It's probably a good idea. How else will they be able to notify next-of-kin when the next customer drops dead from playing an MMORPG for 3 days straight?
And am i reading this right? The entirety of the evidence is a screenshot from MediaSentry, because there was nothing actually found on the HD?
Something like that, it goes downhill from there, but you have the basic idea.
I do not care for people[1] who download music illegally, but I am a big fan for lawyers with integrity who defend justice and Ray Beckerman, I am looking at you.
The sooner the RIAA lawyers get Jack Thompsoned, the better off we will all be. They deserve it.
[1] The straw man argument folks always use in threads like this.
The picture of the #1 item on the list - the toilet looks like[1] one I had in my apartment in Tokyo almost 10 years ago. WTF? Is this a joke, or have people really gotten that insular and stupid in the US?
[1] It does not have the control panel to flush water up your ass after pooping nor heat the toilet seat like Japanese toilets did back then the "innovative" water thingy looks identical.
I am in awe. I didn't realize that there were people intimately familiar with *nix that were not also familiar with Windows.
-1 bad grammar s/x that/x who/
May I ask why should we be?
The slowest part of my morning is my monitor coming out of sleep, followed by typing my password into the box. And then my computer "desktop" resumes the state it has acquired for almost as long as my meatspace desktop has acquired state.
Boot time? Who cares when you're only doing it a time or two a year, at best? Oh wait...
You can be the best damn developer in the world, it's still going to take time for you to adapt to the new environment.
That's true, but...
There's no way you're not going to be fully productive inside of three weeks.
That's a double negative and means the opposite of what you probably intended to write. As written, I agree with you.
As a matter of fact though, I got an assignment that was more less exactly what you wrote last spring. I wasn't writing new code though, just adapting existing code to a situation that none of the previous developers were ever required to deal with. I had no problem getting it done well within 3 weeks either.
I brought that up because I wanted to be Anything Other Than A Programmer when I started college. Preferably a physicist, but at least a scientist. I had no aptitude for it. Absolutely no intuition whatsoever. I could do the math, then stare at the resulting equations and stuff and gain no enlightenment on what it actually meant. That was also a quote from an upper division accounting professor in a required upper division core course[1] after a first disastrous midterm who said something like "if you scored below XX% on this test you should not only rethink being in this class, you should rethink being an Accounting major and a CPA."
You might grok the language quickly, you might get a hang of where everything is in the library in a few weeks, but domain knowledge, the point where you can actually do something productive with the platform, that takes time.
I can see your point on that, but that is different than the point I was trying to make. If you plunked me in something Microsoft Windows and expected me to do such and such a task in C as new code, my 25+ years of experience in C probably wouldn't help me very much. But, (in the same environment) if you said there's a problem in this piece of code, FIX IT!, I can do that and so should anyone else in that situation.
Buy me a beer and I'll tell you about the time I saved a multimillion dollar defense contract in about 10 minutes of work after attending an initial meeting where their technical lead was explaining that he thought the computers they were using were unusually succeptible to cosmic rays and that's why they were having software failures. Got a promotion, multiple bonuses in the same year and huge face with upper management out of that one.
[1] My father always wanted me to follow in his footsteps and study accounting and after years of fighting over it, I attended the University he professed at took all the core accounting courses. I'm glad I did that before he died, actually.
Icon and SNOBOL. I never worked with either, but boy howdy are those names blasts from the past, too!
Icon, the successor to SNOBOL has never gotten the love it deserved from the Open Source community. It was always open, never controlled by some hard to decipher company, and always a fascinating thing to study.
It's still alive now through one of Dr. Griswold's successors.
I made RPMs for Icon when I worked at Turbolinux, but it appears no one else ever picked them up:-(.
Okay, I'll admit that I haven't programmed in Prolog for just this side of two decades, but can't the backtracking of inferences be used as a "function-like" thing
Egad has it been that long? Me too. Backtracking as implemented in the functional language Icon (SNOBOL 6) is similar to what goes on in Prolog, but unification makes Prolog a bit different.
Think of functional languages as a great idea that have never conquered popular mindshare, but Prolog as a neat idea that never kind of, sort of worked out much in real life.
