Time and again MS is trying to enter a market, only to sustain huge losses in the beginning
Yeah, I'm with you. MS Word was a big loser at first against Word Perfect...
ow Bing, before the Zune (ended in failure), the Xbox (lost a lot of money, still alive though, can't imagine it has made them any money overall even if it would be profitable by now), and before I'm sure they lost heaps of money entering the office suite market with OpenOffice, the webmail market with Hotmail, and so on. Only their OS business has made a constant profit it seems. And Office is doing well as well. But that's it.
WTF? Microsoft's model has *always* been:
1) Be the platform everybody else uses. 2) Watch new companies prove business models, 3) Spend the money made in #1 like water to build in the (now proven) business model, 4) Advertise like crazy. 5) Profit!
On the other hand I have never heard about serious losses on Apple's side around the introduction of the iPod. Sure they lost money on some products, but not this kind of numbers.
I guess you never heard of the 1990s?
Sun has likely lost money on development of StarOffice, now OpenOffice.org, but their product is steadily making inroads and I don't think they are still pumping much money in it. If only because they're not such a rich company any more.
Didn't you hear that there is no "Sun" anymore. It's now called "Oracle"... how's life under that rock?
Netscape burnt and died, and from its ashes Firefox has risen. Making heaps of money, going strong, doing well.
Mozilla (the "for-profit" arm of the Mozilla foundation) made about 72 million. While not bad, it's hardly "heaps of money" for a product used by too many millions to count. For a comparison, Mozilla's annual profits are roughly equivalent to what Microsoft profits in a single day. I'm not saying this to knock Mozilla particularly, since I type this in Firefox 3.6. But this "heaps of money" thing is just.... you know.
"Competing on the world stage" may not be cheap, but I think it may help if Microsoft starts to develop their own products and their own ideas, instead of an "iPod killer", a "Google competitor", etc. That seems to me a failure from the start.
When has Microsoft done any different? See their business model above. MS's big deal with IBM was a resell of a hackish copy of a the dominant operating system - CPM.
...MS is not exactly a company that is innovative these days.
... or at any other point in its highly profitable history.
Printing requires a certain overhead cost. Once that overhead cost is met, the cost of printing drops dramatically. But for many years my printing threshold has been far below that overhead cost.
See, to print, you have to have a printer. I'm often mobile; I sure don't want to carry another 15 pound device plus supplies. And printing is unreliable. Ink cartridges are expensive, and prone to drying out and frequent replacement and the associated trip to the office supplies store. Printing is SLOW. You have to set up drivers, you have to plug stuff in, you have to dicker with drivers and print queues when paper doesn't feed properly. Printing over a network is a pain. You have to have drivers for the network printer, and you have to spend anywhere from 10 to 45 minutes setting it all up in the first place.
And then, when you are done, you have a document in your hand. You can't instantly send it *anywhere* save by digitizing it. (EG: faxing, or scan/email) Sure, you might need a signature on it, but once it's digitized, a signature is easily pasted on the document in its original (soft copy) format anyway.
So, why did you do all that, again?
And then there's quality! When I print, it's highly likely to be because I'm making a presentation. To produce *nice* high quality prints, you need a nice, high quality printer, preferably color. For somebody for whom a ream lasts for at least a year, it's hard to justify spending hundreds of dollars in order to print on $5 of paper. So I find that it's easier and cheaper to print to PDF and then email it that to the local Kinko's or other store. I get the best quality prints in color, on demand, without dickering with drivers, and just having to drive about 1/4 mile to get it, on the one or two days in a quarter I might need it. Queue it up around lunch, and it's a quick stop on the way back with my sammich.
I could go on with faxes - receiving faxes with a "fax machine" has a slew of problems. If your paper jams, your fax is hosed. Since the fax may well be a contract worth many thousands of dollars, this is a non-starter. Also, paper faxes can be lost. They can't be reprinted without the original. They aren't automatically archived for later review. They can't be easily viewed in a remote office without being faxed again, along with the problems of quality degradation, etc.
But soft-copy faxes carry NONE of these problems. Done right, a soft-copy fax system is redundant, multi-point, and accessible from anywhere with proper security authentication. We made this switch years ago, and never looked back!
Printing sucks. I do everything I can to eliminate paper!
i wonder if there should be some kind of public domain requirement for obsoleting stuff like that. Basically, when production is shut down, all specs and production processes are handed over to some archive in human readable form.
There is. Or at least, there is supposed to be. And strangely, around these parts, most everybody cries out against it and would rather it disappeared.
It's called a 'patent'. Of course, there are some limitations - the language around patents require a clear, exact description of the invention, and somehow, source code doesn't fall under these constraints, even if most patents nowadays are software patents.
But the idea of what you are looking for *exactly* matches the point of patent!
That was my thought. "Thousands of dollars" seemed ridiculously low. I'd be highly surprised if it wasn't a loss of at least tens of millions of dollars?
I wouldn't be surprised if this was the point where future historians mark McAfee's final demise? I really don't understand why anybody would use such a product so utterly poisoned with suckage. Remember when McAfee was good? Back, in the beautiful days before Norton took it over and turned it into a bloated whale of a product that somehow manages to miss obvious infections while simultaneously slowing down your system more than any virus ever would?
I wonder if you could actually count the amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere due to increased system load on computers (slowly) running their product?
Phones and portable computers haven't, which is why Apple's attempt to start locking them down pisses people off.
What? I can scarcely THINK of a marketplace that has traditionally been more "locked down" than phones. Verizon/ATT/Sprint have long been known for locking down the phones and removing features (such as bluetooth) so that you have to download ring tones at $1 each rather than download them from your bluetooth capable computer. (for free)
In fact, when the iPhone first came out, it was the first phone to NOT be locked down to within an inch of its life by the carrier! You might be pissy about the lockdown that Apple places on the phone, but phones themselves have always been a crappy, locked-down, consumer-unfriendly environment in the United States!
