The same rule that applies to any IT project, also applies to any other kind of thing that can be improved upon:
10% of the effort will produce 90% of the improvements
90% of the effort will produce the other 10% of the improvements.
This will apply to both producing the ultimate Web-browsed and to improving long-distance communications. Any kind of incremental improvements will obey this rule.
The way to go around this is by revolutionary improvements - when creating something totally new you will find yourself in the "smaller investment yields biggest gain" part of the process.
I believe that the point of the author is that no such break-the-mold improvement has been made in the past half-century.
I suspect this kind of study will be used more to prove the necessity of directly reducing debugging time (by reducing QA quality and telling people to "waste less time debugging", instead of being used to promote better analysis and design as a way to inderectly reduce debugging time.
Then again, it's probably because i'm a non-believer in management strategic abilities... *sigh*
However this article is not about what Junkyard Wars is (which would be equivalent to reviewing a book), it's publicizing that a certain TV channel is going to show something (the equivalent of saying that book publisher X is going to put out a new edition of book Y).
It's news, but is low-level, localized kind of news - i had the idea that Slashdot wasn't only for small comunities (even though most comments/news seem to be US-centric)
If company A has the patent on gene X1, why should company B try to develop new applications from gene X1???
If a company patents a gene or sequence, the potencial revenues that any other company would have if it developed an application from that gene or sequence are reduced. The tendency will be that each company will only investigate applications from their own "pool of patented genes" (to maximize returns).
How can the reduction in the number of resources being thrown at a certain problem (e.g. crack a certain gene) increase research eficiency?
If two or more genes which are necessary for a certain process are patented by different companies how many years do you think will be needed before any application is developed for those genes? (I bet it's more than 17...)
Worse, in this situation it is quite likely that one or more of the companies involved will start researching THEIR OWN GENE (it's their's 'cause they bought it) only to find later on that they need another gene which is OWNED by another company - quite likelly they will just scrap the investigation and go try a "more promising" gene (what a waste)
Flexible time is often just a way for a company to make it's people work more hours without any extra pay (in practice they're reducing the per-hour salary).
Some management geniouses out there believe that a worker putting in 16h/day does twice as much as one that puts in 8h/day. "Unfortunatly" people get tired, and tired people do less - worse, if you don't rest enough outside work, next day you come in already tired...
On the other hand if you:
Have the social skills and the know-how to defend yourself against this kind of management
Have had the luck or the inteligence of moving yourself into a company were this doesn't happen (congratulations)
Have a dolphin like brain or a bionic brain and thus need no sleep
then flextime is great. In this situation, you can work 9-to-5 everyday if you really want to (thus having the same results as with fixed schedules) or, go as far as - if the flex is really flex - come in at 2pm leave at 10pm.
Basically flextime moves the choice of schedule from the employer to the employee!
On the other hand, with flextime you don't have an external pressure to get up early, thus demanding stronger willpower 8-)
3. browser ssl - it doesn't matter if the site's key is 128-bit; if the browser functions at 40-bit, then that's the key size used for encryption. This is a problem with all ssl-based connections.
is also flawed. Most new web servers incorporate "step-up" technology, which will "pull" the client crypto up to the level of the server.
FROM the IBM HTTP Server documentation:
Stronger encryption option for financial and banking Web servers
When designated as a financial or banking Web server, the North American edition of the HTTP Server can exploit the strong encryption capabilities in the domestic and international versions of Netscape Navigator 4.x and Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.x. To use this function, you must purchase a special digital certificate from VeriSign called a Global Server ID.
For regular Web transactions, the Netscape and Microsoft export browsers can use 40-bit encryption only for Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) transactions. However, when the server uses a VeriSign Global Server ID for its SSL certificate, the export browsers can use stronger levels of encryption of 128-bits or greater. This enables a server with a Global Server ID to communicate at the highest SSL encryption level with both domestic and international versions of the Netscape and Microsoft browsers.
International financial and banking customers of the HTTP Server who want to use this function must contact IBM for an export license to obtain and use
When creating/updating the content can a designer work on it with minimal support from a programmer?
You need (1) to implement a high-traffic web site which serves dinamic information.
You need (2) if it's oriented to the average consumer.
You need (3) to minimize maintenance costs and speedup changes to the "looks" of the site. The situation in which a programmer has to be called to change the position of an icon in a web page is a very very bad way of maintaining a site.
There should be loads of implementations out there that have (1) and (2). I believe that the next level in quality is having (3).
