Notice that the complaint says "not-for-profit" as opposed to "non-profit". The distinction has been pointed out in other posts that not-for-profit doesn't mean "charitable."
As a matter of fact, Visa International is a not-for-profit corporation. Doesn't mean that the president isn't making seven figures.
Since you must specifically choose to use the GPL'd code, calling it "viral" is FUD at it's worst & most obvious.
Well, wait just a second. Couldn't the GPL'd code be considered an attractive nuisance? Here's this code that does something you want to do. It's just sitting there. You can't help yourself. You have to go over and embrace it.
Next thing you know, you're infected by the GPL virus.
Seems to me, that's just how STDs work. You see a little hottie sitting on the corner, and you can't be bothered to slip on a condom (cleanroom software practices), and next thing you know, you're getting a shot for the clap or worse.
There's one area where you can really shoot yourself in the foot with XP: big databases.
If you drive it all the way from the customer directly to the programmers, and you're dealing with hundreds or thousands of Mb of data, or you're trying to scale up at all, and you're changing the schema every week, you (and the customer) are going to be unhappy. Perhaps there's an intermediate layer missing from the model.
Maybe the end-user isn't the customer. Maybe the end-user talks to the software architects and designers, who consolidate, clarify, help define and tease out the requirements from the end-users. Then, these people that actually know what the end-user wants become the customers of the programmers. The turbulence of the daily end-user requirement changes are smoothed over and presented to the development team in a larger meta-cycle. Think of it as eXtreme Programming buffered by a cache of eXtreme Design.
I guess I should trademark that and write a book. At least now you have some control over the process. Now you can make the application work efficiently, instead of just work.
Based on a recommendation found here @/. I've recently finished reading this book.
The theme of this book to me was constrasting how the open sourcing of the mechanisms of the abstraction of capital have led to the success of capitalism in the west, and the balkanization of capital abstraction systems in the third world and formerly communist countries has been the foundation of the failure of capitalism there.
This seems to bear directly on how the US government cracks down on alternative capital formation schemes. I think that anything that reduces the fungability of the product of my labor is bad. I also think it may be unconstitutional from a search & seizure perspective.
Generally, the video slots split the functionality between the user interface and the gaming controls. All of the random bit-flipping, coin registration and payouts are controlled by PROMS and supporting hardware that is reviewed and approved by the Nevada Gaming Control Board for accuracy and fairness with respect to the design spec.
The flashy UI, which would be under the control of NT, responds to signals from this hardware and sends back the user's commands as to how many credits to play, which widget was selected, and so on.
Don't worry about whether NT will make anything to do with money insecure. It won't.
Now, you might be able to make some headway with the slot club processor.
... . Right now, we are at the knee of the exponential growth curve of the telecommunications market,...
There's always been something that's bothered me about this 'knee of the growth curve' phrase. Aren't you always at the knee of the curve? As time progresses, the slope of the future curve is always exponentially steeper than the slope of the curve behind you. Isn't that why exponential growth on a log plot is a straight line?
Speaking of such things, I just saw a Nova special on PBS the other night about artificial hearts and heart-assist devices. The latest appears to be variations on a thumb sized (well, maybe a fat person's thumb) cylinder that either fits into a heart valve or is attached through a tube near the pointy part of the left ventricle. Inside the cylinder is a 10k-rpm propeller (impeller?) shaped so that the red blood cells don't have a chance to get damaged and start a clotting reaction.
I don't think it's indestructable. Its surface is just packed together very tightly so it doesn't react with anything. Seems to me you could still pulverize it so that the uniformity is compromised, then decompose it further chemically.
Actually, what you describe exists. It's called an 'S-corporation'. Likewise, what you describe about the valuation of a company is as it exists today. The market values a stock at the current value of all future expected cash flows to the stockholder. Whether those flows are in the form of dividends or capital appreciation, you add up all the cash you expect to receive for the life of the company and adjust them to bring them back to the present value. The adjustment is for the amount of time spent waiting for the cash and a reasonable rate of interest relative to the risk of the investment.
The idea is that $1 today is worth more to you than $1 given to you a year from now. That's because if I give you $1 today, at the very worst you can stick it in a savings account and it will be worth $1.03 in a year, so the promise of $1 in a year is worth about $0.97 today.
Now switch to the idea of "how much would I pay for the right to receive $1 every year for the next 30 years?" To solve that, add up the present value of all the $1 you will be receiving. The first one is.97, the next one is.93 (compounding), the next is.88, and so on. Add it all up, and you get about $20. Of course, at the end of the 30 years, the stock isn't worthless unless the company has no assets, and even if it closes down, you'll get a piece of that as a shareholder. So if we wave our hands really fast, we can say that the corporation is worth about $10 per share just based on its assets. That $10 in 30 years would be worth about $4, so the share price you'd be willing to pay (assuming the 3% interest rate as your "price for money") would be about $24 per share.
