Imagine that you have to turn off your phone in order to change games.
Sorry, but my phone's primary purpose is being a phone. If it wants to double as a gaming device, that's fine. If the gaming feature involves disabling the primary feature temporarily though, then it's a useless feature. Am I supposed to carry a seperate phone in case I get paged or called from work while I'm changing games? The fact that it's not merely turning off the device, but disassembling it too is just insult on top of injury.
DAT cost more because blanks include a compulsory royalty paid to the publishing industry. This kept (even to this day) the cost of DAT media very high. YOu can get a spool of CD-Rs for less than a 90 minute DAT blank. THis is why DAT never became affordable, and never succeeded.
And look at how well it worked at preventing piracy.... The market chose an unencumbered format.
Using taxes to pay for external costs that are incured as a consequnece of fossil fuel use is unrelated to the practices I was describing. Not only are such taxes not sneaky or manipulative, but they already exist. Perhaps not all external costs are addressed by the current gasoline tax, but it exists to pay for at least some of the consequences. I'm not even going to touch your tenuous implications about nuclear power there, partially since you didn't specify which fuel source mapped to which of your consequences, but mostly because external costs of the two fuels is so vastly different, and even though public opinion seems to be skiewed in the other direction, the costs of fossil fuels are *much* higher.
There are plenty of reasons for that too. The problem isn't merely that solar equipment is expensive, but also that installation labor is expensive, and there is a signifigant amount of required safety equipment that needs to be installed to have seemless integration of solar electricity and grid power. That equipment is so expensive that most homes in the US that bought solar in the '80s use it for water heating, not electricity. The worst part though, the one tax breaks for consumers can't fix, is the lifespan. Panels don't last long enough. There are plenty of new technologies that promise to solve this problem, or at least to improve the situation, but they're not here yet. Such things have been "almost here" for decades.
These problems are all in addition to a serious flaw in your parent's post about tax breaks anyway. Using taxes and tax credits to promote behavioral change is a nice way of saying that you're forcing people to spend their money in a certain way. You're not going to buy solar? well... We'll just take your money away from you and spend it on solar for you. It's a fundamental moral flaw in left-wing economic theory. If you want to mandate the use of solar, just go and do it. Don't try to candy coat it by calling it a tax incentive, because the outcome is the same either way. Plus, then the public debate of the issue will be properly focused.
I'd argue that it's only brilliant if your customer is an idiot and doesn't understand what is really going on. I'd rather the guy admitted he made a mistake than lie to me. Now if I have a situation where I'm not sure of what's going on I no longer trust that the story I'm getting from them is the truth. Is that causing your customers to lose trust in your service really brilliant customer relationship management?
Does it benefit society to allow people to restrict who can build on their ideas?
If you add "for a limited time" to your question, then yes, it does. It gives a reason for people to create and, more importantly, to publish. If there is a fear the effort put into creation will come to nothing but the financial enrichment of somebody else better able to exploit an idea, the idea may never be published, but kept secret. Don't forget that patents contain (or are supposed to anyway) full documentation of how to reproduce an invention, and that document becomes public domain at the end of the term. Would people publish their ideas as frequently if it weren't for patents?
Please don't take my comments as a defence of the current US patent system, but of the patent concept in general. It's a good idea, but a flawed implementation. If I were to change it, along with improving the review process I'd try to work in compulsory licenses and shorter terms...
So does that mean if you come up with some novel idea, intel or some other big company should be able to profit from it, while you don't because they have the capital to persue the idea and you don't? Would it really benefit society if people could only earn money through either manual labor, or being part of the already established business community?
Patents are one of the few ways new, little companies and inventors can get into the market. Without them the only entities that would ever make money are the established players. Patent abuse and a broken patent system, by themselves, don't make patents in general a bad thing.
As a Christian I find the idea that humans invent knowledge to be ludicrous and offensive.
People finding things ludicrous without non-religous justification, or offensive for non-sexual reasons don't typically change policy.
Call in to ISP tech support after they clearly messed up their router configuration when the reconfigured it. Fortunatly, the tech support staff there actually knows how to get things done, but they come up with the lamest excuses.
Me: My connection isn't working after your recent planned outage. It appears you have a routing loop.
Them: Um. Have you tried resetting your CSU/DSU.
Me: Yes.
Them: Um. Do it again. You have to leave it off for at least a minute to clear out the problem.
Me: What?
Them: Turn it off for 60 seconds.
/me truns off the equipment
Them: <frantic typing>.... Ok, turn it back on.
Them: Is it working now?
Me: Yes. It looks like you fixed it.
Them: If you ever have this problem again, you can call back and we'll walk you through it.
