Actually, in the vast majority of companies the IT department falls within your definition of support people (ie the IT department is a cost center, not a profit center).
This is true for all non-IT companies and even for Software products companies the software development group is often seen as a cost center, since higher revenue correlates much more visibly with bigger/beter sales than with beter software development.
IT Services companies are the exception, not the rule.
The best option is multiple systems, that way there is no single entity that can unilaterally, for whatever strategical self-interest, decide to "pull the plug" on another nation's ability to use satelite based location systems.
So yes, China would be a good one. Also Russia, Western Europe, India, Brasil and whoever else can put a satelite up there - the more the merrier.
I wouldn't trust Western Europe with the keys for one single system (and i was born and bred in these parts), just as i wouldn't trust any other single entity.
As for the strategic interest of the US, the best i can say is: though luck - the world is a lot bigger than just Kentuky and americans ain't more or less deserving than anybody else.
PS: Note that the european decision to go ahead (and spend a couple of billions on it) was most certainly influenced by an increased sense in Europe, over the last few years, that the US will throw their muscle around whenever they want, for whatever self-interest reasons, without listening to anybody else. It's like in high school - some people might fear the bully boy, some people might dislike him, some people might wanna be like him, some might even like him, but hardly anybody trusts him.
You agree to it before you download it via steam. If you purchase the box, read the EULA and still disagree with it, click "I Disagree" and call Valve saying you disagree with their EULA and would like a full refund for the game. You can send them the game and they will refund the purchase price.
Stores will not accept returns, but the company who put out the product usually will.
Will Valve pay me for the time i spent in going out and buying their product?
How about for the hassle of sending it back and getting my money?
How about for the time i spent reading the whole EULA?
Will they pay me for the legal costs incurred in having a lawyer read the whole thing and explain me the legal implications of the EULA (Since it's unlikelly that a layman can fully understand the meaning of the EULA)?
Do i have a full lifetime guarantee that i can give it back if have never installed their product and disagree with the License Agreement?
A well designed system does not rely on the the assumption that no participant will abuse it. When abusing a system is beneficial to the abuser, any system that has no explicit definition of abuse and/or no negative-feedback (read punishment) on abuse will be BE ABUSED - abusing such a system will only provide rewards and no penalties.
This is as valid for a set of rules encoded as a construct of laws as it is for any set of rules determining usage/access of/to a system.
I sugest some form of punishement should be introduced for patent applications deemed to be frivolous, duplicate or over encompassing.
I personally can't quite make the leap to thinking of anything that I create being the property of everyone, with me having no rights over it at all.
Is there any musician who has not been influenced by the sounds of other musicians?
How about writers - is there any writer that's not been influenced by the writings of others?
How about scientists - would any of the scientific discoveries done today be possible without the previous scientific discoveries?
If intelectual property is indeed property, then any producer of intelectual property (unless he has lived his whole life isolated from the rest of the world) - having transformed somebody else's property into their own - is a thief!
I cannot but remind myself of the phrase "We stand on the shoulders of giants". I guess the current crop of intelectual property "producers" would rather have "I stand on the shoulders of giants for free. You on the other hand, will have to pay me a fee"
The problem is that in the US and parts of Europe (such as Britain) people in practice work as a rule (ie every week) 50h+/week without any payed overtime.
Interestingly enough, Britain, which is the place in Europe where workers work the most hours per week, actually has the lowest productivity per worked-hour in Europe.
There is an article in The Economist with the title "France's 35-hour work-week is fine, so long as it is voluntary". Unfortunatly is in their premium content section. If you have a subscription please read it, it's worth it.
The conclusion of the article is that the reduction from 40 to 35h/week in France in 2000 has had too little impact on reducing unemployement and slightly reduced overall economy productivity. Still, i want to call the attention for the following quote from the article: "French productivity, measured by output per hour, has indeed risen since 2000. Anecdotal evidence suggests that shorter hours at the office are paid for in fewer coffee breaks and smarter work habits."
More people actually learned about the technologies used instead of just blindly assuming what they use is good. Maybe if more people learned instead of just being a paper MCSE, IT would matter more.
Actually it's completly the other way around: - People shouldn't have to worry about the technologies that they use.
For a company to strategically differenciate itself from the competition it needs to cut costs, improve performance, increase efficiency, detect trends early and act on them swiftly, provide an improved customer service and more.