Now look at it if you think the business is a lot riskier than a savings account. Say you require a 12% return. Then, these future cash flows are only worth about $8!
Suddenly, we have a marketplace because someone thinks it's worth $8 and someone else thinks it's worth $24. Even if they split the difference and the person who owns it for $8 sells it for $16, they both are happy with the transaction.
From this comes the wild swings in the marketplace. Everyone thinks they have a better model for assesing the value and figuring out what the future cash flows are going to be. A lot of them get proven wrong when a company's revenues aren't as good as projected or they can't make and distribute a product as cheaply as they thought they could, and the investor loses money when the share price drops on this new information.
Brilliant statement. Of course, there is the danger of code bloat as the trailing edge of the sword you wield to promote the concept of a microkernel. Just as the blinding speed Moore's law promises us could be used for good, it could also be used to keep Office 200x running at an acceptable speed.
The idea of improvements in performance allowing for fundamental improvement is always overshadowed by the more likely use of allowing code factory laziness to continue.
I find your argument to be a little slippery and full of waving hands.
Your first assumption that $50 per month is inexpensive, is a bit of a stretch. If you equate that to the actual effort required to generate that much cash with an entry level job, or equate it to a commodity (say 50 loaves of bread), I think that someone earning minimum wage might be more inclined to eat for the month instead of spending 10% of their monthly take-home pay on bytes.
Your second item presumes a certain amount of technical ability, knowledge and that perverse drive that leads people to tinker with stuff they've salvaged. The intersection of people without access due to economic factors and those people that are able to cobble together a homebrew solution is quite small.
You miss the point of the article, that the concept of utopian virtual communities is flawed for the same reason that utopian meatspace communities don't happen: there's not enough to go around.
I'm willing to bet that the elapsed time varies wildly for novices and not very much at all for gurus
I guess that's what I was trying to solicit. For those that have worked in two or more of these languages, give me an estimate of how long you thought it would take you to have coded up each of these examples for each of your langagues when you were at the novice, average and guru stages in your development.
Then, I could aggregate the responses and perhaps plot out some consensus of what the learning curve looks like for each language.
From there, we could interpret the relative performance versus the 'degree of difficulty' and come up with a very precise estimate of the bang per buck ratio of each language
Of course, that very precise estimate will be almost, but not quite, perfectly irrelevant to anything in the real world. (spot the reference)
I would be interested in knowing the relative effort of creation for each of the languages. I know that the universal answer of 'it depends' is the One True Answer, but at the very least, a lines-of-code metric would be good (which I guess I can go and count myself!).
A scientific wild ass guess of elapsed time for a novice, average and guru programmer of each language would also be good.
If people want to look at the sources and email me with their estimates, I'll compile the stats in about a week and post them. Cheers!
Slashdot Mirror
As a matter of fact, Visa International is a not-for-profit corporation. Doesn't mean that the president isn't making seven figures.
I meant to say:
It's from the <fnord> department.
Fumbling fat fingers fail finding preview vs submit...
It's from the \ department. Silly goose.
For those of you looking to addict yourselves to yet another type of crack...
Liquid crystal displays do not generate light. They are either reflective or backlit. The backlighting is sometimes done with a fluorescent bulb.
Well, wait just a second. Couldn't the GPL'd code be considered an attractive nuisance? Here's this code that does something you want to do. It's just sitting there. You can't help yourself. You have to go over and embrace it.
Next thing you know, you're infected by the GPL virus.
Seems to me, that's just how STDs work. You see a little hottie sitting on the corner, and you can't be bothered to slip on a condom (cleanroom software practices), and next thing you know, you're getting a shot for the clap or worse.
If you drive it all the way from the customer directly to the programmers, and you're dealing with hundreds or thousands of Mb of data, or you're trying to scale up at all, and you're changing the schema every week, you (and the customer) are going to be unhappy. Perhaps there's an intermediate layer missing from the model.
Maybe the end-user isn't the customer. Maybe the end-user talks to the software architects and designers, who consolidate, clarify, help define and tease out the requirements from the end-users. Then, these people that actually know what the end-user wants become the customers of the programmers. The turbulence of the daily end-user requirement changes are smoothed over and presented to the development team in a larger meta-cycle. Think of it as eXtreme Programming buffered by a cache of eXtreme Design.
I guess I should trademark that and write a book. At least now you have some control over the process. Now you can make the application work efficiently, instead of just work.
Anota.com is something else. The pen you're after is here
This strongly resembles the plot of the recent Schwarzzenegger flick, The 6th Day
Ohhh... So you admit it's your fault.
The theme of this book to me was constrasting how the open sourcing of the mechanisms of the abstraction of capital have led to the success of capitalism in the west, and the balkanization of capital abstraction systems in the third world and formerly communist countries has been the foundation of the failure of capitalism there.