The memorable experience I had with Icon was with a functional programming (our choice of implementation language) class in college to solve generalized missionaries and cannibals problems. I had the thing coded in Icon in minutes, but took hours debugging the answer to figure out why it was correct.
I've continued to write stuff in Icon, but like you, haven't touched Prolog in over 2 decades so my memory is definitely hazy.
Now, you might say that a person is not a good programmer unless they have mastered a wide range of languages with vastly different approaches. But that's a much higher bar than most folks would use to qualify programmers.
I do not care what most folks think. That is the standard.
The lowering of the bar is what is causing jobs to get outsourced from the US. I'm computer language agnostic, I'll program, but more importantly read code and find and fix bugs in any language. My job is NEVER going to be outsourced. Never.
The only restriction I've ever held on employers (since this decade, sigh, before then it never used to be a problem) is that I refuse to touch Microsoft Windows.
Yeah. Sometimes they aim wildly and hit the right person. When I got hired as a contractor to the company I am now working for, the job notice was worded in such a manner that I was the single best person in the world to take the job - literally. (XEmacs lisp programmer to do development on what proved to be XEmacs 21.1, the last XEmacsen released by my hand). It turned out they didn't want exactly that, but I'm not complaining.
I had this discussion with a recruiter the other day that was adamant about me inserting every single language and tool they wanted into every job description I had.
They're generally pretty clueless and I've experienced similar "discussions" in the past.
What the recruiter is probably thinking of is that some employers only do keywords searches, so you have to get as many keywords into your resume as possible. Of course, this defeats the purpose of keywords searches to begin with...
Anyone can sit down, surf the web, find some sample code, stick it into a project, and then site that you used said tool in your resume...
Suggest you also work on your English language skills. You never know when a Grammar Nazi like me is interviewing you... Also be aware that I was putting resume text through search engines in 1997 (the last time I was interviewing people). I cannot believe the practice has not been continued.
It seems to me like at least a third of the languages we have exist only because they were fun for someone to make.
Duh. Most of the other two-thirds were done to satisfy masters or doctoral thesis requirements.
There are as many reasons to make a new language as there are to make a new Linux distribution, and at least one of those reasons is vanity.
Yeah, so what? I made a Steve/Linux for work because distros weren't ready then (~1996).
There is nothing wrong with choice.
There is nothing wrong with dozens if not hundreds of computer languages. Professionals like me can deal with that.
There is nothing wrong with dozens if not hundreds of different O/S configurations. The world would be a richer place if there were (and not subject to these multibillion dollar MS-Windows viruses/worms/zombie nets).
"Specialization is for insects." - Robert Heinlein
Have scripting languages gotten faster, or have the computers we run them on gotten faster?
A little of both, depending on which you're referring to.
I hate the term "scripting language" being applied to an interpreted computer language. "Scripting language" to me has always meant something like JCL, DCL or (MS not IBM) DOS "batch" that is extremely awkward to do anything complicated with.
Perl is specifically optimized so that it is faster for some regular expression matching stuffs than native C.
I think the main thing I see is that the old argument, "Scripting languages are far too slow!" has finally been put to rest.
Well, that was always an oversimplification anyway. Too slow for what, specifically?
True. And it is also true that the answer to that question (since the time the geniuses at IBM proved beyond a doubt that compiled Fortran could ran faster than handcoded assembly) has been to require a compiled language.
Both have their domains and their uses. Back in the late 1980s, I was writing and rewriting a program to decode "cryptograms" - ciphers that you see in puzzle books and daily newspapers, etc. At one point I got my hands on the (at long last) public domain Webster list of American English list of words and wanted to plug that into the program. I needed a very specialized search routine that would handle not-so regular expressions that obeyed the rules of 1-1 cipher text substitution. I wrote that matching routine in less than 5 minutes in Icon and plugged it into the main program for testing.
Once it worked with the rest of the program, I rewrote the thing in C because interpreted Icon was just too slow on the processor I was working on (M68010 9MHz).
But it depends on your application, your requirements and the available hardware you have to work with. Good programmers will satisfy all three, great programmers will satisfy all three with balance to spare on the most critical element.
