actually i think edit/continue debugging is the same thing. not as predictive compilation, but in letting you fix the program as it's running.
predictive compilation is really only useful for giant projects which take nontrivial time to compile. for the rest of us it comes off as the machine just going ahead and doing a recompile in the background during idle time on the off chance we're gonna hit F5.
i don't have tons of cross platform data, but ime 177 second compile for a 100k sloc project isn't blindingly fast, it's about par.
the distributed compile is hella neat though. if they could extend distributed compiles to being automatic and hefting resources from the underutilized machines of the other coders in a given project group or even entire department - that'd be worth a flag-waving.
Re:This will be another solid update
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Jaguar is Over
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· Score: 1
lets be fair, if you're counting 10.0, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3 (not even out yet) individually then you really ought to mention 95 osr 1 and osr 2 (the release that made 95 usable), 98 se (still clinging on as the gamer OS of choice for people with dos games), and 2003. ME admittedly can't count as it made less forward movement than 95-osr1.
besides all that - output doesn't dictate whether users -want- or are -forced- to upgrade. i would imagine that apple has limited support for os8 just as MS has limited support for its old OSs.
it's the way software is done. stuff gets old, you can't afford to support it or extend it forever. you establish a workaround, or track down the root of a problem - but coding a fix? making all new versions of your software work on the old OSs? it's not feasible, and it certainly isn't what consumers are willing to pay for.
MS doesn't force people to upgrade. it can't. no software company can.
the main difference is in viewpoint, as macolytes love to see their david fight goliath, and the winfidels have come to accept the image of MS as 'bad guy' and so feel put upon to buy new software.
maybe the cd's might be a little more troublesome to rip, but what's to stop someone looping line-out to line in and recording that?
sure with dvd it's a little trickier, since you'd be compressing a compressed copy - bound to be some issues there... but CDs aren't compressed data, it's a raw signal going out to the speakers and well-known form, so i don't see how this is going to stop any audio ripping.
at some point 'copy protection' is nothing more than a hassle for the consumer. and when it's a hassle - it dies. (see: DIVX )
i'll go ahead and skip to the article that page that matters: http://www-iepm.slac.stanford.edu/monito ring/bulk/ tcpstacks/fast.html
here you can see side-by-side tests between Fast TCP and Reno TCP. and you can see that over low latency networks (RTT 100ms) that Reno TCP is more than 5 times faster than 'Fast' TCP. that's right kids - this protocol is designed for use on ultra-wide (by our reckoning) bandwidth pipes with -high-latency-. using a smaller pipe, or having lower latency is against the assumptions of this protocol and does not net the same types of gains.
oh, and the '6000 times faster' comment is a comparison of the speed FastTCP achieves on internet2's pipes vs. consumer broadband. Apples and orangutans.
for posterity:
http://netlab.caltech.edu/pub/papers/fast-030401 .p df - is a recent tech article that explains neat stuff like the fluff papers do.
http://netlab.caltech.edu/pub/papers/fast-030401 .p df is a presentation out of caltech from january 2002 covering the problem again.
http://netlab.caltech.edu/FAST/sc2002/sc02cit-sl ac.pdf here they cover a comparison between linux tcp and fast tcp. they also cover the effects of just jacking up the MTU (keep in mind this is on internet2's fat pipes.)
This isn't a tablet - it's some... obtuse bastard child of a network computer and a tablet.
if you're going to make light of someones tech aspirations, make light of ViewSonic, the silly tarts. MS only sold them the rope by which they're trying to hange themselves.
calling this thing a tablet is like calling my graphing calculator a palm.
Seems to me that Japan turned out alright after US occupation. East Germany and later reunified Germany also seem to be alright.
If the US was in that habit of propping up more dictators, then i might agree with you in worrying about another monster. But since we seem to have been slowly learning the lessons of nation-building - and back democracy over puppets - I think you're just being contrary for the sake of demonstrating your knowledge of past foreign policy f*ckups.