This seems to bear directly on how the US government cracks down on alternative capital formation schemes. I think that anything that reduces the fungability of the product of my labor is bad. I also think it may be unconstitutional from a search & seizure perspective.
Capital wants to be free, just like source.
- "for all intents and purposes" (my pet peeve)
- "Shakespeare"
- "illiterate"
- "wannabes" (plural not possessive)
- "equivalent"
- "smearing fecal matter on my work"
Otherwise I'm totally sympathetic to your position.Now I must furiously check my submission for spelling errors.
They're called 'signatures'.
I just wonder how unique it is...?
I'll give you US$100 for it.
Are you suggesting this was the original blue screen of ecch?
The flashy UI, which would be under the control of NT, responds to signals from this hardware and sends back the user's commands as to how many credits to play, which widget was selected, and so on.
Don't worry about whether NT will make anything to do with money insecure. It won't.
Now, you might be able to make some headway with the slot club processor.
Oh come on now! This has to be a pseudonym.
There's always been something that's bothered me about this 'knee of the growth curve' phrase. Aren't you always at the knee of the curve? As time progresses, the slope of the future curve is always exponentially steeper than the slope of the curve behind you. Isn't that why exponential growth on a log plot is a straight line?
Speaking of such things, I just saw a Nova special on PBS the other night about artificial hearts and heart-assist devices. The latest appears to be variations on a thumb sized (well, maybe a fat person's thumb) cylinder that either fits into a heart valve or is attached through a tube near the pointy part of the left ventricle. Inside the cylinder is a 10k-rpm propeller (impeller?) shaped so that the red blood cells don't have a chance to get damaged and start a clotting reaction.
I don't think it's indestructable. Its surface is just packed together very tightly so it doesn't react with anything. Seems to me you could still pulverize it so that the uniformity is compromised, then decompose it further chemically.
The idea is that $1 today is worth more to you than $1 given to you a year from now. That's because if I give you $1 today, at the very worst you can stick it in a savings account and it will be worth $1.03 in a year, so the promise of $1 in a year is worth about $0.97 today.
Now switch to the idea of "how much would I pay for the right to receive $1 every year for the next 30 years?" To solve that, add up the present value of all the $1 you will be receiving. The first one is .97, the next one is .93 (compounding), the next is .88, and so on. Add it all up, and you get about $20. Of course, at the end of the 30 years, the stock isn't worthless unless the company has no assets, and even if it closes down, you'll get a piece of that as a shareholder. So if we wave our hands really fast, we can say that the corporation is worth about $10 per share just based on its assets. That $10 in 30 years would be worth about $4, so the share price you'd be willing to pay (assuming the 3% interest rate as your "price for money") would be about $24 per share.
Now look at it if you think the business is a lot riskier than a savings account. Say you require a 12% return. Then, these future cash flows are only worth about $8!
Suddenly, we have a marketplace because someone thinks it's worth $8 and someone else thinks it's worth $24. Even if they split the difference and the person who owns it for $8 sells it for $16, they both are happy with the transaction.
From this comes the wild swings in the marketplace. Everyone thinks they have a better model for assesing the value and figuring out what the future cash flows are going to be. A lot of them get proven wrong when a company's revenues aren't as good as projected or they can't make and distribute a product as cheaply as they thought they could, and the investor loses money when the share price drops on this new information.
The idea of improvements in performance allowing for fundamental improvement is always overshadowed by the more likely use of allowing code factory laziness to continue.
Move along, no point to be seen here.
...about 1 7/8 hours, based on the illustration which says "150 miles" and the text that says "80 mph".
Your first assumption that $50 per month is inexpensive, is a bit of a stretch. If you equate that to the actual effort required to generate that much cash with an entry level job, or equate it to a commodity (say 50 loaves of bread), I think that someone earning minimum wage might be more inclined to eat for the month instead of spending 10% of their monthly take-home pay on bytes.
Your second item presumes a certain amount of technical ability, knowledge and that perverse drive that leads people to tinker with stuff they've salvaged. The intersection of people without access due to economic factors and those people that are able to cobble together a homebrew solution is quite small.
You miss the point of the article, that the concept of utopian virtual communities is flawed for the same reason that utopian meatspace communities don't happen: there's not enough to go around.
I guess that's what I was trying to solicit. For those that have worked in two or more of these languages, give me an estimate of how long you thought it would take you to have coded up each of these examples for each of your langagues when you were at the novice, average and guru stages in your development.
Then, I could aggregate the responses and perhaps plot out some consensus of what the learning curve looks like for each language.
From there, we could interpret the relative performance versus the 'degree of difficulty' and come up with a very precise estimate of the bang per buck ratio of each language
Of course, that very precise estimate will be almost, but not quite, perfectly irrelevant to anything in the real world. (spot the reference)
Cheers.
A scientific wild ass guess of elapsed time for a novice, average and guru programmer of each language would also be good.
If people want to look at the sources and email me with their estimates, I'll compile the stats in about a week and post them. Cheers!