your unemployed bricklayers can't pick up the rest of the work. And when your doctors can't work, because they've hit their 35 hour cap and there are no more doctors because doctors a) are the cream of the crop intellectually speaking and b) take 7 years to train anyway, your nurses have to stop too, and with no doctors and no nurses your semi- and un-skilled workers like receptionists, porters, janitors have nothing to do either because the entire damn hospital is closed! Meanwhile, the doctors are cooling their heels, unable to treat patients, because the government won't let them, and if you're a patient, you're screwed!
So, basically, it's not only a dumb idea, it's a dumb idea that's been tried and has failed in the real world.
Why haven't open source ERP packages, like compiere (http://www.compiere.org/), taken off???
1) ERP packages are insanely complicated (because they model real-world processes that are themselves insanely complicated). You need a LOT of vendor/consultant support to implement them. In some cases it is easier and cheaper to restructure your business around SAP instead of vice versa, it's that involved.
2) If you have SAP then you do get the source code for it, which your army of overpriced Accenture drones will customize for you. If you don't have SAP then the source code is not really any good for you, because you'd still need said expensive army to implement it, and if you can afford them you can easily afford to just buy it.
3) SAP et al have a critical mass behind them. If SAP AG went out of business tomorrow, there are legions of third-party firms, from giants like Accenture to one-man shops who can perform maintenance and modifications, depending on the scale of what you want. Same with Oracle. Can you guarantee that in 20 years time there'll be a ready supply of Compiere experts around?
Or have they brought back debtor's prison?
It is not a prison it is a Freedom Centre.
Nothing to see here Citizen, move along.
... the learn to drive. Seriously, kids have better things to do - like being in the outdoors doing kid stuff - than sitting in front of a computer all day.
Read Clifford Stoll's Silicon Snake Oil. Would you rather kids going on field trips, or clicking on websites (he uses CD-ROMS as an example, the book's a few years old)? It's full of that stuff. Computers are useless, even detrimental in education, between the ages of 5 and 16.
The Western world is facing an epidemic of obesity - most likely because kids are conditioned from an early age that sitting on your ass watching virtual people on screens doing stuff - and I mean basic stuff like walking - is better than doing it themselves.
They just don't bother to fix them in a timely fashion because it's not profitable
They don't fix them because they meant them to be there.
Take the notorious problem with Outlook, that it will execute embedded VBscript in emails and send virii (or trojans or whatever) to the people in your address book. Well Outlook was designed to do that. If you have scriptable email, then you can use Exchange/Outlook as a platform to develop workflow applications. Doing it that way has nowadays been superseded by the web, of course. Now, MS were naive to think that no-one would ever exploit that feature maliciously, no-one's denying that. But they can't simply remove VBscript from Outlook because that would break the platform for people who did use it for application building.
If you believe that, move to Switzerland.
You do know that Switzerland is one of the most heavily armed nations on Earth, has compulsory military service, and (almost) every adult male keeps an assault rifle and three full magazines in their home as a matter of course?
The Swiss have remained neutral for centuries because they are double-hard bastards and no-one - not even Hitler or Stalin at their most megalomaniac - dared to attack them.
Programmers write free software to subvert a system that denies them the protection of their property rights by pricing legal defense of those rights out of their reach.
Maybe some do, but most write simply to win the approval and respect of their peers, or for the pleasure of participating in a group problem-solving exercise. Look up "gift economy". Subverting society probably never even occurs to most people.
RMS has the balls to do the right thing (which is to quit the job because they make you use non-free software). Most of us don't.
RMS has a million dollar grant from the MacArthur Foundation, and permanent facilities at his disposal at MIT, one of the best-equipped universities in the world. He is unmarried and has no children.
He can afford high-handed morals. Regular folks don't have that luxury. And it is a luxury; RMS has the money to live the lifestyle he wants to lead. Real people have real responsibilities.
Who wouldn't welcome a slick, well-integrated, back-to-basics, consumer-grade office suite to come out of Apple?
One of the worst mistakes a platform vendor can make is to compete with its own ISVs. You'd have though Apple would have learnt that already.
I mean, fuck. That to me is in such bad taste I'm surprised the guy didn't just punch him and walk out.
It's an entirely reasonable question.
What do you think is paying for the relief effort? Taxes - on profits and salaries - and donations, from people's salaries and investments - in corporations, shock horror! - make it possible. You might say that emergency supplies ought to be made without profit. Well, how to you think the people making those supplies are supposed to feed and clothe their own families, hmm?
On GMTV this morning, the presenter was whinging that some people are so "insensitive" that they took their vacations (in other parts of Thailand) anyway. Well, didn't Guiliani himself say that the best way for the world to help NYC was to come there and spend their tourist dollars? Not to be frightened off by 911?
If the Thai tourism/hospitality industry collapses, they're pretty badly fucked long term. That's a big part of their economy, which is the means by which Joe Thai feeds and clothes his family (etc). If the Sri Lankan exporters all go out of business, then Sri Lanka is pretty badly fucked. These are people like us, they don't want to live on handouts, they want to be self sufficient. Yes it was a disaster but life goes on.
Thank god bleeding hearts like you have no real power in the world, leave it up to us hard-nosed capitalists, because we get stuff done, and we pay for it all, not because of you but despite you.
