Let me get this straight. You are dismissing a perfectly feasible proposal because you read about some other proposal which you yourself admit is infeasible. Worse, your infeasible proposal still only saves 5%!
Let me give you another infeasible proposal which would save us 100% oil every year: let's all kill ourselves.
The sad thing is that conserving oil doesn't matter, as long as our intent is to run out of oil anyway. Taking longer to burn all of it doesn't fix the environmental damage. Moving to clean energy sources would. It is ironic that the best way to achieve clean energy is high oil usage. That will keep energy prices high, which is needed to make new (clean) energy economically feasible.
So please, everyone go out and buy a SUV. It helps;)
the trick is not to accept all mail. If you use a suffix or prefix for your emailaccount (like qmail supports natively), then you don't have any problems with bounced spam.
so on every website you will in prefix-website.com@alanhoyle.com. Now in procmail you filter out the prefix-.*@ messages. Anything that doesn't start with prefix- goes to the junk bin.
I've been using this scheme for a couple of years. works wonders.
you're missing the point. dell innovates on the marketing, sales & logistics front. Selling PC boxes is a logistical problem, not a technical one. You should compare dell with a supermarket like Walmart. Saying that Dell doesn't do a lot of R&D itself is like noting Walmart doesn't design and produce everything it sells. well duh.
of course someone needs to design the products that are sold by Dell (and Walmart, for that matter), but that's not dell's function. it is more sensible for them to let others take the design risk, and simply make money reselling the succesful designs.
I agree with what you're saying, but I think you're missing the point on paperware and process. Imagine a big bureaucracy, like a governmental department. Think what would happen if you have something like a 100+ agile projects, all similtaneously modifying the business processes being performed there. Off course ever process interferes with all the others, so you have a huge coordination issue. Can you imagine what would happen? I think the company would not stand a chance.
Bureaucracies (and possibly other organization types as well) need paperware and processware to survive. The fortune-100 company the OP worked for was likely a bureaucracy. Hence, his strategy was perfectly sensible. Not any fun to execute, but sensible.
no hard feelings, mine is a thought experiment too;)
I think we're talking about the same thing though. The USSR used market planning to allocate production (and therefor capital too, I guess). What I recall from history class, the 5 year plans (the instrument to implement market planning) resulted in people producing stuff that nobody was waiting for. Spending your whole workday, every workday, for five g*ddamn years, in a factory producing for stock doesn't seem too appetizing to me:) But I disgress.
Depending on your criterium of effectiveness, every capital allocation system will have some fault. Have you never sat around saying "I wish microsoft would focus more on security features."? That's the same as with opensource right?
c'mon where's the politburo in open-source? There is no reason to assume open-source will fail because the USSR collapsed. If you truly believe that, I'd like to see your top-down imposed 5-year plan for producing the software equivalent of sub-standard socks or whatever. equalling open-source to communist Russia is just plain nonsense.
it makes way more sense to view open-source as a method of commoditization of software: if production cost are nil, and production is unlimited, then, no matter what the development costs were, the product should become freely available.
In practice, of course, commoditization of software doesnt work that easy. If you're Microsoft and you've just spent a couple of hundred million on your next OS, you are not going to give it away for free, no matter how many copies are sold. However, if you develop an OS as a collective activity, spreading the cost over many participants, then it becomes a different ballgame. Now nobody cares about giving away their effort for free, since their effort isn't that large anyway. At least, it isn't large in the sense that they haven't died of hunger just yet, so apparently they all have some other source of income (e.g. they exert some other effort which they don't provide for free).
The trick is, you can only find enough willing developing participants if the market is sufficiently large for the software. It's simple: for every 10'000 users there is 1 participating developer. You need a 100 developers for a complex project. Do the math. It doesn't work if only 10 people have a use for the stuff you're building.
Viewed this way, you'd expect software like the OS, the office suite, mediaplayers, email & messenging to become available for free. Anything that everybody needs or runs in software you'd expect to come for zilch. It is only in the niche-market software (custom build whatevers for your local businesses) that you would still pay a price.
So no, open source isn't communism. It's capitalism at its best!
2) A law comes with an explanation why it is there. An yes, that is the point. Logic sense tells you the same: If it takes me 100k to develop a product and you can copy mine for 10k, you can sell your product way cheaper than I can. I may go broke, while you get a profit.
Patent law is a necessary evil. But its basics are pretty nice. The general idea is: sharing. Sharing knowledge, and you can't keep the monopoly on the knowledge for ever. It will become the property of the society, so the whole society can benefit.
