we have to know math because the math majors cant program,
In my experience, all the heavyweight programmers come from maths, physics or engineering backgrounds. The CS types are relegated to coding up GUIs and doing customer support. Why? Because they focus on the computer, everyone else focusses on the problem to be solved.
This kind of stuff makes Baby Knuth cry. At least learn enough to know that there are no other options besides "true" and "false".
Actually, in PL/SQL, that would make perfect sense, because a boolean result can be true, false or unknown if either of the inputs are null. True = true, false = false, true != false, true != unknown, false != unknown, unknown != unknown.
Unfortunately, it is also generally true that the closer you are to the money the less you have to do with the actual creation of wealth and the more you have to do with the reallocation of wealth.
You are assuming that the allocation of wealth (which is another way to say resources) is not a value-adding activity, which is wrong. People who make the right decisions - such as investing money in a company which successfully provides products and services that people want to buy - get wealthier, and people who get it wrong lose money. Therefore, the capitalist system gives greater control over allocation of resources to those who make better decisions, and protects itself from bad decision-makers by reducing the resources they have control over.
Even if you were to dole out money equally to all, there would still be rich and poor - the rich would be the ones invest their money wisely, the poor would be the ones who don't. And remember who makes the ultimate decision - the consumer at the end of the chain. Don't like a company? Don't buy from them.
Umm, where? In France, employees pay 15% of their salaries in healthcare tax. In Britain, it's over GBP 250 (around USD 400) a month in healthcare tax. That doesn't cover dental, either. What are you paying right now?
They're hard, and business programmers are not that bright. And nobody has encapsulated these technologies in an IT product.
Hmm, yes. The really bright programmers are living in their parents' basement and working for IBM for free. The dumb ones are getting paid a pile of money to code up forms and reports in fancy code-generation tools, then clocking off at 5 and enjoying themselves.
The system can only respond quickly to a finite set of transactions that was known at design time.
Those dumb business programmers left that paradigm behind in the 80s. The tech to do it (the relational database) was developed in the 70s.
Since I've seen it up close a few times, I can say that the standard "enterprise way" (Oracle/Sun/EMC) delivers very poor bang for the buck.
You've "seen it up", I've "set it up", kid. Once you've been around the block a few times, you'll drop your tech-snobbery and just choose the right tool for the job.
Any of those 64 CPUs fails, and your system will crash.
Doesn't work like that, kid. A CPU on a high-end Sun fails, and the system will keep on running. You can swap the CPU out and replace it with a new one, the system will simply pick it up, assign threads to it, and keep on running. Had a couple of CPUs fail a little while ago... the first we users noticed of it was that the application slowed down slightly. Sysadmin just said yeah, I know, I'll replace 'em when the parts arrive this afternoon. Cool, we said. No data lost, no need to shut down or even restart our app. 'Course you gotta architect your app to deal with that - like don't have just one thread that does a crucial task, 'cos there's a chance that might be on the CPU that fails. But still, it's no big deal.
so it means if you are smart enough, you don't need to have a $1,500,000 Sun server or that kind of shit. leave that for big corporations with lame-ass programmers. imagine what google could do with that kind of shit
The difference is that if Google loses track of a few pages due to node failure it's no big deal because a) they don't guarantee to index every page on the web anyway and b) the chances are that page will be spidered again in the near future - and it may not even still exist anyway.
Your bank, on the other hand, can't just "lose" a few transactions here and there. FedEx can't just lose a few packages there and there. Sure they occasionally physically lose one, but they never lose the information that at one point, they did have it. Your phone company can't just lose a few calls you made and not bill you for them. Your hospital can't just lose a few CAT scans and think oh well, he'll be in for another scan eventually.
Now, I'm not saying that Google's technique isn't clever - I'm saying that it can't really be generalized to other applications. And that's why very smart people - and big corporations can afford to hire very smart people - keep on buying Sun and IBM kit by the boatload.