I doubt it very much that an ideal solution can be found, but you can allways compensate by:
Throwing more computing power at the problem
Staying with less flashy, more simple looks
Teaching the designer some basic computer principles like "for cycles"
Everything is flexible, and what's best for my needs might not be the best for others.
Still, i bet there's a lot of people out there which either have used something like it, or would like to use it.
My first reaction to this kind of articles is always: "I'm safe here in Europe from the problems with the U.S. patents office"
Naturaly, the next tought that pops-up is: "Ooops... There's a big bunch of treaties to make patents valid worldwide
That get's me worried!!!
When, and if, the problems with the U.S. patents office are sorted out, the problem will move elsewere - if patents are global in reach, companies will simply try to patent things (anything) in the places in which they are more likely to be granted so as to increase the number of worldwide patents they have. Competition between "patent heavens" (places were patents are easely granted), will drive restrictions on the granting of patents to zero.
I can just see the great patents of the future:
"A method to obtain the number of elements of the union of two groups from the number of elements from each inicial group" (sum)
"A method of maintaining a human body in the surface of a liquid without auxiliary equipment" (swiming)
The problem is, that the people they lost, might very much be some of the better amongst them - this is not good for any company.
The article seems to indicate that Rambus adoption was completly a high level decision, and that the input from the lower levels (the engineering team) was not only disregarded but also, for those that persisted in voicing their diagreement with the technology, punished.
Altough i believe that choosing Rambus was a bad move, i think that:
"outsourcing inovation" (to Rambus Inc)
Ignoring or even supressing internal opinions
were by far the worst moves that Intel could've done.
Think about this:
It's more than obvious that Rambus Inc exists not to serve the interests of Intel, but to serve the interests of it's own members and/or shareholders
Ignoring the opinions that come from experience, and taking punitive measures against those amongst Intel that were brave enough to stick to their opinions, will just push out from Intel the most knowleadgeable and daring - probably the same persons that are more willing to voice/try new and inovative ideas - and leave Intel with less free spirits and more zombies. Zombies do not inovate.
Te current bottleneck with Peer-to-Peer technology is bandwidth not computing power.
Peer-to-Peer (i refuse to use the acronym) moves the bandwidth consumption for all those big machines connected directly to the Internet Mainbone to a bunch of small machines, most of them connected to punny 56K (minus noise because of lausy telephone lines) connections.
Where before you had
Big pipe <--> 1000 Small pipes
you now have
1000 Small Pipes <--> 1000 Small pipes
an average of 1 inbound and 1 outbound connections for each, meaning half the (already small) bandwidth.
This will eat up your bandwith, not your computing power (in fact it will speed up your computer - you will have to wait twice as long for the things, meaning more free cycles to do other usefull things like encoding MP3s).
Peer-to-Peer will more likely be a boom for high speed ISPs than for Intel.
I would say that stress cascades down from management, clients, whatever...
Think about it, if a manager gets a sudden problem/request:
Who will her/she turn to? - the ones under him/her
When should it be solved? - yesterday
If the ones under the manager are also managers, they will just pass the problem downwards (sometimes sidewards) until it gets to the bottom of the food chain.
Now, good managers are the ones that try to check things out before sending them to the next link in the chain. They will also use prevention to try to minimize the number of problems (think testing), and reserve time for emeregencies (which always happen, no matter how much prevention you do).
When somebody gets a whole lot of problems falling down in their lap
Suddenly "time for emergencies" disapears
Next "prevention" goes down the drain, including (for us coders) proper design.
The more you skip on problem prevention and contention, the more problems you get tomorrow (and yes, tomorrow does indeed come).
This in turn will lead you to cut even further in preevention
...
This happens not only to managers, but to everybody. How many times do you skip proper design - or even basic design - because the project time is too short? How many of those projects finish up in time? How many times do you end up redesigning the data model (or should i say adjusting the data model) in the middle of a project?
All this goes down to the ability to keep calm and think rationaly under fire. The more higher up in the hierarchy you are, the more important this is. Unfortunatly, this does not seem to be taken in account when assigning a person to his or her position...
My case was exactly the same as the first case in the article:
Long hours
Complex project, release time comming, high pressure situation going on for months. Two other projects in paralel
Went on vacations (i was almost burn out so i pressed my employee to accept me going on vacations)
Came back, project in trouble, things even worse than before
Finished project and left (5 weeks after coming from vacations)
The happy ending:
Moved to another country
Earn 2,5 times as much
Work 40 hours per week, period!!!