Android threatens to upset all of that, and the foundation for Android is... ARM. This is not much different than Oracle buying Sun to put down MySQL. (which, you have to admit, is at least PART of the motivation of Oracle to purchase Sun!)
Thinking about it, it's how capitalism works. Accountants, lawyers, marketing droids, most managers, bankers 90% of government employees, etc,etc. None of them do anything productive. They have a job JUST because there's a glitch on the system.
If that's what you think of Accountants, lawyers, marketing droids, managers, and bankers, it's because you haven't a clue yet.
Are you in business? Because if you are, your accountant had better save you lots more money than he/she costs. And no, I'm not talking about complex tax laws, I'm talking about simple asset and expense management. Companies which aren't tightly controlled in accounting burn through cash like you wouldn't believe. It's the accountants who (ahem) account for it all and help control expenses and maximize return on investment!
Your lawyer is there to advise you of the rules of the road. And those rules generally aren't arbitrary, they are complex and detailed because reality is complex and detailed. Laws generally get passed in response to real situations that have really happened! But do you know this? Sorry, of course you don't. And that's why when you are in legal trouble, you get a lawyer. Just the other day, I had a 2 hour interview with my lawyer save me some $100,000 cash. You think I don't value my laywer?
Marketing droids are (I hate to say) some of the most valuable members of an organization. Sure, some are idiots - such as those running the current Verizon ads (which seem to go out of their way to convince me NOT to buy Verizon hi-speed smart phones) but they are the exception. They are there to generate demand for the products of an organization. If they weren't there, selling the widgets that the engineers produce, there wouldn't be any need for engineers to produce anything because nobody would want them. They wouldn't even know that they exist! (which, even the Verizon idiots are succeeding at)
And so on. Each profession has its place, and each presents value to your company and your society. Generally, this value is greater than the cost of the salary, etc. of the individual(s) involved. As in all things involving people, there is some corruption. There are lawyers who are a waste of oxygen, just as there are engineers who are a waste of perfectly good coffee. (See Wally from Dilbert comics, for a stereotyped example)
But you can't dismiss them all, because they actually DO something, even if you aren't aware of what it is, yet!
Hey guys; remember how it was supposed to be a fast browser?
While FF has certainly gained features, it hasn't slowed down while doing so. In fact, it's seen fairly dramatic performance INCREASES. FF hasn't gotten any slower; expectations have sharply risen.
We now expect to be able to program a 3D FPS in Javascript and CSS. The very idea was considered laughable just a few years ago. I've spent the last year building a statistical computation software that's entirely web-based, and entirely written in javascript. This, too, would have been a laughable goal if not for the dramatic performance improvements in FF and Chrome. (We don't currently support IE8 because it's just too slow; hopefully IE9 will be worthy of supporting)
Probably the singlemost important rule in business is a simple one: sell what's cheap! Sounds pretty simple, but any successful business has, as its core component, finding something that it can offer cheaper than is available elsewhere, and then offering it at a markup.
When you buy an iPad for $500, you do so because the easiest way for you to get whatever it is the iPad offers cheaper/easier from Apple than any other reasonable channel. When you buy a tomato from the local grocery for $0.59, you do so because it would cost you more to get it elsewhere. By specializing in making iPads or distributing tomatoes, companies develop ways to reduce the cost of obtaining goods, and thus make it easier for products to be obtained by everyone.
This is simple Econ 101 type stuff, but it's something that's easily forgotten, even by guys who majored as MBAs.
The truth is that the cheapest thing Verizon could possibly offer is data. There is basically no per unit cost for transmitting data. The cost is so low that it might as well be free, at least for Verizon. The only cost that there is for transmitting data are flat-rate running costs of infrastructure development and maintenance, and keeping everything plugged in.
Think about it: 10 years ago, you might have had a 10 Mbit hub at your home or office. 5 years ago, you might have had a 100 Mbit hub, and now you'd probably have a 1000 Mbit hub. The actual cost to you is the same, regardless of the hub speed. The 10 Mbit hub cost around $100 and used perhaps 200 mw of power. The 100 Mbit hub cost around $100 and used perhaps 200 mw of power. The 1000 Mbit hub cost around $100 and used perhaps 200 mw of power.
Are you noticing a trend, here? The only real "running" cost of transmitting data is the relatively flat cost of power. Upgrading equipment is an expense that actually makes data transmission cheaper!
So here's Verizon, swearing to "go after" the customers that most use a product/service that has no meaningful unit cost. (WTF?!) This is blindingly stupid! Verizon runs the real risk of being side-swiped by (among other companies) Google and/or companies like Metro PCS who offer their own data networks. Think this isn't serious? think again: MANY communities have inquired about Google fiber Internet!
Sometimes, people just can't seem to help but trip over their own idiocy...
I'm typing this on my laptop running Fedora Core 12. After recent Fedora builds (from about FC 6) getting successively worse, I was teetering right on the edge of giving up on Fedora and getting a Mac. All my scripts and stuff assume a Fedora environment, (EG: yum) so switching to Ubuntu wouldn't have been significantly easier than jumping to MacOS.
Fedora 12 brought me back to the fold!
Drivers drive. Network managers actually manage networks. And widgets do proper widgetting. It's back to being what a computer O/S outta be - largely invisible!
I can't comment on Ubuntu, but I can say, to the Red Hat team: nice work, guys!
Re:CmdrTaco drags big brass ones along the ground
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iPad Review
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The iPad has only one target: to sell.
Time will tell if it makes its target. I've seen one, and I won't be buying. It's too big for "on the go", I don't want to carry yet another gadget, and it's both too pricey to be a convenience buy, and too limited to be anything more exciting than my Android phone, except that it requires either wifi or an expensive data plan that I can't share with my laptop. It's big enough to be categorized more like my laptop since it doesn't fit into my pocket, but not capable enough to compare well. I can't use it as a remote control, so it doesn't replace my TV remote, either.
So it's an expensive, half-assed replacement for cheaper devices that do a better job in their respective areas. (But then, I don't have an iPod either. I use (and love) my Creative Zen!)