THIS WOULD BE A DISASTER FOR EVERY AMERICAN WORKER BUT JOE. Joe might get rich, he might make a bunch of foreign outsources rich, but he has helped suck both money and jobs out of the country.
Only to the extent that it would be a TRIUMPH for every American car buyer.
Take Bush's policy of protecting the steel industry. Sure it's good for steelworkers. But it's very bad for steel consumers, such as autoworkers, because they are cut off from their supply of cheap raw materials. It's bad for the end user of steel, the American driver.
Protectionism only helps over one election cycle. Long term, it's bad for everyone.
The point of a company/CEO/board is not, and should not be to make as much money as quick as possible, at any cost to anyone. Morality ought to be a consideration in business decisions. Why do so many people seem to think that companies should be faceless money-grubbing automatons? That makes me vomit in my own mouth.
You're very funny. Do you know WHY a CEO puts making money for shareholders above all else?
'Cos if he doesn't, the federal government will sling his sorry ass in jail!
Yes, a public company MUST put its shareholders first. Government regulation requires them to do so.
The reason I say you're funny is this: the people who complain about heartless corporations are the SAME PEOPLE who insist on government regulation of corporations. In other words, people like you created the very problem that people like you complain about!
They benefit mightly from the stability and quality of life here in the USA. They benefit from a strong, educated (relatively) citizen population. They benefit from the power of our military. They benefit from the fact that we have largest number of good higher education facilities.
And all those things grew on trees, did they?
No, the US is powerful because its corporations and its employees and its shareholders pay a lot of tax, and that buys an awful lot of stuff.
Your argument is circular. The corporations benefit from an educated workforce and strong defense, yet that education and that military is paid for by corporate activity.
It's not the only choice, that's the point. They could get rid of a lot of costs by simply reducing the ridiculously insane executive compensation
That's like when socialists say "tax the rich". It never works because relative to the amount "the poor" expect to be spent on them, the "rich" aren't really that rich. A CEO's six or seven figure salary is a mere drop in the ocean of a multinational's revenue.
Michael Moore will tell you that the average CEO earns 500 times the average worker, but that doesn't bear up to analysis. If the average worker is paid say $30,000 then the average CEO is paid $15,000,000. Some are, at the top of the biggest companies in their industries, most are paid six figures at most. Not that Michael Moore fans have ever understood simple maths. That's why they're socialists.
Sometimes people say "if the CEO took a pay cut they wouldn't have to lay so many off". That's assuming that salary is what costs the money for an average employee. In a factory, the payroll bill is small compared to the cost of maintaining and operating the factory itself. If the factory closes because it's surplus to requirement, and the company has nothing else for factory workers with no factory to do, should the CEO take a pay cut so these people can just sit around doing nothing? How about all the other workers take a pay cut to cover salaries? 'Cos they tried that in Soviet Russia and it didn't work too well there.
although it is debatable that this is true now...I think it will become realistically possible within the next few decades
Never happen. Look at all those pictures on CNN of famine in Ethiopia and Somalia. There have been pictures of this on TV for as long as I can remember - yet they still go on having kids, when they can't even feed the adults. Every time the production and distribution of food goes up, demand goes up too. The Chinese knew this and that's why they declared one-child-per-family until they could stabilize the population.
You might think Linux cost nothing. But in fact, it was paid for, but rather than in one huge chunk of cash from one source, which is how Sun wrote Solaris, MS wrote Windows, etc, it was very very many, very very small amounts. Every time a Linux hacker bought a book, made a cup of coffee while coding, upgraded the PC, paid their ISP bill, the cost of Linux was being added to. The fact that the money was donated voluntarily is neither here nor there.
In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if Linux cost AS MUCH to develop as a Solaris or Windows, if that money was all added up.
Stallman was the only guy that got it all those years ago.
You mean the Stallman who's facilities are provided by cash-rich MIT and who received a grant of ONE MILLION DOLLARS from the MacArthur Foundation?
Be careful when holding Stallman up as an example of "free" software. He's a wealthy man, tho' he goes to great lengths to hide it.