The first paragraph does not imply that patents are necessary. You might as well argue that, without patents, those innovations that are presently too expensive to develop are simply weeded out (if your 100K product takes 10K to copy, maybe it isn't the right time to market that product yet).
Interesting, I didn't know they had a spare capacity of boys. Dowries, right?
I also think that America has been called "Imperialist" for much longer than Bush's term in office. I think the label is silly.
This I don't understand. Are you saying the US isn't imperialistic (as in according-to-the-definition), or are you saying it is silly to use the word as a derogative against the US?
Lighten up about the French. Their food is fabulous. Who cares what they say?
Considering the extra population of young Chinese boys, I will be very surprised if China didn't go on some serious imperialistic adventures sometime in the next 15 years.
why? India hasn't either... I'm not that much into Chinese matters, but I don't think they'll be running out of space in the next 15 years will they?
btw, as you probably know, it has been suggested that the Bush administration went to Iraq to prevent China from gaining too much influence in the middle east. If anything causes trouble it will be China's energy appetite in the future, I'd say.
If the world thinks America is imperialist (an idea I find absolutely silly, coming from the France, Britain, and Germany) they're in for a fun surprise when China decides to play.
You left out the Dutch. I'll hate you for that;)
You're stepping over a lot of things though. Of course the French were defending their business interests in Iraq. That wasn't what the fuss was about. The fuss was that european countries were being called traitors ("with us or against us", remember) simply for standing up against the assertion that Iraq was an immediate threat to be dealt with. With all the hindsight we now have, wouldn't you agree with the French?
As I've said before, you can bitch about the French and the Germans all you want. The simple fact of the matter is that it is you Americans that are paying for the war in Iraq, in lives and money. Not the French, not the Germans. Me thinks I'd rather be bitched about then having my young boys and girls sent off to be butchered...
But we'll see, indeed. My guess is a massive devaluation of the dollar will set it all in motion. I don't think we'll have to wait until the end of the Bush term for that to happen...
lol you are absolutely right. fwiw, I sincerely support the right of the Tibetans to be free. I was only commenting on the military aspirations of the Chinese. I'd say the way the Chinese have treated Tibet pretty much supports that view. The way they, for instance, are trying to assimilate Tibet into Chinese culture (by exporting native Chinese to the Tibetan region) is a nice example of dominance through culture.
I don't give the Tibetans much chance, to be honest. They might be better off trying to establish an ethnic region in India...
btw, according to this news article (first hit on google), only 7 out of 10 Taiwanese would agree. The other 3 are probably Chinese spies;)
I just hope the Chinese do not intend to be militaristic-driven in thz same way, because they do not even try to look like peace-loving democrats...
What are you refering to? stuff like Tianoman (spellling?) square?
traditionally the Chinese have a defense oriented army. Last I read about it their army is still based on large amounts of ground troups. Not very effective for an arms race. The huge linkage through intercontinental trade make it uninteresting for the Chinese to attack the US, if that's your concern. The same goes for the EU vs US, btw.
I'd suspect the Chinese will go the same route as Europe has: become a economic powerhouse and exert influence primarily via trade and cultural connections.
All in all, I think it's unlikely any war will be fought between the big countries/unions in the foreseeable future. There's just too much trade interdependency.
If you added up the defence budgets of all 25 members of the EU, how would it compare to that of the US?
Europe (combined) is not nearly in the same ballpark as the US (see this graph for instance http://www.globalissues.org/images/USvsWorld2004To p25.gif ).
Limited signatures - Only one per account and no way to insert during editing a message. A pain for us who use signatures as an Autotext/proforma facility.
For a start, almost no-one has shown they are capable of reliably developing large-scale systems on spec, on time, on budget, and with a low bug count....
I've heard and read this so many times, it is starting to look like a cliche;) What intrigues me though, is that in my experience _small_-scale systems can routinely be build on spec, on time, on budget _and_ with not too many bugs. I do this myself all the time. Off course, mistakes happen, but hey, bridges fall down every once in a while as well right?!
You could say, somewhat naively, that the solution to the difficulty in large scale SD lies in transforming it into small scale SD. And this is a trend that you do see happening. Simply look at the progress in programming languages. I don't care what the gray-bearded C gurus say: development simply takes less time when writing in java or c# than when using one of the older languages. This allows less people to do more, hence transforming large scale project into smaller ones.
So, to conclude, all our troubles will be solved with Java 3.5 2009 edition and MS.NET 2015 (released in 2018):)
Even if you were willing to claim that the ratio is so skewed because of the difference in troop numbers (they aren't the difference isn't that large), you would have to concede that it is the US who pays the price for this world^H^Hwar, not the allies.
