I find that when I get into that "hard to focus" state of mind, it's because I don't have a good, clear idea of what, exactly, needs to be done. In this case, I tend to find that I either stare at the screen blankly wondering what's next, or code madly to solve problems of minor importance and extreme complexity.
Both results are just a waste of time. Usually it's best to quit for the day, and not sit in front of the computer again until the exact problems have been laid out.
I don't qualify my advertising with *any* form of educational requirement. I only list the skills required. Of all the programmers we now have at our small-but-growing-fast company, none of them have even a BA.
PS: We're flexible enough with our hours that one of our programmers is going to school to complete a degree in Mathematics.
I'm not asking for Masters degrees, but I'm getting them. And they sure aren't helping them much, at least as far as I'm concerned.
yes.. because getting in foreign workers will help REDUCE local unemployment.... maybe in soviet russia.
Yeah, because unemployment is "the problem" - not getting the damned job done so that something of value gets created and sold so that wealth can actually get produced, salaries, taxes, and bills paid, and economies improved, right?
I've been having a tough time finding a reasonably qualified programmer from straight out of college. I'm not looking for senior database developers, just people who can solve basic logic skills and... write software!
From fresh grads with MASTERS degress in IS I get blank stares from such questions as: (in any language of choice!)
1) If you had a string, and wanted to replace part of that string with another string, how would you do it?
2) How would you add 5 to each element in an array of integers?
3) How would you add 5 to a field of integers in an SQL table?
4) Write up any form of database "select" query. I don't expect it to parse, just have the basic pieces. Honestly, just a simple "Select field [, field2] from [table] where (conditions));" would suffice.
5) In your language of choice, take a variable containing the value 5 and construct a sentence that says "I have 5 children".
These are all questions I would consider basic when looking for a database programmer, which is the position being advertised, and for which many of the resumes I see are clearly targeting, with words like "Oracle", "Database", and "Information Architecture" in them, underneath "Masters Degree" and "Information Science".
I'm ok with missing a few. But getting only 1 or 2 sensible answers out of 10 or 20 like this?!? How *does* one get a Masters Degree in Information Science without being able to answer basic questions like this? Supposedly, the job I'm offering is why they went to school, but they aren't even qualified to begin. So what did they do for 6 years?
If you are hiring a welder, he'd better know how to weld. If you hire a doctor, he'd better have a good working knowledge of medicine.
Why can't we expect to hire fresh programmers who know how to... program?
There's no answer that's always right. If memory usage was paramount, we'd all have browsers that used 1 MB of RAM and took 10 minutes to render a page, with another 2 minutes to scroll down a page.
But RAM is cheap and developers have to make compromises based on the real-world that they have to compete in. I can get a gig of RAM for about the cost of a burger lunch with my wife.
Do I really care about memory usage? Only to the extent that it's 'good enough' on my slowest computer - a dual-core Mac Mini with 512MB.
FF3 is plenty good enough for me to thoroughly enjoy an episode of 'Burn Notice' on Hulu just now on that very computer.
Sorry you are having probs with memory usage on your (ancient?) computer. Perhaps you should consider forgoing a burger lunch this week?
You say that mesh networks are bad, and then go on to suggest that we should all use HAM radio instead. Why would you think that HAM radio isn't just another variation of a mesh network?
1. Doesn't rely on a centralized carrier - check!
2. Radio waves to transmit digital information - check!
3. Equipment can be stationary or mobile for short-range coomunication - check!
4. Digital information is repeated from point to point until its destination is reached - check!
I think that you've been thinking about mesh networks as short-range wifi-like computer-only mesh networks. But there is no aspect of these networks that isn't being done in some fashion on the far older HAM networks! It's slower, older, often manually prformed - but it's just as much a 'mesh network' if not more so!
Any time you release a new version of software, there's an increased likelihood that there will be unforeseen bugs not specifically tested for. You can test tell you're blue in the face, but no matter how you look at it, real-life is the real test.
And it's not just bugs. Even when things are working exactly to plan, you don't necessarily want to roll it out everywhere all at once.A good example is our password-change policy - we now require periodic changes in passwords. When we did this, requiring everybody to change their password, we did it "gracefully" over a month's time so that the help desk wouldn't be overwhelmed by idiots who don't understand the idea of changing their password.
It's pretty sad that something so simple would cause people to freak out, but it does, and that's just humanity. Get over it, already. People are people, and it's easier to spread the work out over a period of time rather than just beat yourself up all at once.
