Personal opinion, IRC (and typing in general) is way to low bandwidth to hold technical conversations on...
Yes and no. Chat systems are infinitely superior for anyone who needs to communicate what to type, especially if like most code or command line text is has case sensitivity or funny syntax. If someone wants a command or a code snippet, you can paste it to them while talking on the phone in real time.
I can't fucking stand it when people walk over and ask me something like that. What, you expect me to sit there reciting space-that, underscore-this, no that's in caps, that's in single quotes, open curly bracket, open square bracket, blah blah, close both brackets, etc? Anyone who wants code spoken aloud - which they won't remember anyway - is a fucking idiot and doesn't deserve helping.
It's built on MSFT technology, but uses the Internet.
The "standalone" version uses the MSN GUI, but internally I believe it is SIP over HTTPS. The "real" version runs on a 3000 Xtra dealing workstation.
It can log everything to a database, so it's fully compliant for business use. In dealing rooms, unlogged communication is frowned upon, both by managers and staff. The logs are never looked at unless something comes to court, and they can save you from insider trading charges so there are no "geek privacy" concerns. Banks have recorded phone conversations for years.
The problem is that Sparc/Solaris is overkill for commodity tasks such as basic web servers. There's no reason to spend the extra money. In other areas, Solaris/Sparc or AIX/POWER really are needed to provide the reliability that the customers need.
Not really - you can get an entry level SPARC box in a 1U chassis for under $1000 new these days. Sure you could get a PC, but it's a false economy, this little SPARC will still be serving web pages a decade from now with little or no maintenance.
In all my time in the industry, if I've learnt one thing it's that buying PCs to save money is a false economy. Sure, they're cheaper up front, but a mid-90s workstation like an Ultra-2 or an Octane is still a fully productive machine today running the latest OS and applications, a mid-90s PC is pretty much obsolete - if the cheap hardware hasn't failed. Only buy a PC if a PC is what you need, for example for desktop users who want to run MS Office.
In other words, the customers will be forced to look at the quality of the basic hardware. In this area, Sun falls woefully short.
Well, when you buy Sun, you aren't just buying hardware or software, you're buying the complete experience - a wholly known platform backed up by a capable services organization. There's little finger-pointing if you have a problem, because it's all vertically integrated. It's the same if you buy Cisco instead of rolling your own router with FreeBSD. That's what people are paying for.
If Sun can recreate that vertically-integrated experience on Linux, they've a future with it, if not, this will be an expensive mistake, both in cash terms in the short term and in reputation in the long term.
I agree with you that the PDA technically belongs to the company. However, every place I've ever worked has let prizes of this sort go to the employee.
Reminds me of one company I worked for. A large hardware manufacturer donated a dozen or so PDAs to our development group. They weren't quite a perk per se; said hardware manufacturer was just getting into PDAs, and they gave us the hardware and associated SDKs for free, to see what we'd come up with by way of cool applications. Then, we'd go to market together. It was more like seeding developers than giving away freebies.
All those PDAs ended up in the attache cases of non-technical managers. No applications, cool or otherwise, for that platform were ever developed by the company. In fact, it doesn't produce much by way of anything anymore. Exactly the same thing happened when a handset manufacturer gave the developers their latest phones too.
Who would stop individuals connected with terrorists from buying futures on the next suicide bomber?
But if they did that, the price of said future would go up, and the authorities would know to be on their guard for it. The system would therefore give a warning when suicide bombing was more likely. Exactly as it's supposed to.
``How would you feel if you were the king of Jordan and learned that the U.S. Department of Defense was creating a futures market in whether you're going to be overthrown,'' said Dorgan, a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee.
I for one applaud this idea. Recent events have shown us that conventional intelligence agencies are out of their depth in the modern world; the CIA utterly failed on September 11th. When lives are at stake, bold thinking is needed. USD 3M is a tiny price to pay if the system enhances the military's ability to anticipate threats to American civilians.
Remember that the Pentagon will already be planning for the eventuality that the King of Jordan is overthrown; that's what militaries do when they're not actually fighting, they make plans. The only difference is that now the military is inviting opinions from third parties, some of whom may well have a better idea of what's going on.
Iraq actually still HAS an IP infrastructure? They have no electicity or running water but they can still surf porn sites, huh?