Bush is so consistant that he is seen as inflexible by his detractors. I can understand their perspective. Some times, such as announcing to Saddam that he had to allow unfettered nuclear inspector access by a certain date or face military action, you have to follow through, even if you change your mind (which I doubt Bush did), just so people know you mean business. Other times, such as USAPA or DMCA, I would love to see education change his mind.
I don't quite agree with the way you frame this. The important detail you don't mention is that the nuclear weapons inspectors were saying all along that they didn't find anything suspicious of recent activity. Moreover, the nuclear link to niger was proven false. the link to al qaida is weak. Osama Bin Laden was reported (in the nytimes right before the start of the war) to be very dismissive about Saddam. He described Saddam as being a bad follower of the faith, if I recall correctly. There was little reason to assume they had similar concerns. The goal of destruction of America didn't seem to be on the mind of Saddam. The all-important, white-house-sponsored search for WMD turned up zilch.
So yes, Bush is inflexible. Don't forget: the Europeans haven't forgotton it all started with Kyoto. This wasn't a change in attitude after 9/11. It is a consistent inflexible way of dealing with the world.
To close up: You're a sovereign nation. So from a certain point of view, you have the freedom to act as you please in the world, unbothered by shared ethical constraints with other nations. But the consequence is that more than 1'100 American boys and girls have died, while less than 3 british and only 2 dutch have perished. Even if you were willing to claim that the ratio is so skewed because of the difference in troop numbers (they aren't the difference isn't that large), you would have to concede that it is the US who pays the price for this world, not the allies. So maybe from a USA-as-a-900-pound-gorilla point of view, there is some sense in working with the allies.
And we all know that diplomacy doesn't grow on inflexibel people.
are you talking from experience? you ignore the use of (automated) unit tests; you ignore the occurence and consequences of code rot. Do you have experience with either?
Slashdot Mirror
Let me get this straight. You are dismissing a perfectly feasible proposal because you read about some other proposal which you yourself admit is infeasible. Worse, your infeasible proposal still only saves 5%!
;)
Let me give you another infeasible proposal which would save us 100% oil every year: let's all kill ourselves.
The sad thing is that conserving oil doesn't matter, as long as our intent is to run out of oil anyway. Taking longer to burn all of it doesn't fix the environmental damage. Moving to clean energy sources would. It is ironic that the best way to achieve clean energy is high oil usage. That will keep energy prices high, which is needed to make new (clean) energy economically feasible.
So please, everyone go out and buy a SUV. It helps
the trick is not to accept all mail. If you use a suffix or prefix for your emailaccount (like qmail supports natively), then you don't have any problems with bounced spam.
so on every website you will in prefix-website.com@alanhoyle.com. Now in procmail you filter out the prefix-.*@ messages. Anything that doesn't start with prefix- goes to the junk bin.
I've been using this scheme for a couple of years. works wonders.
you're missing the point. dell innovates on the marketing, sales & logistics front. Selling PC boxes is a logistical problem, not a technical one. You should compare dell with a supermarket like Walmart. Saying that Dell doesn't do a lot of R&D itself is like noting Walmart doesn't design and produce everything it sells. well duh.
of course someone needs to design the products that are sold by Dell (and Walmart, for that matter), but that's not dell's function. it is more sensible for them to let others take the design risk, and simply make money reselling the succesful designs.
I agree with what you're saying, but I think you're missing the point on paperware and process. Imagine a big bureaucracy, like a governmental department. Think what would happen if you have something like a 100+ agile projects, all similtaneously modifying the business processes being performed there. Off course ever process interferes with all the others, so you have a huge coordination issue. Can you imagine what would happen? I think the company would not stand a chance.
Bureaucracies (and possibly other organization types as well) need paperware and processware to survive. The fortune-100 company the OP worked for was likely a bureaucracy. Hence, his strategy was perfectly sensible. Not any fun to execute, but sensible.
Atheism is the most fashionable belief, but in the end it just rejects every concrete point of view without actually explaining anything.
Sounds intriguing. How about this sentence:
Believe in some God is the most fashionable belief, but in the end it just rejects every concrete point of view without actually explaining anything.
Me thinks it's equally true to your version. After all, where did God come from?
no hard feelings, mine is a thought experiment too ;)
:) But I disgress.
