I do agree that hybrids are key. People with business knowledge are the ones that get the solution right on the first or second attempt, even with incomplete specs. However, the same logic undermines the offshoring activity. Unless you have bullet-proof specs (I've never seen one in my career), offshoring will result in lower development costs but much longer development time. In most markets, the longer development time means lost business to an amount that clearly offsets the savings in developer paychecks. I've seen it happen in two large IT projects and in one local bank's server support team. All of them were outsourced and offshored and resulted in huge losses and backtracking in 18 months.
In my personal opinion, offshoring has passed its peak. Most organizations are now clear that only a small subset of activities can easily be offshored with real savings, when measured direct and indirect effects.
Perhaps not, but I'm positive the links I gave do not put Fred assertions in a very good light.
Don't take this as an attack on yourself. It's a constructive critique. Whenever you try to debunk a deceptive character, don't ever lower your discussion level to his. Take the high road. Lowering the discussion level places you in the smoke and mirrors terrain, which is a terrain where truth matters less than noise.
I paraphrased the information...
You did not. You stated he aided the tobacco industry into denying the effects of tobacco smoke. He did something much more limited: Singer defends that second hand smoke is not dangerous. It so happens Singer's position is not absurd and is still discussed by scientists. Not like the effects of first hand smoke, like you implied.
The end result? I, a person who doesn't profoundly know either of the two discussed issues, categorize you in the same level as Singer. Both speak 'loudly' and present dubious proof.
He is the guy you call when you want to delay something for a few decades (such as officially aknowlaging a smoker has a 1/20 chance of dying from their drug addiction and it is almost a certainty it will damaging their health), yes I'm a smoker but I don't encourage others and don't deny it's illogical.
Then you should go and correct the Wikipedia article, citing your sources. Wikipedia states that Singer is skeptical as to the correlation between second hand smoke and cancer. While I don't have an opinion on this: a) I recall reading something indeed disputing this correlation, and; b) You are citing wikipedia and distorting what is written there -- it does not play in your favor.
That's four entire widget libraries running at once. Four ways of drawing primitives. Four ways of displayig a button and checking for user input. It's hysterical and sad.
That's two widget libraries there. FF, OOo and Gimp all use GTK. KDevelop uses Qt. Add memory footprint for both and it still comes quite small (A pmap of my gnome-terminal shows 44MB allocated in libraries. A pmap of KDE apps shows about 50MB). As drawing primitive APIs, users don't give a rat's ass about the library API. If everything looks the same, a button is a button is a button. You click it, it acts. Grab a copy of Ubuntu, which has matching themes for gnome and kde and have a look for yourself. Both toolkits produce indentically looking UIs.
Article (1) doesn't even mention UMTS, article (2) points out that the iPhone has/some/ OSX code so it is running OSX, and article (3) just tries to prove the iPhone is oh-so-much better than MS's locked platforms (xbox,zune) without ever showing that iPhone can be a development target.
I'm still using the same OS I did five years ago.. but I've upgraded through SEVERAL versions of gcc...
If you passed the GCC2->GCC3 barrier, you either reinstalled every packaged or recompiled every library. You can't link binaries compiled with v3 against libraries compiled with v2.
Gentoo documentation now recommends recompiling your entire system after updating GCC
Whenever GCC changes the ABI, you will eventually have to recompile everything. It's not that much of a hassle, if you are not on the ~arch bleeding edge. Just leave the computer doing the compile overnight.
Other distros escape the problem by issuing a new release. Ever changed from SuSE 8 to 9? There was the GCC change.
Having said that, I don't believe GCC changed ABI recently. Or are you just moving to GCC 3?
The obvious thing to do would be to jack up the price of the computer to pass along the cost to the consumer.
This type of reasoning is a fallacy. Prices have little to do with cost. It has been long accepted by economists that prices are set by the market. The market being the customers and the company's competitors.
The only relationship between price and cost is that if the market-accepted price is below the cost, then you'll be out of business.
I said photoshop (or the linux equivalent, GIMP).
That application doesn't work without trashing, especially when dealing with poster size images.
Define poster size. I routinely edit several 5Mpx images using gimp on my 3yr old Thinkpad with 512Mb RAM without swapping, nevermind trashing. I'd imagine that if the images themselves use over 512Mb, swapping is inevitable on any OS, but the application itself is not to blame.
