While software has proven itself to be like unto machinery, the fact that there are so many people doing it for free and giving the fruits of their labors away proves that anything infinitely dispersable without loss to the original provider cannot be a true industry without having to actually produce the object being sold. Linus Torvalds created the Linux kernel, but if I copy it and give it to a friend, Linus has lost nothing.
The problem with your argument is that while information can be reproduced for a negligible cost, it cannot be originally produced for a negligible cost. Take Linus as an example, since you mentioned him. He wrote Linux when he was a student, and right now he has a day job at a chip design company. Or take RMS, the father of the Free Software movement. He lives on a MacArthur Foundation grant and presumably tenure at MIT. There are very, very few people in Open Source who do not have a "day job", and it's the day job that actually pays for Open Source to get written.
Or take a movie. A blockbuster movie (say, Matrix Reloaded) is a very expensive thing to make. Lots of physical artifacts were created during the process (for example, the section of highway they built to film on). Lots of people (mostly union members, FWIW) did lots of things, and got paid for doing them. Because that movie can be reproduced for little cost, does that mean it could be created for little cost? No, the two are not even remotely related.
You've bought into the Marxist (and this isn't an insult, just a statement) position on capital and the means of production. Marx believed as you do that only industries that mass produce tangible objects are true "production". He failed to account for the idea that value can be added through pure information manipulation. Example: a CPU is a tangible object, but the value is in the design, not the physical process that was used to refine the silicon, etc. Whereas these days we understand that the "means of production" are owned by the people who carry it around inside their skulls.
I know there are holes in my arguement, but thats where semantics come in and I generally ignore semantics when they are placed on an idealistic level anyhow. Until a serious discussion on the subject takes place, there isn't any point in bothering with them.
In other words, you've already made up your mind, and won't let the facts sway you? Interesting. Marx was the same way. That's why Das Kapital is all about seizing "the means of production" but it doesn't go into much detail on how to organize or operate them; Marx believed that simply owning the physical objects, like a farm or a factory, was enough. But the value was in the mind of the individuals, not in the muscles of the masses.
It is the software product industries Ellison is talking about when he says the software industry is on the decline. He probably even sees it in his own company. No one buys Oracle for the sake of having Oracle software, they buy Oracle so they have Oracle's support infrastructure behind it.
You are exactly right. For example, you can do most of what most Cisco products can do with free software, but when something goes wong, you won't have Cisco's Special Circumstances agents to back you up. You can do most of what a Sun can do with x86 hardware, but (apart from maybe IBM) there's no-one in the x86 space that can give you the kind of backup that Sun can, if you need it.
The software systems and services industries are poised for a boom. Businesses are starting to collect more information, expanding into more markets, becoming (finally) a little more computer literate. It is in these fields we can seek to sell ourselves, and it is also in these fields we can best sell Linux and open source.
The problems these days - and these were always the interesting ones - are not so much "what can we do", which is what the packaged software industry answered but "what should we do, and how do we do it" which is where bespoke software, developed and iterated quickly by people who know both tech and business come in. The future's bright for those that understand that IT is about solving problems in the real world, and can identify and understand those problems.
The problem with any anti-spam proposals is not making laws, it's enforcing them. The EU can pass all the anti-spam legislation it wants, but that doesn't help when the spam originates outside your jurisdiction. Deputize ISPs to fight it? Doesn't work; after all, Customs and Excise officials aren't sent to jail when drugs come into the country, the smugglers are, if they can be caught. The Post Office aren't responsible if someone sends unwanted junk mail.
It won't be long now before people only accept mail from known senders, and if you want to be on someone's list, you have to contact them by another means to get set up. That's how it is on ICQ right now, if you ignore everyone that you don't specifically permission, then even your friends can't contact you to ask to be permissioned, unless they use mail, the phone, etc. Once that happens, the spam problem will go away shortly afterwards, and the inconvenience will be minor. Even now, people have a "spam" account that they use when they need to register on a website, and a private one given only to friends. The signal-to-noise ratio makes it worthwhile; I abandoned Usenet years ago because S/N was too poor, closed mailing lists are far better. Slashdot was almost unusable for a while, then moderation and thresholds were introduced.
Spam's a real problem, but it's one that can be solved in a fairly straightforward way, and it will be as soon as more people get the support for "friends only" in their mail clients.
Fundamentally market data is just a stream of numbers, and once you have access to a stream, it's just a matter of deciding what you want to do with those numbers. There are plenty of Open Source apps for dealing with large blocks of numerical data, for example graphing it, running statistical algorithms over it, and so on, for example Octave and GNUPlot. There is even an open source library for quantitiative finance. And don't underestimate what you can do with just Perl/Tk. Postgres can take care of all your market history, and it's datatypes and query parser are sophisticated enough for data mining, or look at KDB.
The problem you have is twofold. All this stuff is quite low level; you could build something as good as Reuters Dealing/3000 or a BridgeStation out of it, theoretically, but now we're talking about money, we're really talking about time. To integrate QuantLib with Octave with GNUPlot will take a substantial amount of work on your part, altho' once it was done, you could process a feed almost as well as any commercial trading desktop.