IT is but a tool here. And as powerfull a tool as IT is, it can't just by itself make a company successful - a lot of other things are required.
Companies don't care about technology. They care about improving they're business processes to get a competitive advantage. - Is it with a Windows NT machine running Exchange Server - Is it by figuring out that their organizational chart is unbalanced - Is it with a Java Web Application on Tomcat; is it by adding a second factory machine to remove the bottleneck on the production line - Is it with a set of Perl scripts - Is it by fine tunning the market segment that the sales forces should concentrate on - Is it a MySQL database... it doesn't really mater.
The big questions from a company point of view are: a) How much will it cost me (both now to make it happen and later to keep it going)? b) How long will it take to make it happen? c) What improvement(s) will it bring? d) Is it worth it?
"What technology it is?" is only important as part of figuring out a) and b).
Going back to the whole strategical differenciation part of this article - improving business processes by deploying IT solutions in the right places can provide a strategical diferentiation. However, it's not the specifics of the technology that provide the big advantages - it's knowing the right places where to deploy the techonology, the right uses to deploy it to and even more important when to use IT and when not to use it.
So some collegue of yours has implemented a (sub)system using the extensible language du jour.... And now you you are tasked with maintaining and improving said (sub)system.
Naturally said person has used the extendability features all over the code, not only downloading "plugins" but also creating he's own extensions. Also that person has left the company alreay. As for documentation, well, there is never enough time for documentation.
So how exactly will a language in which any arbitrary feature can be an extension (which at first sight looks just like a standard feature) help the "next guy in line" to change the code???
PS: Wouldn't function (methods / procedures / whatever) be a form of "language extension"? At least those are clearly visible.
I could be wrong, and since I'm posting on Slashdot, I probably am, but perhaps the reason why that Canon 300D is so much more in the UK or mainland Europe is because of government import taxes that are attached to it before it goes on sale.
I live in Holland, and just checked the customs web-site (in dutch) There is no import tax on digital cameras. There is however a 19% VAT tax.
Note that this is applicable to the whole european free trade zone (the VAT might change from country to country).
Also note the Great Britain has some extra import controls (vs the rest of the EC). Kinda reminds me of that article i saw a couple of years ago that says that cost of living in GB is in average 1.2 times the one in continental europe....
10 pounds per album, no long-lasting storage facilities (read pressed CD), no covers, no booklets with the lirics and you can't event play it on your MP3 player!!???
I don't expect this to take over the market any time soon.
> I don't want to live like Israel, fighting militant Muslims round every corner. >The problem of Muslim extremists exists and needs to be dealt with, not encouraged by invading innocent countries and waging war on people >who have done nothing to deserve it. I want my children to grow up in a world free from military >oppression and I want a government that understands that the wars of the future are >guerrilla ones which can never be won, even if they are waged for noble purposes (which theirs >never are).
You just completely contradicted yourself in the same paragraph. You don't want the threat, but you don't want to do anything about it, and you want your children to grow up in a militarized world, and you want your government to default to surrender because it can't allow itself to fight guerrilla tactics because somehow they are impossible to employ in the persuit of victory? After such blatant and simple to unravel contradiction, where you are speaking crosswise to yourself without pausing to take a breath, why should we listen to anything else you have to say?
I believe his logic can best be explained as: a)"When you poked the wasp nest you got stung" b)"Poking the bee nest just to get back at the wasps will only make things worse"
This brings me back to my old question: - Why are there no drugs that cure AIDS?
Sure, there's several different treatments to hold the advance of the disease - "take this the rest of your life or die" drugs - but no "take this a couple of times and you're cured" drugs.
From a purelly economical perspective, the gains to be had in selling a drug to someone for the rest of his/her life are much greater than the ones to be had from selling a drug for a limited period.
I cannot avoid thinking that in commercial laboratories, promising research paths to drugs that might cure AIDS have probably been put on hold for the sake of "survival" drugs.
*Vacations in Italy* - "Look a pidgeon" *click* - "Look another pidgeon" *click* - "Look a pidgeon eating" *click* - "Look a pidgeon shitting" *click* - "Look a horny male pidgeon going after a female one" *click* -...
I have worked both in 60h/week and 40h/week situations (different countries).
My experience is that after about 1 month you're being less productive in 10h-days that you were before in 8h-days.