Just for the sake of reference, I just started the gimp (v2.3.13) and it uses 23Mb ram.
The problem is that MS's specs for Vista hardware mandate a secure path for protected content. By secure, they mean physically secure, making it impossible for, say, graphic adapters to decouple video-out from the main chipset. Since decoupling is what allows low grade graphic adapters to be built cheaply (they share the PCB, but the premium components are just not there), Vista will in fact cause a price increase in multimedia hardware...
I put in a pair of disks as a RAID0 configuration and started testing.
On a production setup, you may wish to use either RAID1 to speed up reads, or then leave the disks separate. Then, you can move tables and indexes between the two disks so that their load is balanced. With RAID0 you may end up having one disk as the performance bottleneck with the other sitting idle.
If you do not pay what someone is asking for their product, you are stealing. Even if your gang of thugs (err, government) says they don't care because they don't like the guy you are stealing from.
There is a huge difference between a band of thugs and a government. The failure to recognize such a difference has led to many many errors in history, from the crusades to colonization to, more recently, Iraq. This is the main point that Americans do not understand: Other countries can (and do) have laws that differ from your own. Since they're not your laws, you'll feel they are unfair/incorrect. However, have the humbleness to recognize the US does not hold the universal truth, nor the right to enforce it. Other countries are entitled to run the country as they see fit. The countries' citizens are the ones who should change the status quo if it isn't right.
All through this thread I've not been defending what Russians (as in their government) do. I will, however, always defend their right to manage their country (including IP laws) as they see fit.
Or, in a more down to earth summary: If they are thieves, you are bullies. Kettle, meet pot.
Either way, that amount should be the copyright holder's choice, not AllofMP3's.
And herein lies the error. The choice is not Allofmp3's but the Russian government's. Oh, and it should never ever in any realm be a choice from the *AA's or the US government...
NO, it's not. Warmer means the entire wave is present, not just a sample of it.
Light reading for when you wish to learn more and stop babbling stupid stuff: Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem. When reading, keep in mind that it is a theorem, not a theory. For all practical matters, it is mathematically proven, and states that: "Exact reconstruction of a continuous-time baseband signal from its samples is possible if the signal is band limited and the sampling frequency is greater than twice the signal bandwidth."
I'll add it is not only possible, but in practice extremely easy for the [0-20Khz] range, given the current state of electronics.
There are two differences here. First, the betting case involved using a service, not the reproduction of copyright material. Similarly your Amazon example is about buying goods, rather than copying digital content. Secondly, in each case both countries are in the EU.
It is either a good or a service. I was careful enough to provide examples for both, supporting my point: It is not clear which legal system (buyer's or seller's) covers an international transaction over the internet. I argue common practice today dictates it's the seller's legal system, so allofmp3 was operating within the law.
If an AllOfMP3-type service were running, lawfully, in the EU, then any EU citizen could use it regardless of local law. The point is that no-one could run such a service legally anywhere in the EU.
The question of which legal system is valid applies outside the EU also. If I buy from amazon.com, the terms of service are served under US law. If it is like this for Amazon, why is allofmp3 any different?
one's "own laws" should reflect international norms and basic fairness. That's half the point of the WTO. Russia had a loophole in its law that allowed piracy. They have shut it down. Good ridance.
I'm continuously amazed how close-minded Americans are. "US norms and basic fairness" do not automatically translate to the rest of the world. At least in Europe it is common for (naturally) monopolistic markets (e.g. Electrical distribution) to be regulated, with fixed prices. That's what Russia had for music, and that's what the US forced them to abandon.
Now, take a step back and look. In the US, an album costs 15USD, where 50cents to a dollar is for the musician. In Russia, the copyright licensing price is fixed, with an electronic album costing 2USD with 50cents to a dollar for the musician. Which system is more efficient?
Even if AllOfMP3 was acting legally under Russian law, that didn't make it legal to download the material outside Russia. Certainly in Europe...
I recall a recent case where an Italian court condemned a citizen for accepting sport bet bookings on behalf of a UK company (betting is state-regulated in Italy). The EU court absolved the individual, claiming the transactions occurred in the UK, because that's where the betting company was, although betters were in Italy.