I can write a 20-line utility script in Perl or Scheme just fine.
In the Real World(tm), so what? Unless you are a hit & run programmer, inflicting crap everywhere you go, and then fleeing before the bug reports start pouring in, you are spending a lot more time maintaining code than writing new code.
The important thing is developing what Linus Torvalds calls "taste". If you can recognize crap code when you see it (regardless of language), you are way ahead in the game. Combine that with a rule from The Elements of Programming Style - if you find one bug in a piece of code, DO NOT stop looking, there are probably more, and you can impress anyone and for good reason.
The last major bug of mine in code I had to write myself, I had diagnosed down to a small function. I thought to myself "that really looks like shit, but it ought to work". On a little reflection it was easy to see that it was shit and buggy.
I forget who wrote The Psychology of Computer Programming, but that book advocated egoless programming and all my experiences with Open Source software development and proprietary closed source software development only reinforce the idea that that is a correct model. Always have your code reviewed. Always. Shit happens, but it happens less when there are multiple eyes looking at it.
there's usually a huge learning curve associated with the library(ies)/runtime.
If this is an issue, then you are in the wrong profession or using the wrong development environment.
I don't necessarily think that a programmer's experience needs to be comprehensive for them to be good at their craft.
In a very limited, specialized sort of way... maybe.
But I would consider "good at their craft" to be along the lines of handling someone coming by your desk unexpected, dropping a listing (or the equivalent) on it and saying "fix this" and being able to do so.
Fortunately, such skills are rare in this profession and people like me who are language agnostic and can do things like that will forever have true job security.
Of course, you could be arguing that a programmer isn't very good if he doesn't already have a few functional languages under his or her belt:)
I'd agree with that statement. Maybe even a better statement would be...
Back when I was a programming n00b, I kept count of the number of computer programming languages I could deal with (write new code, read, debug and fix, etc.). Once I lost count, I gained enlightenment.
I fully agree. The most profound education I ever got was from Donald Knuth's Art of Programming where he wrote that.
I know I've lost in this argument over nomenclature, the same as Stallman lost over the once honorable word "hacker", but "scripting language" denigrates what should be considered as interpreted computer languages.
My own picks: Lisp (any flavor)[1] Icon (RIP Dr. Ralph Griswold) Unix Shell (ksh and beyond, but particularly zsh)[2]
[1] I've been paid on several occasions to write Lisp code and oh man, what a rush! All hail Dr. John McCarthy, inventor of the only language over half a century old that people still love and use.
[2] We're supposed to do everything in Perl in the project I'm now on, but I sometimes slightly bend the rules and sneak straight Unix shell stuffs in and zsh when I need to do something a little more complex.
Say you have to send four people to a meeting in Seoul. (I know it doesn't list there as a place but I'm presuming one will be there eventually if they want it to be successful.) KAL from DC or New York to Seoul, South Korea is around $800 each way per person.
For economy try doubling or tripling that.
Just for grins, I tried searching for airline ticket prices, since I pay over $1300 to fly roundtrip SFO/NAIA and unbelievably you may be right and wrong. I did not find any KAL flights out of NYC, but I did find a JAL flight out of NYC with one stop at Narita and then on to SEL for $655. JAL has been quite mismanaged[1] of late, but that is one hell of good price. It also means that they do not necessarily have tickets to sell when you need to travel.
You are not going to be spending US$200/night/head on hotel fare regardless. $100 max, but most likely less.
The second lowest fare I saw was Delta, but you would have to be certifiably insane to fly an American carrier across the Pacific and they were selling tickets starting at $1551.
My last business travel was from Tokyo to Beijing in 2001. When I regularly got sent around the US in the 1980s on business travel, the corporate tickets I got typically had price tags two to three times of what someone shopping around could get. Even with what they described to me as having a "sweetheart" deal with the airline.
Oh and you have to factor in the unpleasantness of the trip. International stopovers suck. Flying over the Pacific sucks unless you're flying Singapore Air[2]. There's going to be a mandatory 3+ hour off-the-plane layover at Narita. Everyone is going to be jetlagged up the ying-yang after the return to New York. And not everyone likes to travel.