Learned where my limits are
Learned how to defend myself from management stupidity (
Mg: "How much time do you think this will take?"
Me: "One month"
Mg: "This is a simple enough thing, surelly it won't take that much time..."
Me: "It will take one month!"
Mg: "This is a really important thing, we're expected to release this in three weeks"
Me: "It will take one month no matter what, it cannot be done in less than that."
Mg: "Look, i'll put it down in planning as taking 3 weeks, and we'll try to do it"
Me: "You can put down whatever you want, it will still take one month. If anybody asks me i will say that i think it will take one month, if [Mg. manager name here] asks me i will say that it will take one month, and that task WILL take one month"
The ideal work enviroment should be artistic - art is above all.
Just think:
Chairs with seats with a 30 degree inclination
Tables with spikes on the sides
Dark and moisty
Screams as enviroment music
Once in a while someone is dragged out by masked men, screaming...
No elevators - just circular narrow stairs
Stone walls
Several kinds of plants - all of them moss
A rest room where you have people in middle-age like poles, and you can throw rotten tomatos at them ( you can put there any workers that spent more than 2 minutes in the bathroom )
Imagine that it is legally possible to do something like this, then this can be used also in the following way:
Company A give their latest specs for "the killer consumer product of the century" to be reviewed to website B.
Website B puts up a review that basically says "This thing is trash, company A must think their costumers are all fools, just look at these specs"
Company A retaliates by sending the a letter to website B saying something like: "Those specs are a trade secret, some nasty PR employee has leaked them, and whe're going to presecute him/her to the full extend of the law. Remove those specs from your site or we will presecute you too"
In the post that contains the text of the specification, insert the full EULA, and after it put a line like this: "Reading the remaining of this article signifies your agreement with the rules and conditions stated above" Quite possibly that might solve it... 8-)
Actually the current ( hopefully not so current anymore ) trend with tech-stocks seems very much like a pyramid scheme:
The first ones to get in earn the more money
There's nothing really being produced ( or in this case, much less than investment seen justifies )
The more people get in the more the ones that are allready in gain ( and at all levels of the pyramid )
You get in hopping that someone gets in after you ( thus raising the stock price ) so you will make more money.
The reasoning behind getting into tech-stocks is the same as for the pyramid scheme:
Everybody that's in is making money
The faster you get in the more money you stand to get
Then again pyramid schemes tend to fall down when there isn't no more money is being put into the scheme - which in the case of the stock market can take some years to happen.
Actually here in Holland, there is a system in which you can load the pre-paid mobile with more time by buying a card with a unique code number. You then just phone the info services for your phone company, dial in the card code, and automagically you get in your phone account as much money as the price of the card.
If you buy a f40 card you get f40. A f80 card will get you f80.
So you can still keep your phone private.
Then again, it's likelly that in the very least, the mobile phone company stores the cell id's in which you used your mobile ( which in normal use will map to the area where you live and the area where you work ), so if you need to have maximum privacy:
Buy the phone anonymously... ( like DreamerFi said )
Buy any cards under the same conditions
Don't use neither the mobile phone nor the GSM card in (or near) your house or your work
Get rid of the mobile after you've used it once - if your mobile is under active surveilance, it's possible to, either from your phone's IMEI (mobile phone id), or from your GSM card ID, determine first, in which cell ( geographical area ) you are, and then, by using more specialized equipment, exactly in which coordinates you are.
Slashdot Mirror
10% of the effort will produce 90% of the improvements
90% of the effort will produce the other 10% of the improvements.
This will apply to both producing the ultimate Web-browsed and to improving long-distance communications. Any kind of incremental improvements will obey this rule.
The way to go around this is by revolutionary improvements - when creating something totally new you will find yourself in the "smaller investment yields biggest gain" part of the process.
I believe that the point of the author is that no such break-the-mold improvement has been made in the past half-century.
Then again, it's probably because i'm a non-believer in management strategic abilities ... *sigh*
Multiple top level registars - that's the future!!!
I like it.
However this article is not about what Junkyard Wars is (which would be equivalent to reviewing a book), it's publicizing that a certain TV channel is going to show something (the equivalent of saying that book publisher X is going to put out a new edition of book Y).