The second problem is getting the feed. If you subscribe to say a Reuters data feed for real time streaming quotes, then the cost of a Reuters terminal is really negligible; you're paying for access to the feed. If you take the feed without the terminal, you still need libraries (like SSL) to actually use it in your own application, or you need something like Tibco eFinance to translate it into XML for you, and you also need something that can format messages back to your counterparty in a format they will accept, say FIX or FpML, - this is probably the easiest part to develop yourself, FIX handles all the instrument classes you're interested in. What you need is access to a feed that comes in a useful format, and which can be sourced for in a contract that doesn't involve taking a physical terminal anyway.
Oracle Designer/Developer is pretty darn cool. You can design your application, then automagically build the same app for a console (like a VT100 or something), a Windows or Motif application, or a web site. In some cases, it can even import a VB app (or at least, all the forms) into its internal format, then generate a web site or a Motif app from it. Not the cheapest, but certainly one of the best RAD tools.
I'm not sure if its exactly what you are looking for, but there are -tons- of topics, and I live in a relativly small city, and there are a few local meetups in the area of differant interests. It's a pretty cool service, and looks like it could grow into something quite cool.
Also see Friendster. Works great in cities like NYC or SF, probably less well in smaller cities. Whoever wrote it seems to think the UK is a lot smaller than it actually is, it's not smart enough to pick cities there, only the country as a whole!
Where to begin. This is a guy who has never had the first clue about what made Star Trek successful and will never ever know it. He killed Kirk stupidly and that was inexcusable. He's had a deathgrip on the Star Trek franchise and has been intent on squeezing the last dollar out of it. It's no fun, it's Politically Correct and boring.
That's just the thing tho', it isn't about the money. Look at the economic history of Star Trek (the show, not the "universe"). It has been wildly profitable and long-running precisely because of the hard-core fanbase. The original series was cancelled because studio execs were too stupid to realize this, but c'mon, there have been 40 years advance in demographic analysis since then. The hard-core fans will watch the movies a few times in the cinema, then buy the DVDs then buy the special editions. They'll collect the books and buy the toys for their kids. They'll watch the TV show, and you can make a fortune selling tech advertising during the breaks, the hard-core fans are the ones who buy all the electronic gadgets like PDAs, MP3 players, new PCs every year and so on.
If I were managing the franchise it would be all about the money, which means it would be all about understanding what the hard core fans want and giving it to them on a plate, and anything they want to pay for, I'd sell. 'Cos for decades, that's what's made Star Trek's money.
My question is this: where are OpenSource design tools? I've tried what I could find on SourceForge, but (as usual?) most of the projects that sounded promising were either still in the planning stages or seemed abandoned. Of course something which allowed be to create nifty class charts and output them to UML and/or SQL would be really cool, but I've yet to find something that works (especially in Linux). What are your favorite Open Source design tools and what do you like about them?"
It's a matter of using the right tool for the job. Example: the Linux kernel developers use proprietary BitKeeper rather than free CVS, because BitKeeper is simply a better tool. Using a free tool just because it is free is a poor decision, because it will cost you more in the long term in lost productivity. In this case, there are no open source design tools because there are no open source applications that have complex schemas (say 100 tables or more). Plus there is an unfortunate attitude that still permeates open source "real men start coding, only corporate minions do UML".
If you need a good tool, try Oracle Designer or Together/J, or since IBM are Linux's new best friend, you might want to look at Rose. I guess if you are cheap you could use Visio.
In these troubling times where IT departments all across the landscape are trying to reduce costs, this will allow companies to say 'No' to expensive support contracts and upgrade costs and still maintain security without having to buy new hardware."
Well, the choice actually is, pay another company to maintain/support it, or pay a linux geek in-house to do it. I would argue that for many reasons, the former is more economical than the latter. If you pay for a support contract, you benefit from the economies of scale, as Nokia can afford to employ multiple experts in this particular system who divide their time amongst its customers. An in-house employee is unlikely to have the same expertise and experience, and if he/she did, then it would not be used full time. Further, the external organization has a global view, and can see all the issues at all its customer's sites, which means if someone runs into a problem before you, the support engineers will probably already have seen it.
Secondly, a support contract is a business expense. If comes out of operating cash, and can be written off against taxes. The firewall kit was paid for out of the capital budget, and can be amortized over time. An employee gets a salary which may be more than the support contract, but there are lots of costs involved, taxes, equipment, HR staff time, office space, etc. None of those apply to a support contract.
Thirdly, there is fitness for purpose. I have a hard time believing that a highly optimized appliance can be repurposed like this without a corresponding reduction in performance and capability. As with all embedded systems, hardware and software are tightly co-ordinated. A general purpose OS can not fully exploit the hardware, and it includes much unnecessary functionality which further reduces effectiveness.
Fourthly, your auditors may not sign off on your insurance if you roll your own solution. This is nothing to do with Nokia taking liability, this is your insurance company deciding what is and is not an acceptable level of risk. A quick scan of BUGTRAQ and CERT reveals many, many more Linux exploits than Nokia exploits!