IP infrastructure is considerably easier to setup and maintain. Yeah, I can hear a horde of CCIE geeks squealing that routing is so much more complex than simple utilities like power and water. But installing and running a router is childishly simple compared to installing and running a power station or a desalination plant. You can put up a microwave relay for IP in minutes, but it would take weeks to lay water mains and sewers over the same distance. That's why the internet is available while "simple" utilities aren't: because they aren't simple at all.
Can someone familiar with the decision making process post a summary of why the LSB group simply didn't choose to implement POSIX rather than creating their own standard?
I've read most of the article, and while there are some things that were clearly (and subjectively) chosen by the LSB group as being "better" (line 123, for example), others appear to be technical limitations (line 219, for example) and some are purely arbitrary (for example line 282).
A lot of time and experience went into creating POSIX, and on the whole it's pretty sound. It seems a shame not to leverage it, both from an academic perspective, and also because lack of POSIX-compliance is a barrier to porting existing applications to Linux.
Avon (the character played by Paul Darrow) was a huge influence on me, altho' I was too young to realize it at the time. He was a dark and complex character, a technology expert who could clearly and rationally see that he could make the most money and wield the most power by betraying his comrades... but he could never quite bring himself to do it. He'd always set off with the intent of doing so, then change his mind at the last minute and use his superior intellect to save the day, then hate himself for it afterwards. He got most of the best lines too. Oh, and he may or may not have been shagging Blake's arch-enemy, the head of the secret police. Certainly they were both up for it, and even avoided killing each other for that purpose while remaining nominal enemies otherwise.
There simply aren't characters with this kind of depth in modern scifi, even in relatively intelligent shows like B5. I can't wait to see the new episodes.
(c) 1995 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
It's copyright Microsoft because MS paid Hip Inc to do the port for them. The GPL still applies, and Microsoft respected it.
That's the problem with the FSF et al - they expect everyone else to respect the GPL, but they won't reciprocate by respecting licenses such as the EULA.
Agreed. And then read this. And learn to use Perl's Win32::API. Most Unix people have no idea that Windows has all this stuff available - it's a bit different from Unix but if you want to use a command line a script everything, you can.
This is a great chance for Linux to get a head start in a certain market: older folks and those who have eye strain problems. Generally speaking, not many people can read Microsoft's widget text on a 150dpi display, which may explain why no one buys them even that they are available. Imagine how frustrating it could be for medical display (x-rays), cad, image editing to have a high resolution realistic image but cannot read the menu and text. If someone can come up with a Window manager to beat MS on 200dpi displays, no doubt this will capture a strong following in image related applications.
Using XP, but it's almost the same on 2000 and NT:
Right-click on the desktop
Select "Properties" from the menu that will appear
Select the "Appearance" tab from the window that will appear
Select "Large" or "Extra large" from the "Font Size" menu on that pane.
Click "OK"
And you're done. This functionality has been in Windows for, I don't know, a decade or more. Generally, commercial OSs, whether Windows or Solaris or MacOS, leave free ones standing when it comes to accessibility. The reason is that they want to sell to corporates, and corporates have to comply with legislation like ADA. Free software authors generally don't have that incentive.
Goldman Sachs, the investment bank, is currently trying to outsource 10% of its equity research to India. If investment banking can be outsourced, management can't be far behind.
Of course, as I said in another post, I've yet to see an outsourcing project that was working as expected 6 months after it starts.
At the company I work for, they only apply for H1B if they spot a promising foreign PhD who might fit into and benefit to the company research profile.
Might be worth you looking into O ("extraordinary scientific ability") visas rather than H ("temporary worker").
You cannot directly compare telecommuting and outsourcing, because they are two different things. Telecommuting involves individual workers, with individual skillsets, working at a remote location. They still require management, they can still quit any time, they still get ill, they still take vacations. Outsourcing is not about individuals, it's about functions. If programming is outsourced, then so is all the overhead of employing programmers, such as HR. The outsourcing company takes care of continuity is an individual is not available, for any reason. The outsourcing company takes care of sourcing equipment and hiring appropriate skillsets.