Unfortunately, the cost of our defense priority at the time (stopping the spread of communism, right or wrong it was our public goal) - is that we have left people like noriega, usama, and saddam in power. utterly unfortunate - in hindsight. However, at the time, we didn't have the fortune of picking our battles or picking our time. We couldn't spend resources in securing a nation building in every country we used to help protect western thought. Now, with no one to openly oppose our military might on the battlefield - we can be a little more spendthrift. with the UN actually commiting a decent number of troops to assist in peacekeeping - we can take our time. But we didn't have that luxury before.
France and Germany's current elected officials seem to only be blocking in the UN to try to make UN approval seem like less of a formality for US foreign policy. Unfortunately - by doing so they run the risk of forcing the only remaining super power to operate outside of the UN, and potentially irreparably destroy the viability of that entity. Currently, the UN itself has felt compelled to do nothing but pass resolutions that apparently have no consequence when ignored outright. Should it insist on being stubborn on this issue - it might well fall by the wayside.
N Korea and Pakistan do not have histories within the last 40 years of gassing their people, nor in invading their neighbors. Pakistan is not ruled by dictatorship, but by democracy. N Korea has only recently been under the control of a dictator who is drawing a shocking parallel between himself and saddam. At the time of the bomb building - we tried to put a cap on the situation with diplomacy. Thats where the power reactor plans and the fuel shipment agreements came from.
So which is it? Are we wrong for wantint to forcibly stop Saddam? Or were we wrong for trying to feel secure with diplomacy in reigning in N Korea? You can't complain that we're too aggressive, and yet not aggressive enough at the same time.
The real problem now is that we've learned the tragic results of inaction. After the 1993 WTC bombing (under beloved liberal Clinton) and the USS Cole bombing we couldn't get any international support to put down ground forces and stop Osama. That's why we had to settle for cruise missiles. We've learned that we can't just settle with what the international community thinks.
When we encounter world governments that are not forthright, not honest, not stable - we have no choice but to ensure that they cannot jeopardize the safety of other free peoples.
You're right, we aren't motivated by the plight of the Iraqi people. We're motivated by the plight of the state of world security. Just as we weren't motivated by the horrible atrocities the people in Afghanistan had to live with. But does that mean that we aren't doing good by freeing them? Does that mean that we're tyrants for ousting murderous regimes and installing democracy?
The risk of inaction is too high. Tyrants can no longer be ignored because they don't have many troops or tanks or are half the world away.
are you surprised that MS has increased 'losses' (as defined to be favorable for tax purposes) in their media division (which saw the final scrapping of the PVR unit this quarter) - when they're getting ready to release a newly engineered and redesigned product? (for those of you not following along: redesign = R&D and all the supplies and manhours used for this task are counted as -losses- for tax purposes)
this is people trying to drum up some news from the game market. as the weekly world news (and cnn) show us: knee jerk reactions, no logic, and inflammatory headlines sell news.
like the news from a week ago about the poor supplier who wasn't getting any more orders from MS. was it because xbox was doing poorly? or because they got left behind when it was re-engineered, and they're sore - so they release a Press Release to exact a little PR revenge? http://news.com.com/2100-1040-982911.htm l
if i were only reactionary and gullible... news would be so much more interesting.
cuz yeah, once you ignore how damn good, clean and fast google is, and then if you ignore images.google news.google froogle.google and the big kahuna: groups.google...
then if we ignore all the featuers built into the googlebar (still shipping for free without bloatware, adware and spyware mind you)...
and then if we ignore how tastefully google did the inevitable merge with advertising content. (no pop-ups, no huge flash ads in the middle of the results page : none of that crap)...
and then if we forget the reasons that Yahoo, inktomi and teoma botched their first chances (selling rankings, intrusive ads, no other added value, no usenet searches)...
yeah - i suppose if we ignore all of this data, we might think that google was in danger.
c'mon - even when they didn't have competition to speak of, in any arena, they were still innovating. but/. only gets excited by the reactionary and the faux-prognostictors. that google has competition isn't news. saying that google is in trouble, and that's newsworthy is insulting to everyone who has a mental capacity (and memory) beyond a fruitfly.
man i actually got kinda geeked when i saw the headline and thought someone actually had achieved a viable system for micropayments.
and then it turns out to be a HowTo: make an annual subscription fee site. yeah. talk about sidestepping the buzzword.
"Look! i've got cold fusion! well actually cold fusion is ridiculous; but here's how you can build a pretty good internal combustion engine..."
you see, the only viable 'micropayment' implimentation would be to take payments in larger chunks, say $5 - $10, and then save that in their 'account'. each time the user views a page, the micropayment is deducted from his/her/its account. eventually it hits 0 (decided entirely by use) and the user needs to pony up some more dough to keep going.
no fancy ecash systems, no ridiculously small credit card charges.
and i thought CNN posted the most horrendously fabricated headlines to get traffic...
it's not like the government is going to grant some managerial dream team this amount of money to spend as they see fit to better the world.
there isn't really a government outlet for that money that is even close to 'far superior management'.
why not ask: "why can't we shake up the damn government so that -it- is develops far superior management?"
or at least:
"what other government program could do more good with $40 billion?"
but come on now. this isn't just a hunk of metal in space we're talking about. it's about a joint political and economical venture with all those world powers that we claim to be friends with. having our space program was a huge boon to our technological advancement. don't you think the europeans, canadians, and asians could go for some of that?
and besides all that, isn't this slashdot, where we rigorously protest that NASA doesn't have a lunar base, or a real plan for Mars?
it cost alot of money to get to the moon. it's going to cost alot of money to figure out how to keep people on the moon.
sure, hindsight management is always 'superior' to the way most things tend to get done - but is that realistic to think that whatever other magical venture we suggest would go flawlessly and be on target? do we even know if the cost overruns for the ISS were avodiable? c'mon, the hairline fuel line fractures in the shuttle fleet was a huge time and money drain for all our space projects. but would better management have avoided it? highly doubtful.
before we take potshots like armchair unilateralist dictators - can we at least examine the facts to determine if indeed it is the 'waste' that the question implies?
i dont think they were evaluating TCO for development firms. just plain jane bland networks that probably only needed file and print sharing.
the dev firm costs would be interesting on their own though. msdn licenses running more expensive than nntp service, and yet linux wonks (typically) more costly than windows programmers (you generally have a boatload more experience than your peers if you're coding from-to *nix.)
but again, that might be the advantage. you can train just about anyone to use VB, just as almost anyone roughly familiar with windows could manage a win2k install - whereas working with *nix tends to be much more involved, and requires an intelligent person behind the wheel.
this is proprietary data that hasn't yet been released to the unwashed masses.
these are -planned- sales, these prices aren't available to the public. they are being passed by employees to these deal sites.
whether we feel any process in this situation is morally 'right' or not isn't pertinant.
the legal matter is: that is proprietary business information that is -not- available to the general public (yet), and those corporations have a right to protect that data.
try to resist the kneejerk reaction until you get some data guys.
first, xp has this neat feature on shortcuts. you can specify to run a program in a 'compatibility mode'. odds are, if you're running 9x software on an xp machine, you have the horsepower to burn. and if it's crashing now, it can only get better. i've used this several times on older software (can't seem to let those XCOM games go) and it's worked great.
and remember, switching OSs isn't a silver bullet. try checking out those sites your children use on OS browsers and the programs they use to IM and the games they play.
they may very well end up hating a switch to an open-source OS if it means they can't chat with their friends, play flash games on the internet, or play their favorite games that USED to work just fine under windows. also consider the amount of new games your kids covet that will work on OpenSource software.
and keep in mind, that running those games in XP compatibility mode involves less overhead than running those apps through wine or a similar 'windows simulator' on an OSS OS.
i'm not discouraging it - but it sounds like the only real reason you want to convert is to stop the crashing (have you looked into driver incompatibilities or compatibility mode or patches?) - and going to an OpenSource OS will most likely stop the crashing - but it may much more likely stop the usage in the first place.
it's software that has driven the windows empire. they have a low barrier for entry for developers, which means alot of apps that people want, which means alot of installed systems - which attracts more developers - who write more apps - etc, etc.
but it's still all about the software. and talk to your kids about it as well. they may not mind rebooting 4 or 5 times a week vs not being able to have all their old toys.
the theatres can't actually do anything to you for cam'ing a film.
they can ask you to leave - but they have to give you a refund. the only time they can deny a refund is if you are disrupting the experience for other guests.
they cannot take your camera, they cannot take your film.
they also dont have the authority to search you. if they think you're packing - sure they can 'ask' to search you, and turn you away if they want.
so in this system, the cam'er just has to keep trying. eventually he'll get through when no one is looking (with 90-100% of ticket sales going to the production companies, most theatres don't adequately staff nor train).
and really, is my cam'ing the film illegal? absolutely not. just like my recording nfl games onto vhs is legal.
redistributing -is- the illegal part. saying p2p isn't to blame isn't entirely wrong either. holding the software to account for this is like holding ups accountable for shipping god-knows-how-many illegal copies of vhs movies across the country.
those people distributing the film are breaking the law. this tends to be the cam'er, but isn't necessarily. so you can't just crack down on the cam'ers because 1: they're not breaking any laws, 2: it doesn't work
of course... then there's the nebulous argument of: is it illegal to distribute a cam if you are not profiting from it? it's not actually the transfer of possession of a copy of something that's illegal, it's the sale.
so is it really illegal if there's no sale? and is that why cam'ers and p2p distributers don't actually go to jail? i mean, the gov't tracks down computer criminals all the time and jails them. but when have you ever heard of a cam-circle getting busted?
and i didn't need a whiteboard, a leather chair or a nice desk.
perhaps they should -qualify- the scale of startup we're talking about here. they could be cutting lawns - and would that have anything to do with their digs?
if those that produce entertainment embraced the technology, they could sell the damn shows individually. want friends? it's a buck an episode. want x-files? it's 2. want Simpsons? $1 an episode.
and then there's still product placement in the production itself. without ads, placements would just go up in demand.
spending money like that on frilly design and a questionably prettier interface...
cmon.
with $1500 for a new imac, a pc vendor could hand you a 2.4ghz machine with 512kb l2 cache, 133mhz system bus, 512mb ddrram, cdrw, 120gb hd, those precious firewire ports and a 17" LCD monitor running windows or linux (your -choice-)
clock for clock those macs might be pretty peppy. but dollar for dollar they're a joke.
if analyzing SLOC says nothing about developer contributions, efficiency, or effectiveness - then isn't estimating value based off SLOC fundamentally flawed?
i mean, you can't have it both ways. Either SLOC shows how productive programmers are, or it doesn't.
if it does - then get over the SLOC analysis in your job reviews. if it doesn't - then you cannot even remotely accurately guage monetary worth through SLOC.
good luck to the people trying to estimate worth of OSS. good luck to the people trying to estimate the worth of programmers.
i just don't know why people don't count 'Customer Problems Solved Over Time' as the end-all, be-all.
(and time and energy fixing software bugs doesn't count. that's not the customers problem. it's the developers)
who cares how many SLOC are in a product. how many needs of the end user does it fulfill, and how long did it take to get done from the word 'go'?
yeah, you'd need to define customer needs much more carefully than most shops do... but isn't that part of the eXtreme Programming retinue/. loves to trumpet?
didn't spiderman out-mega-hype SW though?
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The Empire Stumbles
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· Score: 1
in looking at number of screens shown (sony is in the same megacorporation that owns star/loews theatres, and that helps get the big screen count), and advertising dollars spent?
spiderman opened on 3876 screens, episode ii opened on 3161. sony spent $50 million on advertising, lucas spent around $35.
not to cut episode ii any slack. i just thought that if you're going to rip on star wars, there's plenty of valid points, without resorting to painting with the JonKatz(tm) 'Broad Buzzword Paintbrush'.
i would say that spiderman won because of -better- storytelling, not necessarily simpler (a third grader could come up with the drivel in episode 2.).
hey, i choose spiderman over episode ii myself. but not because i'm bucking mega-hype or sellouts. i prefer it, because episode ii is -that- bad. i also choose xmen over spiderman, and unbreakable over xmen. for reference.
Slashdot Mirror
actually i think edit/continue debugging is the same thing. not as predictive compilation, but in letting you fix the program as it's running.
predictive compilation is really only useful for giant projects which take nontrivial time to compile. for the rest of us it comes off as the machine just going ahead and doing a recompile in the background during idle time on the off chance we're gonna hit F5.
i don't have tons of cross platform data, but ime 177 second compile for a 100k sloc project isn't blindingly fast, it's about par.
the distributed compile is hella neat though. if they could extend distributed compiles to being automatic and hefting resources from the underutilized machines of the other coders in a given project group or even entire department - that'd be worth a flag-waving.
lets be fair, if you're counting 10.0, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3 (not even out yet) individually then you really ought to mention 95 osr 1 and osr 2 (the release that made 95 usable), 98 se (still clinging on as the gamer OS of choice for people with dos games), and 2003. ME admittedly can't count as it made less forward movement than 95-osr1.
besides all that - output doesn't dictate whether users -want- or are -forced- to upgrade.
i would imagine that apple has limited support for
os8 just as MS has limited support for its old OSs.
it's the way software is done. stuff gets old, you can't afford to support it or extend it forever. you establish a workaround, or track down the root of a problem - but coding a fix? making all new versions of your software work on the old OSs? it's not feasible, and it certainly isn't what consumers are willing to pay for.
MS doesn't force people to upgrade. it can't. no software company can.
the main difference is in viewpoint, as macolytes love to see their david fight goliath, and the winfidels have come to accept the image of MS as 'bad guy' and so feel put upon to buy new software.
maybe the cd's might be a little more troublesome to rip, but what's to stop someone looping line-out to line in and recording that?
sure with dvd it's a little trickier, since you'd be compressing a compressed copy - bound to be some issues there... but CDs aren't compressed data, it's a raw signal going out to the speakers and well-known form, so i don't see how this is going to stop any audio ripping.
at some point 'copy protection' is nothing more than a hassle for the consumer. and when it's a hassle - it dies. (see: DIVX )
appropriate link here:
r ts /task1/20021001-Low.pdf
.... 'Than [dialup] Modem'
/ 03 18_030318_internet.html
http://icfamon.dl.ac.uk/papers/DataTAG-WP2/repo
and i'm retarted so i misread 'june' as 'jan'.
and nat'l geographic beat the '6000x faster!' article to the punch by stating that FastTCP is '153,000x Faster'
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/03
just do a quick google.
o ring/bulk/ tcpstacks/fast.html
1 .p df - is a recent tech article that explains neat stuff like the fluff papers do.
1 .p df
l ac .pdf
i'll go ahead and skip to the article that page that matters:
http://www-iepm.slac.stanford.edu/monit
here you can see side-by-side tests between Fast TCP and Reno TCP. and you can see that over low latency networks (RTT 100ms) that Reno TCP is more than 5 times faster than 'Fast' TCP. that's right kids - this protocol is designed for use on ultra-wide (by our reckoning) bandwidth pipes with -high-latency-. using a smaller pipe, or having lower latency is against the assumptions of this protocol and does not net the same types of gains.
oh, and the '6000 times faster' comment is a comparison of the speed FastTCP achieves on internet2's pipes vs. consumer broadband.
Apples and orangutans.
for posterity:
http://netlab.caltech.edu/pub/papers/fast-03040
http://netlab.caltech.edu/pub/papers/fast-03040
is a presentation out of caltech from january 2002 covering the problem again.
http://netlab.caltech.edu/FAST/sc2002/sc02cit-s
here they cover a comparison between linux tcp and fast tcp. they also cover the effects of just jacking up the MTU (keep in mind this is on internet2's fat pipes.)
This isn't a tablet - it's some ... obtuse bastard child of a network computer and a tablet.
if you're going to make light of someones tech aspirations, make light of ViewSonic, the silly tarts. MS only sold them the rope by which they're trying to hange themselves.
calling this thing a tablet is like calling my graphing calculator a palm.
Seems to me that Japan turned out alright after US occupation. East Germany and later reunified Germany also seem to be alright.
If the US was in that habit of propping up more dictators, then i might agree with you in worrying about another monster. But since we seem to have been slowly learning the lessons of nation-building - and back democracy over puppets - I think you're just being contrary for the sake of demonstrating your knowledge of past foreign policy f*ckups.
Unfortunately, the cost of our defense priority at the time (stopping the spread of communism, right or wrong it was our public goal) - is that we have left people like noriega, usama, and saddam in power. utterly unfortunate - in hindsight. However, at the time, we didn't have the fortune of picking our battles or picking our time. We couldn't spend resources in securing a nation building in every country we used to help protect western thought. Now, with no one to openly oppose our military might on the battlefield - we can be a little more spendthrift. with the UN actually commiting a decent number of troops to assist in peacekeeping - we can take our time. But we didn't have that luxury before.
France and Germany's current elected officials seem to only be blocking in the UN to try to make UN approval seem like less of a formality for US foreign policy. Unfortunately - by doing so they run the risk of forcing the only remaining super power to operate outside of the UN, and potentially irreparably destroy the viability of that entity. Currently, the UN itself has felt compelled to do nothing but pass resolutions that apparently have no consequence when ignored outright. Should it insist on being stubborn on this issue - it might well fall by the wayside.
N Korea and Pakistan do not have histories within the last 40 years of gassing their people, nor in invading their neighbors. Pakistan is not ruled by dictatorship, but by democracy. N Korea has only recently been under the control of a dictator who is drawing a shocking parallel between himself and saddam. At the time of the bomb building - we tried to put a cap on the situation with diplomacy. Thats where the power reactor plans and the fuel shipment agreements came from.
So which is it? Are we wrong for wantint to forcibly stop Saddam? Or were we wrong for trying to feel secure with diplomacy in reigning in N Korea? You can't complain that we're too aggressive, and yet not aggressive enough at the same time.
The real problem now is that we've learned the tragic results of inaction. After the 1993 WTC bombing (under beloved liberal Clinton) and the USS Cole bombing we couldn't get any international support to put down ground forces and stop Osama. That's why we had to settle for cruise missiles. We've learned that we can't just settle with what the international community thinks.
When we encounter world governments that are not forthright, not honest, not stable - we have no choice but to ensure that they cannot jeopardize the safety of other free peoples.
You're right, we aren't motivated by the plight of the Iraqi people. We're motivated by the plight of the state of world security. Just as we weren't motivated by the horrible atrocities the people in Afghanistan had to live with. But does that mean that we aren't doing good by freeing them? Does that mean that we're tyrants for ousting murderous regimes and installing democracy?
The risk of inaction is too high. Tyrants can no longer be ignored because they don't have many troops or tanks or are half the world away.
they just got their dividends. keep up.
are you surprised that MS has increased 'losses' (as defined to be favorable for tax purposes) in their media division (which saw the final scrapping of the PVR unit this quarter) - when they're getting ready to release a newly engineered and redesigned product?
m l
(for those of you not following along: redesign = R&D and all the supplies and manhours used for this task are counted as -losses- for tax purposes)
this is people trying to drum up some news from the game market. as the weekly world news (and cnn) show us: knee jerk reactions, no logic, and inflammatory headlines sell news.
like the news from a week ago about the poor supplier who wasn't getting any more orders from MS. was it because xbox was doing poorly? or because they got left behind when it was re-engineered, and they're sore - so they release a Press Release to exact a little PR revenge?
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-982911.ht
if i were only reactionary and gullible... news would be so much more interesting.
cuz yeah, once you ignore how damn good, clean and fast google is, and then if you ignore images.google news.google froogle.google and the big kahuna: groups.google ...
...
...
...
/. only gets excited by the reactionary and the faux-prognostictors. that google has competition isn't news. saying that google is in trouble, and that's newsworthy is insulting to everyone who has a mental capacity (and memory) beyond a fruitfly.
then if we ignore all the featuers built into the googlebar (still shipping for free without bloatware, adware and spyware mind you)
and then if we ignore how tastefully google did the inevitable merge with advertising content. (no pop-ups, no huge flash ads in the middle of the results page : none of that crap)
and then if we forget the reasons that Yahoo, inktomi and teoma botched their first chances (selling rankings, intrusive ads, no other added value, no usenet searches)
yeah - i suppose if we ignore all of this data, we might think that google was in danger.
c'mon - even when they didn't have competition to speak of, in any arena, they were still innovating. but
man i actually got kinda geeked when i saw the headline and thought someone actually had achieved a viable system for micropayments.
and then it turns out to be a HowTo: make an annual subscription fee site. yeah. talk about sidestepping the buzzword.
"Look! i've got cold fusion! well actually cold fusion is ridiculous; but here's how you can build a pretty good internal combustion engine..."
you see, the only viable 'micropayment' implimentation would be to take payments in larger chunks, say $5 - $10, and then save that in their 'account'. each time the user views a page, the micropayment is deducted from his/her/its account. eventually it hits 0 (decided entirely by use) and the user needs to pony up some more dough to keep going.
no fancy ecash systems, no ridiculously small credit card charges.
and i thought CNN posted the most horrendously fabricated headlines to get traffic...
this is government money we're talking about.
it's not like the government is going to grant some managerial dream team this amount of money to spend as they see fit to better the world.
there isn't really a government outlet for that money that is even close to 'far superior management'.
why not ask: "why can't we shake up the damn government so that -it- is develops far superior management?"
or at least:
"what other government program could do more good with $40 billion?"
but come on now. this isn't just a hunk of metal in space we're talking about. it's about a joint political and economical venture with all those world powers that we claim to be friends with. having our space program was a huge boon to our technological advancement. don't you think the europeans, canadians, and asians could go for some of that?
and besides all that, isn't this slashdot, where we rigorously protest that NASA doesn't have a lunar base, or a real plan for Mars?
it cost alot of money to get to the moon. it's going to cost alot of money to figure out how to keep people on the moon.
sure, hindsight management is always 'superior' to the way most things tend to get done - but is that realistic to think that whatever other magical venture we suggest would go flawlessly and be on target? do we even know if the cost overruns for the ISS were avodiable? c'mon, the hairline fuel line fractures in the shuttle fleet was a huge time and money drain for all our space projects. but would better management have avoided it? highly doubtful.
before we take potshots like armchair unilateralist dictators - can we at least examine the facts to determine if indeed it is the 'waste' that the question implies?
i dont think they were evaluating TCO for development firms. just plain jane bland networks that probably only needed file and print sharing.
the dev firm costs would be interesting on their own though. msdn licenses running more expensive than nntp service, and yet linux wonks (typically) more costly than windows programmers (you generally have a boatload more experience than your peers if you're coding from-to *nix.)
but again, that might be the advantage. you can train just about anyone to use VB, just as almost anyone roughly familiar with windows could manage a win2k install - whereas working with *nix tends to be much more involved, and requires an intelligent person behind the wheel.
this is proprietary data that hasn't yet been released to the unwashed masses.
these are -planned- sales, these prices aren't available to the public. they are being passed by employees to these deal sites.
whether we feel any process in this situation is morally 'right' or not isn't pertinant.
the legal matter is: that is proprietary business information that is -not- available to the general public (yet), and those corporations have a right to protect that data.
try to resist the kneejerk reaction until you get some data guys.
first, xp has this neat feature on shortcuts. you can specify to run a program in a 'compatibility mode'. odds are, if you're running 9x software on an xp machine, you have the horsepower to burn. and if it's crashing now, it can only get better. i've used this several times on older software (can't seem to let those XCOM games go) and it's worked great.
and remember, switching OSs isn't a silver bullet. try checking out those sites your children use on OS browsers and the programs they use to IM and the games they play.
they may very well end up hating a switch to an open-source OS if it means they can't chat with their friends, play flash games on the internet, or play their favorite games that USED to work just fine under windows. also consider the amount of new games your kids covet that will work on OpenSource software.
and keep in mind, that running those games in XP compatibility mode involves less overhead than running those apps through wine or a similar 'windows simulator' on an OSS OS.
i'm not discouraging it - but it sounds like the only real reason you want to convert is to stop the crashing (have you looked into driver incompatibilities or compatibility mode or patches?) - and going to an OpenSource OS will most likely stop the crashing - but it may much more likely stop the usage in the first place.
it's software that has driven the windows empire. they have a low barrier for entry for developers, which means alot of apps that people want, which means alot of installed systems - which attracts more developers - who write more apps - etc, etc.
but it's still all about the software. and talk to your kids about it as well. they may not mind rebooting 4 or 5 times a week vs not being able to have all their old toys.
the theatres can't actually do anything to you for cam'ing a film.
they can ask you to leave - but they have to give you a refund. the only time they can deny a refund is if you are disrupting the experience for other guests.
they cannot take your camera, they cannot take your film.
they also dont have the authority to search you.
if they think you're packing - sure they can 'ask' to search you, and turn you away if they want.