We are an ASP er, "cloud computing" (ahem) vendor. We have a cluster of computers to handle our proprietary application stack, which is now around 100,000 lines of code, with over 100 clients averaging around 200 full-time users each.
We've been at a "sweet spot" for several years now. Upgrading every few years, we've gone from dual core systems, to quad-core, to our current mix of quad and 8-core servers. During this time, our database schema has grown from around 50 to around 300 tables, the database size has mushroomed, and the number (and size) of clients have grown rapidly.
But we've served a much larger customer base with a much larger and more complicated schema without an effective increase in the total amount of equipment!
Annual hardware costs remain flat, administration costs remain flat, while the bottom line increases - can you say "win/win"!?!?
Patents aren't perfect. No form of IP is - all forms of IP are a compromise.
But in large part, (perhaps excepting software patents and MAYBE gene patents) the concept of a "patent" gets it RIGHT!!!
In the area of pharmaceuticals, If you do away with patents, then you lose the endless supply of 20-year-old innovation you now know as "generic drugs" because the deal with patents is that, in exchange for FULL AND COMPLETE DISCLOSURE of the patented concept, the owner/holder of the patent gets a reasonable amount of time (20 years in most cases) to exploit the patent for profit. At the end of that 20 years, the patent concepts become public domain and are carefully documented for the public domain.
Just tonight, I took a generic form of Coreg for my blood pressure. It's a highly effective drug that cost millions to develop. Because the original drug was patented, the method of producing it was well documented and in the public domain. The result was a box of pills that extend my life at a cost of just $7 per month!
Do away with drug patents and you won't see cheaper drugs, you'll see more expensive drugs, and a rapid halt of forward progress.
There's nothing that easy about MS technologies. They're superficially easy, sure. But there's quite a lot underneath that.
Well, I certainly agree with you there! But what bothers me more about Windows technology isn't that it's as complex/powerful/intricate as comparable Linux technologies, as much as it's opaque.
You get a binary to install, and there you go. Enjoy, and hope to God that somebody at the other end of the 800 tech support line has mercy on your poor, sorry soul. Because you have virtually no recourse otherwise.
Compare/contrast with more open solutions, which provide options when the chips are down. How many times I've pined for a decent documented config file when rooting thru the menus to fix some obscure problem!
Parent post is probably overly cynical, and in some ways contrary to my experience. He's right that experience helps.
1) If you know how to program, and are actually any good at it, you will have no trouble finding work.
2) As far as I can tell, there are, if anything, more opportunities now than ever! Many companies are feeling the pinch of the recession and are looking for increased dependency on Internet-based applications to cut costs, improve service, and get more sales. As a result, these companies are competing HARD for developers who can do the job for cheap. As a programmer/consultant turned company programmer/executive, I've turned away more work than I could possibly do in a year in the last 3 months alone. All were from companies and people I've worked with in the past who were struggling and trying to figure out how to "get ahead".
3) Parent poster is right about a resume. If it's good, it will get you a phone call and possibly a personal interview. But if you want the job, you'd better have "the stuff" - the ability to work on a project and get it done.
Want my advice, as Chief of Technology in a successful and rapidly growing company? Start a project or get heavily involved in one. There are lots out there! Troll SourceForge until you find a struggling project that sounds interesting, and be the lead man for a year or so. There are literally thousands and thousands of opportunities there, and they will impress if/when you present them.
And make sure it's an actual project and not a CD catalog for personal CD collections! If you do this, you will show the ability to get involved with a project, solve something significant, and the experience you'll get reading somebody else's stuff will do wonders for your skills...
I would offer you a shot at joining our company, but we're not hiring at the moment. In any event, I wish you the best of luck!
Virtually no-one who's spent any time analyzing and working with large amounts of data has a good word to say about SQL.
I've spent 10 years developing intensively relational applications with SQL. I love it!
It was designed from the start as a language that would be integrated into others, and yet simple real world realities make that impossible, with 99% of implementations being of the "Build a large string, and pass that string to "the SQL connector" to be parsed and interpreted" form.
So... because people don't bother to to learn about things like prepared statements, the tool is bad? It's like saying that cars suck because they don't have cruise control!
Its handling of null and the empty string is incomprehensible and useless, in part because nobody involved ever had the cajones to do what needed to be done with both.
OK, so enlighten us with your brilliance! Share with us the ultimate answer of what should be done to differentiate a null (logically, "I don't know") with a blank string (logically, "We know there's nothing there") and what should be done differently?
IMHO, the concept of "null" is a very useful one which allows a developer to differentiate between a blank answer and a no answer.
There is no standardized set of data types in the real world. Simple issues with unstandardized case dependencies can make an application that works with Oracle and only uses standard "select" statements not work under, say, PostgreSQL.
Woah, hold on there boy! You mean to say that features specific to one database engine won't work with another? Well spank my uncle and grease my kittens - this is amazing! Unless, of course, you stick to ANSI 92 syntax, which is pretty much 100% compatible. Yes, there's some regression testing you'll have to do against the different databases. Just like you have to do with HTML, XML, or any other standards-based language.
(yawn)
And these are the surface level technical issues: talk to any relational database guru and they'll come up with numerous philosophical issues too.
Strange how you didn't manage to name even one?
But here's the part of this whole "NoSQL vs SQL" debate - SQL is an interface API to a DBMS, it's not the database itself! You can use any number of technologies "under the hood" including those types of technologies commonly referred to as "NoSQL" and put an SQL interface in front! The whole idea that SQL is somehow the problem is just.... idiotic and betrays an astonishing lack of understanding by the programmer(s) involved.
It's like saying that you should have a stick-shift car because automatic transmissions don't go as fast. It's just moronic. Arguing about NoSQL is like arguing with a tea party dolt about the "socialist" health car plan that just passed! (that was first drafted by the "right wingers" 15 years ago)
Realtek's stuff is pretty much little more than reference implementation. They represent the "value end" of the marketplace, which works fine for cheaper Linux-based computers since drivers are ubiquitous for low-end (ahem: value priced) hardware.
