Management wants shippable code, predictable results, and the ability to swap developers in and out of programming roles as needed. As the life force gets drained from drone A, they want to be able to replace it with drone B without downtime or a learning curve.
Consolidating mail delivery makes sense; apartment dwellers don't expect the postman to delivery individually to their apartment door, instead they collect at their box in the lobby. In my subdivision of 48 homes, there are three "community" mailboxes with a keyed box for each home, plus two larger boxes for packages. I expect this physical consolidation will continue, so it only makes sense to do a temporal consolidation as well. Getting mail once or twice a week would be plenty for me.
I think the danger to the USPS with this plan is that people would start to realize how easily they could do without daily mail delivery. If something's so important I can't wait 3 days for it, I would make other arrangements (email, fax, FedEx overnight, or a phone call). If people had to accommodate infrequent mail delivery, they would start to realize just how little they actually need it.
Maybe my definition of "small shop" is much smaller that yours. I'm thinking the type of place where a desktop machine in the corner that can share out a couple of hard drives and maybe a printer with a Windows 95 license as being "good enough".
I'm the owner of a 50 person company in 1997 with a NetWare server that is so reliable I forget all about it, except when I write checks to the guy I have come in for 6 hours a week to do the backups or to install another $300 NetWare-approved NIC when I get a new desktop. The Microsoft advertisements in PC Magazine are telling me that Windows 95 can solve all my problems, and it looks like I can get network cards for $150 from the local computer store and have the receptionist's desktop host our file share. She doesn't use her machine much anyway, and can probably do the backups too if I hook up a tape drive to that machine and show her what icon to click every Friday afternoon. I also read on AOL that if I change a registry setting in NT, I can get around the server connection limit for free. As my office starts to add a printer here or there or when I get a bigger hard drive in the next desktop I can just share them out. Soon the power supply fan in my 5 year old NetWare server starts making noise, and I realize that if I copy off all the files on that machine to other places on the network we can just unplug it, stop paying the backup guy, and not look back.
No, not an ideal situation and a mess to maintain, but I saw this happen over and over again in small companies.
This. As someone not keeping track too closely, it really seemed to me like they realized just a bit too late that the cash cow (NetWare) was being butchered by Windows.
For a small shop, yes, NetWare was technically leaps and bounds more capable than Windows' server offerings, but it required cluefulness to maintain, and Windows was often "good enough" that blind monkeys could kind of get it working. As hardware got better, the deficiencies of Windows were hidden more easily. Windows also being able to natively talk to NetWare servers made it too easy to run in a mixed environment and then migrate away from the old NetWare servers at leisure.
The move to Linux seemed like a last ditch effort to keep a horse--any horse-- in the server race. But for that same small shop, my options became:
1. Use the networking that comes included with my Windows licenses.
2. Fiddle with Linux for free.
3. Continue to pay for NetWare to replace option 1.
As Windows 95 and later versions started shipping with working network stacks built in, it became harder to justify purchasing and maintaining NetWare in addition to the network that came with the OS "for free".
And a fantastic professor, if you were a motivated student. I had networking and Linux device drivers coursework by Dr. Doupnik as a grad. student and enjoyed it immensely. I was puzzled why so many other students had troubles with his teaching style, until I realized they were mostly frustrated by his refusal to spoon feed them answers rather than demand they seek knowledge on their own.
NES has been abandoned. You cannot buy a retail NES at the store brand new.
GameCube has been abandoned. You cannot buy a retail GameCube at the store brand new.
Copyright law does not agree with your definition of piracy. "Abandoned" (not being sold at retail at the moment) does not automatically mean a work enters the public domain or that at work is in any way less protected by copyright. Just because I can't buy a 1982-era PacMan arcade game, does not mean that I can freely copy the ROMs.
Yes, and good risk management means that you must assume that at some point, everyone MUST be replaced.
The reality is that people die, find new jobs, quit due to family problems, etc. Counting on someone always being there is a bad plan. If the company cannot continue with the hole one person leaves, they are only one heartbeat away from failure at any time.