I think we're talking about the same thing though. The USSR used market planning to allocate production (and therefor capital too, I guess). What I recall from history class, the 5 year plans (the instrument to implement market planning) resulted in people producing stuff that nobody was waiting for. Spending your whole workday, every workday, for five g*ddamn years, in a factory producing for stock doesn't seem too appetizing to me
Depending on your criterium of effectiveness, every capital allocation system will have some fault. Have you never sat around saying "I wish microsoft would focus more on security features."? That's the same as with opensource right?
c'mon where's the politburo in open-source? There is no reason to assume open-source will fail because the USSR collapsed. If you truly believe that, I'd like to see your top-down imposed 5-year plan for producing the software equivalent of sub-standard socks or whatever. equalling open-source to communist Russia is just plain nonsense.
it makes way more sense to view open-source as a method of commoditization of software: if production cost are nil, and production is unlimited, then, no matter what the development costs were, the product should become freely available.
In practice, of course, commoditization of software doesnt work that easy. If you're Microsoft and you've just spent a couple of hundred million on your next OS, you are not going to give it away for free, no matter how many copies are sold. However, if you develop an OS as a collective activity, spreading the cost over many participants, then it becomes a different ballgame. Now nobody cares about giving away their effort for free, since their effort isn't that large anyway. At least, it isn't large in the sense that they haven't died of hunger just yet, so apparently they all have some other source of income (e.g. they exert some other effort which they don't provide for free).
The trick is, you can only find enough willing developing participants if the market is sufficiently large for the software. It's simple: for every 10'000 users there is 1 participating developer. You need a 100 developers for a complex project. Do the math. It doesn't work if only 10 people have a use for the stuff you're building.
Viewed this way, you'd expect software like the OS, the office suite, mediaplayers, email & messenging to become available for free. Anything that everybody needs or runs in software you'd expect to come for zilch. It is only in the niche-market software (custom build whatevers for your local businesses) that you would still pay a price.
So no, open source isn't communism. It's capitalism at its best!
Have you used asp.net w/ visual studio?
My experience with java dates a few years back, and no j2ee. Is any of the technologies you mention as productive and convenient as asp.net?
why? what's wrong with the 'teamplayers'?
2) A law comes with an explanation why it is there. An yes, that is the point. Logic sense tells you the same: If it takes me 100k to develop a product and you can copy mine for 10k, you can sell your product way cheaper than I can. I may go broke, while you get a profit.
Patent law is a necessary evil. But its basics are pretty nice. The general idea is: sharing. Sharing knowledge, and you can't keep the monopoly on the knowledge for ever. It will become the property of the society, so the whole society can benefit.
The first paragraph does not imply that patents are necessary. You might as well argue that, without patents, those innovations that are presently too expensive to develop are simply weeded out (if your 100K product takes 10K to copy, maybe it isn't the right time to market that product yet).
wouldn't it be easier to get a local bank account and get a credit card there?
out of curiosity, how are you going to check your email? There's no connectivity on the Tungsten E is there?
Interesting, I didn't know they had a spare capacity of boys. Dowries, right?
I also think that America has been called "Imperialist" for much longer than Bush's term in office. I think the label is silly.
This I don't understand. Are you saying the US isn't imperialistic (as in according-to-the-definition), or are you saying it is silly to use the word as a derogative against the US?
Lighten up about the French. Their food is fabulous. Who cares what they say?
why? India hasn't either... I'm not that much into Chinese matters, but I don't think they'll be running out of space in the next 15 years will they?
btw, as you probably know, it has been suggested that the Bush administration went to Iraq to prevent China from gaining too much influence in the middle east. If anything causes trouble it will be China's energy appetite in the future, I'd say.
You left out the Dutch. I'll hate you for that
You're stepping over a lot of things though. Of course the French were defending their business interests in Iraq. That wasn't what the fuss was about. The fuss was that european countries were being called traitors ("with us or against us", remember) simply for standing up against the assertion that Iraq was an immediate threat to be dealt with. With all the hindsight we now have, wouldn't you agree with the French?
As I've said before, you can bitch about the French and the Germans all you want. The simple fact of the matter is that it is you Americans that are paying for the war in Iraq, in lives and money. Not the French, not the Germans. Me thinks I'd rather be bitched about then having my young boys and girls sent off to be butchered...
But we'll see, indeed. My guess is a massive devaluation of the dollar will set it all in motion. I don't think we'll have to wait until the end of the Bush term for that to happen...
lol you are absolutely right. fwiw, I sincerely support the right of the Tibetans to be free. I was only commenting on the military aspirations of the Chinese. I'd say the way the Chinese have treated Tibet pretty much supports that view. The way they, for instance, are trying to assimilate Tibet into Chinese culture (by exporting native Chinese to the Tibetan region) is a nice example of dominance through culture.