Sorry for the lack of a reference. However, the question of which law to use -- the seller's or the buyer's -- is still a fuzzy issue. When I purchase stuff from Amazon UK (I'm Portuguese), the contract that binds the transaction is British...
What is legal changes from country to country, but morality is a universal constant. (Even if we don't agree on it.)
What?
Brazilian natives walk around bare-breast with no morality issues. A breast was on television on the US superbowl for ten frames and spurred nationwide rage.
Do you need more examples?
Fixed-price copyright licensing is legal and is moral in Russia. Compare it to the US monopoly system and I'm leaning to believe Russians got it right...
Its not the US, its the PROPER LEGAL owners of the content that have a problem here. That they use the might of the US to get results is mildly objectionable, but I can understand their reasoning.
It *is* the US. The *US legal owners* of the content lobbied the *US government* to have Russia change how they handle copyright licensing. It was the US government who pressed for the change.
Allofmp3 is Russian, and in Russia all they legally had to do was pay the local copyright management authority. The legal owners of the content only had to reclaim the fee from the authority, which they did not. You may not agree, but you must accept it was legal and moral there.
It's understandable, from a business perspective. The American law is much more profitable, and they clearly had the muscle to change Russian law. Just don't try to throw sand in everyone's eyes. It's the US forcing their laws onto the world.
Oh, it was the US indeed. That's crystal clear. And it's not new. The WTO has been force-feeding the world US IP laws. Just follow the pressure for EU to adopt software patents to observe the same behavior in a different scenario.
Personally, I am a big Ruby fan nowadays for web apps. A very close second on my list is Java.
Please don't start a flamewar about this, but: Which big web applications/sites run on Java? I used to be a big Java supporter, but I've been sold to PHP because of its sheer performance. My PHP servers routinely put out 6Mb/s of dynamically generated pages, whereas my previous Java applications struggled serving 1.5Mb/s for about the same complexity.
Slashdot Mirror
I do agree that hybrids are key. People with business knowledge are the ones that get the solution right on the first or second attempt, even with incomplete specs. However, the same logic undermines the offshoring activity. Unless you have bullet-proof specs (I've never seen one in my career), offshoring will result in lower development costs but much longer development time. In most markets, the longer development time means lost business to an amount that clearly offsets the savings in developer paychecks. I've seen it happen in two large IT projects and in one local bank's server support team. All of them were outsourced and offshored and resulted in huge losses and backtracking in 18 months.
In my personal opinion, offshoring has passed its peak. Most organizations are now clear that only a small subset of activities can easily be offshored with real savings, when measured direct and indirect effects.
Don't take this as an attack on yourself. It's a constructive critique. Whenever you try to debunk a deceptive character, don't ever lower your discussion level to his. Take the high road. Lowering the discussion level places you in the smoke and mirrors terrain, which is a terrain where truth matters less than noise.
You did not. You stated he aided the tobacco industry into denying the effects of tobacco smoke. He did something much more limited: Singer defends that second hand smoke is not dangerous. It so happens Singer's position is not absurd and is still discussed by scientists. Not like the effects of first hand smoke, like you implied.
The end result? I, a person who doesn't profoundly know either of the two discussed issues, categorize you in the same level as Singer. Both speak 'loudly' and present dubious proof.
Article (1) doesn't even mention UMTS, article (2) points out that the iPhone has /some/ OSX code so it is running OSX, and article (3) just tries to prove the iPhone is oh-so-much better than MS's locked platforms (xbox,zune) without ever showing that iPhone can be a development target.
There's your summary. No need for TFA.
And that's how you end up in library path hell. I have enough trouble managing the stupidity of /usr/lib and /usr/lib64 on SLES for EMT64.
And, yes, for all practical matters, upgrading GCC means rebuilding everything.
Whenever GCC changes the ABI, you will eventually have to recompile everything. It's not that much of a hassle, if you are not on the ~arch bleeding edge. Just leave the computer doing the compile overnight.
Other distros escape the problem by issuing a new release. Ever changed from SuSE 8 to 9? There was the GCC change.
Having said that, I don't believe GCC changed ABI recently. Or are you just moving to GCC 3?