so in this system, the cam'er just has to keep trying. eventually he'll get through when no one is looking (with 90-100% of ticket sales going to the production companies, most theatres don't adequately staff nor train).
and really, is my cam'ing the film illegal? absolutely not. just like my recording nfl games onto vhs is legal.
redistributing -is- the illegal part.
saying p2p isn't to blame isn't entirely wrong either. holding the software to account for this is like holding ups accountable for shipping god-knows-how-many illegal copies of vhs movies across the country.
those people distributing the film are breaking the law. this tends to be the cam'er, but isn't necessarily. so you can't just crack down on the cam'ers because 1: they're not breaking any laws, 2: it doesn't work
of course... then there's the nebulous argument of: is it illegal to distribute a cam if you are not profiting from it? it's not actually the transfer of possession of a copy of something that's illegal, it's the sale.
so is it really illegal if there's no sale? and is that why cam'ers and p2p distributers don't actually go to jail? i mean, the gov't tracks down computer criminals all the time and jails them. but when have you ever heard of a cam-circle getting busted?
but unlike every other parasitic species... trolls rarely evolve to meet a changing environment or more warey or resistant hosts.
and i didn't need a whiteboard, a leather chair or a nice desk.
perhaps they should -qualify- the scale of startup we're talking about here. they could be cutting lawns - and would that have anything to do with their digs?
did we already forget that?
if those that produce entertainment embraced the technology, they could sell the damn shows individually. want friends? it's a buck an episode. want x-files? it's 2. want Simpsons? $1 an episode.
and then there's still product placement in the production itself. without ads, placements would just go up in demand.
spending money like that on frilly design and a questionably prettier interface...
cmon.
with $1500 for a new imac, a pc vendor could hand you a 2.4ghz machine with 512kb l2 cache, 133mhz system bus, 512mb ddrram, cdrw, 120gb hd, those precious firewire ports and a 17" LCD monitor running windows or linux (your -choice-)
clock for clock those macs might be pretty peppy. but dollar for dollar they're a joke.
if analyzing SLOC says nothing about developer contributions, efficiency, or effectiveness - then isn't estimating value based off SLOC fundamentally flawed?
i mean, you can't have it both ways. Either SLOC shows how productive programmers are, or it doesn't.
if it does - then get over the SLOC analysis in your job reviews.
if it doesn't - then you cannot even remotely accurately guage monetary worth through SLOC.
good luck to the people trying to estimate worth of OSS. good luck to the people trying to estimate the worth of programmers.
i just don't know why people don't count 'Customer Problems Solved Over Time' as the end-all, be-all.
(and time and energy fixing software bugs doesn't count. that's not the customers problem. it's the developers)
who cares how many SLOC are in a product. how many needs of the end user does it fulfill, and how long did it take to get done from the word 'go'?
yeah, you'd need to define customer needs much more carefully than most shops do... but isn't that part of the eXtreme Programming retinue
in looking at number of screens shown (sony is in the same megacorporation that owns star/loews theatres, and that helps get the big screen count), and advertising dollars spent?
spiderman opened on 3876 screens, episode ii opened on 3161. sony spent $50 million on advertising, lucas spent around $35.
not to cut episode ii any slack. i just thought that if you're going to rip on star wars, there's plenty of valid points, without resorting to painting with the JonKatz(tm) 'Broad Buzzword Paintbrush'.
i would say that spiderman won because of -better- storytelling, not necessarily simpler (a third grader could come up with the drivel in episode 2.).
hey, i choose spiderman over episode ii myself. but not because i'm bucking mega-hype or sellouts. i prefer it, because episode ii is -that- bad. i also choose xmen over spiderman, and unbreakable over xmen. for reference.
/. without ads doesn't help me.
/. for it's own content. i visit it because it's a convenient dumping ground for links to many things i find interesting.
/. is a collection of links to stories on -other- websites who -will- have ads.
i don't read
the forums? hah! those are mind-numbing.
if the ads were intrusive (the page-top banner is thoroughly tuned out on just about every site) then i'd just stop visiting.
try a different model.
subscription didn't work for PCXL and it -had- redeeming self-generated content.
in other news:
you say toh-mah-toe, i say toh-may-toe