[1] Since they're based in Japan, the CEO jumped out of a window without any kind of a parachute, let alone a golden one.
[2] Not only is Singapore Air *really* the #1 airline in Asia, they offer Linux powered entertainment systems even in economy. Even more important, their stewardesses are beautiful^Wmost polite and courteous.
The Cisco Telepresence systems are nice, but not/that/ nice. $400 per hour seems a bit steep when you have to travel to the meeting place to begin with. Maybe for the extremely rare instance for a smallish company.
You're going to have to do that anyway. And if you must have a face-to-face, the price is quite competitive when you consider airfare, hotel rentals, car rentals, per diem expenses, etc.
So long as it is the extremely rare instance (which is all that is justified IMO when you have offices in distant time zones), this is a very nice system.
The basic problem with heavy dependence on any type of real-time technology is time zone differences. 9AM to 5PM in Tokyo is 4PM to Midnight (5PM to 1AM in the winter) in California.
Disclaimer: I work for Cisco, but in a different part of the company.
Not exactly. Doesn't an orgy require a few senses other than sight and sound?
I got to attend a telepresence meeting at the beginning of the summer and color me unimpressed. Of course, I'm not very enthusiastic about any real-time technology binding a company with offices all over the world (include telephones and worse, IRC in that too).
PHBs of the sort who drove Turbolinux into the ground (trying to drive schedules in Tokyo based on California business hours) will love this though.
And yes, once you get the meeting established, the video and audio is quite good.
Disclaimer: I work for Cisco, but in a different part of the company.
Slashdot Mirror
It's probably a good idea. How else will they be able to notify next-of-kin when the next customer drops dead from playing an MMORPG for 3 days straight?
And am i reading this right? The entirety of the evidence is a screenshot from MediaSentry, because there was nothing actually found on the HD?
Something like that, it goes downhill from there, but you have the basic idea.
I do not care for people[1] who download music illegally, but I am a big fan for lawyers with integrity who defend justice and Ray Beckerman, I am looking at you.
The sooner the RIAA lawyers get Jack Thompsoned, the better off we will all be. They deserve it.
[1] The straw man argument folks always use in threads like this.
The picture of the #1 item on the list - the toilet looks like[1] one I had in my apartment in Tokyo almost 10 years ago. WTF? Is this a joke, or have people really gotten that insular and stupid in the US?
[1] It does not have the control panel to flush water up your ass after pooping nor heat the toilet seat like Japanese toilets did back then the "innovative" water thingy looks identical.
Seriously is there anyone on /. that isn't a "me too, me too" Microsoft sucks, Linux is good person?
You must be new here. Hasn't been that way in a long, long time if it ever was.
I am in awe. I didn't realize that there were people intimately familiar with *nix that were not also familiar with Windows.
-1 bad grammar s/x that/x who/
May I ask why should we be?
The slowest part of my morning is my monitor coming out of sleep, followed by typing my password into the box. And then my computer "desktop" resumes the state it has acquired for almost as long as my meatspace desktop has acquired state.
Boot time? Who cares when you're only doing it a time or two a year, at best? Oh wait ...
I was thinking of "Dagger of the Mind" in Star Trek classic when I wrote that, but what you wrote back was soooooo much better. Awesome!
You can be the best damn developer in the world, it's still going to take time for you to adapt to the new environment.
That's true, but ...
There's no way you're not going to be fully productive inside of three weeks.
That's a double negative and means the opposite of what you probably intended to write. As written, I agree with you.
As a matter of fact though, I got an assignment that was more less exactly what you wrote last spring. I wasn't writing new code though, just adapting existing code to a situation that none of the previous developers were ever required to deal with. I had no problem getting it done well within 3 weeks either.
I brought that up because I wanted to be Anything Other Than A Programmer when I started college. Preferably a physicist, but at least a scientist. I had no aptitude for it. Absolutely no intuition whatsoever. I could do the math, then stare at the resulting equations and stuff and gain no enlightenment on what it actually meant. That was also a quote from an upper division accounting professor in a required upper division core course[1] after a first disastrous midterm who said something like "if you scored below XX% on this test you should not only rethink being in this class, you should rethink being an Accounting major and a CPA."