This type of reasoning is a fallacy. Prices have little to do with cost. It has been long accepted by economists that prices are set by the market. The market being the customers and the company's competitors.
The only relationship between price and cost is that if the market-accepted price is below the cost, then you'll be out of business.
Define poster size. I routinely edit several 5Mpx images using gimp on my 3yr old Thinkpad with 512Mb RAM without swapping, nevermind trashing. I'd imagine that if the images themselves use over 512Mb, swapping is inevitable on any OS, but the application itself is not to blame.
Just for the sake of reference, I just started the gimp (v2.3.13) and it uses 23Mb ram.
The problem is that MS's specs for Vista hardware mandate a secure path for protected content. By secure, they mean physically secure, making it impossible for, say, graphic adapters to decouple video-out from the main chipset. Since decoupling is what allows low grade graphic adapters to be built cheaply (they share the PCB, but the premium components are just not there), Vista will in fact cause a price increase in multimedia hardware...
It's not like it eats your laptop whole. Get some good distro and try it out. Stop whining. Waste your time, not other people's.
There is a huge difference between a band of thugs and a government. The failure to recognize such a difference has led to many many errors in history, from the crusades to colonization to, more recently, Iraq. This is the main point that Americans do not understand: Other countries can (and do) have laws that differ from your own. Since they're not your laws, you'll feel they are unfair/incorrect. However, have the humbleness to recognize the US does not hold the universal truth, nor the right to enforce it. Other countries are entitled to run the country as they see fit. The countries' citizens are the ones who should change the status quo if it isn't right.
All through this thread I've not been defending what Russians (as in their government) do. I will, however, always defend their right to manage their country (including IP laws) as they see fit.
Or, in a more down to earth summary: If they are thieves, you are bullies. Kettle, meet pot.
Light reading for when you wish to learn more and stop babbling stupid stuff: Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem. When reading, keep in mind that it is a theorem, not a theory. For all practical matters, it is mathematically proven, and states that: "Exact reconstruction of a continuous-time baseband signal from its samples is possible if the signal is band limited and the sampling frequency is greater than twice the signal bandwidth."
I'll add it is not only possible, but in practice extremely easy for the [0-20Khz] range, given the current state of electronics.
I'm continuously amazed how close-minded Americans are. "US norms and basic fairness" do not automatically translate to the rest of the world. At least in Europe it is common for (naturally) monopolistic markets (e.g. Electrical distribution) to be regulated, with fixed prices. That's what Russia had for music, and that's what the US forced them to abandon.
Now, take a step back and look. In the US, an album costs 15USD, where 50cents to a dollar is for the musician. In Russia, the copyright licensing price is fixed, with an electronic album costing 2USD with 50cents to a dollar for the musician. Which system is more efficient?
I recall a recent case where an Italian court condemned a citizen for accepting sport bet bookings on behalf of a UK company (betting is state-regulated in Italy). The EU court absolved the individual, claiming the transactions occurred in the UK, because that's where the betting company was, although betters were in Italy.
Sorry for the lack of a reference. However, the question of which law to use -- the seller's or the buyer's -- is still a fuzzy issue. When I purchase stuff from Amazon UK (I'm Portuguese), the contract that binds the transaction is British...
What?
Brazilian natives walk around bare-breast with no morality issues. A breast was on television on the US superbowl for ten frames and spurred nationwide rage.
Do you need more examples?
Fixed-price copyright licensing is legal and is moral in Russia. Compare it to the US monopoly system and I'm leaning to believe Russians got it right...
It *is* the US. The *US legal owners* of the content lobbied the *US government* to have Russia change how they handle copyright licensing. It was the US government who pressed for the change.
Allofmp3 is Russian, and in Russia all they legally had to do was pay the local copyright management authority. The legal owners of the content only had to reclaim the fee from the authority, which they did not. You may not agree, but you must accept it was legal and moral there.
It's understandable, from a business perspective. The American law is much more profitable, and they clearly had the muscle to change Russian law. Just don't try to throw sand in everyone's eyes. It's the US forcing their laws onto the world.
Oh, it was the US indeed. That's crystal clear. And it's not new. The WTO has been force-feeding the world US IP laws. Just follow the pressure for EU to adopt software patents to observe the same behavior in a different scenario.