realestate.boston.com has a fairly comprehensive search engine, not only to find houses that had recently been listed for sale in the Boston Globe, but also to determine recent real estate sales in the same neighborhood, which may be useful to know when negotiating the price.
The question was asked if the net will replace real estate agents? IMO, probably about as much as it has replaced car salesmen (in other words, it won't). Even if, as a buyer, you don't want to deal with an agent, it's up to the seller of a property whether or not to go through an agent. At least in Boston, a prospective home buyer searching on the net will find that most of the bigger real estate firms (like Century 21, DeWolfe, etc.) have set up their own search engines.
There are several possible motivations why Java is being chosen as the language du jour for intro-level CS courses (though for the record, I am just speculating here; I don't think any of them are necessarily good ones):
The already-mentioned academic reason that Java is perceived to be a pure OO language, which some professors may well have bought into;
colleges have long been criticized by industry (who will eventually employ the students at these colleges) for not teaching those students skills that they can immediately apply when they are employed. Hence, Java (since it is perceived to be the programming language of the future);
colleges want to impart upon their students skills that would command large salaries from business when they are alumni (thus increasing both the prestige of the college itself, and potential donations from said alumni). Right now, Java programming fits that bill;
it may well be easier to teach programming in Java than in other languages. Less concepts to deal with, I suppose. Again, not a good reason, but those who actually teach may consider it as one;
When I'm flying commercial, the pilot doesn't ask me to close my (paper) book everytime he wants to take off and land the plane. Unlike a laptop, Palm Pilot, Walkman, cell-phone, or e-book. Now, I think that the jury is still out on whether this is really a technical issue, or the airlines just being super-cautious, but one has to have something to do while waiting.
Until that restriction is lifted, I'll stick to paper.
...they will certainly try to find ways to cut costs.
Perhaps, but it won't be out of their software budget. If the order comes down from on high to cut costs, it generally means that people are going to be laid off.
I don't understand why they don't just concentrate on getting the job done
Because to many managers, it isn't about just getting the job done efficiently, but also climbing the corporate ladder. And many PHBs think that getting (and keeping) a big budget makes them more important in the corporate hierarchy. Sad but true.
I don't know -- sometimes, there's less training and development time involved in using open source tools than using their closed source counterparts. CVS comes immediately to mind here. Most commericial source control tools require a lot of training for an organization to use effectively (training that the companies that develop these tools make a pretty penny off of giving), In addition, some of these tools need at least one or two full-time trained administrators to keep it running, answer questions, etc.
The licensing cost for closed source tools is sometimes only the beginning of the expenses. And the sad thing is, many of the extra features on these tools which requires the training in order to use either aren't used by the developers or used only because of a mandate from the PHB, whether or not they contribute to productivity.
Believe it or not, not including the support issues mentioned earlier, the "open source/free is better" stance also will likely run into serious opposition from the IT/IS/product development managers within those Fortune 500 companies, because any savings generated by using open source tools would translate into their budgets being cut by the resulting savings (unless they spent it on something else). That's how the really strange world of the big company budgeting process works: if a manager spends less than his/her budget for a given year, that manager gets less money the next year, even though the manager has done what seems to be the right thing for the company. Then, by extension, that manager would lose that much political prestige/status/karma/whatever you want to call it within the company, since they then have a budget potentially smaller than their peers.
Even stranger, I've seen cases where managers new to a company demanded what was the most expensive tool for a given task, even though the free tool fit the developers' needs better. It's all about "how important is this project?"
I know it sounds bass-ackwards (at least it did to me when one of my old bosses explained it to me), but that's the way it works in a lot of places.
AOL is a bunch of hypocrites. Before the merger with TW, the suits at AOL were whining for equal access to the cable lines of MediaOne (now AT&T), TW, and the other big cable providers. Of course, they went on record as taking this stance not for their own self-interest and bottom line, but to "protect consumer choice". Nice sentiment, but of course, now that they control at least a piece of those cable lines, notice how they're no longer singing that tune.
Considering the story, it's even more annoying how TNT runs those cheesy ads for AOL at least three times an hour. (good thing there's a "Mute" button on the remote)
That observation don't correspond at all to the numbers that I'm seeing. Running SETI 3.03 on a 850 MHz PIII running Win98 and a 350 MHz B&W G3 running OS9, I'm showing (very roughly -- I realize that not all work sets are the same size) 9-10 hrs/work set on the PIII, and about double that on the G3.
I read a similar article in the WSJ yesterday, and getting the tap on the cable was anything but "easy." The article was fairly speculative about exactly how the operation was done (since the NSA isn't about to divulge anything itself) but it required a submarine specially modified with either a special chamber on board or a detachable module to work on the cable (which is very sensitive to the elements when exposed, and on which interruptions and tampering are supposedly very easily detectable).
Now, relative to that, yes sifting through the mountain of data that travels over these wires is even harder.
I saw that paragraph, and thought that instead of spending money on software to see if the kids are purchasing the school lunches, maybe the school administrators ought to try spending money on improving those lunches, instead.
On the whole, though, what is this whole setup supposed to improve or solve? Sounds like this is the sort of system that caters mainly to really obsessive and overbearing parents.
Re:MS Tactic to end reverse-engineering?
on
Shared Source?
·
· Score: 1
The fundamental requirement for the guys who create the competing/replacement/compatible product is that they must never have viewed any of the original source
Does it count if the guys who are creating any replacement product look at the original source, then laugh hysterically and say "what a load of cr@p! Who wrote this pile of junk!?" (a phrase that I'm sure will be repeated very often when M$ does get around to "sharing" their source), and then code the replacement exactly the opposite from the original source?
I've read an article on the Register containing some speculation regarding Apple rackmounts and OS X Server 2.0. The source of the Reg's article came in turn from a similar article at ThinkSecret.
What are Dell, Compaq, IBM, eMachines, etc, etc, and all the other big computer builders going to think when the XBox starts to eat into the sales of its Home-PC lines!
I'll go out on a limb and say that home PC sales aren't the bread and butter for at least the first three companies that you mention there. I'm sure that hey are happy to have the business of the "Consumo-tron-2000 PC buyer", but that's not where they concentrate their marketing and sales efforts. Their business PC lines probably generate the bulk of the sales and profits for those companies. (And eMachines doesn't have the clout to tell MS to stuff it.)
I'm also not even sure that the Xbox is necessarily going to eat that much into the sales of PCs in general, even with avid gamers. Generally PC games don't translate well into consoles, and vice versa. MS hasn't exactly innovated a new type of game controller for the Xbox, and good PC games generally make use of the whole keyboard plus the mouse, which is far more inputs than a console game controller has.
Ya know, I wonder if Levin is kicking himself in the backside right now. If he had waited a year or so, TW probably could have bought AOL for chump change, instead of being taken over by them. I really wonder how far AOL's (overly inflated, IMO) stock price would have tanked had they not acquired TW when they did.
What I do not understand is why is there so much anti-aol hysteria to this day?
in some ways, for the same reason that there is so much anti-M$ hysteria: because while it may be "good enough" for most non-techies, those who know better know it is a thoroughly mediocre product, and better solutions do exist;
because those of us who got burned by a totally rotten user experience with AOL have very long memories.
Since consumers have historically gone with "good enough and cheaper" rather than "better but more expensive" (witness: M$ vs. Apple in the desktop wars nearly a decade ago), at this point, I'd be betting on the consoles.
The backdoor was slipped in by a coder who managed ot get it through a code review, etc, etc.
I don't know. I'd like to think that if this particular piece of code really was peer-reviewed, then it would have been caught before release.
But I agree that it is not isolated to M$. I have yet to work at a place that really understands how code reviews are supposed to work. Too often, managers say "do a code review", without understanding that it takes more manpower than the overworked coder one cube over to do a proper code review.
IMO, the release of the backdoor wasn't a defect -- it was a foul-up, and a stupid one at that. While I'm sure that there was a good reason to have a back door during development and testing, the coder should have ensured that this wouldn't get put into a release build of the product, and therefore put the approprate compiler/linker flags in the build so that it didn't. But, when you're talking about a large company where developers are rushing half-baked stuff out the door to meet whatever deadlines the resident PHBs dream up, these kinds of mistakes are going to happen.
...because the "explore strange new worlds" aspect of any Star Trek series set prior to the TNG/DS9/VOY era will be probably nil. Instead, the viewers are going to be "discovering" races that are already old hat to current ST viewers, like Klingons and Romulans.
Other than it being a prequel series and Scott Bakula as captain, is there any more information about the new show? (The trektoday site is still/.'ed)
I'm surprised that the student in question wasn't either expelled or put on academic probation by the dean right then and there for what clearly was cheating? I mean, if the parents really did something like sue the school over this, there would be the daughter's fingerprints on the paper and other such evidence to indicate that it was _her_ paper.
As for the parents' reaction, though I should be surprised by it, sadly I'm not. It's the "entitlement mentality" at work. They probably feel that they paid a lot of money to the college, and that their daughter is "entitled" to her degree, regardless of her actual performance or lack thereof.
But I could never get further confirmation from anyone if, in fact, my 'F' stuck. It was all very insidious
At some schools, giving an "F" requires that the professor fill out a fair chunk of paperwork to indicate that the student really deserved that grade (and by extension cover their butts in the event of what happened to you). Where I went, a 2.0 average or better per semester was required to stay in good academic standing, and getting an "F" meant that you don't get credit for that class. With that set of rules, then in that situation, "promoting" the grade to a "D-" would have nearly the same effect on the student's academic standing, without the extra paperwork and headaches for the dean or the school.
...Amazon is at the front of the IT unionization battle.
Perhaps, but I don't think of Amazon as an IT company. Although they like to portray themselves as the vanguard of the "New Economy", Amazon is essentially a mail order operation that happens to have just a web storefront and no brick&mortar stores. A lot of the job functions at Amazon (warehouse workers, customer support reps) are unionized at other places. IIRC, Bezos has long been telling the workers there on how they don't need to unionize, because they are owners in the company. Worked great, as long as the stock kept going up. I'm not surprised that the unionization efforts have got some traction, now that the workers' net worth has dropped a bit.
Yeah, that bit in the article came out of left field. I think the author got it wrong, anyways. M$ is trying to "protect their flank" against OS X more than trying to actually combat/kill it. If they really wanted to kill OS X, they probably wouldn't be developing Office for it.
Why do you think 19 out of the 20 biggest Telco companies use ObjectStore?
Exactly what kinds of applications are they using them for? How many developers within each of these telcos are working on apps that use an OODBMS? How many users of those apps are there? I'll hazard a guess that many of them are using them only for research purposes and small-scale applications (a point that is left off when OODB vendors list these apps on their web pages as testimonials)
The answer is speed! I have never seen an
app running faster on Oracle than on ObjectStore.
Do you have any hard numbers to back that up? What kinds of apps are we talking about? How big were the schemas or object models?
Slashdot Mirror
Today'sSalon has an update on the plight of the so-called "homeless dot-commers". Turns out there's more to the story than initially posted.
Also, Newsfactor posted a piece yesterday titled, "Despite Cutbacks, IT Jobs Go Begging". The title says it all...
realestate.boston.com has a fairly comprehensive search engine, not only to find houses that had recently been listed for sale in the Boston Globe, but also to determine recent real estate sales in the same neighborhood, which may be useful to know when negotiating the price.
The question was asked if the net will replace real estate agents? IMO, probably about as much as it has replaced car salesmen (in other words, it won't). Even if, as a buyer, you don't want to deal with an agent, it's up to the seller of a property whether or not to go through an agent. At least in Boston, a prospective home buyer searching on the net will find that most of the bigger real estate firms (like Century 21, DeWolfe, etc.) have set up their own search engines.
Sometimes even a bad programmer is better than no programmer at all.
When is this true? A bad programmer usually decreases the productivity of the other programmers.
How does one learn software design without learning how to program?
There are several possible motivations why Java is being chosen as the language du jour for intro-level CS courses (though for the record, I am just speculating here; I don't think any of them are necessarily good ones):
...in the progression from dead trees to bits:
When I'm flying commercial, the pilot doesn't ask me to close my (paper) book everytime he wants to take off and land the plane. Unlike a laptop, Palm Pilot, Walkman, cell-phone, or e-book. Now, I think that the jury is still out on whether this is really a technical issue, or the airlines just being super-cautious, but one has to have something to do while waiting.
Until that restriction is lifted, I'll stick to paper.
Perhaps, but it won't be out of their software budget. If the order comes down from on high to cut costs, it generally means that people are going to be laid off.
I don't understand why they don't just concentrate on getting the job done
Because to many managers, it isn't about just getting the job done efficiently, but also climbing the corporate ladder. And many PHBs think that getting (and keeping) a big budget makes them more important in the corporate hierarchy. Sad but true.
I don't know -- sometimes, there's less training and development time involved in using open source tools than using their closed source counterparts. CVS comes immediately to mind here. Most commericial source control tools require a lot of training for an organization to use effectively (training that the companies that develop these tools make a pretty penny off of giving), In addition, some of these tools need at least one or two full-time trained administrators to keep it running, answer questions, etc.
The licensing cost for closed source tools is sometimes only the beginning of the expenses. And the sad thing is, many of the extra features on these tools which requires the training in order to use either aren't used by the developers or used only because of a mandate from the PHB, whether or not they contribute to productivity.
Believe it or not, not including the support issues mentioned earlier, the "open source/free is better" stance also will likely run into serious opposition from the IT/IS/product development managers within those Fortune 500 companies, because any savings generated by using open source tools would translate into their budgets being cut by the resulting savings (unless they spent it on something else). That's how the really strange world of the big company budgeting process works: if a manager spends less than his/her budget for a given year, that manager gets less money the next year, even though the manager has done what seems to be the right thing for the company. Then, by extension, that manager would lose that much political prestige/status/karma/whatever you want to call it within the company, since they then have a budget potentially smaller than their peers.
Even stranger, I've seen cases where managers new to a company demanded what was the most expensive tool for a given task, even though the free tool fit the developers' needs better. It's all about "how important is this project?"
I know it sounds bass-ackwards (at least it did to me when one of my old bosses explained it to me), but that's the way it works in a lot of places.
AOL is a bunch of hypocrites. Before the merger with TW, the suits at AOL were whining for equal access to the cable lines of MediaOne (now AT&T), TW, and the other big cable providers. Of course, they went on record as taking this stance not for their own self-interest and bottom line, but to "protect consumer choice". Nice sentiment, but of course, now that they control at least a piece of those cable lines, notice how they're no longer singing that tune.
Considering the story, it's even more annoying how TNT runs those cheesy ads for AOL at least three times an hour. (good thing there's a "Mute" button on the remote)
That observation don't correspond at all to the numbers that I'm seeing. Running SETI 3.03 on a 850 MHz PIII running Win98 and a 350 MHz B&W G3 running OS9, I'm showing (very roughly -- I realize that not all work sets are the same size) 9-10 hrs/work set on the PIII, and about double that on the G3.
I read a similar article in the WSJ yesterday, and getting the tap on the cable was anything but "easy." The article was fairly speculative about exactly how the operation was done (since the NSA isn't about to divulge anything itself) but it required a submarine specially modified with either a special chamber on board or a detachable module to work on the cable (which is very sensitive to the elements when exposed, and on which interruptions and tampering are supposedly very easily detectable).
Now, relative to that, yes sifting through the mountain of data that travels over these wires is even harder.
I saw that paragraph, and thought that instead of spending money on software to see if the kids are purchasing the school lunches, maybe the school administrators ought to try spending money on improving those lunches, instead.
On the whole, though, what is this whole setup supposed to improve or solve? Sounds like this is the sort of system that caters mainly to really obsessive and overbearing parents.
The fundamental requirement for the guys who create the competing/replacement/compatible product is that they must never have viewed any of the original source
Does it count if the guys who are creating any replacement product look at the original source, then laugh hysterically and say "what a load of cr@p! Who wrote this pile of junk!?" (a phrase that I'm sure will be repeated very often when M$ does get around to "sharing" their source), and then code the replacement exactly the opposite from the original source?
I've read an article on the Register containing some speculation regarding Apple rackmounts and OS X Server 2.0. The source of the Reg's article came in turn from a similar article at ThinkSecret.
What are Dell, Compaq, IBM, eMachines, etc, etc, and all the other big computer builders going to think when the XBox starts to eat into the sales of its Home-PC lines!
I'll go out on a limb and say that home PC sales aren't the bread and butter for at least the first three companies that you mention there. I'm sure that hey are happy to have the business of the "Consumo-tron-2000 PC buyer", but that's not where they concentrate their marketing and sales efforts. Their business PC lines probably generate the bulk of the sales and profits for those companies. (And eMachines doesn't have the clout to tell MS to stuff it.)
I'm also not even sure that the Xbox is necessarily going to eat that much into the sales of PCs in general, even with avid gamers. Generally PC games don't translate well into consoles, and vice versa. MS hasn't exactly innovated a new type of game controller for the Xbox, and good PC games generally make use of the whole keyboard plus the mouse, which is far more inputs than a console game controller has.
Ya know, I wonder if Levin is kicking himself in the backside right now. If he had waited a year or so, TW probably could have bought AOL for chump change, instead of being taken over by them. I really wonder how far AOL's (overly inflated, IMO) stock price would have tanked had they not acquired TW when they did.
Microsoft also practice this 'eat your own dogfood' approach, and look how successful they are.
That doesn't mean the quality of the dogfood is improving any.
The sooner you get rid of xterm and kterm and the like, then we can consider Linux an OS for 'the rest of us'.
I suppose that explains why Mac OS X ships with a terminal emulator now?
What I do not understand is why is there so much anti-aol hysteria to this day?
Take your pick.
Since consumers have historically gone with "good enough and cheaper" rather than "better but more expensive" (witness: M$ vs. Apple in the desktop wars nearly a decade ago), at this point, I'd be betting on the consoles.
The backdoor was slipped in by a coder who managed ot get it through a code review, etc, etc.
I don't know. I'd like to think that if this particular piece of code really was peer-reviewed, then it would have been caught before release.
But I agree that it is not isolated to M$. I have yet to work at a place that really understands how code reviews are supposed to work. Too often, managers say "do a code review", without understanding that it takes more manpower than the overworked coder one cube over to do a proper code review.
IMO, the release of the backdoor wasn't a defect -- it was a foul-up, and a stupid one at that. While I'm sure that there was a good reason to have a back door during development and testing, the coder should have ensured that this wouldn't get put into a release build of the product, and therefore put the approprate compiler/linker flags in the build so that it didn't. But, when you're talking about a large company where developers are rushing half-baked stuff out the door to meet whatever deadlines the resident PHBs dream up, these kinds of mistakes are going to happen.
...because the "explore strange new worlds" aspect of any Star Trek series set prior to the TNG/DS9/VOY era will be probably nil. Instead, the viewers are going to be "discovering" races that are already old hat to current ST viewers, like Klingons and Romulans.
Other than it being a prequel series and Scott Bakula as captain, is there any more information about the new show? (The trektoday site is still /.'ed)
I'm surprised that the student in question wasn't either expelled or put on academic probation by the dean right then and there for what clearly was cheating? I mean, if the parents really did something like sue the school over this, there would be the daughter's fingerprints on the paper and other such evidence to indicate that it was _her_ paper.
As for the parents' reaction, though I should be surprised by it, sadly I'm not. It's the "entitlement mentality" at work. They probably feel that they paid a lot of money to the college, and that their daughter is "entitled" to her degree, regardless of her actual performance or lack thereof.
But I could never get further confirmation from anyone if, in fact, my 'F' stuck. It was all very insidious
At some schools, giving an "F" requires that the professor fill out a fair chunk of paperwork to indicate that the student really deserved that grade (and by extension cover their butts in the event of what happened to you). Where I went, a 2.0 average or better per semester was required to stay in good academic standing, and getting an "F" meant that you don't get credit for that class. With that set of rules, then in that situation, "promoting" the grade to a "D-" would have nearly the same effect on the student's academic standing, without the extra paperwork and headaches for the dean or the school.
Perhaps, but I don't think of Amazon as an IT company. Although they like to portray themselves as the vanguard of the "New Economy", Amazon is essentially a mail order operation that happens to have just a web storefront and no brick&mortar stores. A lot of the job functions at Amazon (warehouse workers, customer support reps) are unionized at other places. IIRC, Bezos has long been telling the workers there on how they don't need to unionize, because they are owners in the company. Worked great, as long as the stock kept going up. I'm not surprised that the unionization efforts have got some traction, now that the workers' net worth has dropped a bit.
So, MS is trying to kill Mac OS X with XP?
Yeah, that bit in the article came out of left field. I think the author got it wrong, anyways. M$ is trying to "protect their flank" against OS X more than trying to actually combat/kill it. If they really wanted to kill OS X, they probably wouldn't be developing Office for it.
Exactly what kinds of applications are they using them for? How many developers within each of these telcos are working on apps that use an OODBMS? How many users of those apps are there? I'll hazard a guess that many of them are using them only for research purposes and small-scale applications (a point that is left off when OODB vendors list these apps on their web pages as testimonials)
The answer is speed! I have never seen an app running faster on Oracle than on ObjectStore.
Do you have any hard numbers to back that up? What kinds of apps are we talking about? How big were the schemas or object models?