You might grok the language quickly, you might get a hang of where everything is in the library in a few weeks, but domain knowledge, the point where you can actually do something productive with the platform, that takes time.
I can see your point on that, but that is different than the point I was trying to make. If you plunked me in something Microsoft Windows and expected me to do such and such a task in C as new code, my 25+ years of experience in C probably wouldn't help me very much. But, (in the same environment) if you said there's a problem in this piece of code, FIX IT!, I can do that and so should anyone else in that situation.
Buy me a beer and I'll tell you about the time I saved a multimillion dollar defense contract in about 10 minutes of work after attending an initial meeting where their technical lead was explaining that he thought the computers they were using were unusually succeptible to cosmic rays and that's why they were having software failures. Got a promotion, multiple bonuses in the same year and huge face with upper management out of that one.
[1] My father always wanted me to follow in his footsteps and study accounting and after years of fighting over it, I attended the University he professed at took all the core accounting courses. I'm glad I did that before he died, actually.
For a company to risk losing the good will of the customer on a marketing gimmick seems foolhardy to me. Trust is easy to lose, hard to regain.
Quoted for truth. The other stuff you wrote was nice, but dang, that is an exactly correct summary in a sound bite.
Icon and SNOBOL. I never worked with either, but boy howdy are those names blasts from the past, too!
Icon, the successor to SNOBOL has never gotten the love it deserved from the Open Source community. It was always open, never controlled by some hard to decipher company, and always a fascinating thing to study.
It's still alive now through one of Dr. Griswold's successors.
I made RPMs for Icon when I worked at Turbolinux, but it appears no one else ever picked them up :-(.
Okay, I'll admit that I haven't programmed in Prolog for just this side of two decades, but can't the backtracking of inferences be used as a "function-like" thing
Egad has it been that long? Me too. Backtracking as implemented in the functional language Icon (SNOBOL 6) is similar to what goes on in Prolog, but unification makes Prolog a bit different.
Think of functional languages as a great idea that have never conquered popular mindshare, but Prolog as a neat idea that never kind of, sort of worked out much in real life.
The memorable experience I had with Icon was with a functional programming (our choice of implementation language) class in college to solve generalized missionaries and cannibals problems. I had the thing coded in Icon in minutes, but took hours debugging the answer to figure out why it was correct.
I've continued to write stuff in Icon, but like you, haven't touched Prolog in over 2 decades so my memory is definitely hazy.
Now, you might say that a person is not a good programmer unless they have mastered a wide range of languages with vastly different approaches. But that's a much higher bar than most folks would use to qualify programmers.
I do not care what most folks think. That is the standard.
The lowering of the bar is what is causing jobs to get outsourced from the US. I'm computer language agnostic, I'll program, but more importantly read code and find and fix bugs in any language. My job is NEVER going to be outsourced. Never.
The only restriction I've ever held on employers (since this decade, sigh, before then it never used to be a problem) is that I refuse to touch Microsoft Windows.
How about SNOBOL
SNOBOL is obsolete, use Icon. RIP Dr. Ralph Griswold, one of my heroes.
I find recruiters often miss the mark.
Yeah. Sometimes they aim wildly and hit the right person. When I got hired as a contractor to the company I am now working for, the job notice was worded in such a manner that I was the single best person in the world to take the job - literally. (XEmacs lisp programmer to do development on what proved to be XEmacs 21.1, the last XEmacsen released by my hand). It turned out they didn't want exactly that, but I'm not complaining.
I had this discussion with a recruiter the other day that was adamant about me inserting every single language and tool they wanted into every job description I had.
They're generally pretty clueless and I've experienced similar "discussions" in the past.
Suggest you read: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=994501&cid=25365639
What the recruiter is probably thinking of is that some employers only do keywords searches, so you have to get as many keywords into your resume as possible. Of course, this defeats the purpose of keywords searches to begin with ...
Anyone can sit down, surf the web, find some sample code, stick it into a project, and then site that you used said tool in your resume...
