Maintenance can be really expensive, especially if you have to maintain a bunch of old projects written in 25 different languages. So for all the reasons you just mentioned, a really big, monolithic, waterfall shop may have standardized on just a few languages, and you won't get a real choice. They will probably tell you when you are being interviewed that the job will be C++ or Java or C#, and the scripting language will be perl or vbscript or sh or whatever they use, so it shouldn't be a surprise.
Oh, what I missed saying here is why an "expert juror" could be a bad thing. The court doesn't explore your expertise, and doesn't know if you're qualified. You might be a world-renowned bacteriologist, or you might be a guy who has a 20 year old doctorate in biology back when they only taught the "tail theory of classifying salmonella" or whatever.
And the lawyers don't have the time or knowledge to vet every juror in depth. It's better to get jurors who are intelligent, but not necessarily experts in the subject matter.
Common sense is pretty much the attribute that both sides desire in jurors (except in a criminal trial where the defendant is actually guilty, in which case the lawyer tries to stack the jury with easily swayed idiots.)
You can be a smart person, know nothing about networking, and still be an effective juror.
Consider a case about a technical topic on which you may know very few specifics; let's say it's about someone infected with a strain of salmonella. The lawyers for the defense may present an expert witness who studies bacteria. This guy comes up and says "I look at bacteria all day, and this isn't the same strain as the one the plaintiff claims it is. Here is a picture of what I looked at: see this curly tail? That's only curly on strain X. Now look at the picture of the plaintiff's bacterium. It has a straight tail, meaning it's not strain X. Different strains mean that your client didn't get his salmonella from my client's restaurant."
The plaintiff's expert then comes out and says "in the old days we used to look at salmonella tails, but today we sequence the genomes. You can see here that this is a strain that is only two mutations separated from the other, and the chances of that happening in this case are very high because of the time difference in taking the samples. Therefore, my client did get salmonella from your client's restaurant."
Now, you don't have to be a biologist or geneticist to understand and evaluate the facts as they were presented. What the court is asking you to do is sort out which of the experts is right. And frequently, they both are, to some degree.
It's kind of like Star Trek, where everything has a complicated technical explanation, then someone comes around and makes a simple analogy, like someone putting too much air in a balloon.
During voir dire the lawyers probably asked if any of them were network professionals and dismissed those that were.
The court wants only the presented evidence and facts to enter the case, not the external, uncontrolled ideas of some hacker ranting in the jury room. When I served on jury duty, the judge made it plain that in that case the law was only what he told us it was. We weren't to consider things from outside of the courtroom.
It's kind of like designing code. He's trying to minimize external dependencies.
You are already without a Fourth Estate. Western journalism, with the U.S. in the vanguard, is rapidly becoming a Versailles court doing nothing but flattering the King.
That's where I still have hope. You may claim that it's all done, but your phrase "rapidly becoming" really implies "there's still something there; it may not be much and it's tanking quickly, but it still exists." If the AP can save themselves, even just a bit, it's a whole lot better than the frightening 100%-Murdoch-filled future I'm picturing.
And then the aggregators will aggregate...What, exactly?
The news gathering organizations would sell their feeds to Google Premium News for $/month, $/eyeball, or whatever. Google would use their ability to host payment systems to collect from the subscribers. Google's free news.google.com aggregator would still scoop up the stories from the Bloomington Suburban Coffee Shop News, The Wright County Urinal Press, and whatever smaller news organizations don't mind providing free news. But the papers with AP and Reuters feeds would stop publishing free news in the plain aggregator, or at least no more than the first paragraph. You want to read it, sign up with The Google.
Or the Yahoo!, or the MSN Live. But pay you must.
No papers are making money in the current model. They're all scared shitless. If the big feeds figure out how to get out of the current free-news trap, any for-profit newspaper is going to jump immediately to follow them into the revenue boat. They just need a leader to follow.
What could make this problematic would be the effect of truly public news sources: public radio and public television, the BBC, the Christian Science Monitor, etc., or any organization that is duty bound to distribute their news for free. For-profit news sources that obtain their revenue from other streams (such as TV news) will likely be slow to participate, but once they see the money's there they'll dive in with both feet. And biased news organizations with almost limitless money and an agenda (such as Faux News) will also give away their propaganda for free, and that'll be good enough for a large chunk of the undereducated world.
(Rupert Murdoch really is just a Persian cat and a monocle away from becoming a Bond villain, isn't he? I mean they all but used his name in Tomorrow Never Dies.)