It's news, but is low-level, localized kind of news - i had the idea that Slashdot wasn't only for small comunities (even though most comments/news seem to be US-centric)
You mean that when i click on the "Non-flash version of this page" link i'm loosing out on my web experience???
If a company patents a gene or sequence, the potencial revenues that any other company would have if it developed an application from that gene or sequence are reduced. The tendency will be that each company will only investigate applications from their own "pool of patented genes" (to maximize returns).
How can the reduction in the number of resources being thrown at a certain problem (e.g. crack a certain gene) increase research eficiency?
If two or more genes which are necessary for a certain process are patented by different companies how many years do you think will be needed before any application is developed for those genes? (I bet it's more than 17 ...)
Worse, in this situation it is quite likely that one or more of the companies involved will start researching THEIR OWN GENE (it's their's 'cause they bought it) only to find later on that they need another gene which is OWNED by another company - quite likelly they will just scrap the investigation and go try a "more promising" gene (what a waste)
"I have a question for you but you don't seem to be around. I'll try to sort it out myself, but if i can't, then i'll contact you tomorrow."
That will get them!!!
P.S. Naturaly you always manage to sort those things out ...
Some management geniouses out there believe that a worker putting in 16h/day does twice as much as one that puts in 8h/day. "Unfortunatly" people get tired, and tired people do less - worse, if you don't rest enough outside work, next day you come in already tired ...
On the other hand if you:
- Have the social skills and the know-how to defend yourself against this kind of management
- Have had the luck or the inteligence of moving yourself into a company were this doesn't happen (congratulations)
- Have a dolphin like brain or a bionic brain and thus need no sleep
then flextime is great. In this situation, you can work 9-to-5 everyday if you really want to (thus having the same results as with fixed schedules) or, go as far as - if the flex is really flex - come in at 2pm leave at 10pm.Basically flextime moves the choice of schedule from the employer to the employee!
On the other hand, with flextime you don't have an external pressure to get up early, thus demanding stronger willpower 8-)
Couple this to a low radar and IR profile and you have a pretty good change success.
Also this can be used to safely resuply ground troops in dangerous areas (different payload, same principle)
I doubt doing this is in the best interest of defense contractors though - it would imply less contracts to build Tomahawks.
Just deploy your white noise generator, pump up the power, and watch those birds falling out of the sky ...
Nothing like a good jamming session!!!
Stronger encryption option for financial and banking Web servers
When designated as a financial or banking Web server, the North American edition of the HTTP Server can exploit the strong encryption capabilities in the domestic and international versions of Netscape Navigator 4.x and Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.x. To use this function, you must purchase a special digital certificate from VeriSign called a Global Server ID.
For regular Web transactions, the Netscape and Microsoft export browsers can use 40-bit encryption only for Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) transactions. However, when the server uses a VeriSign Global Server ID for its SSL certificate, the export browsers can use stronger levels of encryption of 128-bits or greater. This enables a server with a Global Server ID to communicate at the highest SSL encryption level with both domestic and international versions of the Netscape and Microsoft browsers.
International financial and banking customers of the HTTP Server who want to use this function must contact IBM for an export license to obtain and use
You need (1) to implement a high-traffic web site which serves dinamic information.
You need (2) if it's oriented to the average consumer.
You need (3) to minimize maintenance costs and speedup changes to the "looks" of the site. The situation in which a programmer has to be called to change the position of an icon in a web page is a very very bad way of maintaining a site.
There should be loads of implementations out there that have (1) and (2). I believe that the next level in quality is having (3).
I doubt it very much that an ideal solution can be found, but you can allways compensate by:
- Throwing more computing power at the problem
- Staying with less flashy, more simple looks
- Teaching the designer some basic computer principles like "for cycles"
Everything is flexible, and what's best for my needs might not be the best for others.Still, i bet there's a lot of people out there which either have used something like it, or would like to use it.
Naturaly, the next tought that pops-up is: " Ooops ... There's a big bunch of treaties to make patents valid worldwide
That get's me worried!!!
When, and if, the problems with the U.S. patents office are sorted out, the problem will move elsewere - if patents are global in reach, companies will simply try to patent things (anything) in the places in which they are more likely to be granted so as to increase the number of worldwide patents they have. Competition between "patent heavens" (places were patents are easely granted), will drive restrictions on the granting of patents to zero.
I can just see the great patents of the future:
Excuse me, i have to go and throwup now ...
The article seems to indicate that Rambus adoption was completly a high level decision, and that the input from the lower levels (the engineering team) was not only disregarded but also, for those that persisted in voicing their diagreement with the technology, punished.