Suggest you also work on your English language skills. You never know when a Grammar Nazi like me is interviewing you ... Also be aware that I was putting resume text through search engines in 1997 (the last time I was interviewing people). I cannot believe the practice has not been continued.
It seems to me like at least a third of the languages we have exist only because they were fun for someone to make.
Duh. Most of the other two-thirds were done to satisfy masters or doctoral thesis requirements.
There are as many reasons to make a new language as there are to make a new Linux distribution, and at least one of those reasons is vanity.
Yeah, so what? I made a Steve/Linux for work because distros weren't ready then (~1996).
There is nothing wrong with choice.
There is nothing wrong with dozens if not hundreds of computer languages. Professionals like me can deal with that.
There is nothing wrong with dozens if not hundreds of different O/S configurations. The world would be a richer place if there were (and not subject to these multibillion dollar MS-Windows viruses/worms/zombie nets).
"Specialization is for insects." - Robert Heinlein
Have scripting languages gotten faster, or have the computers we run them on gotten faster?
A little of both, depending on which you're referring to.
I hate the term "scripting language" being applied to an interpreted computer language. "Scripting language" to me has always meant something like JCL, DCL or (MS not IBM) DOS "batch" that is extremely awkward to do anything complicated with.
Perl is specifically optimized so that it is faster for some regular expression matching stuffs than native C.
I think the main thing I see is that the old argument, "Scripting languages are far too slow!" has finally been put to rest.
Well, that was always an oversimplification anyway. Too slow for what, specifically?
True. And it is also true that the answer to that question (since the time the geniuses at IBM proved beyond a doubt that compiled Fortran could ran faster than handcoded assembly) has been to require a compiled language.
Both have their domains and their uses. Back in the late 1980s, I was writing and rewriting a program to decode "cryptograms" - ciphers that you see in puzzle books and daily newspapers, etc. At one point I got my hands on the (at long last) public domain Webster list of American English list of words and wanted to plug that into the program. I needed a very specialized search routine that would handle not-so regular expressions that obeyed the rules of 1-1 cipher text substitution. I wrote that matching routine in less than 5 minutes in Icon and plugged it into the main program for testing.
Once it worked with the rest of the program, I rewrote the thing in C because interpreted Icon was just too slow on the processor I was working on (M68010 9MHz).
But it depends on your application, your requirements and the available hardware you have to work with. Good programmers will satisfy all three, great programmers will satisfy all three with balance to spare on the most critical element.
I can write a 20-line utility script in Perl or Scheme just fine.
In the Real World(tm), so what? Unless you are a hit & run programmer, inflicting crap everywhere you go, and then fleeing before the bug reports start pouring in, you are spending a lot more time maintaining code than writing new code.
The important thing is developing what Linus Torvalds calls "taste". If you can recognize crap code when you see it (regardless of language), you are way ahead in the game. Combine that with a rule from The Elements of Programming Style - if you find one bug in a piece of code, DO NOT stop looking, there are probably more, and you can impress anyone and for good reason.
The last major bug of mine in code I had to write myself, I had diagnosed down to a small function. I thought to myself "that really looks like shit, but it ought to work". On a little reflection it was easy to see that it was shit and buggy.
I forget who wrote The Psychology of Computer Programming, but that book advocated egoless programming and all my experiences with Open Source software development and proprietary closed source software development only reinforce the idea that that is a correct model. Always have your code reviewed. Always. Shit happens, but it happens less when there are multiple eyes looking at it.
there's usually a huge learning curve associated with the library(ies)/runtime.
If this is an issue, then you are in the wrong profession or using the wrong development environment.
I don't necessarily think that a programmer's experience needs to be comprehensive for them to be good at their craft.
In a very limited, specialized sort of way ... maybe.
But I would consider "good at their craft" to be along the lines of handling someone coming by your desk unexpected, dropping a listing (or the equivalent) on it and saying "fix this" and being able to do so.
Fortunately, such skills are rare in this profession and people like me who are language agnostic and can do things like that will forever have true job security.
I'm sure I'm missing some areas, too.
You sound like a micromanager.