Years ago, as a consultant, I was hired by a pet wholesaler to come up with a solution for his computers, which had a very short useful life before the dust got to 'em.
The place was loaded with fine, silty dust, which was *everywhere* and all over everything despite their obvious effort to keep things clean. Birds, lizards, and other pets can generate an *insane* amount of this, and if you can imagine a large, heated warehouse where pets were bred and sold in volume, then you get the idea. They were having trouble keeping brand new computers running much more than a few months!
After some consideration, I realized that the trick for the computer was in the air - the air, otherwise needed to cool the computer, carried the dust that just did the computers in. Most computer ventilation systems create *negative* pressure - air "sucks in" every possible crack, bringing dust with it. After getting clearance for a "non-standard solution", (they were DESPERATE!) here's what I came up with:
1) Normal desktop computers. There were three of them, connected by a LAN.
2) I removed the power supplies and reversed the fans (which normally blow outward) so that they blew inward.
3) I got a bunch of HEPA air filters, 3 large, flat boxes, duct tape, and some dryer hose.
I cut large, square holes on two sides of the box and duct-taped the hepa air filters so that they sealed over the holes. Then, I cut a hole on the small side for the dryer hose, and sealed the dryer hose to the back of the power supply on the computer. If I remember correctly, I put a cheap 6" fan in the bottom of the box to help blow air into the dryer hose, and sealed the box.
This forced clean air into the computer, creating a *positive* air pressure of clean air inside the computer. This worked to push dush and silt out of the computer, and even worked to protect otherwise sensitive parts like the CD/DVD ROM drive. After 6 months, the computers were all working at 100% and they were happy! The solution was cheap, effective, and reliable.
While I solved their problem with a bit of redneck engineering, you could probably use/modify a personal air filtration system from the likes of Sears or x-Mart.
And the "ME MY OUR" mentality all works wonders when you are technology centric enough to make it work, and conscious enough to apply it. But what happens when you are unconscious? And even if you aren't unconscious, what happens to the 50% percent of humanity that is statistically dumber than the average Joe?
The sad truth is that we need a system that works, even for the dumb people who can barely scratch their names onto a piece of paper and believe in aliens, creationism, and/or the illuminatti. "You don't have your records, and now you'll probably die" is not a good answer to give to the sorry young lady who lost her USB drive with the medical records on it when her boyfriend threw them into the fireplace in a jealous rage.
The problem is a problem because of the adversarial relationship we all have to have with private insurance companies. Policies such as "no pre-existing health conditions" and others required in a for-profit scenario make it a bad thing to document health conditions because they become loopholes exploited by private entities who seek to take our money while denying us the (costly) health care.
If only we could come up with a system that would allow everybody equal access to quality healthcare, without the motive for profit... too bad humanity isn't ingenious enough to figure this out! And so, because of this horrid lack of a solution, we have the messy quagmire of privacy and accessibility conflicts that all but nullify the benefits of information technology in health care.
It's time for a single-payer system - too bad we aren't going to get it.
Sure - new codebase, new bugs. A given. What isn't given is why the original developers thought this was a good idea? None of the answers to that question that I can think of are complimentary to what is now core infrastructure to the Internet. Was it not modularly written? Was it horribly insecure, and so badly so that it wasn't considered worth extending?
Bind is now in its tenth revision. You'd think by now that some sort of good, workable framework or design pattern would have evolved by now?
But clearly, it hasn't, and clearly, after several rewrites, it's *still* not considered worthy of being extended or refactored rather than rewritten. This bespeaks (to me) a well of WTFs, in light of the idea that you should basically never rewrite your software.
First, it's already much cheaper to ship goods from Asia to America, thanks to the super-barges just crossing the Pacific. They have to go quite a bit further to get to Europe.
Second, the United States already has a well developed rail system. The only reason we don't use it more is because fuel costs are so low in the United States.
Never mind. We're screwed. The sky is falling. Agyugh! RUN FOR COVER!!!
Not only that, but his initial premise is already wrong! Most people conceptualize a program like an application - it's launched, loads into memory, and then does stuff. And while that's typical, it's a grave mistake to think that's the ONLY way to go!
Off the top of my head, I can think of registering malware as a callack handler for a system event. In this case, you have an infected computer without any code running at all, in a context and namespace different than running applications!
Winows just wasn't designed with a multi-user security model. Adding this after the fact is showing itself to be exponentially more difficult!
Drug companies aren't perfect. Neither is any other kind of company or organization, including government, because they are all run by people.
But drug companies play a VITAL role in the longest-ever life expectancy you hope to enjoy! Sorry, but when I'm feeling down, it's the drug companies products in conjunction with knowledgeable doctors who will keep my sorry, hairy white ass alive. I can pray all I want, and that might help about as much as any other placebo, but it's the doctors and the drug companies who get results.
Want me to buy your sarcasm about the drug companies? Get cancer and then NOT get chemo and take all them damned pills. Then I'll believe you. Until then, you are just a sorry whiner biting the hand that feeds your pampered Western ass.
Drug companies already have so many chum-excited lawyers chasing them that they have a real tough time justifying any new drugs. Take a look - the number of new drugs available for treatment, especially for critical, life-saving drugs have been plummeting the last 10 or 20 years. People sue when some pill has a side effect when their life is on the line. They sue much less often when they have side effects while trying to make their boobs bigger.
So guess what the drug companies produce? Boob enhancers, of course!
Slashdot Mirror
Ugh. Uninformed post rated highly by fanbois...
Time and again MS is trying to enter a market, only to sustain huge losses in the beginning
Yeah, I'm with you. MS Word was a big loser at first against Word Perfect...
ow Bing, before the Zune (ended in failure), the Xbox (lost a lot of money, still alive though, can't imagine it has made them any money overall even if it would be profitable by now), and before I'm sure they lost heaps of money entering the office suite market with OpenOffice, the webmail market with Hotmail, and so on. Only their OS business has made a constant profit it seems. And Office is doing well as well. But that's it.
WTF? Microsoft's model has *always* been:
1) Be the platform everybody else uses.
2) Watch new companies prove business models,
3) Spend the money made in #1 like water to build in the (now proven) business model,
4) Advertise like crazy.
5) Profit!
On the other hand I have never heard about serious losses on Apple's side around the introduction of the iPod. Sure they lost money on some products, but not this kind of numbers.
I guess you never heard of the 1990s?
Sun has likely lost money on development of StarOffice, now OpenOffice.org, but their product is steadily making inroads and I don't think they are still pumping much money in it. If only because they're not such a rich company any more.
Didn't you hear that there is no "Sun" anymore. It's now called "Oracle"... how's life under that rock?
Netscape burnt and died, and from its ashes Firefox has risen. Making heaps of money, going strong, doing well.
Mozilla (the "for-profit" arm of the Mozilla foundation) made about 72 million. While not bad, it's hardly "heaps of money" for a product used by too many millions to count. For a comparison, Mozilla's annual profits are roughly equivalent to what Microsoft profits in a single day. I'm not saying this to knock Mozilla particularly, since I type this in Firefox 3.6. But this "heaps of money" thing is just.... you know.
"Competing on the world stage" may not be cheap, but I think it may help if Microsoft starts to develop their own products and their own ideas, instead of an "iPod killer", a "Google competitor", etc. That seems to me a failure from the start.
When has Microsoft done any different? See their business model above. MS's big deal with IBM was a resell of a hackish copy of a the dominant operating system - CPM.
...MS is not exactly a company that is innovative these days.
... or at any other point in its highly profitable history.
Printing requires a certain overhead cost. Once that overhead cost is met, the cost of printing drops dramatically. But for many years my printing threshold has been far below that overhead cost.
See, to print, you have to have a printer. I'm often mobile; I sure don't want to carry another 15 pound device plus supplies. And printing is unreliable. Ink cartridges are expensive, and prone to drying out and frequent replacement and the associated trip to the office supplies store. Printing is SLOW. You have to set up drivers, you have to plug stuff in, you have to dicker with drivers and print queues when paper doesn't feed properly. Printing over a network is a pain. You have to have drivers for the network printer, and you have to spend anywhere from 10 to 45 minutes setting it all up in the first place.
And then, when you are done, you have a document in your hand. You can't instantly send it *anywhere* save by digitizing it. (EG: faxing, or scan/email) Sure, you might need a signature on it, but once it's digitized, a signature is easily pasted on the document in its original (soft copy) format anyway.
So, why did you do all that, again?
And then there's quality! When I print, it's highly likely to be because I'm making a presentation. To produce *nice* high quality prints, you need a nice, high quality printer, preferably color. For somebody for whom a ream lasts for at least a year, it's hard to justify spending hundreds of dollars in order to print on $5 of paper. So I find that it's easier and cheaper to print to PDF and then email it that to the local Kinko's or other store. I get the best quality prints in color, on demand, without dickering with drivers, and just having to drive about 1/4 mile to get it, on the one or two days in a quarter I might need it. Queue it up around lunch, and it's a quick stop on the way back with my sammich.
I could go on with faxes - receiving faxes with a "fax machine" has a slew of problems. If your paper jams, your fax is hosed. Since the fax may well be a contract worth many thousands of dollars, this is a non-starter. Also, paper faxes can be lost. They can't be reprinted without the original. They aren't automatically archived for later review. They can't be easily viewed in a remote office without being faxed again, along with the problems of quality degradation, etc.
But soft-copy faxes carry NONE of these problems. Done right, a soft-copy fax system is redundant, multi-point, and accessible from anywhere with proper security authentication. We made this switch years ago, and never looked back!
Printing sucks. I do everything I can to eliminate paper!
i wonder if there should be some kind of public domain requirement for obsoleting stuff like that. Basically, when production is shut down, all specs and production processes are handed over to some archive in human readable form.
There is. Or at least, there is supposed to be. And strangely, around these parts, most everybody cries out against it and would rather it disappeared.
It's called a 'patent'. Of course, there are some limitations - the language around patents require a clear, exact description of the invention, and somehow, source code doesn't fall under these constraints, even if most patents nowadays are software patents.
But the idea of what you are looking for *exactly* matches the point of patent!
You roably want to see our galiant efforts to stop ID theft.
http://www.effortlessis.com/stopidtheft
That was my thought. "Thousands of dollars" seemed ridiculously low. I'd be highly surprised if it wasn't a loss of at least tens of millions of dollars?
I wouldn't be surprised if this was the point where future historians mark McAfee's final demise? I really don't understand why anybody would use such a product so utterly poisoned with suckage. Remember when McAfee was good? Back, in the beautiful days before Norton took it over and turned it into a bloated whale of a product that somehow manages to miss obvious infections while simultaneously slowing down your system more than any virus ever would?
I wonder if you could actually count the amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere due to increased system load on computers (slowly) running their product?
Sorry, but if I became a paying subscriber I would expect ad free viewing on all content.
Remember when that was the deal with Cable TV? Maybe not, but I do. The more things change, the more they stay the same.... (sigh)
Phones and portable computers haven't, which is why Apple's attempt to start locking them down pisses people off.
What? I can scarcely THINK of a marketplace that has traditionally been more "locked down" than phones. Verizon/ATT/Sprint have long been known for locking down the phones and removing features (such as bluetooth) so that you have to download ring tones at $1 each rather than download them from your bluetooth capable computer. (for free)
In fact, when the iPhone first came out, it was the first phone to NOT be locked down to within an inch of its life by the carrier! You might be pissy about the lockdown that Apple places on the phone, but phones themselves have always been a crappy, locked-down, consumer-unfriendly environment in the United States!
Android threatens to upset all of that, and the foundation for Android is... ARM. This is not much different than Oracle buying Sun to put down MySQL. (which, you have to admit, is at least PART of the motivation of Oracle to purchase Sun!)
Thinking about it, it's how capitalism works. Accountants, lawyers, marketing droids, most managers, bankers 90% of government employees, etc,etc. None of them do anything productive. They have a job JUST because there's a glitch on the system.
If that's what you think of Accountants, lawyers, marketing droids, managers, and bankers, it's because you haven't a clue yet.
Are you in business? Because if you are, your accountant had better save you lots more money than he/she costs. And no, I'm not talking about complex tax laws, I'm talking about simple asset and expense management. Companies which aren't tightly controlled in accounting burn through cash like you wouldn't believe. It's the accountants who (ahem) account for it all and help control expenses and maximize return on investment!
Your lawyer is there to advise you of the rules of the road. And those rules generally aren't arbitrary, they are complex and detailed because reality is complex and detailed. Laws generally get passed in response to real situations that have really happened! But do you know this? Sorry, of course you don't. And that's why when you are in legal trouble, you get a lawyer. Just the other day, I had a 2 hour interview with my lawyer save me some $100,000 cash. You think I don't value my laywer?
Marketing droids are (I hate to say) some of the most valuable members of an organization. Sure, some are idiots - such as those running the current Verizon ads (which seem to go out of their way to convince me NOT to buy Verizon hi-speed smart phones) but they are the exception. They are there to generate demand for the products of an organization. If they weren't there, selling the widgets that the engineers produce, there wouldn't be any need for engineers to produce anything because nobody would want them. They wouldn't even know that they exist! (which, even the Verizon idiots are succeeding at)
And so on. Each profession has its place, and each presents value to your company and your society. Generally, this value is greater than the cost of the salary, etc. of the individual(s) involved. As in all things involving people, there is some corruption. There are lawyers who are a waste of oxygen, just as there are engineers who are a waste of perfectly good coffee. (See Wally from Dilbert comics, for a stereotyped example)
But you can't dismiss them all, because they actually DO something, even if you aren't aware of what it is, yet!
Hey guys; remember how it was supposed to be a fast browser?
While FF has certainly gained features, it hasn't slowed down while doing so. In fact, it's seen fairly dramatic performance INCREASES. FF hasn't gotten any slower; expectations have sharply risen.
We now expect to be able to program a 3D FPS in Javascript and CSS. The very idea was considered laughable just a few years ago. I've spent the last year building a statistical computation software that's entirely web-based, and entirely written in javascript. This, too, would have been a laughable goal if not for the dramatic performance improvements in FF and Chrome. (We don't currently support IE8 because it's just too slow; hopefully IE9 will be worthy of supporting)
Probably the singlemost important rule in business is a simple one: sell what's cheap! Sounds pretty simple, but any successful business has, as its core component, finding something that it can offer cheaper than is available elsewhere, and then offering it at a markup.
When you buy an iPad for $500, you do so because the easiest way for you to get whatever it is the iPad offers cheaper/easier from Apple than any other reasonable channel. When you buy a tomato from the local grocery for $0.59, you do so because it would cost you more to get it elsewhere. By specializing in making iPads or distributing tomatoes, companies develop ways to reduce the cost of obtaining goods, and thus make it easier for products to be obtained by everyone.
This is simple Econ 101 type stuff, but it's something that's easily forgotten, even by guys who majored as MBAs.
The truth is that the cheapest thing Verizon could possibly offer is data. There is basically no per unit cost for transmitting data. The cost is so low that it might as well be free, at least for Verizon. The only cost that there is for transmitting data are flat-rate running costs of infrastructure development and maintenance, and keeping everything plugged in.
Think about it: 10 years ago, you might have had a 10 Mbit hub at your home or office. 5 years ago, you might have had a 100 Mbit hub, and now you'd probably have a 1000 Mbit hub. The actual cost to you is the same, regardless of the hub speed. The 10 Mbit hub cost around $100 and used perhaps 200 mw of power. The 100 Mbit hub cost around $100 and used perhaps 200 mw of power. The 1000 Mbit hub cost around $100 and used perhaps 200 mw of power.
Are you noticing a trend, here? The only real "running" cost of transmitting data is the relatively flat cost of power. Upgrading equipment is an expense that actually makes data transmission cheaper!
So here's Verizon, swearing to "go after" the customers that most use a product/service that has no meaningful unit cost. (WTF?!) This is blindingly stupid! Verizon runs the real risk of being side-swiped by (among other companies) Google and/or companies like Metro PCS who offer their own data networks. Think this isn't serious? think again: MANY communities have inquired about Google fiber Internet!
Sometimes, people just can't seem to help but trip over their own idiocy...
I'm typing this on my laptop running Fedora Core 12. After recent Fedora builds (from about FC 6) getting successively worse, I was teetering right on the edge of giving up on Fedora and getting a Mac. All my scripts and stuff assume a Fedora environment, (EG: yum) so switching to Ubuntu wouldn't have been significantly easier than jumping to MacOS.
Fedora 12 brought me back to the fold!
Drivers drive. Network managers actually manage networks. And widgets do proper widgetting. It's back to being what a computer O/S outta be - largely invisible!
I can't comment on Ubuntu, but I can say, to the Red Hat team: nice work, guys!
The iPad has only one target: to sell.
Time will tell if it makes its target. I've seen one, and I won't be buying. It's too big for "on the go", I don't want to carry yet another gadget, and it's both too pricey to be a convenience buy, and too limited to be anything more exciting than my Android phone, except that it requires either wifi or an expensive data plan that I can't share with my laptop. It's big enough to be categorized more like my laptop since it doesn't fit into my pocket, but not capable enough to compare well. I can't use it as a remote control, so it doesn't replace my TV remote, either.
So it's an expensive, half-assed replacement for cheaper devices that do a better job in their respective areas. (But then, I don't have an iPod either. I use (and love) my Creative Zen!)
Meh.
We are an ASP er, "cloud computing" (ahem) vendor. We have a cluster of computers to handle our proprietary application stack, which is now around 100,000 lines of code, with over 100 clients averaging around 200 full-time users each.
We've been at a "sweet spot" for several years now. Upgrading every few years, we've gone from dual core systems, to quad-core, to our current mix of quad and 8-core servers. During this time, our database schema has grown from around 50 to around 300 tables, the database size has mushroomed, and the number (and size) of clients have grown rapidly.
But we've served a much larger customer base with a much larger and more complicated schema without an effective increase in the total amount of equipment!
Annual hardware costs remain flat, administration costs remain flat, while the bottom line increases - can you say "win/win"!?!?
Patents aren't perfect. No form of IP is - all forms of IP are a compromise.
But in large part, (perhaps excepting software patents and MAYBE gene patents) the concept of a "patent" gets it RIGHT!!!
In the area of pharmaceuticals, If you do away with patents, then you lose the endless supply of 20-year-old innovation you now know as "generic drugs" because the deal with patents is that, in exchange for FULL AND COMPLETE DISCLOSURE of the patented concept, the owner/holder of the patent gets a reasonable amount of time (20 years in most cases) to exploit the patent for profit. At the end of that 20 years, the patent concepts become public domain and are carefully documented for the public domain.
Just tonight, I took a generic form of Coreg for my blood pressure. It's a highly effective drug that cost millions to develop. Because the original drug was patented, the method of producing it was well documented and in the public domain. The result was a box of pills that extend my life at a cost of just $7 per month!
Do away with drug patents and you won't see cheaper drugs, you'll see more expensive drugs, and a rapid halt of forward progress.
There's nothing that easy about MS technologies. They're superficially easy, sure. But there's quite a lot underneath that.
Well, I certainly agree with you there! But what bothers me more about Windows technology isn't that it's as complex/powerful/intricate as comparable Linux technologies, as much as it's opaque.
You get a binary to install, and there you go. Enjoy, and hope to God that somebody at the other end of the 800 tech support line has mercy on your poor, sorry soul. Because you have virtually no recourse otherwise.
Compare/contrast with more open solutions, which provide options when the chips are down. How many times I've pined for a decent documented config file when rooting thru the menus to fix some obscure problem!
Parent post is probably overly cynical, and in some ways contrary to my experience. He's right that experience helps.
1) If you know how to program, and are actually any good at it, you will have no trouble finding work.
2) As far as I can tell, there are, if anything, more opportunities now than ever! Many companies are feeling the pinch of the recession and are looking for increased dependency on Internet-based applications to cut costs, improve service, and get more sales. As a result, these companies are competing HARD for developers who can do the job for cheap. As a programmer/consultant turned company programmer/executive, I've turned away more work than I could possibly do in a year in the last 3 months alone. All were from companies and people I've worked with in the past who were struggling and trying to figure out how to "get ahead".
3) Parent poster is right about a resume. If it's good, it will get you a phone call and possibly a personal interview. But if you want the job, you'd better have "the stuff" - the ability to work on a project and get it done.
Want my advice, as Chief of Technology in a successful and rapidly growing company? Start a project or get heavily involved in one. There are lots out there! Troll SourceForge until you find a struggling project that sounds interesting, and be the lead man for a year or so. There are literally thousands and thousands of opportunities there, and they will impress if/when you present them.
And make sure it's an actual project and not a CD catalog for personal CD collections! If you do this, you will show the ability to get involved with a project, solve something significant, and the experience you'll get reading somebody else's stuff will do wonders for your skills...
I would offer you a shot at joining our company, but we're not hiring at the moment. In any event, I wish you the best of luck!
Virtually no-one who's spent any time analyzing and working with large amounts of data has a good word to say about SQL.
I've spent 10 years developing intensively relational applications with SQL. I love it!
It was designed from the start as a language that would be integrated into others, and yet simple real world realities make that impossible, with 99% of implementations being of the "Build a large string, and pass that string to "the SQL connector" to be parsed and interpreted" form.
So... because people don't bother to to learn about things like prepared statements, the tool is bad? It's like saying that cars suck because they don't have cruise control!
Its handling of null and the empty string is incomprehensible and useless, in part because nobody involved ever had the cajones to do what needed to be done with both.
OK, so enlighten us with your brilliance! Share with us the ultimate answer of what should be done to differentiate a null (logically, "I don't know") with a blank string (logically, "We know there's nothing there") and what should be done differently?
IMHO, the concept of "null" is a very useful one which allows a developer to differentiate between a blank answer and a no answer.
There is no standardized set of data types in the real world. Simple issues with unstandardized case dependencies can make an application that works with Oracle and only uses standard "select" statements not work under, say, PostgreSQL.
Woah, hold on there boy! You mean to say that features specific to one database engine won't work with another? Well spank my uncle and grease my kittens - this is amazing! Unless, of course, you stick to ANSI 92 syntax, which is pretty much 100% compatible. Yes, there's some regression testing you'll have to do against the different databases. Just like you have to do with HTML, XML, or any other standards-based language.
(yawn)
And these are the surface level technical issues: talk to any relational database guru and they'll come up with numerous philosophical issues too.
Strange how you didn't manage to name even one?
But here's the part of this whole "NoSQL vs SQL" debate - SQL is an interface API to a DBMS, it's not the database itself! You can use any number of technologies "under the hood" including those
types of technologies commonly referred to as "NoSQL" and put an SQL interface in front! The whole idea that SQL is somehow the problem is just.... idiotic and betrays an astonishing lack of understanding by the programmer(s) involved.
It's like saying that you should have a stick-shift car because automatic transmissions don't go as fast. It's just moronic. Arguing about NoSQL is like arguing with a tea party dolt about the "socialist" health car plan that just passed! (that was first drafted by the "right wingers" 15 years ago)
It's argument from stupidity.
Realtek's stuff is pretty much little more than reference implementation. They represent the "value end" of the marketplace, which works fine for cheaper Linux-based computers since drivers are ubiquitous for low-end (ahem: value priced) hardware.
Years ago, as a consultant, I was hired by a pet wholesaler to come up with a solution for his computers, which had a very short useful life before the dust got to 'em.
The place was loaded with fine, silty dust, which was *everywhere* and all over everything despite their obvious effort to keep things clean. Birds, lizards, and other pets can generate an *insane* amount of this, and if you can imagine a large, heated warehouse where pets were bred and sold in volume, then you get the idea. They were having trouble keeping brand new computers running much more than a few months!
After some consideration, I realized that the trick for the computer was in the air - the air, otherwise needed to cool the computer, carried the dust that just did the computers in. Most computer ventilation systems create *negative* pressure - air "sucks in" every possible crack, bringing dust with it. After getting clearance for a "non-standard solution", (they were DESPERATE!) here's what I came up with:
1) Normal desktop computers. There were three of them, connected by a LAN.
2) I removed the power supplies and reversed the fans (which normally blow outward) so that they blew inward.
3) I got a bunch of HEPA air filters, 3 large, flat boxes, duct tape, and some dryer hose.
I cut large, square holes on two sides of the box and duct-taped the hepa air filters so that they sealed over the holes. Then, I cut a hole on the small side for the dryer hose, and sealed the dryer hose to the back of the power supply on the computer. If I remember correctly, I put a cheap 6" fan in the bottom of the box to help blow air into the dryer hose, and sealed the box.
This forced clean air into the computer, creating a *positive* air pressure of clean air inside the computer. This worked to push dush and silt out of the computer, and even worked to protect otherwise sensitive parts like the CD/DVD ROM drive. After 6 months, the computers were all working at 100% and they were happy! The solution was cheap, effective, and reliable.
While I solved their problem with a bit of redneck engineering, you could probably use/modify a personal air filtration system from the likes of Sears or x-Mart.
And the "ME MY OUR" mentality all works wonders when you are technology centric enough to make it work, and conscious enough to apply it. But what happens when you are unconscious? And even if you aren't unconscious, what happens to the 50% percent of humanity that is statistically dumber than the average Joe?
The sad truth is that we need a system that works, even for the dumb people who can barely scratch their names onto a piece of paper and believe in aliens, creationism, and/or the illuminatti. "You don't have your records, and now you'll probably die" is not a good answer to give to the sorry young lady who lost her USB drive with the medical records on it when her boyfriend threw them into the fireplace in a jealous rage.
The problem is a problem because of the adversarial relationship we all have to have with private insurance companies. Policies such as "no pre-existing health conditions" and others required in a for-profit scenario make it a bad thing to document health conditions because they become loopholes exploited by private entities who seek to take our money while denying us the (costly) health care.
If only we could come up with a system that would allow everybody equal access to quality healthcare, without the motive for profit... too bad humanity isn't ingenious enough to figure this out! And so, because of this horrid lack of a solution, we have the messy quagmire of privacy and accessibility conflicts that all but nullify the benefits of information technology in health care.
It's time for a single-payer system - too bad we aren't going to get it.
Sure - new codebase, new bugs. A given. What isn't given is why the original developers thought this was a good idea? None of the answers to that question that I can think of are complimentary to what is now core infrastructure to the Internet. Was it not modularly written? Was it horribly insecure, and so badly so that it wasn't considered worth extending?
Bind is now in its tenth revision. You'd think by now that some sort of good, workable framework or design pattern would have evolved by now?
But clearly, it hasn't, and clearly, after several rewrites, it's *still* not considered worthy of being extended or refactored rather than rewritten. This bespeaks (to me) a well of WTFs, in light of the idea that you should basically never rewrite your software .
I'm not sure I see Wikipedia as being the "killer app" for video standards.
I'm not sure that you see just how big Wikipedia actually is. It's not just a big driver of traffic, it's farking huge. According to Alexa, It's number 6 worldwide, after Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Youtube, and Live.com. Wikipedia pulls an astonishing 12-13% of users worldwide!
For comparison:
MySpace is #18, with 3% reach.
Twitter is #12, with 5% reach.
Slashdot is #1,262, with 0.1% reach.
Whatever you do, don't underestimate the gravity of this news - Wikipedia is one of the Internet TITANS!
First, it's already much cheaper to ship goods from Asia to America, thanks to the super-barges just crossing the Pacific. They have to go quite a bit further to get to Europe.
Second, the United States already has a well developed rail system. The only reason we don't use it more is because fuel costs are so low in the United States.
Never mind. We're screwed. The sky is falling. Agyugh! RUN FOR COVER!!!
Not only that, but his initial premise is already wrong! Most people conceptualize a program like an application - it's launched, loads into memory, and then does stuff. And while that's typical, it's a grave mistake to think that's the ONLY way to go!
Off the top of my head, I can think of registering malware as a callack handler for a system event. In this case, you have an infected computer without any code running at all, in a context and namespace different than running applications!
Winows just wasn't designed with a multi-user security model. Adding this after the fact is showing itself to be exponentially more difficult!
Drug companies aren't perfect. Neither is any other kind of company or organization, including government, because they are all run by people.
But drug companies play a VITAL role in the longest-ever life expectancy you hope to enjoy! Sorry, but when I'm feeling down, it's the drug companies products in conjunction with knowledgeable doctors who will keep my sorry, hairy white ass alive. I can pray all I want, and that might help about as much as any other placebo, but it's the doctors and the drug companies who get results.
Want me to buy your sarcasm about the drug companies? Get cancer and then NOT get chemo and take all them damned pills. Then I'll believe you. Until then, you are just a sorry whiner biting the hand that feeds your pampered Western ass.
Drug companies already have so many chum-excited lawyers chasing them that they have a real tough time justifying any new drugs. Take a look - the number of new drugs available for treatment, especially for critical, life-saving drugs have been plummeting the last 10 or 20 years. People sue when some pill has a side effect when their life is on the line. They sue much less often when they have side effects while trying to make their boobs bigger.
So guess what the drug companies produce? Boob enhancers, of course!