On the principle of the thing, I think the VAT is the way to go; you spend more, you pay more in taxes. What I worry about as a American is that I often see new ideas floated to introduce new taxes, but these are always in addition to existing tax sources, never as a replacement.
Here's an example of how things work here. Right now, the federal government offers tax rebates for the purchase of "clean air" vehicles (natural gas, electric, hybrids above a certain Miles Per Gallon efficiency). The tax income needed to maintain our road system is largely based on fuel taxes, so as more and more of these vehicles displace gas-hungry cars, the government's revenue from the gas tax is reduced. We're starting to hear rumblings that a road tax based on miles driven needs to be introduced to offset this effect, never mind that the government's offer of reduced taxes was one of the incentives to get a cleaner (but more expensive) vehicle. At the same time, other people are saying that we need to increase the fuel tax to encourage people to choose more efficient cars and be smarter about their driving.
The pessimist in me fully expects that a "National Sales Tax" would start out that way, but that states would then slowly re-introduce their own tax to augment their revenues.
At home (Australia FWIW), sales tax (GST) is a single Federal tax. The revenue collected by the Federal Govt. is then distributed among the State Governments according to some formula.
The problem with this is that it's up to the federal government to redistribute the tax back to the states at their whim. Then it becomes the carrot and stick that encourages the states to go along with unpopular programs. Right now, if a state does not fall in line with No Child Left Behind, they risk losing federal funding for their school systems, for example. Federal highway funds and medicaid reimbursements are also huge pressure points with states to encourage compliance with federal guidelines.
If this system eliminate the states' revenue source of state taxes, they would be even more dependent on the federal dollars coming back their way.
In those days, getting online was an adventure. There was gold out there. You just had the figure out the right mix of technical and social engineering to get to it.
I remember the sense of awe connecting halfway across the country to banks and other businesses trying random ports after connecting to the local number of the Telenet (later Sprintnet) service...
This. The last place I worked had a bonus structure tied at three levels: personal, departmental, and company-wide. It wasn't 33.3% at each level, but the idea was to tie the company's overall performance to your piece of the pie.
At my current company, the structure is: "Bonus? Work is its own reward, heathen!"
I'm curious if the surgeon that assisted with this "art project" is still licensed to practice medicine. I'm no MD, but if I were on an ethics board reviewing his malpractice insurance application or continued employment at my hospital, it would be a tough sell to justify to me attaching an experimental camera to a normally-sighted man's skull for the entertainment value.
The issue of semi-random device names at deployment time is a good point. Maybe an extension to udev that allows you to pick the bus type/port to assign each name to?
Sadly, Android doesn't seem much better at a system level. A pared-out init process with a totally new, undocumented init.rc format. Wifi support based on a stripped out version of wpa_supplicant, a stripped-down version of the C libraries. It gets better if you are an app developer only interested in using the virtualized Java layer; but if you are a system developer, the pain is bleeding-from-the-eyes level.
Yes. A huge pitfall is to assume that if it's somebody else's job, it must be easy to do or trivial.
I'm a software engineer, I know how to launch Photoshop, how hard could could it be to do the work of those industrial designers in the next row of cubicles? I mean, they're just picking colors and shapes, right?
I'm a hardware engineer, I understand the product in and out, and all those marketing and sales guys do is visit customers to take their orders, so we could probably just replace that whole department with an e-commerce site with a kick-ass shopping cart, right?
TO DO: Invent and patent pistol that does not fire (no firing pin?). Fund lawsuit against firearm company for accidental shooting, requiring all firearms to license my patent.
The real savings is if you decide for some reason to cancel your service and go elsewhere. The draconian charges for cancellation make the idea of just buying the phone up front the only option I'd consider.
Except apparently (from the article) the phone will not work with AT&T, the other GSM carrier in the US. So, then I suppose your recourse to get your money back on the phone is to try and sell it?
Re:Why doesn't television use better compression?
on
Intel Launches Wi-Di
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· Score: 1
The Digital TV transition has been in the works for what, 10-12 years now? All that fancy-pants h.264 stuff takes processing power to decode, which means extra cost in every TV set.