But I think they have to try something now, because they're all within a year or two of Chapter 11. And they may have to collude to do it, but since we're on the other side of the newsprint they'll probably never tell us!
Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems
My mind filled in the missing parts as: "Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Put your hand on a pretty girl for a minute and it seems like 20 years in prison."
And how many of these are actual news sources? The only time we see Obama on slashdot is when the secret service takes away his crackberry. Even then, the news doesn't come from White House Correspondent Samzenpus, rather it comes cut-and-pasted by J. Random Hacker directly from a real New York Times article.
That's not independence, it's not useful, and it's not news. Even if it was, would Samzenpus be able to tell the difference between a health care bill and whatever Senator Dewey Cheatham's aide tells him? No, he's not a professional journalist, and he'd be extraordinarily easy to manipulate.
What does Slashdot have to say about Afghanistan, or Pakistan, or the Palestinians? Even if it was more than nothing, do we want this to be that forum? Do I want to subscribe to 52 other forums and try to pick out the facts myself? There's a reason journalists get paid to do a job -- sorting through all that crap is real work.
Thank you, you just proved your own point. The signal to noise ratio is far too high to make blogging work.
The market doesn't appear to want to pay for subscriber supported high quality journalism any more either. So we're going to have low bit rate mp3 news as well.
GP is correct that their attempting to force users to pay for it won't work, anymore than forcing users to pay for music when its available "for free" is working.
What most people don't understand is the threat to their liberty of a "low bit rate mp3 news" feed (good analogy, by the way.) The only people who will present news are going to be those pushing a slant hard.
Imagine if every news channel was filled with the biased loudmouths on Faux News, only without today's pretense at facts. And with only homegrown "competition" (picture Billy Bob's Northern Florida Crop Report and Congressional Oversight Journal telling us all that Congressman Johnson was picked up by aliens and probed last night) we're going to get overrun by politicians who are NEVER held to account for their crimes. We'll be an Idiocracy before you can say "Michael Moore ate my burrito".
Gathering news is expensive, and you have to pay the journalists every day, otherwise there'll be nobody standing guard over Washington when we desperately need them. And I've noticed that we need them every single day that corrupt crooks hold office, which is pretty much every single day.
Whatever they do, they better do it quickly before all the professionals leave the industry. Free aggregators are going to kill the papers unless they all move in this direction.
I'm frankly scared of the thought of us being without the Fourth Estate. Whether you laugh with Jon Stewart or shout in outrage with Rush Limbaugh, the press (or at least the fear of the press) helps keep the power in check, and that helps keep the corruption down.
The more immediate question is: do they move us to subscribe on a periodic basis, or try micropayments-per-story? I've kind of thought they should move to a paid-aggregator model. Imagine Google Premium News, where I can get stories from the WSJ, AP, Reuters, etc., without having to worry which has the better coverage. It'd have the Google cachet, and it wouldn't fundamentally change how I get my news. Plus I wouldn't be concerned about clicking on a story that might cost me a quarter and say something stupid.
The Eclipse Process Framework is designed explicitly to design and document processes. It ties together disciplines, processes, roles, domains, work products, guidance, and tools. It's extensible. It comes with OpenUP, a lean open-source process library based on RUP. You can start with OpenUP and modify it to meet your needs, or you can write your own from scratch.
It can run error checks to make sure that you have tied up all your loose ends, so that you don't end up with a process that produces some piece of work but nobody was assigned to create it.
You can publish it as a static web site, or as a web app (wrapped in a WAR file.)
Just download it. It's free, Open Source, and based on Eclipse, of course. Go through a tutorial and you'll go "wow - this is exactly what I asked Slashdot for."
Considering that a $200 million "film" can be obtained in DVD for USD$20 at most, I am sure that there is no way a Wii game should cost more than that... (currently 50 euro!)
I think you have no concept how much many of these games cost to develop. Here's an 8-year-old chart that shows costs in 2001, and claims that it cost $40 million to create HalfLife 2. I would bet money that WoW has exceeded $200 million in development costs so far, plus Blizzard incurs staggering operating costs hosting and supporting their millions of users.
Plus every game is a huge gamble. Nobody knows for sure if a game is going to sell well. For each Doom 3 that gets released, there are three or four Daikatanas that are stinking up the bargain bin. How would your company do if you invested $40 million in development per game on four games but only one of them was popular? Sorry, trick question: your company would have folded after the failure of the first or second game.
They already have an independent catalog of star data (the USNO-B) from which they built their reference search data. It's used to locate the incoming pictures, and they won't extend the catalog from user-submitted pictures.