McNealy would rather choke than see a Ultrasparc run Windows
Actually, that's not true. Microsoft ported NT to SPARC - it never made it out of beta, but I've seen it personally. NT was explicitly designed to be cross-platform, and was released on x86, PowerPC, Alpha and MIPS. It was originally developed on the i960 processor, which these days is mainly found in RIPs. The problem with the SPARC port was they could never get the HAL to perform well with SPARC endianness.
Some of what they say HAS to be right, as it says in the interview, you don't make it long by making lots of mistakes. you have to get it right, most of the time. and every time that it counts.
Yes, in the same way that a stopped clock is still right twice a day.
Analysts are to IT what PRs are to Hollywood and spin doctors are to politicians. They'll take what they're given and present it in the best possible light, omit anything negative, and collude with the press where they can, trading access to information for favourable coverage. They're outsourced marketing departments, dressed up in a thin veneer of "independent research" for credibility.
Analysts that do have a clue are either working for mutual fund managers or for serious newspapers like the FT, and even they get it wrong a lot of the time.
Open up the yellow page phone book you have next to your phone. Look up any topic like "lawyers" and you'll find not one lawyer but a whole gaggle
You have totally misunderstood the issue. It's like you pick up the phone book and look up Lawyers R Us and call the number, only to find that you get Lawyers 4 U, a rival firm, and that Lawyers 4 U paid the phone book people to put their number in under the name of Lawyers R Us.
Why are companies afraid of competition? Because it makes them work a little bit harder?
They aren't afraid of competition, they're afraid of brand dilution. I laugh at Slashdot in cases like this. Let's say Microsoft renamed EULA to GPL, the "Gates Programming License" or something - the Slashbots would be frothing with rage. Many of them would be unable to even post comments about it because their fingers would cramp up in spasms of anger. This is no different.
"Direct" and "Assurance" can both be found in a dictionary, and therefore should both be available to anybody who wants to pay a search engine for them (I'm not disagreeing with you here)
That is a ridiculous comment. You might as well say the letters A and X are taught in many primary schools therefore they should be available to anyone who wants to pay a search engine for them.
oh no! we'll actually have to compete with somebody... but I wanted my monopoly:cry
Yes, see how worked up the Slashbots get about trivial issues, but it's a different question when another organization does it.
How often do you machine-gun through a roll? And what does that professional scan cost?
Well, if I want to get a perfect image, then any amount of film is worth blowing through to get it - and if I do get it, then I want it in the best quality I can get. Like the photo of the husky howling - any idea how hard it would be to get the perfect shot of something as frantic as a husky raring to go without a motor drive? Yeah a medium-format is better quality, but a MF camera can't do what a 35mm SLR can do either. Still, that Bronica 645 is awful tempting...
Chromatic abberation is a result of the fact that different wavelengths are refracted differently. They come out of the lens at slightly different angles.
Yes, and the larger the sensor, the less this matters, as the light will have a higher chance of hitting the same sensor element as the other wavelengths in that pixel. Smaller sensors exacerbate chromatic aberration as there is a greater likelihood that light that should all be part of the same eventual pixel actually ends up on adjacent sensor elements. Noise happens on a smaller sensors because fewer photons hit a given element, and greater gain must be used to get an acceptable exposure time. A large sensor might be less sensitive per unit area, but it is more sensitive per sensor element and hence requires less electrical amplification.
Slashdot Mirror
Really though, the kick for all of this will be gasoline prices 2-4x what they are now.
Are you in the US? In the UK, petrol prices are more than 4x yours, and we still have many, many commuters.
we have to know math because the math majors cant program,
In my experience, all the heavyweight programmers come from maths, physics or engineering backgrounds. The CS types are relegated to coding up GUIs and doing customer support. Why? Because they focus on the computer, everyone else focusses on the problem to be solved.
This kind of stuff makes Baby Knuth cry. At least learn enough to know that there are no other options besides "true" and "false".
Actually, in PL/SQL, that would make perfect sense, because a boolean result can be true, false or unknown if either of the inputs are null. True = true, false = false, true != false, true != unknown, false != unknown, unknown != unknown.