I'm not trying to imply that an upgrade *isn't* needed, but you didn't list a single reason in your question for upgrading. Being an old DOS app is fine if it works. Having no support is fine if you aren't having issues, and haven't in ages. Is the software not doing something he needs? Is it broken?
If it's doing the job it may be a good idea to keep it. You'll have the benefit of being able to run on practically free hardware, and no migration costs. Plus, whatever new vendor you find may not be a stupid as the company that sold you the previous software, and they might force you into an upgrade cycle, which is practically the only way a software company that targets such a narrow market can stay in business. Is that new software really just $5000, or are there yearly "maintnence" fees? Do they come out with a new version every 6 months?
Even free software has costs associated with it. It's free as in "freedom," not free as in beer, remember? You're unlikely to find exactly what you need, so how much of your time will you spend building something? How much is it worth to you compared to what you have, and this $5000 option?
If you decide you really do need something, and you don't want to buy a commercial product, a good option may be to find yourself a freshman year computer science student. After their first year they should have all the skills nescicary to build a simple database application for your membership needs, and they'll likely be availble for 3 more years of cheap support. It may cost you about $5000 in the long run, but it won't be all at once, and you'll get something that's tailored perfectly to your needs. When it's done, perhaps you could release it as free software, so the next guy in your situation doesn't have to reinvent the wheel. I know a few small businesses that do this, and it's worked out quite well for them. Also, I did this for a company when I was in college, and it worked out quite well for me too. I don't recommend having a custom built app handle your financials though...
Doesn't that mean he needs bigger fonts and widgets, and not nescicarily bigger pixels? If you have to get 1600x1200 instead of 1024x768, just scale everything up 50%.
The sentence before your quoted line there speaks volumes to the issue.
Surely a pair of Xeons on shared bus ought to have this same advantage.
It's way easier to ramp up the bus speed for a single processor, since it only has to interact with one other device. It's considerably harder to increase the speed when there are three devices on the bus instead of only two. Since the Opteron uses point to point connections they don't have this same problem. In that sense it's not really puzzling at all. They probably just can't get it to work.
When the Linux world gets their act together and makes a system which doesn't require so much work just to get a program to run, _then_ you can tell me about how shitty Windows is right out of the box.
Try Debian. Since the packages in their library are all build relative to each other, you never have to worry that dependancies are unmet. Of course, if you spent months tracking library dependancies, and didn't come across debian on your own, you probably should spend some time learning how to research effectively.
Of course you also say "whoppee, time to track down and recompile half of/usr/lib/* again"... So you're almost definatly talking out your ass, and I just took the flamebait.
Do you people have this same level of expectations for other products you buy? If something, right out of the box, is shitty to the point where it's humorous, why is it so wrong to say so?
You may not thing what you're saying is a joke, but it sure is damned funny. I wonder what other hoops we could get you to jump through.
It's especially ironic that you recognize time and effort as part of the overall cost, but you still find your suggestion reasonable.
So your solution is to spend $80 on hardware to workaround a defect in $100+ software? Does he have to carry this device around with his laptop everywhere? This is a joke, right?
It was only a point of contention because Nintendo showed one thing then released another. Everybody watched the preview video a million and a quarter times and got all excited for a game that didn't come out.
The customer may be many things, but even if your last name is Miyamoto, you must concede the customer is always right. Because even if he's wrong, he's still not buying your product.
Don't you have that a little backwards? After all the crap on the internet about how it was going to "suck" it's still one of the best selling games ever. He could shit in a box and millions of Cube owners would go buy it.
It sounded to me like he just didn't want it to work in a way we all practically universally decided was undesirable. Spatial does *not* mean folders == windows. It seems that the UI designers for Gnome locked themselves in a cave, turned the clock back to the '80s, and didn't pay attention to any arguments on either side of the issue. Instead they just made up their mind and strapped on the blinders. The vast majority of the people I know who use Nautilus can't stand the new interface and turn it off. If you piss off your user base, you need to be prepared for some negative feedback. Negative feedback is *not* FUD.
Along with everything the other posters replied to you with, this does *way* more than OWA. Palm synching, and appointment reminders come tom mind off the top of my head. OWA is nice to check your e-mail now and then, but other than that it sucks. I'd rather access exchange via IMAP than use OWA.
1) Minors can't buy from iTMS (see need for credit card).
Minors can hold credit cards with an adult co-signatory. The contract with the credit card company is for the payment of charges made. A minor cannot enter their parents into binding agreements through the use of a credit card their parents co-signed for. Having a credit card is *not* proof of age. Anybody that tells you they're using your card to "verify your age" is ripping you off.