However, since they're talking about using the data to locate faint moving objects, it would be theoretically possible to submit a series of doctored photos that show a fake "object" moving.
Even this would be pretty much useless because if you faked anything of interest, such as an asteroid plummeting toward Earth, dozens of astronomers would be scanning the skies looking for a glimpse of it. In astronomy, it's easy to confirm data. So they'd call shenanigans on you when they didn't find it, and you'd be kicked out of the club.
I wonder if they'll be able to figure out where I live though...
Given that they're matching these pictures against those taken over the last 60 years or so, and considering the accuracy of the typical consumer camera, I think they'd be able to pinpoint you to an orbit somewhere around the star Sol.
It's similar to Photosynth in that it finds the stars in the sky, but it only provides location information. It does not provide links (you can't navigate from photo to photo the way you can in photosynth.) Not to say they couldn't add that functionality later.
I think of this more like a real-life version of the "Astrogator" role on the space ships from old sci-fi stories, where they arrive at some spot deep in space, the astrogator looks around at the stars and determines exactly where they are.
Now if you google for illini1022 and pedophile, you'll get this story. I don't think there's much you can do, other than provide people with google queries that help isolate you.
Tell your future boss to google for "John Smith -pedophile". That will assure him you're a good person.
"Note: I work for the CRTC. They are not proposing influencing the content itself but rather the distribution."
In either case, the nanny province is telling me what I can and cannot watch. Whether it is the content,
that is direct cesorship, or the distribution, that is the ability to see what I want without "help" from the
government (that is you), it is STILL censorship. It is, like all cancon laws, tarted up censorship, eh.
JE
There, I Canuckified that for you. It's now compliant with the Canadian Content laws.
Correction: I just remembered the V550 did not have a standard connector, so I did not have a cable for it. I had to set the ring tones and pictures via Bluetooth.
Slashdot Mirror
No, the big company executives are all going to go get a second job delivering pizzas in the evenings in order to pay for this
How do you deliver pizzas in a Gulfstream IV? ;)
Really, really fast.
Perhaps in something like water or sewer where nothing changes.
The work crews digging up the road by my house would beg to differ.
Same with the work crews fixing the cellular spectrum outside my window. Oh, wait ...
Maintenance can be really expensive, especially if you have to maintain a bunch of old projects written in 25 different languages. So for all the reasons you just mentioned, a really big, monolithic, waterfall shop may have standardized on just a few languages, and you won't get a real choice. They will probably tell you when you are being interviewed that the job will be C++ or Java or C#, and the scripting language will be perl or vbscript or sh or whatever they use, so it shouldn't be a surprise.
Yes, that was exactly my point.
Oh, what I missed saying here is why an "expert juror" could be a bad thing. The court doesn't explore your expertise, and doesn't know if you're qualified. You might be a world-renowned bacteriologist, or you might be a guy who has a 20 year old doctorate in biology back when they only taught the "tail theory of classifying salmonella" or whatever.
And the lawyers don't have the time or knowledge to vet every juror in depth. It's better to get jurors who are intelligent, but not necessarily experts in the subject matter.
Common sense is pretty much the attribute that both sides desire in jurors (except in a criminal trial where the defendant is actually guilty, in which case the lawyer tries to stack the jury with easily swayed idiots.)
You can be a smart person, know nothing about networking, and still be an effective juror.
Consider a case about a technical topic on which you may know very few specifics; let's say it's about someone infected with a strain of salmonella. The lawyers for the defense may present an expert witness who studies bacteria. This guy comes up and says "I look at bacteria all day, and this isn't the same strain as the one the plaintiff claims it is. Here is a picture of what I looked at: see this curly tail? That's only curly on strain X. Now look at the picture of the plaintiff's bacterium. It has a straight tail, meaning it's not strain X. Different strains mean that your client didn't get his salmonella from my client's restaurant."
The plaintiff's expert then comes out and says "in the old days we used to look at salmonella tails, but today we sequence the genomes. You can see here that this is a strain that is only two mutations separated from the other, and the chances of that happening in this case are very high because of the time difference in taking the samples. Therefore, my client did get salmonella from your client's restaurant."
Now, you don't have to be a biologist or geneticist to understand and evaluate the facts as they were presented. What the court is asking you to do is sort out which of the experts is right. And frequently, they both are, to some degree.
It's kind of like Star Trek, where everything has a complicated technical explanation, then someone comes around and makes a simple analogy, like someone putting too much air in a balloon.
I can't find the "Mod: +7 True, but fucking pathetic" button.
During voir dire the lawyers probably asked if any of them were network professionals and dismissed those that were.
The court wants only the presented evidence and facts to enter the case, not the external, uncontrolled ideas of some hacker ranting in the jury room. When I served on jury duty, the judge made it plain that in that case the law was only what he told us it was. We weren't to consider things from outside of the courtroom.
It's kind of like designing code. He's trying to minimize external dependencies.
That said, it still seems pretty stupid.
You are already without a Fourth Estate. Western journalism, with the U.S. in the vanguard, is rapidly becoming a Versailles court doing nothing but flattering the King.
That's where I still have hope. You may claim that it's all done, but your phrase "rapidly becoming" really implies "there's still something there; it may not be much and it's tanking quickly, but it still exists." If the AP can save themselves, even just a bit, it's a whole lot better than the frightening 100%-Murdoch-filled future I'm picturing.
And then the aggregators will aggregate...What, exactly?
The news gathering organizations would sell their feeds to Google Premium News for $/month, $/eyeball, or whatever. Google would use their ability to host payment systems to collect from the subscribers. Google's free news.google.com aggregator would still scoop up the stories from the Bloomington Suburban Coffee Shop News, The Wright County Urinal Press, and whatever smaller news organizations don't mind providing free news. But the papers with AP and Reuters feeds would stop publishing free news in the plain aggregator, or at least no more than the first paragraph. You want to read it, sign up with The Google. Or the Yahoo!, or the MSN Live. But pay you must.
No papers are making money in the current model. They're all scared shitless. If the big feeds figure out how to get out of the current free-news trap, any for-profit newspaper is going to jump immediately to follow them into the revenue boat. They just need a leader to follow.
What could make this problematic would be the effect of truly public news sources: public radio and public television, the BBC, the Christian Science Monitor, etc., or any organization that is duty bound to distribute their news for free. For-profit news sources that obtain their revenue from other streams (such as TV news) will likely be slow to participate, but once they see the money's there they'll dive in with both feet. And biased news organizations with almost limitless money and an agenda (such as Faux News) will also give away their propaganda for free, and that'll be good enough for a large chunk of the undereducated world.
(Rupert Murdoch really is just a Persian cat and a monocle away from becoming a Bond villain, isn't he? I mean they all but used his name in Tomorrow Never Dies.)
But I think they have to try something now, because they're all within a year or two of Chapter 11. And they may have to collude to do it, but since we're on the other side of the newsprint they'll probably never tell us!
Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems
My mind filled in the missing parts as: "Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Put your hand on a pretty girl for a minute and it seems like 20 years in prison."
And how many of these are actual news sources? The only time we see Obama on slashdot is when the secret service takes away his crackberry. Even then, the news doesn't come from White House Correspondent Samzenpus, rather it comes cut-and-pasted by J. Random Hacker directly from a real New York Times article.
That's not independence, it's not useful, and it's not news. Even if it was, would Samzenpus be able to tell the difference between a health care bill and whatever Senator Dewey Cheatham's aide tells him? No, he's not a professional journalist, and he'd be extraordinarily easy to manipulate.
What does Slashdot have to say about Afghanistan, or Pakistan, or the Palestinians? Even if it was more than nothing, do we want this to be that forum? Do I want to subscribe to 52 other forums and try to pick out the facts myself? There's a reason journalists get paid to do a job -- sorting through all that crap is real work.
Thank you, you just proved your own point. The signal to noise ratio is far too high to make blogging work.
The market doesn't appear to want to pay for subscriber supported high quality journalism any more either. So we're going to have low bit rate mp3 news as well.
GP is correct that their attempting to force users to pay for it won't work, anymore than forcing users to pay for music when its available "for free" is working.
What most people don't understand is the threat to their liberty of a "low bit rate mp3 news" feed (good analogy, by the way.) The only people who will present news are going to be those pushing a slant hard.
Imagine if every news channel was filled with the biased loudmouths on Faux News, only without today's pretense at facts. And with only homegrown "competition" (picture Billy Bob's Northern Florida Crop Report and Congressional Oversight Journal telling us all that Congressman Johnson was picked up by aliens and probed last night) we're going to get overrun by politicians who are NEVER held to account for their crimes. We'll be an Idiocracy before you can say "Michael Moore ate my burrito".
Gathering news is expensive, and you have to pay the journalists every day, otherwise there'll be nobody standing guard over Washington when we desperately need them. And I've noticed that we need them every single day that corrupt crooks hold office, which is pretty much every single day.
Whatever they do, they better do it quickly before all the professionals leave the industry. Free aggregators are going to kill the papers unless they all move in this direction.
I'm frankly scared of the thought of us being without the Fourth Estate. Whether you laugh with Jon Stewart or shout in outrage with Rush Limbaugh, the press (or at least the fear of the press) helps keep the power in check, and that helps keep the corruption down.
The more immediate question is: do they move us to subscribe on a periodic basis, or try micropayments-per-story? I've kind of thought they should move to a paid-aggregator model. Imagine Google Premium News, where I can get stories from the WSJ, AP, Reuters, etc., without having to worry which has the better coverage. It'd have the Google cachet, and it wouldn't fundamentally change how I get my news. Plus I wouldn't be concerned about clicking on a story that might cost me a quarter and say something stupid.
The Eclipse Process Framework is designed explicitly to design and document processes. It ties together disciplines, processes, roles, domains, work products, guidance, and tools. It's extensible. It comes with OpenUP, a lean open-source process library based on RUP. You can start with OpenUP and modify it to meet your needs, or you can write your own from scratch.
It can run error checks to make sure that you have tied up all your loose ends, so that you don't end up with a process that produces some piece of work but nobody was assigned to create it.
You can publish it as a static web site, or as a web app (wrapped in a WAR file.)
Just download it. It's free, Open Source, and based on Eclipse, of course. Go through a tutorial and you'll go "wow - this is exactly what I asked Slashdot for."
Considering that a $200 million "film" can be obtained in DVD for USD$20 at most, I am sure that there is no way a Wii game should cost more than that... (currently 50 euro!)
I think you have no concept how much many of these games cost to develop. Here's an 8-year-old chart that shows costs in 2001, and claims that it cost $40 million to create HalfLife 2. I would bet money that WoW has exceeded $200 million in development costs so far, plus Blizzard incurs staggering operating costs hosting and supporting their millions of users.
Plus every game is a huge gamble. Nobody knows for sure if a game is going to sell well. For each Doom 3 that gets released, there are three or four Daikatanas that are stinking up the bargain bin. How would your company do if you invested $40 million in development per game on four games but only one of them was popular? Sorry, trick question: your company would have folded after the failure of the first or second game.
They already have an independent catalog of star data (the USNO-B) from which they built their reference search data. It's used to locate the incoming pictures, and they won't extend the catalog from user-submitted pictures.
However, since they're talking about using the data to locate faint moving objects, it would be theoretically possible to submit a series of doctored photos that show a fake "object" moving.
Even this would be pretty much useless because if you faked anything of interest, such as an asteroid plummeting toward Earth, dozens of astronomers would be scanning the skies looking for a glimpse of it. In astronomy, it's easy to confirm data. So they'd call shenanigans on you when they didn't find it, and you'd be kicked out of the club.
I wonder if they'll be able to figure out where I live though...
Given that they're matching these pictures against those taken over the last 60 years or so, and considering the accuracy of the typical consumer camera, I think they'd be able to pinpoint you to an orbit somewhere around the star Sol.
to confuse the shit out of someone with photo of a backlit piece of black card with random pinpricks in it.
Sounds like something a random prick would do.
It's similar to Photosynth in that it finds the stars in the sky, but it only provides location information. It does not provide links (you can't navigate from photo to photo the way you can in photosynth.) Not to say they couldn't add that functionality later.
I think of this more like a real-life version of the "Astrogator" role on the space ships from old sci-fi stories, where they arrive at some spot deep in space, the astrogator looks around at the stars and determines exactly where they are.
Christopher Lloyd made the least believable Klingon: "So, Kirk, you won't give me the Genesis Project? Well, okey-dokey."
Now if you google for illini1022 and pedophile, you'll get this story. I don't think there's much you can do, other than provide people with google queries that help isolate you.
Tell your future boss to google for "John Smith -pedophile". That will assure him you're a good person.
You wrote:
"Note: I work for the CRTC. They are not proposing influencing the content itself but rather the distribution."
In either case, the nanny province is telling me what I can and cannot watch. Whether it is the content, that is direct cesorship, or the distribution, that is the ability to see what I want without "help" from the government (that is you), it is STILL censorship. It is, like all cancon laws, tarted up censorship, eh.
JE
There, I Canuckified that for you. It's now compliant with the Canadian Content laws.
Correction: I just remembered the V550 did not have a standard connector, so I did not have a cable for it. I had to set the ring tones and pictures via Bluetooth.