(And I'll up an ante on this one, I've spent 8 years at uni doing journalism at an academic level ;)
Wow. Planning to graduate anytime? I mean, seriously. Any random Slashbot has more credibility that anyone who's been at university for 8 years!
In future, better to say "I studied journalism at university", that way everyone will just assume you graduated in 3-4 years like anyone else.
Unfortunately, it is also generally true that the closer you are to the money the less you have to do with the actual creation of wealth and the more you have to do with the reallocation of wealth.
You are assuming that the allocation of wealth (which is another way to say resources) is not a value-adding activity, which is wrong. People who make the right decisions - such as investing money in a company which successfully provides products and services that people want to buy - get wealthier, and people who get it wrong lose money. Therefore, the capitalist system gives greater control over allocation of resources to those who make better decisions, and protects itself from bad decision-makers by reducing the resources they have control over.
Even if you were to dole out money equally to all, there would still be rich and poor - the rich would be the ones invest their money wisely, the poor would be the ones who don't. And remember who makes the ultimate decision - the consumer at the end of the chain. Don't like a company? Don't buy from them.
the guy said that he was a "Senor Sails Associate".
Maybe he worked at a boat store?
Living and especially HEALTH CARE are affordable
Umm, where? In France, employees pay 15% of their salaries in healthcare tax. In Britain, it's over GBP 250 (around USD 400) a month in healthcare tax. That doesn't cover dental, either. What are you paying right now?
This is a LIE. The BEST you will get is that it detects what failed and after the PANIC AND REBOOT you will have that board or CPU disabled.
The feature is called "CPU Offlining" - go look it up. The CPU will be flagged as bad at the next reboot it's true, but you don't have to reboot.
They're hard, and business programmers are not that bright. And nobody has encapsulated these technologies in an IT product.
Hmm, yes. The really bright programmers are living in their parents' basement and working for IBM for free. The dumb ones are getting paid a pile of money to code up forms and reports in fancy code-generation tools, then clocking off at 5 and enjoying themselves.
The system can only respond quickly to a finite set of transactions that was known at design time.
Those dumb business programmers left that paradigm behind in the 80s. The tech to do it (the relational database) was developed in the 70s.
Since I've seen it up close a few times, I can say that the standard "enterprise way" (Oracle/Sun/EMC) delivers very poor bang for the buck.
You've "seen it up", I've "set it up", kid. Once you've been around the block a few times, you'll drop your tech-snobbery and just choose the right tool for the job.
Any of those 64 CPUs fails, and your system will crash.
Doesn't work like that, kid. A CPU on a high-end Sun fails, and the system will keep on running. You can swap the CPU out and replace it with a new one, the system will simply pick it up, assign threads to it, and keep on running. Had a couple of CPUs fail a little while ago... the first we users noticed of it was that the application slowed down slightly. Sysadmin just said yeah, I know, I'll replace 'em when the parts arrive this afternoon. Cool, we said. No data lost, no need to shut down or even restart our app. 'Course you gotta architect your app to deal with that - like don't have just one thread that does a crucial task, 'cos there's a chance that might be on the CPU that fails. But still, it's no big deal.
so it means if you are smart enough, you don't need to have a $1,500,000 Sun server or that kind of shit. leave that for big corporations with lame-ass programmers. imagine what google could do with that kind of shit
The difference is that if Google loses track of a few pages due to node failure it's no big deal because a) they don't guarantee to index every page on the web anyway and b) the chances are that page will be spidered again in the near future - and it may not even still exist anyway.
Your bank, on the other hand, can't just "lose" a few transactions here and there. FedEx can't just lose a few packages there and there. Sure they occasionally physically lose one, but they never lose the information that at one point, they did have it. Your phone company can't just lose a few calls you made and not bill you for them. Your hospital can't just lose a few CAT scans and think oh well, he'll be in for another scan eventually.