If you're not working on a compiler, that stuff doesn't really help you all that much.
Bzzzzt. We have a loser.
Algoritmic complexity of your libraries/templates/whatever your favorite language calls them is not something the compiler even cares about. Your programmers, on the other hand, should. So you have an object, and your dynamic casting and operator overloading allow you to add, multiply and compare the objects. Then you imbed the objects in each other and it's all done in 10 to 12 lines of code and it's all good, right? Wrong. What if your adds and compares have exponential complexity? What code actually runs when you insert an object into a container? When you do the math, does the result fit into your performance requirements? When your app doesn't run fast enough to be saleable, will your programmers even be able to figure out why?
I agree with your point that just a Computer Science degree does not a good programmer make. You need some software engineering background too, but you need the math as much as you need the style. If your idea of "programming" is designing a gui and it hooking up to a database with some prexisting toolkit, you're not really writing software, you're just aranging software that somebody else wrote, and we're having the wrong conversation.
a distinction that these threads are making clear is that CompSci is about science.
Yes, it is, and one of the tools of a computer scientist is math.
Now we need worker bees, like myself, with a relatively different set of skills than what a CS grad would have, to make the digital world go round cleanly -- and efficiently from a business standpoint, not an academic one.
Inovative technology is made possible by the scientists. You wouldn't get by without us. You'd have to be a worker bee in some other field. It's not all academic either. You "business" types don't even get involved until some innovation is developed to the point where it can conceivably become a product, and most investors (who do a lot of math on their own) won't even get involved in a project before a scientist type comes in and convinces them that the project is possible.
It's amazing to me that with the number of people like you out there, there are still people who wonder why programs are slow and resource hungry when written with modern object oriented languages. If you don't understand the math, you don't understand the complexity of the underlying algorithms, and you don't understand why you need a 3 Ghz Pentium 4 to do what everybody else was doing 15 years ago.Just because we have tools and paradigms to hide complexity when you're programming doesn't mean you shouldn't understand how they work. The tools are there to help reduce error, and speed development. They're not there to lower the bar of understanding required to produce code for a living.
Coding may not be math, and Computer Science (which is what this is about, isn't it?) certainly isn't coding, but math *is* useful in the real world. If you don't understand that, you'll be doomed to never realize why some of the projects you manage fail.
Clarification. I mean *any* software you'd like. You can get development tools (at no cost even) and write your own operating system for your mac, or you can use one of the many existing operating systems that are ported to or created for the mac. It's *not* just user level software.
Slashdot Mirror
Imagine that you have to turn off your phone in order to change games.
Sorry, but my phone's primary purpose is being a phone. If it wants to double as a gaming device, that's fine. If the gaming feature involves disabling the primary feature temporarily though, then it's a useless feature. Am I supposed to carry a seperate phone in case I get paged or called from work while I'm changing games? The fact that it's not merely turning off the device, but disassembling it too is just insult on top of injury.
DAT cost more because blanks include a compulsory royalty paid to the publishing industry. This kept (even to this day) the cost of DAT media very high. YOu can get a spool of CD-Rs for less than a 90 minute DAT blank. THis is why DAT never became affordable, and never succeeded.
And look at how well it worked at preventing piracy.... The market chose an unencumbered format.
Using taxes to pay for external costs that are incured as a consequnece of fossil fuel use is unrelated to the practices I was describing. Not only are such taxes not sneaky or manipulative, but they already exist. Perhaps not all external costs are addressed by the current gasoline tax, but it exists to pay for at least some of the consequences. I'm not even going to touch your tenuous implications about nuclear power there, partially since you didn't specify which fuel source mapped to which of your consequences, but mostly because external costs of the two fuels is so vastly different, and even though public opinion seems to be skiewed in the other direction, the costs of fossil fuels are *much* higher.
There are plenty of reasons for that too. The problem isn't merely that solar equipment is expensive, but also that installation labor is expensive, and there is a signifigant amount of required safety equipment that needs to be installed to have seemless integration of solar electricity and grid power. That equipment is so expensive that most homes in the US that bought solar in the '80s use it for water heating, not electricity. The worst part though, the one tax breaks for consumers can't fix, is the lifespan. Panels don't last long enough. There are plenty of new technologies that promise to solve this problem, or at least to improve the situation, but they're not here yet. Such things have been "almost here" for decades.
These problems are all in addition to a serious flaw in your parent's post about tax breaks anyway. Using taxes and tax credits to promote behavioral change is a nice way of saying that you're forcing people to spend their money in a certain way. You're not going to buy solar? well... We'll just take your money away from you and spend it on solar for you. It's a fundamental moral flaw in left-wing economic theory. If you want to mandate the use of solar, just go and do it. Don't try to candy coat it by calling it a tax incentive, because the outcome is the same either way. Plus, then the public debate of the issue will be properly focused.