This HDD would enable me to just copy the photos to a HDD whenever I max out my memory stick
There are plenty of devices designed for this, such as the Nikon Coolwalker that are better suited to the task.
I think you are underestimating how small a subset of Oracle features most client applications use.
Possibly, but just knowing the options are there if needed is one of Oracle's major selling points. For example, just the other day, one of our DBAs enable PGA Aggregate Target on one of our Oracle 9i servers. It's not the sort of thing you would even think about until you need something like it, but now we find it very useful. Oracle is full of stuff like that, you think you need something, go to the docs (or better yet a Tom Kyte book) and there'll be a parameter for it. People buy Oracle even for small installations because they are confident that it'll grow with them.
Also, it simply isn't going to take nearly as much to develop products that are highly SQL language and library call compliant with products like Oracle and SQL Server compared to the effort that has gone into Wine.
I don't think you understand what a high-end database is. Oracle, for example, almost completely abstracts the underlying operating system. Oracle has its own thread scheduling subsystem, for example, with finer-grained quotas and priorities that most Unixes. It's the only way it can offer its whole feature set on the 90-odd platforms it runs on. It has its own authentication mechanisms and name resolution system, independant of NIS, LDAP, DNS, etc. It has its own filesystem - you can point Oracle at unformatted disks if you want, it will manage them just fine even if your OS can't mount them. It has several of its own interprocess communication mechanisms, including one with guaranteed delivery (or guaranteed notification of failure, either way nothing gets lost). It has its own networking subsystem, TNS - Oracle clients and servers don't care if your network is TCP/IP, DECNet, AppleTalk, whatever, they manage that themselves. And I've barely scratched the surface. Oracle is a good deal more complex than most of the operating systems it runs on - it would not be an exaggeration to say that Oracle is more complex than all of a Linux distribution. SQL is to Oracle as shell script is to Unix, just a very very small part of the whole.
This enables you to use whatever database is on sale this week and even change your mind mid-stream.
I've said this before and doubtless I'll say it again it doesn't work like that in the real world.
Tell me how your app handles concurrency, if you've thought about it. An application optimized for performance with Sybase style locking will be crippled on Oracle and vice versa. Want to be completely generic? OK, accept that your performance will suck everywhere, and that your end users won't get a fraction of the value they paid for their database - and their hardware - and their developer's time.
People who pursue database independence are on a wild goose chase, and that's the truth.
So what we're really doing it devaluing IT work in the US.
The thing that really devalues IT work in the US is the concept that software should be produced and given away for free...
you still need people back at home making the decisions. I'll become one of those.
You're funny. Y'see, Western managers think "hey, why are we paying for expensive programmers in our own country when we could get them cheap in India?"
And that works, until the Indians realize "hang on, we know this business now, why are we supporting Western managers in their luxury offices? Why don't we just start our own company, manage it ourselves?"
Western management is going the way of Western programming, and if you can't see that, your MBA isn't worth the paper it's printed on.
I've done significant work in a dozen languages over my 15-year career.
Oh yeah, I've used as many languages myself. But having used lots of languages in the past is not what I'm bringing to the table, but the ability to solve problems using appropriate tools as within time and budget as possible. Having used a bunch of languages and having the ability to learn new ones is taken for granted these days.
These people are listing HTML and LOGO on their CVs, just to pad out the list...
They are afraid when they see a resume with 20 different programming languages on it.
That is so true, I see CVs all the time in which people have listed every lanuage they've every used, sometimes it's MORE than 20.
These CVs I toss in the bin, not because I'm afraid that they aren't specialized enough, but because I recognize when someone's trying to just drop buzzwords in lieu of having actual achievements. You're better off putting no languages at all on your CV and just talking about the projects you've worked on.
not just some energy intensive subsidy to farmers
Not taxing something is NOT the same thing as subsidizing it!
There was a big old truck (F350) relatively new stopped at a light in front of me. The bed was empty except for a full size american flag that was tied to a broomstick which was attached to rear corner of the truck.
It is impossible to drive an unneccessarily large vehicle AND be a patriot. Oil money is a major driver of global instability. SUVs are fine for folk who live out in rural Maine and Colorado, but not in cities. Anyone who drives an SUV purely for vanity is more traitor than patriot, no matter what flags they fly.
I nominate the above for "best Slashdot post ever".
If I was more than an amateur, I'd be racing for something with archival ink.
Errm, it already exists. Fuji Crystal Archive paper, printed with a Fuji Frontier, is rated to last 150 years.
...he/she refers to source code as "codes".
Old-school FORTRAN types often refer to single-purpose batch programs, like FEA jobs, as "codes". If you look in engineering magazines, HPC vendors often promise to run your "codes" faster than ever, etc.
and continue the "Archaeologist vs. Nazi" saga in there.
It's been done to death, Nazis are such a cliche now. Let's see Indy trying to whisk some Chinese artefacts out from under the nose of the Cultural Revolution in China, or rescue some Buddhist stuff from the forefathers of the Taliban. Remember the Nazis in Indiana Jones wanted the stuff for themselves; the Chinese and the Taliban were hell-bent on just destroying history, the films would be darker and more intense, what a modern audience wants.
More like 35, 40 years his junior, knowing Hollywood these days.
If he's still with Calista Flockhart (I don't keep track of these things), she turned 40 last month according to IMDB, so it's 22 years.