The 60 h/week system ends up being less productive because of:
Increased number of bugs because the developers are tired. These bugs will cause problems which have to be diagnosed, tracked down and fixed - the time doing that pretty much wipes out the extra 20h/week and even causes a negative balance (the further down a "extra effort" project the more tired people are and the worse it gets)
The "lets get over with this" mentality one gets after a while. There ain't any greater source of crappy code, lausy design and buggy or non-performant programs than a developer that just "wants to get over with it"
Faking the hours. One might be in the office till 10 in the evening but that doesn't mean one is actually doing any real work
Management relies on the extra hours to cover any possible time slipages in the project. No time is reserverd to fix unexpected problems (and there are always some), impossible deadlines are common "because people will do that extra effort", no effort is placed in improving work efficiency (for example, developers end up working extra hours to make up for the fact that their crappy machine doesn't have enough memory and trashes all the time).
Crappy management is compensated by developers working extra hours. For example, if in a project of 3 months developers are waiting for machines for 2 weeks (management didn't do any preparation for the project so they didn't order the machines on time), then developers will have to work extra hours to deliver the project on time (more so if the manager in question has already "sold" an irrealistic deadline to his boss)
Little preparation. People simply don't stop and think, they don't set up a plan of attack or look at the big picture - they feel they have no time to do so. The whole project ends up moving in starts and stops - short high intensity stretches of work followed by waiting periods (while you wait for code from somebody else, or input from the customers, or new machines or needed software or whatever) or complete changes of track (when you find out something completely different needs to be done before you can finish what you're doing now) or even going back (when you find out the requirements you just implemented weren't quite right)
Does that mean every comet/asteroid that orbits the sun is technically a planet? If you throw out the size requirement, what other criteria remain for designating something a planet?
Sure, the micro nuclear explosions inside your DXVD-R writer can get a bit loud at times, but the 10000 Libraries Of Congress worth of storage power per disk easely outweight the hassle.
The missing word is adoption (as in 12 Reasons for Growth of Open Source Adoption).
That's because he states mostly reasons for doing open source, not using it (unless you think users really believe that "Open source means standing on the shoulders of giants" or find it a compelling argument ofr open source that "The Internet is also the platform through which open source is developed").
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, in the vast majority of companies the IT department falls within your definition of support people (ie the IT department is a cost center, not a profit center).
This is true for all non-IT companies and even for Software products companies the software development group is often seen as a cost center, since higher revenue correlates much more visibly with bigger/beter sales than with beter software development.
IT Services companies are the exception, not the rule.
The best option is multiple systems, that way there is no single entity that can unilaterally, for whatever strategical self-interest, decide to "pull the plug" on another nation's ability to use satelite based location systems.
So yes, China would be a good one. Also Russia, Western Europe, India, Brasil and whoever else can put a satelite up there - the more the merrier.
I wouldn't trust Western Europe with the keys for one single system (and i was born and bred in these parts), just as i wouldn't trust any other single entity.
As for the strategic interest of the US, the best i can say is: though luck - the world is a lot bigger than just Kentuky and americans ain't more or less deserving than anybody else.
PS: Note that the european decision to go ahead (and spend a couple of billions on it) was most certainly influenced by an increased sense in Europe, over the last few years, that the US will throw their muscle around whenever they want, for whatever self-interest reasons, without listening to anybody else. It's like in high school - some people might fear the bully boy, some people might dislike him, some people might wanna be like him, some might even like him, but hardly anybody trusts him.
You agree to it before you download it via steam. If you purchase the box, read the EULA and still disagree with it, click "I Disagree" and call Valve saying you disagree with their EULA and would like a full refund for the game. You can send them the game and they will refund the purchase price.
Stores will not accept returns, but the company who put out the product usually will.
Will Valve pay me for the time i spent in going out and buying their product?
How about for the hassle of sending it back and getting my money?
How about for the time i spent reading the whole EULA?
Will they pay me for the legal costs incurred in having a lawyer read the whole thing and explain me the legal implications of the EULA (Since it's unlikelly that a layman can fully understand the meaning of the EULA)?
Do i have a full lifetime guarantee that i can give it back if have never installed their product and disagree with the License Agreement?
No???
I thought so,!
A well designed system does not rely on the the assumption that no participant will abuse it. When abusing a system is beneficial to the abuser, any system that has no explicit definition of abuse and/or no negative-feedback (read punishment) on abuse will be BE ABUSED - abusing such a system will only provide rewards and no penalties.