You must remember that salaries are only a fraction of the cost of doing business. Telecommuting can address some of the other issues, such as the cost of providing an office environment. But outsourcing, in theory*, reduces risk because it allows a company to treat an entire function as "black box" - specs in, code out. Managing and mitigating risk is the biggest cost, in both time and money, of every IT project.
In summary, this topic makes no sense because it is comparing two different ideas that address two different business problems.
-- * In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. I was on site with a customer yesterday untangling an unholy mess created by the people they outsourced their helpdesk to. I've yet to hear of, let alone personally experience, an outsourcing project that worked 6 months after it started.
Right wingers are anti-prosperity: prosperity for all would remove their source of power.
Isn't it funny, then, that free-market capitalist countries like the US, UK, Switzerland, Japan etc are at or near the top of every prosperity league table, and Socialist ones like North Korea are near the bottom?
Sorry, but the facts simply don't bear out your hypothesis. Even poor people in the US are mostly better off than wealthy people in North Korea. India is prospering right now because it is adopting the capitalist model.
But he isn't writing a fantasy, he is writing science fiction. Therefore, his "constraints" are valid, since they are what define the genre.
Actually, the thing that matters in scifi is consistency. You can make up the rules, but once you have you have to stick to them, otherwise your stories disintegrate into deus ex machina handwaving. That is why Star Trek is bad scifi* - the capabilities of all its technological artifacts change from episode to episode, and they can always "technobabble" their way out of any situation. In Star Trek, technology is indistinguishable from magic. Far, far better is the work of Alastair Reynolds - he does use technologies which don't yet exist, but his characters are forced to work within fixed limitations (i.e. humans colonize the nearby stars relying on relativistic time dilation and suspended animation - there is no FTL, and anyone who tries it fails, no matter how useful it might be for the story).
-- * However it can be good drama, it's not scifi even tho' it's in space.
Part of the definition of a corporation is that it is a separate entity from its shareholders.
Indeed, that is the whole point of a corporation - if your business venture goes horribly wrong, your exposure is limited to the value of your shareholding. You might lose it all to pay off creditors, sure, but those creditors could not come after you personally. That's why the Lloyds of London scandal a few years ago was such big news - under syndicate rules, creditors can come after individuals. If the "names" (as they are called) had been shareholders, like in most financial institutions, they'd have been safe(r).
we don't see anti-matter photons hitting our telescopes, therefore anti-matter stars do no exist...
I'm pretty sure that a photon from a matter-antimatter reaction is the same as a regular photon, and that gamma radiation from said reaction is just regular gamma radiation also, not "anti-gamma". Therefore, I don't think anti-hydrogen fusion is going to be that different from regular hydrogen fusion. I don't think you would be able to tell the difference between a matter and an antimatter star just by looking at it, you'd have to get close enough (or observe something made of matter that got close enough) to get caught in its solar wind (anti-hydrogen is definitely different from regular hydrogen, see).
Learn to appreciate the feeling of a tiny hunger. Consider it a sign from your belly to your brain saying "hey dude : you're losing weight right now ! Keep up the spirit !".
You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. The body doesn't store vitamins and other trace nutrients. If you don't eat, you aren't getting those. Your body will go into a survival mode in which your metabolism slows. Not only will you not burn fat in this mode, but you will feel lethargic and miserable as your body tries to conserve energy, this discouraging you from exercising.
There is no need not to eat three good-sized meals a day - just so long as they are sensible meals. Foods like brown rice and wholemeal pasta are effectively "free" - use them to bulk up your meals so you are satisfied.
Umm, maybe it's supposed to be obvious, but... Why not?
Because if you cut the hours that an employee in profession X can work, and there are no more qualified X'ers in the economy, then less of X gets done. A modern economy needs lots of people with very specialized skills. If you restrict the amount of X that gets done, it has a knock-on effect onto Y and Z too.
Now, if the French economy was based on unskilled and semiskilled labour, their idea might have worked, because there are much lower barriers to people doing whatever job needs to be done. The person-hour is a commodity. Someone working on a farm could do his 35 hours, then have his job done by an unemployed assembly-line worker. But, if you start placing artificial restrictions on high-skill jobs, then there is less flexibility - unemployed lawyers can't fill the position left by a surgeon who's done his 35 hours. If the networking engineer has done his 35 hrs, and there aren't any more to hand, then maybe the programmers can't work without the LAN.
So, the result is that a lot of extra latency is introduced into the economy, slowing everything down. This increases unemployment, because less work being done means less demand for supporting work to be done, and so on.
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Personal opinion, IRC (and typing in general) is way to low bandwidth to hold technical conversations on...
Yes and no. Chat systems are infinitely superior for anyone who needs to communicate what to type, especially if like most code or command line text is has case sensitivity or funny syntax. If someone wants a command or a code snippet, you can paste it to them while talking on the phone in real time.
I can't fucking stand it when people walk over and ask me something like that. What, you expect me to sit there reciting space-that, underscore-this, no that's in caps, that's in single quotes, open curly bracket, open square bracket, blah blah, close both brackets, etc? Anyone who wants code spoken aloud - which they won't remember anyway - is a fucking idiot and doesn't deserve helping.
It's built on MSFT technology, but uses the Internet.
The "standalone" version uses the MSN GUI, but internally I believe it is SIP over HTTPS. The "real" version runs on a 3000 Xtra dealing workstation.
It can log everything to a database, so it's fully compliant for business use. In dealing rooms, unlogged communication is frowned upon, both by managers and staff. The logs are never looked at unless something comes to court, and they can save you from insider trading charges so there are no "geek privacy" concerns. Banks have recorded phone conversations for years.
The problem is that Sparc/Solaris is overkill for commodity tasks such as basic web servers. There's no reason to spend the extra money. In other areas, Solaris/Sparc or AIX/POWER really are needed to provide the reliability that the customers need.
Not really - you can get an entry level SPARC box in a 1U chassis for under $1000 new these days. Sure you could get a PC, but it's a false economy, this little SPARC will still be serving web pages a decade from now with little or no maintenance.
In all my time in the industry, if I've learnt one thing it's that buying PCs to save money is a false economy. Sure, they're cheaper up front, but a mid-90s workstation like an Ultra-2 or an Octane is still a fully productive machine today running the latest OS and applications, a mid-90s PC is pretty much obsolete - if the cheap hardware hasn't failed. Only buy a PC if a PC is what you need, for example for desktop users who want to run MS Office.
In other words, the customers will be forced to look at the quality of the basic hardware. In this area, Sun falls woefully short.
Well, when you buy Sun, you aren't just buying hardware or software, you're buying the complete experience - a wholly known platform backed up by a capable services organization. There's little finger-pointing if you have a problem, because it's all vertically integrated. It's the same if you buy Cisco instead of rolling your own router with FreeBSD. That's what people are paying for.
If Sun can recreate that vertically-integrated experience on Linux, they've a future with it, if not, this will be an expensive mistake, both in cash terms in the short term and in reputation in the long term.
How so?
I suppose if Sun distributed a Linux kernel that had code in it that IBM got from AIX or Dynix?
I agree with you that the PDA technically belongs to the company. However, every place I've ever worked has let prizes of this sort go to the employee.
Reminds me of one company I worked for. A large hardware manufacturer donated a dozen or so PDAs to our development group. They weren't quite a perk per se; said hardware manufacturer was just getting into PDAs, and they gave us the hardware and associated SDKs for free, to see what we'd come up with by way of cool applications. Then, we'd go to market together. It was more like seeding developers than giving away freebies.
All those PDAs ended up in the attache cases of non-technical managers. No applications, cool or otherwise, for that platform were ever developed by the company. In fact, it doesn't produce much by way of anything anymore. Exactly the same thing happened when a handset manufacturer gave the developers their latest phones too.
Who would stop individuals connected with terrorists from buying futures on the next suicide bomber?
But if they did that, the price of said future would go up, and the authorities would know to be on their guard for it. The system would therefore give a warning when suicide bombing was more likely. Exactly as it's supposed to.
``How would you feel if you were the king of Jordan and learned that the U.S. Department of Defense was creating a futures market in whether you're going to be overthrown,'' said Dorgan, a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee.
I for one applaud this idea. Recent events have shown us that conventional intelligence agencies are out of their depth in the modern world; the CIA utterly failed on September 11th. When lives are at stake, bold thinking is needed. USD 3M is a tiny price to pay if the system enhances the military's ability to anticipate threats to American civilians.