Really Brilliant.
I'd argue that it's only brilliant if your customer is an idiot and doesn't understand what is really going on. I'd rather the guy admitted he made a mistake than lie to me. Now if I have a situation where I'm not sure of what's going on I no longer trust that the story I'm getting from them is the truth. Is that causing your customers to lose trust in your service really brilliant customer relationship management?
Does it benefit society to allow people to restrict who can build on their ideas?
If you add "for a limited time" to your question, then yes, it does. It gives a reason for people to create and, more importantly, to publish. If there is a fear the effort put into creation will come to nothing but the financial enrichment of somebody else better able to exploit an idea, the idea may never be published, but kept secret. Don't forget that patents contain (or are supposed to anyway) full documentation of how to reproduce an invention, and that document becomes public domain at the end of the term. Would people publish their ideas as frequently if it weren't for patents?
Please don't take my comments as a defence of the current US patent system, but of the patent concept in general. It's a good idea, but a flawed implementation. If I were to change it, along with improving the review process I'd try to work in compulsory licenses and shorter terms...
So does that mean if you come up with some novel idea, intel or some other big company should be able to profit from it, while you don't because they have the capital to persue the idea and you don't? Would it really benefit society if people could only earn money through either manual labor, or being part of the already established business community?
Patents are one of the few ways new, little companies and inventors can get into the market. Without them the only entities that would ever make money are the established players. Patent abuse and a broken patent system, by themselves, don't make patents in general a bad thing.
As a Christian I find the idea that humans invent knowledge to be ludicrous and offensive.
People finding things ludicrous without non-religous justification, or offensive for non-sexual reasons don't typically change policy.
I'm not trying to imply that an upgrade *isn't* needed, but you didn't list a single reason in your question for upgrading. Being an old DOS app is fine if it works. Having no support is fine if you aren't having issues, and haven't in ages. Is the software not doing something he needs? Is it broken?
If it's doing the job it may be a good idea to keep it. You'll have the benefit of being able to run on practically free hardware, and no migration costs. Plus, whatever new vendor you find may not be a stupid as the company that sold you the previous software, and they might force you into an upgrade cycle, which is practically the only way a software company that targets such a narrow market can stay in business. Is that new software really just $5000, or are there yearly "maintnence" fees? Do they come out with a new version every 6 months?
Even free software has costs associated with it. It's free as in "freedom," not free as in beer, remember? You're unlikely to find exactly what you need, so how much of your time will you spend building something? How much is it worth to you compared to what you have, and this $5000 option?
If you decide you really do need something, and you don't want to buy a commercial product, a good option may be to find yourself a freshman year computer science student. After their first year they should have all the skills nescicary to build a simple database application for your membership needs, and they'll likely be availble for 3 more years of cheap support. It may cost you about $5000 in the long run, but it won't be all at once, and you'll get something that's tailored perfectly to your needs. When it's done, perhaps you could release it as free software, so the next guy in your situation doesn't have to reinvent the wheel. I know a few small businesses that do this, and it's worked out quite well for them. Also, I did this for a company when I was in college, and it worked out quite well for me too. I don't recommend having a custom built app handle your financials though...
More likely they won't have the workers availble to process your payment in a timely manner, so you'll be charged a late fee.
Doesn't that mean he needs bigger fonts and widgets, and not nescicarily bigger pixels? If you have to get 1600x1200 instead of 1024x768, just scale everything up 50%.
The sentence before your quoted line there speaks volumes to the issue.
Surely a pair of Xeons on shared bus ought to have this same advantage.
It's way easier to ramp up the bus speed for a single processor, since it only has to interact with one other device. It's considerably harder to increase the speed when there are three devices on the bus instead of only two. Since the Opteron uses point to point connections they don't have this same problem. In that sense it's not really puzzling at all. They probably just can't get it to work.
When the Linux world gets their act together and makes a system which doesn't require so much work just to get a program to run, _then_ you can tell me about how shitty Windows is right out of the box.
/usr/lib/* again"... So you're almost definatly talking out your ass, and I just took the flamebait.
Try Debian. Since the packages in their library are all build relative to each other, you never have to worry that dependancies are unmet. Of course, if you spent months tracking library dependancies, and didn't come across debian on your own, you probably should spend some time learning how to research effectively.
Of course you also say "whoppee, time to track down and recompile half of
Never use dialup huh?
NAT isn't for security anyway.
Insightful? My ass.