This is as valid for a set of rules encoded as a construct of laws as it is for any set of rules determining usage/access of/to a system.
I sugest some form of punishement should be introduced for patent applications deemed to be frivolous, duplicate or over encompassing.
I personally can't quite make the leap to thinking of anything that I create being the property of everyone, with me having no rights over it at all.
Is there any musician who has not been influenced by the sounds of other musicians?
How about writers - is there any writer that's not been influenced by the writings of others?
How about scientists - would any of the scientific discoveries done today be possible without the previous scientific discoveries?
If intelectual property is indeed property, then any producer of intelectual property (unless he has lived his whole life isolated from the rest of the world) - having transformed somebody else's property into their own - is a thief!
I cannot but remind myself of the phrase "We stand on the shoulders of giants".
I guess the current crop of intelectual property "producers" would rather have "I stand on the shoulders of giants for free. You on the other hand, will have to pay me a fee"
The problem is that in the US and parts of Europe (such as Britain) people in practice work as a rule (ie every week) 50h+/week without any payed overtime.
Interestingly enough, Britain, which is the place in Europe where workers work the most hours per week, actually has the lowest productivity per worked-hour in Europe.
There is an article in The Economist with the title "France's 35-hour work-week is fine, so long as it is voluntary".
Unfortunatly is in their premium content section. If you have a subscription please read it, it's worth it.
The conclusion of the article is that the reduction from 40 to 35h/week in France in 2000 has had too little impact on reducing unemployement and slightly reduced overall economy productivity. Still, i want to call the attention for the following quote from the article:
"French productivity, measured by output per hour, has indeed risen since 2000. Anecdotal evidence suggests that shorter hours at the office are paid for in fewer coffee breaks and smarter work habits."
"Book" in portuguese is almost equal the word Livre, it is Livro.
While Livra is an expeletive used similarly to the (non-portuguese) "sheesh" or "huff" such as "Sheesh! (livra!) That was a hard course"
Livru on the other hand doesn't exist, unless you're trying to spel some regional way of saying livro (because the sounds are similar).
Livri also doesn't exist. It might however be used by people that faking the ability to speak latin (who knows, maybe it even is latin).
As for Livry, let's just say the Y is not used in Portuguese, except maybe for saying "bye, bye" to English hooligans after the EK 2004.
Nah ...
Some of us just stay true to the geek credo and only leave home to resuply on Cheetos and Jolt
More people actually learned about the technologies used instead of just blindly assuming what they use is good. Maybe if more people learned instead of just being a paper MCSE, IT would matter more.
... it doesn't really mater.
Actually it's completly the other way around:
- People shouldn't have to worry about the technologies that they use.
For a company to strategically differenciate itself from the competition it needs to cut costs, improve performance, increase efficiency, detect trends early and act on them swiftly, provide an improved customer service and more.
IT is but a tool here. And as powerfull a tool as IT is, it can't just by itself make a company successful - a lot of other things are required.
Companies don't care about technology. They care about improving they're business processes to get a competitive advantage.
- Is it with a Windows NT machine running Exchange Server
- Is it by figuring out that their organizational chart is unbalanced
- Is it with a Java Web Application on Tomcat; is it by adding a second factory machine to remove the bottleneck on the production line
- Is it with a set of Perl scripts
- Is it by fine tunning the market segment that the sales forces should concentrate on
- Is it a MySQL database
The big questions from a company point of view are:
a) How much will it cost me (both now to make it happen and later to keep it going)?
b) How long will it take to make it happen?
c) What improvement(s) will it bring?
d) Is it worth it?
"What technology it is?" is only important as part of figuring out a) and b).
Going back to the whole strategical differenciation part of this article - improving business processes by deploying IT solutions in the right places can provide a strategical diferentiation. However, it's not the specifics of the technology that provide the big advantages - it's knowing the right places where to deploy the techonology, the right uses to deploy it to and even more important when to use IT and when not to use it.
My serious take on the parent post ...
So some collegue of yours has implemented a (sub)system using the extensible language du jour....
And now you you are tasked with maintaining and improving said (sub)system.
Naturally said person has used the extendability features all over the code, not only downloading "plugins" but also creating he's own extensions. Also that person has left the company alreay. As for documentation, well, there is never enough time for documentation.