Now, I'm not saying that Google's technique isn't clever - I'm saying that it can't really be generalized to other applications. And that's why very smart people - and big corporations can afford to hire very smart people - keep on buying Sun and IBM kit by the boatload.
THIS WOULD BE A DISASTER FOR EVERY AMERICAN WORKER BUT JOE. Joe might get rich, he might make a bunch of foreign outsources rich, but he has helped suck both money and jobs out of the country.
Only to the extent that it would be a TRIUMPH for every American car buyer.
Take Bush's policy of protecting the steel industry. Sure it's good for steelworkers. But it's very bad for steel consumers, such as autoworkers, because they are cut off from their supply of cheap raw materials. It's bad for the end user of steel, the American driver.
Protectionism only helps over one election cycle. Long term, it's bad for everyone.
The point of a company/CEO/board is not, and should not be to make as much money as quick as possible, at any cost to anyone. Morality ought to be a consideration in business decisions. Why do so many people seem to think that companies should be faceless money-grubbing automatons? That makes me vomit in my own mouth.
You're very funny. Do you know WHY a CEO puts making money for shareholders above all else?
'Cos if he doesn't, the federal government will sling his sorry ass in jail!
Yes, a public company MUST put its shareholders first. Government regulation requires them to do so.
The reason I say you're funny is this: the people who complain about heartless corporations are the SAME PEOPLE who insist on government regulation of corporations. In other words, people like you created the very problem that people like you complain about!
They benefit mightly from the stability and quality of life here in the USA. They benefit from a strong, educated (relatively) citizen population. They benefit from the power of our military. They benefit from the fact that we have largest number of good higher education facilities.
And all those things grew on trees, did they?
No, the US is powerful because its corporations and its employees and its shareholders pay a lot of tax, and that buys an awful lot of stuff.
Your argument is circular. The corporations benefit from an educated workforce and strong defense, yet that education and that military is paid for by corporate activity.
It's not the only choice, that's the point. They could get rid of a lot of costs by simply reducing the ridiculously insane executive compensation
That's like when socialists say "tax the rich". It never works because relative to the amount "the poor" expect to be spent on them, the "rich" aren't really that rich. A CEO's six or seven figure salary is a mere drop in the ocean of a multinational's revenue.
Michael Moore will tell you that the average CEO earns 500 times the average worker, but that doesn't bear up to analysis. If the average worker is paid say $30,000 then the average CEO is paid $15,000,000. Some are, at the top of the biggest companies in their industries, most are paid six figures at most. Not that Michael Moore fans have ever understood simple maths. That's why they're socialists.
Sometimes people say "if the CEO took a pay cut they wouldn't have to lay so many off". That's assuming that salary is what costs the money for an average employee. In a factory, the payroll bill is small compared to the cost of maintaining and operating the factory itself. If the factory closes because it's surplus to requirement, and the company has nothing else for factory workers with no factory to do, should the CEO take a pay cut so these people can just sit around doing nothing? How about all the other workers take a pay cut to cover salaries? 'Cos they tried that in Soviet Russia and it didn't work too well there.
And you won't give a thought to what happens with nanofactories 20 or 30 or 80 years from now, because you will _be_ a nanofactory.
/. for a long time.
Parent is the smartest comment I have seen on
although it is debatable that this is true now...I think it will become realistically possible within the next few decades
Never happen. Look at all those pictures on CNN of famine in Ethiopia and Somalia. There have been pictures of this on TV for as long as I can remember - yet they still go on having kids, when they can't even feed the adults. Every time the production and distribution of food goes up, demand goes up too. The Chinese knew this and that's why they declared one-child-per-family until they could stabilize the population.
because software costs zero to copy or modify.
Unfortunately it doesn't cost nothing to CREATE.
You might think Linux cost nothing. But in fact, it was paid for, but rather than in one huge chunk of cash from one source, which is how Sun wrote Solaris, MS wrote Windows, etc, it was very very many, very very small amounts. Every time a Linux hacker bought a book, made a cup of coffee while coding, upgraded the PC, paid their ISP bill, the cost of Linux was being added to. The fact that the money was donated voluntarily is neither here nor there.