;)
I don't give the Tibetans much chance, to be honest. They might be better off trying to establish an ethnic region in India...
btw, according to this news article (first hit on google), only 7 out of 10 Taiwanese would agree. The other 3 are probably Chinese spies
What are you refering to? stuff like Tianoman (spellling?) square?
traditionally the Chinese have a defense oriented army. Last I read about it their army is still based on large amounts of ground troups. Not very effective for an arms race. The huge linkage through intercontinental trade make it uninteresting for the Chinese to attack the US, if that's your concern. The same goes for the EU vs US, btw.
I'd suspect the Chinese will go the same route as Europe has: become a economic powerhouse and exert influence primarily via trade and cultural connections.
All in all, I think it's unlikely any war will be fought between the big countries/unions in the foreseeable future. There's just too much trade interdependency.
Europe (combined) is not nearly in the same ballpark as the US (see this graph for instance http://www.globalissues.org/images/USvsWorld2004T
Me thinks (as a European) that's a good thing
Take a look at the list on the MS website of apps that are broken by SP2.
Microsoft have more applications on there than any other single vendor.
do you think this might be because no one else bothered to have their app tested by microsoft?
Limited signatures - Only one per account and no way to insert during editing a message. A pain for us who use signatures as an Autotext/proforma facility.
Doesn't the tagzilla plugin allow you to do this?
Again an interesting read, thanks.
...
;) What intrigues me though, is that in my experience _small_-scale systems can routinely be build on spec, on time, on budget _and_ with not too many bugs. I do this myself all the time. Off course, mistakes happen, but hey, bridges fall down every once in a while as well right?!
.NET 2015 (released in 2018) :)
For a start, almost no-one has shown they are capable of reliably developing large-scale systems on spec, on time, on budget, and with a low bug count.
I've heard and read this so many times, it is starting to look like a cliche
You could say, somewhat naively, that the solution to the difficulty in large scale SD lies in transforming it into small scale SD. And this is a trend that you do see happening. Simply look at the progress in programming languages. I don't care what the gray-bearded C gurus say: development simply takes less time when writing in java or c# than when using one of the older languages. This allows less people to do more, hence transforming large scale project into smaller ones.
So, to conclude, all our troubles will be solved with Java 3.5 2009 edition and MS
So why do you think this hasn't happened in the IT industry yet?
your argument doesn't quite hold. what if the ratio of men vs. women who actually voted is 46/54, just like the exit poll ratio you quote?
In that case there is no reason to believe that the fact that more women were interviewed at the exit pll has skewed the outcome of the exit poll.
Even if you were willing to claim that the ratio is so skewed because of the difference in troop numbers (they aren't the difference isn't that large), you would have to concede that it is the US who pays the price for this world^H^Hwar, not the allies.
damn, should've previewed
Bush is so consistant that he is seen as inflexible by his detractors. I can understand their perspective. Some times, such as announcing to Saddam that he had to allow unfettered nuclear inspector access by a certain date or face military action, you have to follow through, even if you change your mind (which I doubt Bush did), just so people know you mean business. Other times, such as USAPA or DMCA, I would love to see education change his mind.
I don't quite agree with the way you frame this. The important detail you don't mention is that the nuclear weapons inspectors were saying all along that they didn't find anything suspicious of recent activity. Moreover, the nuclear link to niger was proven false. the link to al qaida is weak. Osama Bin Laden was reported (in the nytimes right before the start of the war) to be very dismissive about Saddam. He described Saddam as being a bad follower of the faith, if I recall correctly. There was little reason to assume they had similar concerns. The goal of destruction of America didn't seem to be on the mind of Saddam. The all-important, white-house-sponsored search for WMD turned up zilch.
So yes, Bush is inflexible. Don't forget: the Europeans haven't forgotton it all started with Kyoto. This wasn't a change in attitude after 9/11. It is a consistent inflexible way of dealing with the world.
To close up: You're a sovereign nation. So from a certain point of view, you have the freedom to act as you please in the world, unbothered by shared ethical constraints with other nations. But the consequence is that more than 1'100 American boys and girls have died, while less than 3 british and only 2 dutch have perished. Even if you were willing to claim that the ratio is so skewed because of the difference in troop numbers (they aren't the difference isn't that large), you would have to concede that it is the US who pays the price for this world, not the allies. So maybe from a USA-as-a-900-pound-gorilla point of view, there is some sense in working with the allies.
And we all know that diplomacy doesn't grow on inflexibel people.
are you talking from experience? you ignore the use of (automated) unit tests; you ignore the occurence and consequences of code rot. Do you have experience with either?