So in short, if you have a spare Nokia for free and need a general-purpose computing device, then sure, why not, but if you have one and need a firewall, then use it for its intended purpose. I only use Open Source software when it actually is the best - there is no room for ideology in technology decisions, particularly when the risks of compromising security are so high. You're messing around with people lives here; if the business fails, then jobs are lost. But equally, if you can objectively prove that Linux is better, then use it. Unfortunately, this type of analysis is all too rare, all I hear is "MS sucks, d00d!".
know it's a little late now that there are like 400 comments but how can American Greetings trademark something that's already part of the language? I'm
pretty sure people were calling that delicious dessert "strawberry shortcake" way before AG invented that stupid character.
It's all about context. You can use the same words as trademarks in different contexts without any overlap. For example, once upon a time there were VAX vaccuum cleaners and VAX computers, and there was no legal problem there, since there was no danger of a consumer mistaking one for another. So, you could happily write a book called "Strawberry Shortcake" full of recipes if you wanted to, or manufacture a range of cooking implements under that name, but if you featured the Strawberry Shortcake(tm) character in your recipe book, or placed images of that character on your products, then you would be in trouble.
From this e-mail, it seems as though they weren't taking the first step toqwards a lawsuit, they were more like testing to see if a simple letter would stop it all.
Uhh, that's what a cease-and-desist letter is. It a lawyer saying, "let's be reasonable here, we don't want to take you to court, it's a lot of hassle for both of us, but we'll have to if you continue to do what you're doing". It's polite and civilized, just a friendly warning. The polite and civilized thing to do, in the case, would have been for PA to comply.
Think about it. Why did American McGee choose Alice in Wonderland? 'Cos he was smart enough to know that no-one's going to have a problem with that, legally speaking, the character has passed into the public domain. If PA had been smart, they'd have done a cartoon of Snow White or Sleeping Beauty or someone. But they didn't think before they published, and they've frankly gotten off lightly.
The only image tarnished by this whole affair is that of the overly-litigious facist dorks who thought a suit would be a good idea.
I know it's "trendy" to always criticize "corporations" for everything they do but as the law stands, if you don't actively police your trademarks, you lose them. If AG's lawyers had not acted, they would not be able to defend themselves in the case of a genuine infringement, for example by a rival toy manufacturer, in the future. If you want to blame anyone, blame the government for enshrining a law that doesn't discriminate between different levels of trademark infringement.
The closest thing to a pure "society is the aggregation of decisions we make as individuals" would be a pure democracy, which breaks down and forms a tyranny of the majority.
The closest thing is the stock market. You "vote" with your dollars by making investment decisions.
Critics of capitalism claim that markets are random, and that socialist economies can be properly planned. In actual fact, markets are only random-looking in the short term, over the long term clear trends emerge (even if they were very difficult to detect when they started). A market is the collective intelligence of every participant, not merely the chosen few on a "planning committee". And socialist planning always fails precisely because the long term trends are so difficult to detect in their nascent form.
The funny thing is, if the USSR had won, they'd be saying the exact same thing.
I don't think people like Stalin ever thought of themselves as "good". The rhetoric about "the people" was all for show. Stalin knew what he was doing wasn't really about "the people" and simply didn't care, he just wanted all the power.
Say what you want about the West, about corruption, etc, but the fact is, you can say it without fear of reprisal, and every few years we have an election. If a politician is too corrupt, the free press will expose him. If there is evidence, the independent judiciary will impeach him. None of this was possible under the Soviet system, it was power for the sake of power.
Look up the history of the McCarthy years in the United States for a start. It's finally getting some real historical analysis, having been brushed under the carpet for a long time.
I'm quite familiar with McCarthy; yes some people unjustly lost their jobs, etc, but c'mon, was anyone sent to a gold mine in Alaska, then left to freeze or starve to death? No, nothing like that happened at all.
Drawing any sort of parallel between McCarthyism and Stalin's purges is just absurd.
Far be it from someone with a 4 digit user ID to understand the damn difference between the submitters comments, and the editors comments, for christs sake!
Ah, but what editors are supposed to do is edit! Either correct the original, or put a note on it. That's what they've done in the past, when they've bothered.
the Cold War mentality that infected much of society on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The story tells of how in 1937...
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the Cold War and the Iron Curtain didn't begin until after WWII, in the late 1940's.
And while I'm on the subject, what the hell does the original poster mean "both sides"? As far as I am aware, the US and UK never sent anyone to a forced labour camp for daring to criticize the state. In fact, Communist parties both existed back then and still exist today all throughout the West. Just this lunchtime I walked past someone selling Socialist Worker, as anti-capitalist, anti-democratic magazine as you can imagine, and he was perfectly free to do that. No-one was ever sent to a gulag for opposing the government, hell we didn't even have gulags in the first place! It was the Soviets who were guilty of intolerance, persecution and oppression, not the West.
Time to call a spade a fucking shovel. We were the good guys, they were the bad guys, they lost, end of story.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the Cold War and the Iron Curtain didn't begin until after WWII, in the late 1940's.
You are correct, Winston Churchill coined the phrase "Iron Curtain" on March 5, 1946, while accepting an honorary degree in the US.
From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia; all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and in some cases increasing measure of control from Moscow.
Far be it from a/. editor to have the slightest grasp of history...
Doesn't MOSIX already do this? Or does MOSIX just migrate a single process from one host to another without 'sharing' memory?
I'm not familiar with MOSIX, but Oracle uses RSM on the theory that the high-speed RSM link is always faster than accessing the physical disk. So if you have 2 nodes sharing a single disk array, and Oracle on one node knows that it needs a particular block (it can know this because in Oracle you can calculate the physical location of a block from rowid as an offset from the start of the datafile - that's how indexes work) then the first thing it will do is ask the other node if it has it. This is called "cache fusion". If it has, then it is retrieved. Previous versions of Oracle had to do a "block ping" - notify the other node that it wanted the block, the block would then be flushed to disk, and the first node would load it. This guaranteed consistency, but was slow. With RSM, the algorithms that manage the block buffer cache can be applied across the cluster, which is very fast and efficient.
Speaking of process migration, there is a feature of Oracle called TAF, Transparent Application Failover. Say you are doing a big select, retrieving millions of rows, connected to one node of a cluster, and that machine fails in the middle of the query. Your connection will be redirected to a surviving node, and your statement will resume from where it left off. I'm unaware of an open-source database that can do either of these.
This feature has been available for a while now, but using a dedicated link rather than IP. Sun call it Remote Shared Memory and it's mainly used for database clusters.
Oh PLEASE! I worked for, what was at the time, the 17th largest CC processor in the nation.
That's not the financial services industry in any meaningful sense of the word, just a teeny tiny corner of it. If you're trading real instruments - think Wall Street, or the Square Mile - you need to keep everything around for 7+ years, and if anyone you've traded with in that time gets audited, you might be asked for your counterparty records. Not to mention the fact that you can trade instruments with a maturity date of 30 years. If in 29 years you want to know what positions you need to close out - that data has got to be there, preferably online, at worse in an easily accessible archive. Think commercial banking, pension funds and government treasuries.
Financial companies are CHEAP.
Goldman's alone spends $1B/year on IT. And they're not even the biggest investment bank. And there are mutual funds, hedge funds, commercial banks, etc, spending comparable amounts. Maybe small companies are cheap, but the big players will spend whatever it takes to get the job done - because it's worth it.
The male teachers were by far the worst. They taught, and thought, right down the line like men think. When asked why you do operation X to dataset Y, they had exactly one answer each time. That was the best answer, and if you didn't get it, then you didn't get math. Since teenagers, typically riddled with self-doubt, are prone to hear this kind of negativity whether it exists or not, they are very quick to pick up on it when it is in fact their teacher's opinion. At that point they just give up.
This is really the problem with American schools (altho' it has spread to British schools also): the notion that it's less important to be right than it is to bolster a student's self-esteem. In some subjects , like History, there really are many possible "right answers" but in other fields, like Engineering, there aren't. Either the bridge is strong enough or it collapses. Either there is enough power or the lights go out. Either there is enough insulation or the building catches fire. Either you are right or you aren't, and when people who do calculations for a living are wrong, other people die.
High school mathematics is intended to make it possible for students to choose to study maths at a higher level, should they wish to. It is in the interests of society that those who cannot are weeded out as soon as possible. That isn't a bad thing; after all there are plenty of careers open to those who can't handle math (and equally, those careers are often not suitable for those who are mathematically inclined).
Uh, don't you already have that? I haven't seen a government yet that claims to represent its people and doesn't tax them in some way.
No, we have a large number of people who enjoy the privileges of society (including voting) but do not share the responsibility of contributing to society. Thus, the balance of power rests in the hands of people who don't care what government costs. This is undemocratic and effectively disenfranchises those who pay more into society than they get out.
That is why we need a "None of the above" choice on the ballot too. California tried this via referendum, but it didn't go through.
I believe Taiwan has a system like this. If "none of the above" wins, the election must be re-held with entirely new candidates. IF we could get that along with mandatory voting, and no-representation-without-taxation, then there's hope for Democracy yet.
Well, duh! Open Source / Free Software is a software phenomenon. You can't take a new hardware device and use it's existence to bash the Open Source community.
The tablet isn't just a piece of hardware in the way that a new 3-box desktop computer is a piece of hardware. It's an integrated system; a tablet with handwriting recognition, wireless networking that can also dock and be used as a regular PC is an new form of appliance. For example PDAs and laptops have some things in common, but they are different devices for different purposes. A tablet has emergent properties i.e. it is more useful than the sum of its parts.
So software that can be written to take advantage of this new platform is dependent on the existance of the platform; sure you could just write applications that worked equally well with a mouse and a vertical screen as with a stylus and a horizontal screen, but such an application would be suboptimal from both perspectives (example: MS' attempts to shrink Office into "Pocket Word", "Pocket Excel" and so on). Before the Open Source community can write useful software for tablets, someone else had to create the tablet - in this case it was MS, but it could easily have been IBM, Sun, NCR, Xerox, Oracle or anyone else.
Slashdot Mirror
While software has proven itself to be like unto machinery, the fact that there are so many people doing it for free and giving the fruits of their labors away proves that anything infinitely dispersable without loss to the original provider cannot be a true industry without having to actually produce the object being sold. Linus Torvalds created the Linux kernel, but if I copy it and give it to a friend, Linus has lost nothing.
The problem with your argument is that while information can be reproduced for a negligible cost, it cannot be originally produced for a negligible cost. Take Linus as an example, since you mentioned him. He wrote Linux when he was a student, and right now he has a day job at a chip design company. Or take RMS, the father of the Free Software movement. He lives on a MacArthur Foundation grant and presumably tenure at MIT. There are very, very few people in Open Source who do not have a "day job", and it's the day job that actually pays for Open Source to get written.
Or take a movie. A blockbuster movie (say, Matrix Reloaded) is a very expensive thing to make. Lots of physical artifacts were created during the process (for example, the section of highway they built to film on). Lots of people (mostly union members, FWIW) did lots of things, and got paid for doing them. Because that movie can be reproduced for little cost, does that mean it could be created for little cost? No, the two are not even remotely related.
You've bought into the Marxist (and this isn't an insult, just a statement) position on capital and the means of production. Marx believed as you do that only industries that mass produce tangible objects are true "production". He failed to account for the idea that value can be added through pure information manipulation. Example: a CPU is a tangible object, but the value is in the design, not the physical process that was used to refine the silicon, etc. Whereas these days we understand that the "means of production" are owned by the people who carry it around inside their skulls.
I know there are holes in my arguement, but thats where semantics come in and I generally ignore semantics when they are placed on an idealistic level anyhow. Until a serious discussion on the subject takes place, there isn't any point in bothering with them.
In other words, you've already made up your mind, and won't let the facts sway you? Interesting. Marx was the same way. That's why Das Kapital is all about seizing "the means of production" but it doesn't go into much detail on how to organize or operate them; Marx believed that simply owning the physical objects, like a farm or a factory, was enough. But the value was in the mind of the individuals, not in the muscles of the masses.
It is the software product industries Ellison is talking about when he says the software industry is on the decline. He probably even sees it in his own company. No one buys Oracle for the sake of having Oracle software, they buy Oracle so they have Oracle's support infrastructure behind it.
You are exactly right. For example, you can do most of what most Cisco products can do with free software, but when something goes wong, you won't have Cisco's Special Circumstances agents to back you up. You can do most of what a Sun can do with x86 hardware, but (apart from maybe IBM) there's no-one in the x86 space that can give you the kind of backup that Sun can, if you need it.
The software systems and services industries are poised for a boom. Businesses are starting to collect more information, expanding into more markets, becoming (finally) a little more computer literate. It is in these fields we can seek to sell ourselves, and it is also in these fields we can best sell Linux and open source.
The problems these days - and these were always the interesting ones - are not so much "what can we do", which is what the packaged software industry answered but "what should we do, and how do we do it" which is where bespoke software, developed and iterated quickly by people who know both tech and business come in. The future's bright for those that understand that IT is about solving problems in the real world, and can identify and understand those problems.
The problem with any anti-spam proposals is not making laws, it's enforcing them. The EU can pass all the anti-spam legislation it wants, but that doesn't help when the spam originates outside your jurisdiction. Deputize ISPs to fight it? Doesn't work; after all, Customs and Excise officials aren't sent to jail when drugs come into the country, the smugglers are, if they can be caught. The Post Office aren't responsible if someone sends unwanted junk mail.
It won't be long now before people only accept mail from known senders, and if you want to be on someone's list, you have to contact them by another means to get set up. That's how it is on ICQ right now, if you ignore everyone that you don't specifically permission, then even your friends can't contact you to ask to be permissioned, unless they use mail, the phone, etc. Once that happens, the spam problem will go away shortly afterwards, and the inconvenience will be minor. Even now, people have a "spam" account that they use when they need to register on a website, and a private one given only to friends. The signal-to-noise ratio makes it worthwhile; I abandoned Usenet years ago because S/N was too poor, closed mailing lists are far better. Slashdot was almost unusable for a while, then moderation and thresholds were introduced.
Spam's a real problem, but it's one that can be solved in a fairly straightforward way, and it will be as soon as more people get the support for "friends only" in their mail clients.
Fundamentally market data is just a stream of numbers, and once you have access to a stream, it's just a matter of deciding what you want to do with those numbers. There are plenty of Open Source apps for dealing with large blocks of numerical data, for example graphing it, running statistical algorithms over it, and so on, for example Octave and GNUPlot. There is even an open source library for quantitiative finance. And don't underestimate what you can do with just Perl/Tk. Postgres can take care of all your market history, and it's datatypes and query parser are sophisticated enough for data mining, or look at KDB.
The problem you have is twofold. All this stuff is quite low level; you could build something as good as Reuters Dealing/3000 or a BridgeStation out of it, theoretically, but now we're talking about money, we're really talking about time. To integrate QuantLib with Octave with GNUPlot will take a substantial amount of work on your part, altho' once it was done, you could process a feed almost as well as any commercial trading desktop.
The second problem is getting the feed. If you subscribe to say a Reuters data feed for real time streaming quotes, then the cost of a Reuters terminal is really negligible; you're paying for access to the feed. If you take the feed without the terminal, you still need libraries (like SSL) to actually use it in your own application, or you need something like Tibco eFinance to translate it into XML for you, and you also need something that can format messages back to your counterparty in a format they will accept, say FIX or FpML, - this is probably the easiest part to develop yourself, FIX handles all the instrument classes you're interested in. What you need is access to a feed that comes in a useful format, and which can be sourced for in a contract that doesn't involve taking a physical terminal anyway.
Oracle forms [oracle.com]
Oracle Designer/Developer is pretty darn cool. You can design your application, then automagically build the same app for a console (like a VT100 or something), a Windows or Motif application, or a web site. In some cases, it can even import a VB app (or at least, all the forms) into its internal format, then generate a web site or a Motif app from it. Not the cheapest, but certainly one of the best RAD tools.
I'm not sure if its exactly what you are looking for, but there are -tons- of topics, and I live in a relativly small city, and there are a few local meetups in the area of differant interests. It's a pretty cool service, and looks like it could grow into something quite cool.
Also see Friendster. Works great in cities like NYC or SF, probably less well in smaller cities. Whoever wrote it seems to think the UK is a lot smaller than it actually is, it's not smart enough to pick cities there, only the country as a whole!
Where to begin. This is a guy who has never had the first clue about what made Star Trek successful and will never ever know it. He killed Kirk stupidly and that was inexcusable. He's had a deathgrip on the Star Trek franchise and has been intent on squeezing the last dollar out of it. It's no fun, it's Politically Correct and boring.
That's just the thing tho', it isn't about the money. Look at the economic history of Star Trek (the show, not the "universe"). It has been wildly profitable and long-running precisely because of the hard-core fanbase. The original series was cancelled because studio execs were too stupid to realize this, but c'mon, there have been 40 years advance in demographic analysis since then. The hard-core fans will watch the movies a few times in the cinema, then buy the DVDs then buy the special editions. They'll collect the books and buy the toys for their kids. They'll watch the TV show, and you can make a fortune selling tech advertising during the breaks, the hard-core fans are the ones who buy all the electronic gadgets like PDAs, MP3 players, new PCs every year and so on.
If I were managing the franchise it would be all about the money, which means it would be all about understanding what the hard core fans want and giving it to them on a plate, and anything they want to pay for, I'd sell. 'Cos for decades, that's what's made Star Trek's money.
My question is this: where are OpenSource design tools? I've tried what I could find on SourceForge, but (as usual?) most of the projects that sounded promising were either still in the planning stages or seemed abandoned. Of course something which allowed be to create nifty class charts and output them to UML and/or SQL would be really cool, but I've yet to find something that works (especially in Linux). What are your favorite Open Source design tools and what do you like about them?"
It's a matter of using the right tool for the job. Example: the Linux kernel developers use proprietary BitKeeper rather than free CVS, because BitKeeper is simply a better tool. Using a free tool just because it is free is a poor decision, because it will cost you more in the long term in lost productivity. In this case, there are no open source design tools because there are no open source applications that have complex schemas (say 100 tables or more). Plus there is an unfortunate attitude that still permeates open source "real men start coding, only corporate minions do UML".
If you need a good tool, try Oracle Designer or Together/J, or since IBM are Linux's new best friend, you might want to look at Rose. I guess if you are cheap you could use Visio.
In these troubling times where IT departments all across the landscape are trying to reduce costs, this will allow companies to say 'No' to expensive support contracts and upgrade costs and still maintain security without having to buy new hardware."
Well, the choice actually is, pay another company to maintain/support it, or pay a linux geek in-house to do it. I would argue that for many reasons, the former is more economical than the latter. If you pay for a support contract, you benefit from the economies of scale, as Nokia can afford to employ multiple experts in this particular system who divide their time amongst its customers. An in-house employee is unlikely to have the same expertise and experience, and if he/she did, then it would not be used full time. Further, the external organization has a global view, and can see all the issues at all its customer's sites, which means if someone runs into a problem before you, the support engineers will probably already have seen it.
Secondly, a support contract is a business expense. If comes out of operating cash, and can be written off against taxes. The firewall kit was paid for out of the capital budget, and can be amortized over time. An employee gets a salary which may be more than the support contract, but there are lots of costs involved, taxes, equipment, HR staff time, office space, etc. None of those apply to a support contract.
Thirdly, there is fitness for purpose. I have a hard time believing that a highly optimized appliance can be repurposed like this without a corresponding reduction in performance and capability. As with all embedded systems, hardware and software are tightly co-ordinated. A general purpose OS can not fully exploit the hardware, and it includes much unnecessary functionality which further reduces effectiveness.
Fourthly, your auditors may not sign off on your insurance if you roll your own solution. This is nothing to do with Nokia taking liability, this is your insurance company deciding what is and is not an acceptable level of risk. A quick scan of BUGTRAQ and CERT reveals many, many more Linux exploits than Nokia exploits!
So in short, if you have a spare Nokia for free and need a general-purpose computing device, then sure, why not, but if you have one and need a firewall, then use it for its intended purpose. I only use Open Source software when it actually is the best - there is no room for ideology in technology decisions, particularly when the risks of compromising security are so high. You're messing around with people lives here; if the business fails, then jobs are lost. But equally, if you can objectively prove that Linux is better, then use it. Unfortunately, this type of analysis is all too rare, all I hear is "MS sucks, d00d!".
know it's a little late now that there are like 400 comments but how can American Greetings trademark something that's already part of the language? I'm
pretty sure people were calling that delicious dessert "strawberry shortcake" way before AG invented that stupid character.
It's all about context. You can use the same words as trademarks in different contexts without any overlap. For example, once upon a time there were VAX vaccuum cleaners and VAX computers, and there was no legal problem there, since there was no danger of a consumer mistaking one for another. So, you could happily write a book called "Strawberry Shortcake" full of recipes if you wanted to, or manufacture a range of cooking implements under that name, but if you featured the Strawberry Shortcake(tm) character in your recipe book, or placed images of that character on your products, then you would be in trouble.
From this e-mail, it seems as though they weren't taking the first step toqwards a lawsuit, they were more like testing to see if a simple letter would stop it all.
Uhh, that's what a cease-and-desist letter is. It a lawyer saying, "let's be reasonable here, we don't want to take you to court, it's a lot of hassle for both of us, but we'll have to if you continue to do what you're doing". It's polite and civilized, just a friendly warning. The polite and civilized thing to do, in the case, would have been for PA to comply.
Think about it. Why did American McGee choose Alice in Wonderland? 'Cos he was smart enough to know that no-one's going to have a problem with that, legally speaking, the character has passed into the public domain. If PA had been smart, they'd have done a cartoon of Snow White or Sleeping Beauty or someone. But they didn't think before they published, and they've frankly gotten off lightly.
The only image tarnished by this whole affair is that of the overly-litigious facist dorks who thought a suit would be a good idea.
I know it's "trendy" to always criticize "corporations" for everything they do but as the law stands, if you don't actively police your trademarks, you lose them. If AG's lawyers had not acted, they would not be able to defend themselves in the case of a genuine infringement, for example by a rival toy manufacturer, in the future. If you want to blame anyone, blame the government for enshrining a law that doesn't discriminate between different levels of trademark infringement.
The closest thing to a pure "society is the aggregation of decisions we make as individuals" would be a pure democracy, which breaks down and forms a tyranny of the majority.
The closest thing is the stock market. You "vote" with your dollars by making investment decisions.
Critics of capitalism claim that markets are random, and that socialist economies can be properly planned. In actual fact, markets are only random-looking in the short term, over the long term clear trends emerge (even if they were very difficult to detect when they started). A market is the collective intelligence of every participant, not merely the chosen few on a "planning committee". And socialist planning always fails precisely because the long term trends are so difficult to detect in their nascent form.
The funny thing is, if the USSR had won, they'd be saying the exact same thing.
I don't think people like Stalin ever thought of themselves as "good". The rhetoric about "the people" was all for show. Stalin knew what he was doing wasn't really about "the people" and simply didn't care, he just wanted all the power.
Say what you want about the West, about corruption, etc, but the fact is, you can say it without fear of reprisal, and every few years we have an election. If a politician is too corrupt, the free press will expose him. If there is evidence, the independent judiciary will impeach him. None of this was possible under the Soviet system, it was power for the sake of power.
Look up the history of the McCarthy years in the United States for a start. It's finally getting some real historical analysis, having been brushed under the carpet for a long time.
I'm quite familiar with McCarthy; yes some people unjustly lost their jobs, etc, but c'mon, was anyone sent to a gold mine in Alaska, then left to freeze or starve to death? No, nothing like that happened at all.
Drawing any sort of parallel between McCarthyism and Stalin's purges is just absurd.
Far be it from someone with a 4 digit user ID to understand the damn difference between the submitters comments, and the editors comments, for christs sake!
Ah, but what editors are supposed to do is edit! Either correct the original, or put a note on it. That's what they've done in the past, when they've bothered.
the Cold War mentality that infected much of society on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The story tells of how in 1937...
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the Cold War and the Iron Curtain didn't begin until after WWII, in the late 1940's.
And while I'm on the subject, what the hell does the original poster mean "both sides"? As far as I am aware, the US and UK never sent anyone to a forced labour camp for daring to criticize the state. In fact, Communist parties both existed back then and still exist today all throughout the West. Just this lunchtime I walked past someone selling Socialist Worker, as anti-capitalist, anti-democratic magazine as you can imagine, and he was perfectly free to do that. No-one was ever sent to a gulag for opposing the government, hell we didn't even have gulags in the first place! It was the Soviets who were guilty of intolerance, persecution and oppression, not the West.
Time to call a spade a fucking shovel. We were the good guys, they were the bad guys, they lost, end of story.
You are correct, Winston Churchill coined the phrase "Iron Curtain" on March 5, 1946, while accepting an honorary degree in the US.
Far be it from a
Doesn't MOSIX already do this? Or does MOSIX just migrate a single process from one host to another without 'sharing' memory?
I'm not familiar with MOSIX, but Oracle uses RSM on the theory that the high-speed RSM link is always faster than accessing the physical disk. So if you have 2 nodes sharing a single disk array, and Oracle on one node knows that it needs a particular block (it can know this because in Oracle you can calculate the physical location of a block from rowid as an offset from the start of the datafile - that's how indexes work) then the first thing it will do is ask the other node if it has it. This is called "cache fusion". If it has, then it is retrieved. Previous versions of Oracle had to do a "block ping" - notify the other node that it wanted the block, the block would then be flushed to disk, and the first node would load it. This guaranteed consistency, but was slow. With RSM, the algorithms that manage the block buffer cache can be applied across the cluster, which is very fast and efficient.
Speaking of process migration, there is a feature of Oracle called TAF, Transparent Application Failover. Say you are doing a big select, retrieving millions of rows, connected to one node of a cluster, and that machine fails in the middle of the query. Your connection will be redirected to a surviving node, and your statement will resume from where it left off. I'm unaware of an open-source database that can do either of these.
This feature has been available for a while now, but using a dedicated link rather than IP. Sun call it Remote Shared Memory and it's mainly used for database clusters.
Oh PLEASE! I worked for, what was at the time, the 17th largest CC processor in the nation.
That's not the financial services industry in any meaningful sense of the word, just a teeny tiny corner of it. If you're trading real instruments - think Wall Street, or the Square Mile - you need to keep everything around for 7+ years, and if anyone you've traded with in that time gets audited, you might be asked for your counterparty records. Not to mention the fact that you can trade instruments with a maturity date of 30 years. If in 29 years you want to know what positions you need to close out - that data has got to be there, preferably online, at worse in an easily accessible archive. Think commercial banking, pension funds and government treasuries.
Financial companies are CHEAP.
Goldman's alone spends $1B/year on IT. And they're not even the biggest investment bank. And there are mutual funds, hedge funds, commercial banks, etc, spending comparable amounts. Maybe small companies are cheap, but the big players will spend whatever it takes to get the job done - because it's worth it.
The male teachers were by far the worst. They taught, and thought, right down the line like men think. When asked why you do operation X to dataset Y, they had exactly one answer each time. That was the best answer, and if you didn't get it, then you didn't get math. Since teenagers, typically riddled with self-doubt, are prone to hear this kind of negativity whether it exists or not, they are very quick to pick up on it when it is in fact their teacher's opinion. At that point they just give up.
This is really the problem with American schools (altho' it has spread to British schools also): the notion that it's less important to be right than it is to bolster a student's self-esteem. In some subjects , like History, there really are many possible "right answers" but in other fields, like Engineering, there aren't. Either the bridge is strong enough or it collapses. Either there is enough power or the lights go out. Either there is enough insulation or the building catches fire. Either you are right or you aren't, and when people who do calculations for a living are wrong, other people die.
High school mathematics is intended to make it possible for students to choose to study maths at a higher level, should they wish to. It is in the interests of society that those who cannot are weeded out as soon as possible. That isn't a bad thing; after all there are plenty of careers open to those who can't handle math (and equally, those careers are often not suitable for those who are mathematically inclined).
Uh, don't you already have that? I haven't seen a government yet that claims to represent its people and doesn't tax them in some way.
No, we have a large number of people who enjoy the privileges of society (including voting) but do not share the responsibility of contributing to society. Thus, the balance of power rests in the hands of people who don't care what government costs. This is undemocratic and effectively disenfranchises those who pay more into society than they get out.
That is why we need a "None of the above" choice on the ballot too. California tried this via referendum, but it didn't go through.
I believe Taiwan has a system like this. If "none of the above" wins, the election must be re-held with entirely new candidates. IF we could get that along with mandatory voting, and no-representation-without-taxation, then there's hope for Democracy yet.
Well, duh! Open Source / Free Software is a software phenomenon. You can't take a new hardware device and use it's existence to bash the Open Source community.
The tablet isn't just a piece of hardware in the way that a new 3-box desktop computer is a piece of hardware. It's an integrated system; a tablet with handwriting recognition, wireless networking that can also dock and be used as a regular PC is an new form of appliance. For example PDAs and laptops have some things in common, but they are different devices for different purposes. A tablet has emergent properties i.e. it is more useful than the sum of its parts.
So software that can be written to take advantage of this new platform is dependent on the existance of the platform; sure you could just write applications that worked equally well with a mouse and a vertical screen as with a stylus and a horizontal screen, but such an application would be suboptimal from both perspectives (example: MS' attempts to shrink Office into "Pocket Word", "Pocket Excel" and so on). Before the Open Source community can write useful software for tablets, someone else had to create the tablet - in this case it was MS, but it could easily have been IBM, Sun, NCR, Xerox, Oracle or anyone else.