Altough i believe that choosing Rambus was a bad move, i think that:
- "outsourcing inovation" (to Rambus Inc)
- Ignoring or even supressing internal opinions
were by far the worst moves that Intel could've done.Think about this:
Peer-to-Peer (i refuse to use the acronym) moves the bandwidth consumption for all those big machines connected directly to the Internet Mainbone to a bunch of small machines, most of them connected to punny 56K (minus noise because of lausy telephone lines) connections.
Where before you had
Big pipe <--> 1000 Small pipes
you now have
1000 Small Pipes <--> 1000 Small pipes
an average of 1 inbound and 1 outbound connections for each, meaning half the (already small) bandwidth.
This will eat up your bandwith, not your computing power (in fact it will speed up your computer - you will have to wait twice as long for the things, meaning more free cycles to do other usefull things like encoding MP3s).
Peer-to-Peer will more likely be a boom for high speed ISPs than for Intel.
Think about it, if a manager gets a sudden problem/request:
- Who will her/she turn to? - the ones under him/her
- When should it be solved? - yesterday
If the ones under the manager are also managers, they will just pass the problem downwards (sometimes sidewards) until it gets to the bottom of the food chain.Now, good managers are the ones that try to check things out before sending them to the next link in the chain. They will also use prevention to try to minimize the number of problems (think testing), and reserve time for emeregencies (which always happen, no matter how much prevention you do).
When somebody gets a whole lot of problems falling down in their lap
- Suddenly "time for emergencies" disapears
- Next "prevention" goes down the drain, including (for us coders) proper design.
- The more you skip on problem prevention and contention, the more problems you get tomorrow (and yes, tomorrow does indeed come).
- This in turn will lead you to cut even further in preevention
- ...
This happens not only to managers, but to everybody. How many times do you skip proper design - or even basic design - because the project time is too short? How many of those projects finish up in time? How many times do you end up redesigning the data model (or should i say adjusting the data model) in the middle of a project?All this goes down to the ability to keep calm and think rationaly under fire. The more higher up in the hierarchy you are, the more important this is. Unfortunatly, this does not seem to be taken in account when assigning a person to his or her position ...
Netherlands
My case was exactly the same as the first case in the article:
The happy ending:
- Mg: "How much time do you think this will take?"
- Me: "One month"
- Mg: "This is a simple enough thing, surelly it won't take that much time..."
- Me: "It will take one month!"
- Mg: "This is a really important thing, we're expected to release this in three weeks"
- Me: "It will take one month no matter what, it cannot be done in less than that."
- Mg: "Look, i'll put it down in planning as taking 3 weeks, and we'll try to do it"
- Me: "You can put down whatever you want, it will still take one month. If anybody asks me i will say that i think it will take one month, if [Mg. manager name here] asks me i will say that it will take one month, and that task WILL take one month"
)P.S.It did took one month
Just think:
Company A give their latest specs for "the killer consumer product of the century" to be reviewed to website B.
Website B puts up a review that basically says "This thing is trash, company A must think their costumers are all fools, just look at these specs"
Company A retaliates by sending the a letter to website B saying something like: "Those specs are a trade secret, some nasty PR employee has leaked them, and whe're going to presecute him/her to the full extend of the law. Remove those specs from your site or we will presecute you too"
What a great censurship weapon
In the post that contains the text of the specification, insert the full EULA, and after it put a line like this: "Reading the remaining of this article signifies your agreement with the rules and conditions stated above" Quite possibly that might solve it ... 8-)
- The first ones to get in earn the more money
- There's nothing really being produced ( or in this case, much less than investment seen justifies )
- The more people get in the more the ones that are allready in gain ( and at all levels of the pyramid )
- You get in hopping that someone gets in after you ( thus raising the stock price ) so you will make more money.
The reasoning behind getting into tech-stocks is the same as for the pyramid scheme:- Everybody that's in is making money
- The faster you get in the more money you stand to get
Then again pyramid schemes tend to fall down when there isn't no more money is being put into the scheme - which in the case of the stock market can take some years to happen.If you buy a f40 card you get f40.
A f80 card will get you f80.
So you can still keep your phone private.
Then again, it's likelly that in the very least, the mobile phone company stores the cell id's in which you used your mobile ( which in normal use will map to the area where you live and the area where you work ), so if you need to have maximum privacy: