Actually, I wouldn't mind programmable jumpsuits with a wireless interface, so that they could be programmed to whatever color scheme and configuration that made sense to me.
Ooooooh, nice. I'm gonna add that to my Geek Gift wishlist.
Anybody remember seeing the movie version of Disclosure?
There was this supposedly state of the art revolutionary 3D Virtual Reality immersive file system they were using (enough mid-90's buzzwords in there for you?)
So anyway, there's Michael Douglas and he's looking for a file. He's on some techno-trampoline with clunky VR goggles on. They show his visual perspective, and he's jogging down what appears to be a library hallway, looking at virtual books on the shelves. After several minutes of jogging he finds the book he wants, selects it from the virtual bookshelf, and opens it to find the file he wants.
That scene always cracked me up. What are these people thinking? We have computers to store information so we don't HAVE to jog down hallways to locate a book.
I'm not saying that the interfaces in the article were nearly as convoluted as that, but researchers keep beating up on the desktop for no apparently good reason. People make all kinds of emotional claims about how much the desktop sucks, but every system that gets proposed (for example, this weird-ass filecard system) appear to suck more.
Whatever. As long as I can still get to a command prompt, I'll live.
There is nothing wrong in principle with measuring what has happened in the past, and using that to predict what will happen in the future, before you discover why it works like that.
You go on to make a good argument as to why this doesn't work in the rest of the post -- and you're right, constants work great for systems that don't change (pi, e, etc. in mathematical systems) or systems that *may* be changing, albeit very slowly (cosmological constant in astronomy). But, for the reasons you've enumerated, a standard constant across all companies and projects just doesn't make sense - thing change too rapidly. Size of company, competence of employees, stability of economy..... screw it, just multiply by 1.75!
But I'd also like to add that we weren't provided with any validity for the rest of the equation. Any formula will work for a given set of circumstances if you add in the right "magic number". Not to mention the idea that the formula itself contained estimates -- who knows where the "lines of code" estimate was supposed to come from.
Anyway, I wanted to address this topic but I didn't want to respond to the obvious flamebait troll the other guy posted about pi.
The bean counters are desperate for a way to understand programmers without knowing a line of code.
I agree with you on that. But I also believe that besides just giving the bean counters a way to estimate, cost completion models give the suits some air of authority with which they can back up their paper estimates.
"What, Project X is $7 million over budget?! But, but.... I used CoCoMo(tm)!"
*camera zooms in on single teardrop running down cheek and dripping onto lapel of $1000 suit*
I remember being in my software engineering class in college the day the professor was lecturing on "CoCoMo" (think it stood for "Cost Completion Model").
He very carefully laid out the algorithm - I don't have my textbook handy, but it involved elementary mathematical operations on estimated man hours, estimated lines of code, estimated overhead, etc., then at the end -- and I am not making this up -- they multiply the result by a "magic number".
Where did you get the magic number, oh sage of the ivory tower? Well, we just made it up -- it seems to work.
It hit me then that the whole discipline of estimating cost completion is all bullshit. You might as well be estimating with a crystal ball or divining the future with chicken bones. Since I've been working, the best advice I've gotten so far has been "take how long you think it'll take and double it".
How old are you, 15? So if a movie is really not worth paying for, but you want to see it, someone should sneak in?
Blargh - at the price of $9.50 a person ($19.00 for my girlfriend and I), though I haven't done it, I can't say the thought hasn't crossed my mind. And that's not $19 to sit in a nice, THX-super surround sound 3D stereo stadium seating back-massaging theatre, either. The theatres around us suck.
So, rather than sneak in I've just quit going to all but the absolutely necessary movies (Castaway and Final Fantasy were the last two).
I'm not 17 anymore - I just don't have that kind of disposable income.
When Windows for Workgroups came out (believe it was "Windows 3.11"), it was a bit ahead of its time. It had support for networking that most users - home and office - simply couldn't take advantage of, because networking hardware was still expensive.
People in the press started calling it "Windows for Warehouses" because Bill & Co. were having such a hard time moving any copies of it.
Bottom line is, people won't pay for new features they don't need, especially when many of us have *finally* stabalized our current Windows version. I predict this will be another "Windows for Warehouses".
I'm running 98 on my Windows machine at home, and quite frankly, I'm going to stick with software that was created *before* the "software-as-a-service" craze that's taken over MS.
Remember that Disney has a history of propaganda - In the movie "The New Spirit" (a film commisioned from Disney during WWII), Donald Duck reminds Americans that it is their patriotic duty to pay their taxes on time (search for "Donald Duck" - believe me, it's there).
Apologies in advance for the horribly OT post - but where did your.sig come from? I used to have a college roommate who would tell me that every time I'd forget an assignment ("You forgot your homework? Then you must fight the bear!").
Yeah. But not too often. My motto is "if you don't have something to say that's worth at least +1, don't say anything at all".
Hey, Wil - consider posting more often. I was always a TNG fan (but definately not a card-carrying Spock-ear-wearing psycho), and have to admit that I went back and peeked at some of your old posts when I realized what your handle was.
You're definately helping out the signal-to-noise ratio around this place.
Actually, we're remarkable at it. Even if you believe the Taliban's propogandist, over-inflated number of 200 civilian deaths, after seven days of intense, effective air raids, we've accidentally killed 4% of the number of civilians intentionally killed in the WTC attack. Not too bad.
Accidents will happen - but we don't intentionally target civilians unlikesomepeople.
If it weren't for the technology we have, you could reasonably expect Afghani casualties in the thousands.
If people had cared about not killing civilians back before gunpowder, they would've had a much easier time of it.
I don't believe that's the case at all. You seem to have a naive picture in your head of the pre-gunpowder knight charging down on the black knight with his broadsword on a lone field of battle.
In an extended siege, one very effective way of getting your enemy to capitulate was to use a "trebuchet", an extremely powerful catapult-like device, to launch dead, diseased animals into the city that was under siege. Diseased cows don't differentiate between civilian and military targets. It was the first germ warfare.
So, maybe you were talking before the advent of any technology, including the catapult? Well, what was the first weapon of mass destruction? Probably a boulder rolled down a mountain on an enemy tribe. No technology going on there, and boulders also have a hard time differentiating between combatants and non-combatants.
We've always had ways to wipe out large numbers of people without looking them in the eye -- that wasn't invented with gunpowder. The original point of my post was that we've gotten away from carpet-bombing, napalming, and cow-launching to a system where we specifically go after military targets -- technology has allowed us to do that.
Not because of some notion that AOL have decent content. Nor because it is allegedly easy to use. It's because here in the UK, our comms network is so arcane (BT owning everything!) that it still costs to use a dialup. Unmetered 0800 (freephone) ISPs are few and far between, and AOL is one of them. It's also the cheapest (£14.99 pm), since I don't have to pay for BT Smurftime (£14.99pm) on top of that. The total cost for something like Freeserve is twice that of AOL.
Blargh! You guys don't have any good broadband options over there? I just got into a discussion with another UK Slashdotter a few days ago about how you guys are paying like $4.25/gallon for gas (~ 0.75 pounds / liter?).
The UK sure gets the shaft on some stuff... My broadband connection costs me about $50 / month (cable modem) - expensive, but always on and frees up my phone line.
I'm running Gnome and KDE. In gnome, you would simply double-click the AOL icon on your desktop or select it from the program menu. KDE you single-click the desktop icon or select it from the menu. I don't know about you, but I don't get much "dirt under my fingernails" by clicking an icon.
I'm running Gnome here also. Sure, now that it's set up, it's very easy for me to run programs. But getting the system set up and firewalled properly, tying down nasty little daemons that script kiddies are dying to r00t wasn't exactly point and click.
There is one point you and many others overlook: @Home is bankrupt.
Y'know, I've been kind of confused about this.. I've got Roadrunner, so I haven't been affected, but I know a lot of people who have @Home. Some have made the distinction (perhaps incorrectly) that it's not @Home that's gone out of business, but Excite@Home (dunno what that is - some kind of Newsletter maybe? Or are they synonymous?)
...whereas back before explosives became popular, all that hand-to-hand weaponry was soooo imprecise with its targeting mechanisms.
.. and sieges of towns starving out non-combatants, not to mention slashing and burning whole villages was common. I'm sorry, you can't convince me that our sensitivities to human rights have retrograded over the last thousand years.
I suspect a fair number of people never try Linux or one of the BSDs because they're moderately happy with AOL as an ISP...
Let's face it, the reason that AOL and Linux don't mesh isn't because there's no AOL-Linux interface. It's because people who use AOL use it for a reason - it's got a happy, friendly, push big rainbow colored buttons, don't-cut-yourself safety-scissors interface. Love 'em or hate 'em, it's what they do well - an interface so simple that even grandma can use the demon box.
Linux is still, even in its most user-friendly form, a system that requires you to get some dirt under your fingernails while you use it. It's still a power-user OS.
There just simply isn't a big overlap between the types of people who use AOL and the types of people who traditionally run Linux.
As technology advances, we increase our ability to kill more people, at a faster rate.
Call me a starry-eyed optimist, but I believe that technology has helped prevent the deaths of non-combatants.
Laser-guided rockets, TOW missiles, satellite intel... all things have allowed us to specifically target military establishments, rather than carpet-bombing cities full of civilians.
Is technology 100% perfect? No. Non-combatants will still be killed. That's war. But at least technology has given us the ability to target the people we're really after, rather than carpet-bombing whole cities.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I wouldn't mind programmable jumpsuits with a wireless interface, so that they could be programmed to whatever color scheme and configuration that made sense to me.
Ooooooh, nice. I'm gonna add that to my Geek Gift wishlist.
Remember the old movies, etc that said how the world would be in 2001? I want my flying cars, jet packs, all those neat toys.
Yeah, I want all that stuff, too, but I think the tradeoff is that we have to wear silver jumpsuits all the time.
Do you go bowling, play poker, or help your colleagues pave the driveway of their new home?
I'm helping a coworker put a second story on his house in December. Does that count?
Anybody remember seeing the movie version of Disclosure?
There was this supposedly state of the art revolutionary 3D Virtual Reality immersive file system they were using (enough mid-90's buzzwords in there for you?)
So anyway, there's Michael Douglas and he's looking for a file. He's on some techno-trampoline with clunky VR goggles on. They show his visual perspective, and he's jogging down what appears to be a library hallway, looking at virtual books on the shelves. After several minutes of jogging he finds the book he wants, selects it from the virtual bookshelf, and opens it to find the file he wants.
That scene always cracked me up. What are these people thinking? We have computers to store information so we don't HAVE to jog down hallways to locate a book.
I'm not saying that the interfaces in the article were nearly as convoluted as that, but researchers keep beating up on the desktop for no apparently good reason. People make all kinds of emotional claims about how much the desktop sucks, but every system that gets proposed (for example, this weird-ass filecard system) appear to suck more.
Whatever. As long as I can still get to a command prompt, I'll live.
There is nothing wrong in principle with measuring what has happened in the past, and using that to predict what will happen in the future, before you discover why it works like that.
..... screw it, just multiply by 1.75!
You go on to make a good argument as to why this doesn't work in the rest of the post -- and you're right, constants work great for systems that don't change (pi, e, etc. in mathematical systems) or systems that *may* be changing, albeit very slowly (cosmological constant in astronomy). But, for the reasons you've enumerated, a standard constant across all companies and projects just doesn't make sense - thing change too rapidly. Size of company, competence of employees, stability of economy
But I'd also like to add that we weren't provided with any validity for the rest of the equation. Any formula will work for a given set of circumstances if you add in the right "magic number". Not to mention the idea that the formula itself contained estimates -- who knows where the "lines of code" estimate was supposed to come from.
Anyway, I wanted to address this topic but I didn't want to respond to the obvious flamebait troll the other guy posted about pi.
The bean counters are desperate for a way to understand programmers without knowing a line of code.
I agree with you on that. But I also believe that besides just giving the bean counters a way to estimate, cost completion models give the suits some air of authority with which they can back up their paper estimates.
"What, Project X is $7 million over budget?! But, but.... I used CoCoMo(tm)!"
*camera zooms in on single teardrop running down cheek and dripping onto lapel of $1000 suit*
I remember being in my software engineering class in college the day the professor was lecturing on "CoCoMo" (think it stood for "Cost Completion Model").
He very carefully laid out the algorithm - I don't have my textbook handy, but it involved elementary mathematical operations on estimated man hours, estimated lines of code, estimated overhead, etc., then at the end -- and I am not making this up -- they multiply the result by a "magic number".
Where did you get the magic number, oh sage of the ivory tower? Well, we just made it up -- it seems to work.
It hit me then that the whole discipline of estimating cost completion is all bullshit. You might as well be estimating with a crystal ball or divining the future with chicken bones. Since I've been working, the best advice I've gotten so far has been "take how long you think it'll take and double it".
How old are you, 15? So if a movie is really not worth paying for, but you want to see it, someone should sneak in?
Blargh - at the price of $9.50 a person ($19.00 for my girlfriend and I), though I haven't done it, I can't say the thought hasn't crossed my mind. And that's not $19 to sit in a nice, THX-super surround sound 3D stereo stadium seating back-massaging theatre, either. The theatres around us suck.
So, rather than sneak in I've just quit going to all but the absolutely necessary movies (Castaway and Final Fantasy were the last two).
I'm not 17 anymore - I just don't have that kind of disposable income.
The Case: I went with the precut window, and put in the window, as well as ordered the blue neon light to put inside of the machine.
..
..
.. then later on
The Processor: Being that I was trying to be at least somewhat budget conscious
Buddy, if you're trying to stay on a budget, buying a $230 case and a $40 light fixture is not the way to do it.
Because w9x is as buggy as hell.
I thought I upgraded to Windows 95 because Windows 3.1 was buggy as hell...
Then I upgraded to Windows 98 because 95 was buggy as hell..
Then I upgraded to Windows 98 SE because Windows 98 FE was buggy as hell..
:-)
I don't know if anybody here remembers it, but...
When Windows for Workgroups came out (believe it was "Windows 3.11"), it was a bit ahead of its time. It had support for networking that most users - home and office - simply couldn't take advantage of, because networking hardware was still expensive.
People in the press started calling it "Windows for Warehouses" because Bill & Co. were having such a hard time moving any copies of it.
Bottom line is, people won't pay for new features they don't need, especially when many of us have *finally* stabalized our current Windows version. I predict this will be another "Windows for Warehouses".
I'm running 98 on my Windows machine at home, and quite frankly, I'm going to stick with software that was created *before* the "software-as-a-service" craze that's taken over MS.
Remember that Disney has a history of propaganda - In the movie "The New Spirit" (a film commisioned from Disney during WWII), Donald Duck reminds Americans that it is their patriotic duty to pay their taxes on time (search for "Donald Duck" - believe me, it's there).
Sheesh, friggin' moderators.
Hit me again, I've got karma to burn.
Apologies in advance for the horribly OT post - but where did your .sig come from? I used to have a college roommate who would tell me that every time I'd forget an assignment ("You forgot your homework? Then you must fight the bear!").
Have you ever posted here ?
Yeah. But not too often. My motto is "if you don't have something to say that's worth at least +1, don't say anything at all".
Hey, Wil - consider posting more often. I was always a TNG fan (but definately not a card-carrying Spock-ear-wearing psycho), and have to admit that I went back and peeked at some of your old posts when I realized what your handle was.
You're definately helping out the signal-to-noise ratio around this place.
:-)
And we're so good at it, too.
Actually, we're remarkable at it. Even if you believe the Taliban's propogandist, over-inflated number of 200 civilian deaths, after seven days of intense, effective air raids, we've accidentally killed 4% of the number of civilians intentionally killed in the WTC attack. Not too bad.
Accidents will happen - but we don't intentionally target civilians unlike some people.
If it weren't for the technology we have, you could reasonably expect Afghani casualties in the thousands.
If people had cared about not killing civilians back before gunpowder, they would've had a much easier time of it.
I don't believe that's the case at all. You seem to have a naive picture in your head of the pre-gunpowder knight charging down on the black knight with his broadsword on a lone field of battle.
In an extended siege, one very effective way of getting your enemy to capitulate was to use a "trebuchet", an extremely powerful catapult-like device, to launch dead, diseased animals into the city that was under siege. Diseased cows don't differentiate between civilian and military targets. It was the first germ warfare.
So, maybe you were talking before the advent of any technology, including the catapult? Well, what was the first weapon of mass destruction? Probably a boulder rolled down a mountain on an enemy tribe. No technology going on there, and boulders also have a hard time differentiating between combatants and non-combatants.
We've always had ways to wipe out large numbers of people without looking them in the eye -- that wasn't invented with gunpowder. The original point of my post was that we've gotten away from carpet-bombing, napalming, and cow-launching to a system where we specifically go after military targets -- technology has allowed us to do that.
Not because of some notion that AOL have decent content. Nor because it is allegedly easy to use. It's because here in the UK, our comms network is so arcane (BT owning everything!) that it still costs to use a dialup. Unmetered 0800 (freephone) ISPs are few and far between, and AOL is one of them. It's also the cheapest (£14.99 pm), since I don't have to pay for BT Smurftime (£14.99pm) on top of that. The total cost for something like Freeserve is twice that of AOL.
Blargh! You guys don't have any good broadband options over there? I just got into a discussion with another UK Slashdotter a few days ago about how you guys are paying like $4.25/gallon for gas (~ 0.75 pounds / liter?).
The UK sure gets the shaft on some stuff... My broadband connection costs me about $50 / month (cable modem) - expensive, but always on and frees up my phone line.
I'm running Gnome and KDE. In gnome, you would simply double-click the AOL icon on your desktop or select it from the program menu. KDE you single-click the desktop icon or select it from the menu. I don't know about you, but I don't get much "dirt under my fingernails" by clicking an icon.
I'm running Gnome here also. Sure, now that it's set up, it's very easy for me to run programs. But getting the system set up and firewalled properly, tying down nasty little daemons that script kiddies are dying to r00t wasn't exactly point and click.
There is one point you and many others overlook: @Home is bankrupt.
Y'know, I've been kind of confused about this.. I've got Roadrunner, so I haven't been affected, but I know a lot of people who have @Home. Some have made the distinction (perhaps incorrectly) that it's not @Home that's gone out of business, but Excite@Home (dunno what that is - some kind of Newsletter maybe? Or are they synonymous?)
...whereas back before explosives became popular, all that hand-to-hand weaponry was soooo imprecise with its targeting mechanisms.
.. and sieges of towns starving out non-combatants, not to mention slashing and burning whole villages was common. I'm sorry, you can't convince me that our sensitivities to human rights have retrograded over the last thousand years.
And I thought people used AOL because it's easier for them to find vast quantities of low-quality pr0n...
Not when you've got the power of usenet at your fingertips!
:-)
I suspect a fair number of people never try Linux or one of the BSDs because they're moderately happy with AOL as an ISP ...
Let's face it, the reason that AOL and Linux don't mesh isn't because there's no AOL-Linux interface. It's because people who use AOL use it for a reason - it's got a happy, friendly, push big rainbow colored buttons, don't-cut-yourself safety-scissors interface. Love 'em or hate 'em, it's what they do well - an interface so simple that even grandma can use the demon box.
Linux is still, even in its most user-friendly form, a system that requires you to get some dirt under your fingernails while you use it. It's still a power-user OS.
There just simply isn't a big overlap between the types of people who use AOL and the types of people who traditionally run Linux.
As technology advances, we increase our ability to kill more people, at a faster rate.
Call me a starry-eyed optimist, but I believe that technology has helped prevent the deaths of non-combatants.
Laser-guided rockets, TOW missiles, satellite intel... all things have allowed us to specifically target military establishments, rather than carpet-bombing cities full of civilians.
Is technology 100% perfect? No. Non-combatants will still be killed. That's war. But at least technology has given us the ability to target the people we're really after, rather than carpet-bombing whole cities.