Gradual roll-out is a *good thing* unless it's a terrible security issue that must be addressed immediately.
Sure it may not be a problem for your airplane, but what about for the tens of thousands of flying cars that will be filling the sky over the major cities?
Flying cars will be regulated by the FAA. You have to be an FAA-licensed pilot to fly one. That's why the guys actually making these a reality don't call it a "flying car" but rather a "roadable airplane".
And when flying over a big city, you are almost 100% in heavily controlled airspace. For example, take a look at the online aviation map and punch in KBOS at the right. You'll see a pilot's map of the Boston area.
Now, see all those circles made by thick, blue lines? Those are the lines of demarcation for class B(ravo) airspace - under RADAR control, you must have permission to enter, and your plane MUST be equipped with the appropriate equipment - or they come after you with guns, if necessary. As you can see, almost all of Boston is underneath this heavily controlled airspace - most cities are.
So don't think that just any old Tom, Dick, and Harry can get in a plane and start buzzing around without hard time afterwards.
In case you are curious, controlled airspace looks like an upside-down layer-cake, starting from the airport. For (usually) 5 miles away from the airport, the control is from the top of the "cake" down to the surface. You'll see something like 70/SFC within the inner circle, meaning that the ceiling is 7,000 feet, the floor is the ground. Then, further out, you'll see so mething like 70/15, meaning ceiling 7,000, floor 1500 feet.
Bigger airports go higher (Ex: KSFO ceiling is 10,000 ft) and further out. And the entire area is under the control of "approach control", called class E(cho) airspace, which is still RADAR controlled, but you don't need permission to enter. It's more advisory.
And basically every pilot I've flown with going virtually anywhere takes advantage of these advisories, called "flight following".
I see comment after comment like "What about teh airplanzes!?!" but such comments come from a severe lack of understanding of controlled airspace.
See, while it's true that the Eastern seaboard is one of the busiest airspaces in the world, it's also one of the most tightly controlled. Airspace is commonly restricted to 18,000 feet, above which *all* airspace is controlled. (It's called "class A(lpha) airspace at/above 18,000 ft) The only effect this would have on air traffic is that ATC would redirect commercial flights around the kites, which isn't particularly hard to do.
As a pilot myself, I've many times been diverted around hazards such as other planes, mountains, and even UAVs. (Un-manned Aeronautical vehicles, being tested by the military)
And obviously, these wouldn't be assembled on the instrument approach path for O'Hare airport. This makes the whole "Teh planezes are fallingz" as exciting a story as "Teh Internetz iz failingz" due to lack of router memory.
You have NO IDEA what "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" means!
Think of a car. It's got four wheels. Wheels need tires, which are made of Vulcanized rubber. Dupont makes Vulcanized rubber for tires. Some other company comes along and makes better rubber for tires. So Dupont now "Embraces" the new type of rubber so that the original company gets tired and starts making balloons.
Red balloons, Blue balloons require different compounds for coloring. Different colors, like crayons come in 8, 24, and 72-packs. I always liked the 72 packs because they came with a crayon sharpener. Seriously, how cool is that?
I once saw a car painted so that it looked like it was painted with crayons. It even had a crayon-sharpener on the back trunk! (Where the key was hidden) It was so cool it...
I'm a Verizon customer. They have HORRID billing practices (throw in lots of ambiguous "fees" and then wait for you to call and bitch about this $20 and that $16 charge before removing them) and downright deceptive marketing.
I have a WinMo smartphone (The HTC Mogul, and it's a pretty cool phone, feels to be about Win'95 as far as its O/S) and (of course) need a data plan. Vzw has two dataplans, the $30 "consumer" plan, and the $45 "corporate" plan. I asked what the difference is, since they both have unlimited data usage, since I didn't want to pay $15/mo more for a feature that I didn't need.
I was explained that the corporate account is designed for people who access company email and intranet applications, while the cheaper plan is for home users. I asked if they actually block connections with the $30 plan, and was assured that they did not. I went with the cheaper plan, and have had no trouble at all connecting to my corporate mail server.
In other words, Verizon wireless charges a $15/mo 'stupid tax' for anybody who wants to use a smart phone for business since their consumer plan offers the same actual functionality. I wonder just how many people are paying this $180/year 'stupid tax'?
Did you actually just say "buy a water"? I offer a glimpse at what you get when you buy a bottle of "pure" water. And if you don't mind me asking: what is it that I'm doing to myself, other than enjoying a sweet, tasty beverage with no calories and no known side effects?
Diet soda is actually more pure water than bottled water in many cases. Me? I'd rather go for the (highly regulated) tap if it's just water anyway.
Absolutely. Besides, early adopters always get the shaft. That's the price you pay for being an early adopter.
This statement reflects a cliche that's just wrong.
Back in the 1980's, the concept of the database was just starting to filter down into the small business world, to replace paper. I remember helping my pappy set up his fire-breathing 286/20 (with 20 MB of HDD, and a whole MEGABYTE of RAM!!!) in order to take advantage of a custom database package based on FoxPro.
The computer had far less processing and storage power than my phone today. The screen was lower resolution, as well. Yet somehow, my pappy not only managed to justify the $10,000 price tag, he actually managed to come out ahead in about a year, in reduced man hours as well as "chased down" insurance payments that would have been missed otherwise.
Sure, you could put together the same package today for $3,100. ($3,000 for the software, $100 for the computer on EBay) But it's just idiotic to think that my pappy's small medical practice didn't come out ahead. And these guys who complain about $200? That works out to somewhere around $0.50 per day, less than I spend on the 2-litre of diet soda I buy every day on the way home from work.
No, I haven't done the math behind this. But given that the force of gravity decreases by the inverse square law, using something like the infltable tower might make the space elevator much more feasible to create.
You mention helium, but why not simply use compressed air, especially at the higher levels?
In any event, this is the sort of out-of-the-box thinking needed to make space travel feasible!
Going by the wikipedia definition, decisions made in typical software development cycles don't seem to rely on a justification based mathematical or physical analysis. Admittedly I might be generalising, but is it more of a soft-skill then?
That's just horsepucky.
The only reason it seems the way you mention is that software processing cycles are so ridiculously cheap compared to, say, 3" C-Channel girders. But just today, I was doing some engineering to develop a distributed, self-healing clustering file system. Specifically, I was doing performance analysis of different approach, doing a base unit of 1,000 simple file reads. That is most *definitely* a physical analysis - performance tuning always is. But do I care about each individual line? Not really. Do I do extensive analysis of each individual element? Not by a long shot, simply because the actual, real, overall cost of the software is so low.
We host highly complex, vertical-market database solutions. We have a pretty decent hardware cluster comprising some $25,000 in whitebox rackmount equipment. A nice half-rack of stuff. And another $10k or so for a failover DR scenario. But compared to the number of customers we service, and the size of my company, that's an insignificant investment, yet we are overbuilt at least 400%!
If 3" C-Channel cost $0.05 per linear foot, how much checking would you do beyond "good enough"?
Passwords are a bad means of securing a computer. Sure, passwords are far cry more secure means no authentication at all, but they do have some pretty severe limitations...
1) Any breach of a password pretty much kills them. Dead. If your ex-GF/BF gets the password to your webmail account, god help you, because the password in their hands works just as well as in yours.
2) Usually you don't have any (obvious) way of knowing that the breach occurred.
3) Because of (1) and (2), they are highly vulnerable to social engineering attacks: just convince somebody to give the password and it's game over. And it doesn't have to be you: it could be the system administrator, somebody at the help desk, you name it.
So they have to hack the phone company's system too, or find a way to clone his cellphone, so they can intercept the call and approve access?
Yes. That's the point, and it's a good point, too. This is a good step towards improving security, and I've toyed with doing something similar with our web-based product. Basically, the idea goes like this:
1) End user enters login name, clicks the "next" button.
1a) (in the background, a text message is sent to user's cell phone, with a code tied to the account and to the specific login session)
2) End user enters password, clicks the "next" button.
2a) (password verified against login account)
3) End user enters code that they've received on their phone, click next
3a) (system compares login, password, session, and entered code. If they all match, user is allowed through.
In order compromise this system without actually rooting the server, the hax0r has to: know the login & password, have the cell phone or hax0rz the phone company, AND know the session code sent to the end user's browser. While not actually impossible, it's a damned sight more difficult than just a username/password!
Usually, the only way to accomplish these is to either BE the person, or steal their phone AND know their login/password. And if the phone is stolen, the rightful owner only needs to make a phone call to report it stolen, so the attack window is very small.
Are you saying that 1TB of space should be enough for anyone?
No, but let's be a bit realistic, here. 1 TB is enough space for some 100 hours of DVD-quality video. 1 PB is 100,000 hours of DVD video. If current trends continue, we're fast approaching the point where we really *can* store ALL movies ever produced on a single backpack HDD. We went from a GB to a TB HDD in about 10 years, so it's not unreasonable to think that we'll have 1 PB in another 10. At that time, you can record every second of your life on a single HDD, in RAW format.
OOo has been able to 'save to the cloud' for a very, very long time. WevDAV was introduced many years ago, and works as well today as ever. It gives decent security, is quite reliable, and can be seen as a local drive on most modern OSs. (Sadly, even Windows Vista still needs NetDrive)
Bottom line: there is no need to NOT save to the cloud in basically any program out there today, client-based or no, if you are at least somewhat intelligent about it.
When you buy something, you should have rights to whatever it is that your buying. It does not matter whether you are buying a CD, a car, or somebody's time.
Think about it: if you paid somebody to clean your house, and they worked on their sister's car while charging you for the time, wouldn't you be upset? There you are, paying (your dime) to have some gal's car (that you don't even know) fixed. Sound fair to you?
If I hire you to do something, I'm paying you for your time, and I have rights to that time. That's the point of a job. You agree to let somebody else dictate what you do with your time in exchange for money. Thus, what an employee does with his/her/its time is paid on the employer's dime. Because what you do while "on the job" is being paid for, it is a form of theft if you don't do what is being asked.
I'm going to offer good pay, full-time schedule, excellent (expensive!) medical/health benefits, a courteous and comfortable work environment, and in exchange, I want you to work for me. I have no desire to pay you to start up a competing company - do that on your own dime like I did. I don't care if you want to build a PHP thingie that keeps track of your MP3 collection, but if you come up with a useful idea while working on our products and decide to keep it for yourself rather than provide it, that would piss me off - it's my dime that you developed it with!
I'm not asking you to never work for anyone else, I really don't care much what you do after you quit. But while you're working for me, I do expect you to (ahem) work for me.
You don't understand how this "free market economy" works, do you?
All that's needed for Cisco is to sell more product than it costs them to make. That's called profit. So long as they make a profit, it's a good move. If they don't sell enough, then it's a short-lived moved.
The fact that you named so many vendors (Dell, HP, VMWare) makes it clear that it's still an *open* marketplace, and that there is still competition. Thus, it's not "cornered" by any stretch. In fact, not only have I *never* purchased hardware from any of the vendors you name, one of the vendors doesn't even sell hardware! (when did VMWare get into the hardware business?)
Personally, I welcome another hat thrown into the fray! The only possible thing that could come of this is lower prices, better quality, and more likely both. Predicting their demise as they enter the marketplace, when they are one of the most well-known and trusted brands in IT is just a tad premature.
Often, digital computing is clumsy, awkward, and overly precise.
A good example of this is in Aviation. Pilots are still trained to use the E6B Flight computer which is really a glorified slide rule.
When you are estimating fuel consumption, and figure you'll probably use about 11.5 GPH for 3 1/3 hours, it's not important to know any more accuracy than perhaps to a gallon or so, since reality will always be a bit different than your calculations, anyway. You don't need to be exactly precise on your degrees of heading, and when you are computing weight & balance, it's stupid to calculate your moment to the 4th decimal place.
Knowing how to use an E6B, you can get calculations in a second or two with a single hand that are "good enough" - and that's important when you're flying an airplane in turbulence while trying to stay on top of busy ATC calls in a heavily trafficked area. You can't even enter the first of 3 or 4 digits into a digital calculator in that time, and you'd have to use two hands. (Frequently, when flying, your hands are both occupied and you're steering with just your feet)
'What's next, will Scientologists have to wear yellow, six-pointed stars on our clothing?' During World War II, Hitler forced Jewish men, women and children to wear a a yellow cloth star bearing the word Jude to brand them in the streets of Europe, and in the Nazi death camps."
Well, if that's a problem, we could force them to wear a colored arm-band around their right arm. This shouldn't be a big deal, since many of their members already do. And if they are extra-good, they get the gold-colored band and they can even spend one night per week with their spouse!/Heebie-Jeebies/
Seriously, name a single other "religion" that charges members "donations" individually for services, complete with a price sheet?
Slashdot Mirror
One more thing:
7) Could be a missed assumption?
I find that when I get into that "hard to focus" state of mind, it's because I don't have a good, clear idea of what, exactly, needs to be done. In this case, I tend to find that I either stare at the screen blankly wondering what's next, or code madly to solve problems of minor importance and extreme complexity.
Both results are just a waste of time. Usually it's best to quit for the day, and not sit in front of the computer again until the exact problems have been laid out.
I don't qualify my advertising with *any* form of educational requirement. I only list the skills required. Of all the programmers we now have at our small-but-growing-fast company, none of them have even a BA.
PS: We're flexible enough with our hours that one of our programmers is going to school to complete a degree in Mathematics.
I'm not asking for Masters degrees, but I'm getting them. And they sure aren't helping them much, at least as far as I'm concerned.
A motorcycle? A motorcycle !?!?!? Psshht. Phaw.
Why half-ass it? Get something real, like a private plane! That will give you confidence!
yes.. because getting in foreign workers will help REDUCE local unemployment.... maybe in soviet russia.
Yeah, because unemployment is "the problem" - not getting the damned job done so that something of value gets created and sold so that wealth can actually get produced, salaries, taxes, and bills paid, and economies improved, right?
I've been having a tough time finding a reasonably qualified programmer from straight out of college. I'm not looking for senior database developers, just people who can solve basic logic skills and... write software!
From fresh grads with MASTERS degress in IS I get blank stares from such questions as: (in any language of choice!)
1) If you had a string, and wanted to replace part of that string with another string, how would you do it?
2) How would you add 5 to each element in an array of integers?
3) How would you add 5 to a field of integers in an SQL table?
4) Write up any form of database "select" query. I don't expect it to parse, just have the basic pieces. Honestly, just a simple "Select field [, field2] from [table] where (conditions));" would suffice.
5) In your language of choice, take a variable containing the value 5 and construct a sentence that says "I have 5 children".
These are all questions I would consider basic when looking for a database programmer, which is the position being advertised, and for which many of the resumes I see are clearly targeting, with words like "Oracle", "Database", and "Information Architecture" in them, underneath "Masters Degree" and "Information Science".
I'm ok with missing a few. But getting only 1 or 2 sensible answers out of 10 or 20 like this?!? How *does* one get a Masters Degree in Information Science without being able to answer basic questions like this? Supposedly, the job I'm offering is why they went to school, but they aren't even qualified to begin. So what did they do for 6 years?
If you are hiring a welder, he'd better know how to weld. If you hire a doctor, he'd better have a good working knowledge of medicine.
Why can't we expect to hire fresh programmers who know how to... program?
There's no answer that's always right. If memory usage was paramount, we'd all have browsers that used 1 MB of RAM and took 10 minutes to render a page, with another 2 minutes to scroll down a page.
But RAM is cheap and developers have to make compromises based on the real-world that they have to compete in. I can get a gig of RAM for about the cost of a burger lunch with my wife.
Do I really care about memory usage? Only to the extent that it's 'good enough' on my slowest computer - a dual-core Mac Mini with 512MB.
FF3 is plenty good enough for me to thoroughly enjoy an episode of 'Burn Notice' on Hulu just now on that very computer.
Sorry you are having probs with memory usage on your (ancient?) computer. Perhaps you should consider forgoing a burger lunch this week?
You say that mesh networks are bad, and then go on to suggest that we should all use HAM radio instead. Why would you think that HAM radio isn't just another variation of a mesh network?
1. Doesn't rely on a centralized carrier - check!
2. Radio waves to transmit digital information - check!
3. Equipment can be stationary or mobile for short-range coomunication - check!
4. Digital information is repeated from point to point until its destination is reached - check!
I think that you've been thinking about mesh networks as short-range wifi-like computer-only mesh networks. But there is no aspect of these networks that isn't being done in some fashion on the far older HAM networks! It's slower, older, often manually prformed - but it's just as much a 'mesh network' if not more so!
Any time you release a new version of software, there's an increased likelihood that there will be unforeseen bugs not specifically tested for. You can test tell you're blue in the face, but no matter how you look at it, real-life is the real test.
And it's not just bugs. Even when things are working exactly to plan, you don't necessarily want to roll it out everywhere all at once.A good example is our password-change policy - we now require periodic changes in passwords. When we did this, requiring everybody to change their password, we did it "gracefully" over a month's time so that the help desk wouldn't be overwhelmed by idiots who don't understand the idea of changing their password.
It's pretty sad that something so simple would cause people to freak out, but it does, and that's just humanity. Get over it, already. People are people, and it's easier to spread the work out over a period of time rather than just beat yourself up all at once.
Gradual roll-out is a *good thing* unless it's a terrible security issue that must be addressed immediately.
Sure it may not be a problem for your airplane, but what about for the tens of thousands of flying cars that will be filling the sky over the major cities?
Flying cars will be regulated by the FAA. You have to be an FAA-licensed pilot to fly one. That's why the guys actually making these a reality don't call it a "flying car" but rather a "roadable airplane".
And when flying over a big city, you are almost 100% in heavily controlled airspace. For example, take a look at the online aviation map and punch in KBOS at the right. You'll see a pilot's map of the Boston area.
Now, see all those circles made by thick, blue lines? Those are the lines of demarcation for class B(ravo) airspace - under RADAR control, you must have permission to enter, and your plane MUST be equipped with the appropriate equipment - or they come after you with guns, if necessary. As you can see, almost all of Boston is underneath this heavily controlled airspace - most cities are.
So don't think that just any old Tom, Dick, and Harry can get in a plane and start buzzing around without hard time afterwards.
In case you are curious, controlled airspace looks like an upside-down layer-cake, starting from the airport. For (usually) 5 miles away from the airport, the control is from the top of the "cake" down to the surface. You'll see something like 70/SFC within the inner circle, meaning that the ceiling is 7,000 feet, the floor is the ground. Then, further out, you'll see so mething like 70/15, meaning ceiling 7,000, floor 1500 feet.
Bigger airports go higher (Ex: KSFO ceiling is 10,000 ft) and further out. And the entire area is under the control of "approach control", called class E(cho) airspace, which is still RADAR controlled, but you don't need permission to enter. It's more advisory.
And basically every pilot I've flown with going virtually anywhere takes advantage of these advisories, called "flight following".
I see comment after comment like "What about teh airplanzes!?!" but such comments come from a severe lack of understanding of controlled airspace.
See, while it's true that the Eastern seaboard is one of the busiest airspaces in the world, it's also one of the most tightly controlled. Airspace is commonly restricted to 18,000 feet, above which *all* airspace is controlled. (It's called "class A(lpha) airspace at/above 18,000 ft) The only effect this would have on air traffic is that ATC would redirect commercial flights around the kites, which isn't particularly hard to do.
As a pilot myself, I've many times been diverted around hazards such as other planes, mountains, and even UAVs. (Un-manned Aeronautical vehicles, being tested by the military)
And obviously, these wouldn't be assembled on the instrument approach path for O'Hare airport. This makes the whole "Teh planezes are fallingz" as exciting a story as "Teh Internetz iz failingz" due to lack of router memory.
In short, it's just not a significant issue.
You have NO IDEA what "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" means!
Think of a car. It's got four wheels. Wheels need tires, which are made of Vulcanized rubber. Dupont makes Vulcanized rubber for tires. Some other company comes along and makes better rubber for tires. So Dupont now "Embraces" the new type of rubber so that the original company gets tired and starts making balloons.
Red balloons, Blue balloons require different compounds for coloring. Different colors, like crayons come in 8, 24, and 72-packs. I always liked the 72 packs because they came with a crayon sharpener. Seriously, how cool is that?
I once saw a car painted so that it looked like it was painted with crayons. It even had a crayon-sharpener on the back trunk! (Where the key was hidden) It was so cool it...
Wait a minute.... Where was I going with this?
/Sigh/
I'm a Verizon customer. They have HORRID billing practices (throw in lots of ambiguous "fees" and then wait for you to call and bitch about this $20 and that $16 charge before removing them) and downright deceptive marketing.
I have a WinMo smartphone (The HTC Mogul, and it's a pretty cool phone, feels to be about Win'95 as far as its O/S) and (of course) need a data plan. Vzw has two dataplans, the $30 "consumer" plan, and the $45 "corporate" plan. I asked what the difference is, since they both have unlimited data usage, since I didn't want to pay $15/mo more for a feature that I didn't need.
I was explained that the corporate account is designed for people who access company email and intranet applications, while the cheaper plan is for home users. I asked if they actually block connections with the $30 plan, and was assured that they did not. I went with the cheaper plan, and have had no trouble at all connecting to my corporate mail server.
In other words, Verizon wireless charges a $15/mo 'stupid tax' for anybody who wants to use a smart phone for business since their consumer plan offers the same actual functionality. I wonder just how many people are paying this $180/year 'stupid tax'?
Did you actually just say "buy a water"? I offer a glimpse at what you get when you buy a bottle of "pure" water. And if you don't mind me asking: what is it that I'm doing to myself, other than enjoying a sweet, tasty beverage with no calories and no known side effects?
Diet soda is actually more pure water than bottled water in many cases. Me? I'd rather go for the (highly regulated) tap if it's just water anyway.
Absolutely. Besides, early adopters always get the shaft. That's the price you pay for being an early adopter.
This statement reflects a cliche that's just wrong.
Back in the 1980's, the concept of the database was just starting to filter down into the small business world, to replace paper. I remember helping my pappy set up his fire-breathing 286/20 (with 20 MB of HDD, and a whole MEGABYTE of RAM!!!) in order to take advantage of a custom database package based on FoxPro.
The computer had far less processing and storage power than my phone today. The screen was lower resolution, as well. Yet somehow, my pappy not only managed to justify the $10,000 price tag, he actually managed to come out ahead in about a year, in reduced man hours as well as "chased down" insurance payments that would have been missed otherwise.
Sure, you could put together the same package today for $3,100. ($3,000 for the software, $100 for the computer on EBay) But it's just idiotic to think that my pappy's small medical practice didn't come out ahead. And these guys who complain about $200? That works out to somewhere around $0.50 per day, less than I spend on the 2-litre of diet soda I buy every day on the way home from work.
Wwwwwaaaahhhh!
No, I haven't done the math behind this. But given that the force of gravity decreases by the inverse square law, using something like the infltable tower might make the space elevator much more feasible to create.
You mention helium, but why not simply use compressed air, especially at the higher levels?
In any event, this is the sort of out-of-the-box thinking needed to make space travel feasible!
Slash tends to be inhabited by techies who 'get it' but I'm thinking the same thing....
4chan ...
4chan
4chan
4chan
4chan
Can't wait until the first letters of the winners spell MUDKIPS!!
Going by the wikipedia definition, decisions made in typical software development cycles don't seem to rely on a justification based mathematical or physical analysis. Admittedly I might be generalising, but is it more of a soft-skill then?
That's just horsepucky.
The only reason it seems the way you mention is that software processing cycles are so ridiculously cheap compared to, say, 3" C-Channel girders. But just today, I was doing some engineering to develop a distributed, self-healing clustering file system. Specifically, I was doing performance analysis of different approach, doing a base unit of 1,000 simple file reads. That is most *definitely* a physical analysis - performance tuning always is. But do I care about each individual line? Not really. Do I do extensive analysis of each individual element? Not by a long shot, simply because the actual, real, overall cost of the software is so low.
We host highly complex, vertical-market database solutions. We have a pretty decent hardware cluster comprising some $25,000 in whitebox rackmount equipment. A nice half-rack of stuff. And another $10k or so for a failover DR scenario. But compared to the number of customers we service, and the size of my company, that's an insignificant investment, yet we are overbuilt at least 400%!
If 3" C-Channel cost $0.05 per linear foot, how much checking would you do beyond "good enough"?
Passwords are a bad means of securing a computer. Sure, passwords are far cry more secure means no authentication at all, but they do have some pretty severe limitations...
1) Any breach of a password pretty much kills them. Dead. If your ex-GF/BF gets the password to your webmail account, god help you, because the password in their hands works just as well as in yours.
2) Usually you don't have any (obvious) way of knowing that the breach occurred.
3) Because of (1) and (2), they are highly vulnerable to social engineering attacks: just convince somebody to give the password and it's game over. And it doesn't have to be you: it could be the system administrator, somebody at the help desk, you name it.
So they have to hack the phone company's system too, or find a way to clone his cellphone, so they can intercept the call and approve access?
Yes. That's the point, and it's a good point, too. This is a good step towards improving security, and I've toyed with doing something similar with our web-based product. Basically, the idea goes like this:
1) End user enters login name, clicks the "next" button.
1a) (in the background, a text message is sent to user's cell phone, with a code tied to the account and to the specific login session)
2) End user enters password, clicks the "next" button.
2a) (password verified against login account)
3) End user enters code that they've received on their phone, click next
3a) (system compares login, password, session, and entered code. If they all match, user is allowed through.
In order compromise this system without actually rooting the server, the hax0r has to: know the login & password, have the cell phone or hax0rz the phone company, AND know the session code sent to the end user's browser. While not actually impossible, it's a damned sight more difficult than just a username/password!
Usually, the only way to accomplish these is to either BE the person, or steal their phone AND know their login/password. And if the phone is stolen, the rightful owner only needs to make a phone call to report it stolen, so the attack window is very small.
This is a GOOD thing folks!
Are you saying that 1TB of space should be enough for anyone?
No, but let's be a bit realistic, here. 1 TB is enough space for some 100 hours of DVD-quality video. 1 PB is 100,000 hours of DVD video. If current trends continue, we're fast approaching the point where we really *can* store ALL movies ever produced on a single backpack HDD. We went from a GB to a TB HDD in about 10 years, so it's not unreasonable to think that we'll have 1 PB in another 10. At that time, you can record every second of your life on a single HDD, in RAW format.
With strong lossy compression you can do it now.
The Dollhouse isn't so horribly far away....
OOo has been able to 'save to the cloud' for a very, very long time. WevDAV was introduced many years ago, and works as well today as ever. It gives decent security, is quite reliable, and can be seen as a local drive on most modern OSs. (Sadly, even Windows Vista still needs NetDrive)
Bottom line: there is no need to NOT save to the cloud in basically any program out there today, client-based or no, if you are at least somewhat intelligent about it.
When you buy something, you should have rights to whatever it is that your buying. It does not matter whether you are buying a CD, a car, or somebody's time.
Think about it: if you paid somebody to clean your house, and they worked on their sister's car while charging you for the time, wouldn't you be upset? There you are, paying (your dime) to have some gal's car (that you don't even know) fixed. Sound fair to you?
If I hire you to do something, I'm paying you for your time, and I have rights to that time. That's the point of a job. You agree to let somebody else dictate what you do with your time in exchange for money. Thus, what an employee does with his/her/its time is paid on the employer's dime. Because what you do while "on the job" is being paid for, it is a form of theft if you don't do what is being asked.
Econ 101, folks...
I'm an employer.
I'm going to offer good pay, full-time schedule, excellent (expensive!) medical/health benefits, a courteous and comfortable work environment, and in exchange, I want you to work for me. I have no desire to pay you to start up a competing company - do that on your own dime like I did. I don't care if you want to build a PHP thingie that keeps track of your MP3 collection, but if you come up with a useful idea while working on our products and decide to keep it for yourself rather than provide it, that would piss me off - it's my dime that you developed it with!
I'm not asking you to never work for anyone else, I really don't care much what you do after you quit. But while you're working for me, I do expect you to (ahem) work for me.
Really, what is wrong with that arrangement?
You're a day late and a dollar short.
You don't understand how this "free market economy" works, do you?
All that's needed for Cisco is to sell more product than it costs them to make. That's called profit. So long as they make a profit, it's a good move. If they don't sell enough, then it's a short-lived moved.
The fact that you named so many vendors (Dell, HP, VMWare) makes it clear that it's still an *open* marketplace, and that there is still competition. Thus, it's not "cornered" by any stretch. In fact, not only have I *never* purchased hardware from any of the vendors you name, one of the vendors doesn't even sell hardware! (when did VMWare get into the hardware business?)
Personally, I welcome another hat thrown into the fray! The only possible thing that could come of this is lower prices, better quality, and more likely both. Predicting their demise as they enter the marketplace, when they are one of the most well-known and trusted brands in IT is just a tad premature.
No, but using FF 3 on Linux, there is no background for the titles.
Makes it damned hard to see what the post is about without highlighting the header with a click-drag with the mouse.
(sigh)
Wouldn't it be nice if Slashdot editors used the O/S that they promote?
Often, digital computing is clumsy, awkward, and overly precise.
A good example of this is in Aviation. Pilots are still trained to use the E6B Flight computer which is really a glorified slide rule.
When you are estimating fuel consumption, and figure you'll probably use about 11.5 GPH for 3 1/3 hours, it's not important to know any more accuracy than perhaps to a gallon or so, since reality will always be a bit different than your calculations, anyway. You don't need to be exactly precise on your degrees of heading, and when you are computing weight & balance, it's stupid to calculate your moment to the 4th decimal place.
Knowing how to use an E6B, you can get calculations in a second or two with a single hand that are "good enough" - and that's important when you're flying an airplane in turbulence while trying to stay on top of busy ATC calls in a heavily trafficked area. You can't even enter the first of 3 or 4 digits into a digital calculator in that time, and you'd have to use two hands. (Frequently, when flying, your hands are both occupied and you're steering with just your feet)
Digital isn't always better.
'What's next, will Scientologists have to wear yellow, six-pointed stars on our clothing?' During World War II, Hitler forced Jewish men, women and children to wear a a yellow cloth star bearing the word Jude to brand them in the streets of Europe, and in the Nazi death camps."
Well, if that's a problem, we could force them to wear a colored arm-band around their right arm. This shouldn't be a big deal, since many of their members already do. And if they are extra-good, they get the gold-colored band and they can even spend one night per week with their spouse! /Heebie-Jeebies/
Seriously, name a single other "religion" that charges members "donations" individually for services, complete with a price sheet?