In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if Linux cost AS MUCH to develop as a Solaris or Windows, if that money was all added up.
Stallman was the only guy that got it all those years ago.
You mean the Stallman who's facilities are provided by cash-rich MIT and who received a grant of ONE MILLION DOLLARS from the MacArthur Foundation?
Be careful when holding Stallman up as an example of "free" software. He's a wealthy man, tho' he goes to great lengths to hide it.
They just can't offer price-competitive counterings to Xeons and Opterons.
Have another look at Sun's prices - their 1U kit starts at under a grand these days.
McNealy would rather choke than see a Ultrasparc run Windows
Actually, that's not true. Microsoft ported NT to SPARC - it never made it out of beta, but I've seen it personally. NT was explicitly designed to be cross-platform, and was released on x86, PowerPC, Alpha and MIPS. It was originally developed on the i960 processor, which these days is mainly found in RIPs. The problem with the SPARC port was they could never get the HAL to perform well with SPARC endianness.
Some of what they say HAS to be right, as it says in the interview, you don't make it long by making lots of mistakes. you have to get it right, most of the time. and every time that it counts.
Yes, in the same way that a stopped clock is still right twice a day.
Analysts are to IT what PRs are to Hollywood and spin doctors are to politicians. They'll take what they're given and present it in the best possible light, omit anything negative, and collude with the press where they can, trading access to information for favourable coverage. They're outsourced marketing departments, dressed up in a thin veneer of "independent research" for credibility.
Analysts that do have a clue are either working for mutual fund managers or for serious newspapers like the FT, and even they get it wrong a lot of the time.
Open up the yellow page phone book you have next to your phone. Look up any topic like "lawyers" and you'll find not one lawyer but a whole gaggle
You have totally misunderstood the issue. It's like you pick up the phone book and look up Lawyers R Us and call the number, only to find that you get Lawyers 4 U, a rival firm, and that Lawyers 4 U paid the phone book people to put their number in under the name of Lawyers R Us.
Why are companies afraid of competition? Because it makes them work a little bit harder?
They aren't afraid of competition, they're afraid of brand dilution. I laugh at Slashdot in cases like this. Let's say Microsoft renamed EULA to GPL, the "Gates Programming License" or something - the Slashbots would be frothing with rage. Many of them would be unable to even post comments about it because their fingers would cramp up in spasms of anger. This is no different.
"Direct" and "Assurance" can both be found in a dictionary, and therefore should both be available to anybody who wants to pay a search engine for them (I'm not disagreeing with you here)
:cry
That is a ridiculous comment. You might as well say the letters A and X are taught in many primary schools therefore they should be available to anyone who wants to pay a search engine for them.
oh no! we'll actually have to compete with somebody... but I wanted my monopoly
Yes, see how worked up the Slashbots get about trivial issues, but it's a different question when another organization does it.
How often do you machine-gun through a roll? And what does that professional scan cost?
Well, if I want to get a perfect image, then any amount of film is worth blowing through to get it - and if I do get it, then I want it in the best quality I can get. Like the photo of the husky howling - any idea how hard it would be to get the perfect shot of something as frantic as a husky raring to go without a motor drive? Yeah a medium-format is better quality, but a MF camera can't do what a 35mm SLR can do either. Still, that Bronica 645 is awful tempting...
Chromatic abberation is a result of the fact that different wavelengths are refracted differently. They come out of the lens at slightly different angles.
Yes, and the larger the sensor, the less this matters, as the light will have a higher chance of hitting the same sensor element as the other wavelengths in that pixel. Smaller sensors exacerbate chromatic aberration as there is a greater likelihood that light that should all be part of the same eventual pixel actually ends up on adjacent sensor elements. Noise happens on a smaller sensors because fewer photons hit a given element, and greater gain must be used to get an acceptable exposure time. A large sensor might be less sensitive per unit area, but it is more sensitive per sensor element and hence requires less electrical amplification.