Remember that the Pentagon will already be planning for the eventuality that the King of Jordan is overthrown; that's what militaries do when they're not actually fighting, they make plans. The only difference is that now the military is inviting opinions from third parties, some of whom may well have a better idea of what's going on.
Iraq actually still HAS an IP infrastructure? They have no electicity or running water but they can still surf porn sites, huh?
IP infrastructure is considerably easier to setup and maintain. Yeah, I can hear a horde of CCIE geeks squealing that routing is so much more complex than simple utilities like power and water. But installing and running a router is childishly simple compared to installing and running a power station or a desalination plant. You can put up a microwave relay for IP in minutes, but it would take weeks to lay water mains and sewers over the same distance. That's why the internet is available while "simple" utilities aren't: because they aren't simple at all.
Can someone familiar with the decision making process post a summary of why the LSB group simply didn't choose to implement POSIX rather than creating their own standard?
I've read most of the article, and while there are some things that were clearly (and subjectively) chosen by the LSB group as being "better" (line 123, for example), others appear to be technical limitations (line 219, for example) and some are purely arbitrary (for example line 282).
A lot of time and experience went into creating POSIX, and on the whole it's pretty sound. It seems a shame not to leverage it, both from an academic perspective, and also because lack of POSIX-compliance is a barrier to porting existing applications to Linux.
Avon (the character played by Paul Darrow) was a huge influence on me, altho' I was too young to realize it at the time. He was a dark and complex character, a technology expert who could clearly and rationally see that he could make the most money and wield the most power by betraying his comrades... but he could never quite bring himself to do it. He'd always set off with the intent of doing so, then change his mind at the last minute and use his superior intellect to save the day, then hate himself for it afterwards. He got most of the best lines too. Oh, and he may or may not have been shagging Blake's arch-enemy, the head of the secret police. Certainly they were both up for it, and even avoided killing each other for that purpose while remaining nominal enemies otherwise.
There simply aren't characters with this kind of depth in modern scifi, even in relatively intelligent shows like B5. I can't wait to see the new episodes.
(c) 1995 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
It's copyright Microsoft because MS paid Hip Inc to do the port for them. The GPL still applies, and Microsoft respected it.
That's the problem with the FSF et al - they expect everyone else to respect the GPL, but they won't reciprocate by respecting licenses such as the EULA.
Thanks
Install cygwin.
Agreed. And then read this. And learn to use Perl's Win32::API. Most Unix people have no idea that Windows has all this stuff available - it's a bit different from Unix but if you want to use a command line a script everything, you can.
Using XP, but it's almost the same on 2000 and NT:
And you're done. This functionality has been in Windows for, I don't know, a decade or more. Generally, commercial OSs, whether Windows or Solaris or MacOS, leave free ones standing when it comes to accessibility. The reason is that they want to sell to corporates, and corporates have to comply with legislation like ADA. Free software authors generally don't have that incentive.
Simple test: are the managers being outsourced?
Goldman Sachs, the investment bank, is currently trying to outsource 10% of its equity research to India. If investment banking can be outsourced, management can't be far behind.
Of course, as I said in another post, I've yet to see an outsourcing project that was working as expected 6 months after it starts.
At the company I work for, they only apply for H1B if they spot a promising foreign PhD who might fit into and benefit to the company research profile.
Might be worth you looking into O ("extraordinary scientific ability") visas rather than H ("temporary worker").
Workers in India are cheaper.
You cannot directly compare telecommuting and outsourcing, because they are two different things. Telecommuting involves individual workers, with individual skillsets, working at a remote location. They still require management, they can still quit any time, they still get ill, they still take vacations. Outsourcing is not about individuals, it's about functions. If programming is outsourced, then so is all the overhead of employing programmers, such as HR. The outsourcing company takes care of continuity is an individual is not available, for any reason. The outsourcing company takes care of sourcing equipment and hiring appropriate skillsets.
You must remember that salaries are only a fraction of the cost of doing business. Telecommuting can address some of the other issues, such as the cost of providing an office environment. But outsourcing, in theory*, reduces risk because it allows a company to treat an entire function as "black box" - specs in, code out. Managing and mitigating risk is the biggest cost, in both time and money, of every IT project.
In summary, this topic makes no sense because it is comparing two different ideas that address two different business problems.