So how exactly will a language in which any arbitrary feature can be an extension (which at first sight looks just like a standard feature) help the "next guy in line" to change the code???
PS: Wouldn't function (methods / procedures / whatever) be a form of "language extension"? At least those are clearly visible.
I could be wrong, and since I'm posting on Slashdot, I probably am, but perhaps the reason why that Canon 300D is so much more in the UK or mainland Europe is because of government import taxes that are attached to it before it goes on sale.
....
I live in Holland, and just checked the customs web-site (in dutch)
There is no import tax on digital cameras. There is however a 19% VAT tax.
Note that this is applicable to the whole european free trade zone (the VAT might change from country to country).
Also note the Great Britain has some extra import controls (vs the rest of the EC). Kinda reminds me of that article i saw a couple of years ago that says that cost of living in GB is in average 1.2 times the one in continental europe
10 pounds per album, no long-lasting storage facilities (read pressed CD), no covers, no booklets with the lirics and you can't event play it on your MP3 player!!???
I don't expect this to take over the market any time soon.
> I don't want to live like Israel, fighting militant Muslims round every corner.
>The problem of Muslim extremists exists and needs to be dealt with, not encouraged by invading innocent countries and waging war on people
>who have done nothing to deserve it. I want my children to grow up in a world free from military
>oppression and I want a government that understands that the wars of the future are
>guerrilla ones which can never be won, even if they are waged for noble purposes (which theirs
>never are).
You just completely contradicted yourself in the same paragraph. You don't want the threat, but you don't want to do anything about it, and you want your children to grow up in a militarized world, and you want your government to default to surrender because it can't allow itself to fight guerrilla tactics because somehow they are impossible to employ in the persuit of victory? After such blatant and simple to unravel contradiction, where you are speaking crosswise to yourself without pausing to take a breath, why should we listen to anything else you have to say?
I believe his logic can best be explained as:
a)"When you poked the wasp nest you got stung"
b)"Poking the bee nest just to get back at the wasps will only make things worse"
That's already been solved.
See, all you need is a really long pole and a good support point, and then it's just a question of pulling the short end of the pole.
I'm sure that was the sort of thing they were saying the first time a caveman snatched a burning stick from a lightning-blasted tree.
Actually the precise words were:
- Uga uga, bum bum
This brings me back to my old question:
- Why are there no drugs that cure AIDS?
Sure, there's several different treatments to hold the advance of the disease - "take this the rest of your life or die" drugs - but no "take this a couple of times and you're cured" drugs.
From a purelly economical perspective, the gains to be had in selling a drug to someone for the rest of his/her life are much greater than the ones to be had from selling a drug for a limited period.
I cannot avoid thinking that in commercial laboratories, promising research paths to drugs that might cure AIDS have probably been put on hold for the sake of "survival" drugs.
So how do you explain that your face gets extremely hot ... ... when the results are announced?
I can just see it:
...
*Vacations in Italy*
- "Look a pidgeon" *click*
- "Look another pidgeon" *click*
- "Look a pidgeon eating" *click*
- "Look a pidgeon shitting" *click*
- "Look a horny male pidgeon going after a female one" *click*
-
My experience is that after about 1 month you're being less productive in 10h-days that you were before in 8h-days.
The 60 h/week system ends up being less productive because of:
They're really, really big (bigger than trees), they could eat people with one bite (if there were any at the time) and they really existed.
What's there not to be fascinated about dinosaurs?
Does that mean every comet/asteroid that orbits the sun is technically a planet? If you throw out the size requirement, what other criteria remain for designating something a planet?
A planet is not a fruit.
Blue lasers are lame.
Real hardcore early adopters uses X-Ray lasers!
Sure, the micro nuclear explosions inside your DXVD-R writer can get a bit loud at times, but the 10000 Libraries Of Congress worth of storage power per disk easely outweight the hassle.
That's the real title from the article.
The missing word is adoption (as in 12 Reasons for Growth of Open Source Adoption).
That's because he states mostly reasons for doing open source, not using it (unless you think users really believe that "Open source means standing on the shoulders of giants" or find it a compelling argument ofr open source that "The Internet is also the platform through which open source is developed").
Now with a 4 year engineering degree I'm a part of the fucking unwashed masses
Have you considered bathing?
Trust me, you don't need and MBA to take a bath.