See http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=996855&cid=25394157
Of course, you could be arguing that a programmer isn't very good if he doesn't already have a few functional languages under his or her belt :)
I'd agree with that statement. Maybe even a better statement would be ...
Back when I was a programming n00b, I kept count of the number of computer programming languages I could deal with (write new code, read, debug and fix, etc.). Once I lost count, I gained enlightenment.
I fully agree. The most profound education I ever got was from Donald Knuth's Art of Programming where he wrote that.
I know I've lost in this argument over nomenclature, the same as Stallman lost over the once honorable word "hacker", but "scripting language" denigrates what should be considered as interpreted computer languages.
My own picks:
Lisp (any flavor)[1]
Icon (RIP Dr. Ralph Griswold)
Unix Shell (ksh and beyond, but particularly zsh)[2]
[1] I've been paid on several occasions to write Lisp code and oh man, what a rush! All hail Dr. John McCarthy, inventor of the only language over half a century old that people still love and use.
[2] We're supposed to do everything in Perl in the project I'm now on, but I sometimes slightly bend the rules and sneak straight Unix shell stuffs in and zsh when I need to do something a little more complex.
I do not think you have priced things out right.
Say you have to send four people to a meeting in Seoul. (I know it doesn't list there as a place but I'm presuming one will be there eventually if they want it to be successful.) KAL from DC or New York to Seoul, South Korea is around $800 each way per person.
For economy try doubling or tripling that.
Just for grins, I tried searching for airline ticket prices, since I pay over $1300 to fly roundtrip SFO/NAIA and unbelievably you may be right and wrong. I did not find any KAL flights out of NYC, but I did find a JAL flight out of NYC with one stop at Narita and then on to SEL for $655. JAL has been quite mismanaged[1] of late, but that is one hell of good price. It also means that they do not necessarily have tickets to sell when you need to travel.
You are not going to be spending US$200/night/head on hotel fare regardless. $100 max, but most likely less.
The second lowest fare I saw was Delta, but you would have to be certifiably insane to fly an American carrier across the Pacific and they were selling tickets starting at $1551.
My last business travel was from Tokyo to Beijing in 2001. When I regularly got sent around the US in the 1980s on business travel, the corporate tickets I got typically had price tags two to three times of what someone shopping around could get. Even with what they described to me as having a "sweetheart" deal with the airline.
Oh and you have to factor in the unpleasantness of the trip. International stopovers suck. Flying over the Pacific sucks unless you're flying Singapore Air[2]. There's going to be a mandatory 3+ hour off-the-plane layover at Narita. Everyone is going to be jetlagged up the ying-yang after the return to New York. And not everyone likes to travel.
[1] Since they're based in Japan, the CEO jumped out of a window without any kind of a parachute, let alone a golden one.
[2] Not only is Singapore Air *really* the #1 airline in Asia, they offer Linux powered entertainment systems even in economy. Even more important, their stewardesses are beautiful^Wmost polite and courteous.
The Cisco Telepresence systems are nice, but not /that/ nice. $400 per hour seems a bit steep when you have to travel to the meeting place to begin with. Maybe for the extremely rare instance for a smallish company.
You're going to have to do that anyway. And if you must have a face-to-face, the price is quite competitive when you consider airfare, hotel rentals, car rentals, per diem expenses, etc.
So long as it is the extremely rare instance (which is all that is justified IMO when you have offices in distant time zones), this is a very nice system.
The basic problem with heavy dependence on any type of real-time technology is time zone differences. 9AM to 5PM in Tokyo is 4PM to Midnight (5PM to 1AM in the winter) in California.
Disclaimer: I work for Cisco, but in a different part of the company.
Not exactly. Doesn't an orgy require a few senses other than sight and sound?
I got to attend a telepresence meeting at the beginning of the summer and color me unimpressed. Of course, I'm not very enthusiastic about any real-time technology binding a company with offices all over the world (include telephones and worse, IRC in that too).
PHBs of the sort who drove Turbolinux into the ground (trying to drive schedules in Tokyo based on California business hours) will love this though.
And yes, once you get the meeting established, the video and audio is quite good.
Disclaimer: I work for Cisco, but in a different part of the company.