Do you people have this same level of expectations for other products you buy? If something, right out of the box, is shitty to the point where it's humorous, why is it so wrong to say so?
You may not thing what you're saying is a joke, but it sure is damned funny. I wonder what other hoops we could get you to jump through.
It's especially ironic that you recognize time and effort as part of the overall cost, but you still find your suggestion reasonable.
So your solution is to spend $80 on hardware to workaround a defect in $100+ software? Does he have to carry this device around with his laptop everywhere? This is a joke, right?
It was only a point of contention because Nintendo showed one thing then released another. Everybody watched the preview video a million and a quarter times and got all excited for a game that didn't come out.
The customer may be many things, but even if your last name is Miyamoto, you must concede the customer is always right. Because even if he's wrong, he's still not buying your product.
Don't you have that a little backwards? After all the crap on the internet about how it was going to "suck" it's still one of the best selling games ever. He could shit in a box and millions of Cube owners would go buy it.
It sounded to me like he just didn't want it to work in a way we all practically universally decided was undesirable. Spatial does *not* mean folders == windows. It seems that the UI designers for Gnome locked themselves in a cave, turned the clock back to the '80s, and didn't pay attention to any arguments on either side of the issue. Instead they just made up their mind and strapped on the blinders. The vast majority of the people I know who use Nautilus can't stand the new interface and turn it off. If you piss off your user base, you need to be prepared for some negative feedback. Negative feedback is *not* FUD.
Along with everything the other posters replied to you with, this does *way* more than OWA. Palm synching, and appointment reminders come tom mind off the top of my head. OWA is nice to check your e-mail now and then, but other than that it sucks. I'd rather access exchange via IMAP than use OWA.
1) Minors can't buy from iTMS (see need for credit card).
Minors can hold credit cards with an adult co-signatory. The contract with the credit card company is for the payment of charges made. A minor cannot enter their parents into binding agreements through the use of a credit card their parents co-signed for. Having a credit card is *not* proof of age. Anybody that tells you they're using your card to "verify your age" is ripping you off.
It's been, what, a year now since Novell bought Ximian? Anyway, that's how it belongs to Novell now.
Download the source now!
If you're not working on a compiler, that stuff doesn't really help you all that much.
Bzzzzt. We have a loser.
Algoritmic complexity of your libraries/templates/whatever your favorite language calls them is not something the compiler even cares about. Your programmers, on the other hand, should. So you have an object, and your dynamic casting and operator overloading allow you to add, multiply and compare the objects. Then you imbed the objects in each other and it's all done in 10 to 12 lines of code and it's all good, right? Wrong. What if your adds and compares have exponential complexity? What code actually runs when you insert an object into a container? When you do the math, does the result fit into your performance requirements? When your app doesn't run fast enough to be saleable, will your programmers even be able to figure out why?
I agree with your point that just a Computer Science degree does not a good programmer make. You need some software engineering background too, but you need the math as much as you need the style. If your idea of "programming" is designing a gui and it hooking up to a database with some prexisting toolkit, you're not really writing software, you're just aranging software that somebody else wrote, and we're having the wrong conversation.
a distinction that these threads are making clear is that CompSci is about science.
Yes, it is, and one of the tools of a computer scientist is math.
Now we need worker bees, like myself, with a relatively different set of skills than what a CS grad would have, to make the digital world go round cleanly -- and efficiently from a business standpoint, not an academic one.
Inovative technology is made possible by the scientists. You wouldn't get by without us. You'd have to be a worker bee in some other field. It's not all academic either. You "business" types don't even get involved until some innovation is developed to the point where it can conceivably become a product, and most investors (who do a lot of math on their own) won't even get involved in a project before a scientist type comes in and convinces them that the project is possible.
It's amazing to me that with the number of people like you out there, there are still people who wonder why programs are slow and resource hungry when written with modern object oriented languages. If you don't understand the math, you don't understand the complexity of the underlying algorithms, and you don't understand why you need a 3 Ghz Pentium 4 to do what everybody else was doing 15 years ago.Just because we have tools and paradigms to hide complexity when you're programming doesn't mean you shouldn't understand how they work. The tools are there to help reduce error, and speed development. They're not there to lower the bar of understanding required to produce code for a living.
Coding may not be math, and Computer Science (which is what this is about, isn't it?) certainly isn't coding, but math *is* useful in the real world. If you don't understand that, you'll be doomed to never realize why some of the projects you manage fail.
Clarification. I mean *any* software you'd like. You can get development tools (at no cost even) and write your own operating system for your mac, or you can use one of the many existing operating systems that are ported to or created for the mac. It's *not* just user level software.