--
* In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. I was on site with a customer yesterday untangling an unholy mess created by the people they outsourced their helpdesk to. I've yet to hear of, let alone personally experience, an outsourcing project that worked 6 months after it started.
Right wingers are anti-prosperity: prosperity for all would remove their source of power.
Isn't it funny, then, that free-market capitalist countries like the US, UK, Switzerland, Japan etc are at or near the top of every prosperity league table, and Socialist ones like North Korea are near the bottom?
Sorry, but the facts simply don't bear out your hypothesis. Even poor people in the US are mostly better off than wealthy people in North Korea. India is prospering right now because it is adopting the capitalist model.
But he isn't writing a fantasy, he is writing science fiction. Therefore, his "constraints" are valid, since they are what define the genre.
Actually, the thing that matters in scifi is consistency. You can make up the rules, but once you have you have to stick to them, otherwise your stories disintegrate into deus ex machina handwaving. That is why Star Trek is bad scifi* - the capabilities of all its technological artifacts change from episode to episode, and they can always "technobabble" their way out of any situation. In Star Trek, technology is indistinguishable from magic. Far, far better is the work of Alastair Reynolds - he does use technologies which don't yet exist, but his characters are forced to work within fixed limitations (i.e. humans colonize the nearby stars relying on relativistic time dilation and suspended animation - there is no FTL, and anyone who tries it fails, no matter how useful it might be for the story).
--
* However it can be good drama, it's not scifi even tho' it's in space.
Part of the definition of a corporation is that it is a separate entity from its shareholders.
Indeed, that is the whole point of a corporation - if your business venture goes horribly wrong, your exposure is limited to the value of your shareholding. You might lose it all to pay off creditors, sure, but those creditors could not come after you personally. That's why the Lloyds of London scandal a few years ago was such big news - under syndicate rules, creditors can come after individuals. If the "names" (as they are called) had been shareholders, like in most financial institutions, they'd have been safe(r).
we don't see anti-matter photons hitting our telescopes, therefore anti-matter stars do no exist...
I'm pretty sure that a photon from a matter-antimatter reaction is the same as a regular photon, and that gamma radiation from said reaction is just regular gamma radiation also, not "anti-gamma". Therefore, I don't think anti-hydrogen fusion is going to be that different from regular hydrogen fusion. I don't think you would be able to tell the difference between a matter and an antimatter star just by looking at it, you'd have to get close enough (or observe something made of matter that got close enough) to get caught in its solar wind (anti-hydrogen is definitely different from regular hydrogen, see).
Learn to appreciate the feeling of a tiny hunger. Consider it a sign from your belly to your brain saying "hey dude : you're losing weight right now ! Keep up the spirit !".
You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. The body doesn't store vitamins and other trace nutrients. If you don't eat, you aren't getting those. Your body will go into a survival mode in which your metabolism slows. Not only will you not burn fat in this mode, but you will feel lethargic and miserable as your body tries to conserve energy, this discouraging you from exercising.
There is no need not to eat three good-sized meals a day - just so long as they are sensible meals. Foods like brown rice and wholemeal pasta are effectively "free" - use them to bulk up your meals so you are satisfied.
Umm, maybe it's supposed to be obvious, but... Why not?
Because if you cut the hours that an employee in profession X can work, and there are no more qualified X'ers in the economy, then less of X gets done. A modern economy needs lots of people with very specialized skills. If you restrict the amount of X that gets done, it has a knock-on effect onto Y and Z too.
Now, if the French economy was based on unskilled and semiskilled labour, their idea might have worked, because there are much lower barriers to people doing whatever job needs to be done. The person-hour is a commodity. Someone working on a farm could do his 35 hours, then have his job done by an unemployed assembly-line worker. But, if you start placing artificial restrictions on high-skill jobs, then there is less flexibility - unemployed lawyers can't fill the position left by a surgeon who's done his 35 hours. If the networking engineer has done his 35 hrs, and there aren't any more to hand, then maybe the programmers can't work without the LAN.
So, the result is that a lot of extra latency is introduced into the economy, slowing everything down. This increases unemployment, because less work being done means less demand for supporting work to be done, and so on.
Iceland, the new Albania.
I've never been to Albania, but I have been to Iceland. It's hardly obscure.