Just ask yourself: which is more valuable, the programmers' time, or the computer's time?
When your processor's running at 2GHz, optimizing a loop to squeeze 4 million instructions into 3.4 million instructions saves the computer less than 1/10 of a second, while costing the programmer how many minutes? At that's a generous guess, assuming that your compiler can't do a better job of optimization that the programmer, anyway.
In most cases, every programmer trying to learn your code (and that includes you, 4 weeks after writing it) is better served by making it as dead-simple-easy to understand as possible than trying to shave instructions.
Of course, then there are the special cases; if that loop is going to be run 500 times a second, then maybe the computer's time is starting to get more valuable, and shifts the calculation in its favor. Then the real question isn't when to be clever, but knowing how to measure that.
Spain?!?! I'm an American, and I lived in Spain for two years. Gorgeous country, friendly people. High unemployment, broken health care system. Regressive tax system.
New Zealand does have an appeal; maybe it's the mystique of it, but I could see living there.
Slashdot Mirror
Management wants shippable code, predictable results, and the ability to swap developers in and out of programming roles as needed. As the life force gets drained from drone A, they want to be able to replace it with drone B without downtime or a learning curve.
A strict process tends to help this.
Consolidating mail delivery makes sense; apartment dwellers don't expect the postman to delivery individually to their apartment door, instead they collect at their box in the lobby. In my subdivision of 48 homes, there are three "community" mailboxes with a keyed box for each home, plus two larger boxes for packages. I expect this physical consolidation will continue, so it only makes sense to do a temporal consolidation as well. Getting mail once or twice a week would be plenty for me.
I think the danger to the USPS with this plan is that people would start to realize how easily they could do without daily mail delivery. If something's so important I can't wait 3 days for it, I would make other arrangements (email, fax, FedEx overnight, or a phone call). If people had to accommodate infrequent mail delivery, they would start to realize just how little they actually need it.
All that aside, he is an engaging writer and I do enjoy his insights. Granted, his is only one data point.
Maybe my definition of "small shop" is much smaller that yours. I'm thinking the type of place where a desktop machine in the corner that can share out a couple of hard drives and maybe a printer with a Windows 95 license as being "good enough".
I'm the owner of a 50 person company in 1997 with a NetWare server that is so reliable I forget all about it, except when I write checks to the guy I have come in for 6 hours a week to do the backups or to install another $300 NetWare-approved NIC when I get a new desktop. The Microsoft advertisements in PC Magazine are telling me that Windows 95 can solve all my problems, and it looks like I can get network cards for $150 from the local computer store and have the receptionist's desktop host our file share. She doesn't use her machine much anyway, and can probably do the backups too if I hook up a tape drive to that machine and show her what icon to click every Friday afternoon. I also read on AOL that if I change a registry setting in NT, I can get around the server connection limit for free. As my office starts to add a printer here or there or when I get a bigger hard drive in the next desktop I can just share them out. Soon the power supply fan in my 5 year old NetWare server starts making noise, and I realize that if I copy off all the files on that machine to other places on the network we can just unplug it, stop paying the backup guy, and not look back.
No, not an ideal situation and a mess to maintain, but I saw this happen over and over again in small companies.
This. As someone not keeping track too closely, it really seemed to me like they realized just a bit too late that the cash cow (NetWare) was being butchered by Windows.
For a small shop, yes, NetWare was technically leaps and bounds more capable than Windows' server offerings, but it required cluefulness to maintain, and Windows was often "good enough" that blind monkeys could kind of get it working. As hardware got better, the deficiencies of Windows were hidden more easily. Windows also being able to natively talk to NetWare servers made it too easy to run in a mixed environment and then migrate away from the old NetWare servers at leisure.
The move to Linux seemed like a last ditch effort to keep a horse--any horse-- in the server race. But for that same small shop, my options became:
As Windows 95 and later versions started shipping with working network stacks built in, it became harder to justify purchasing and maintaining NetWare in addition to the network that came with the OS "for free".
And a fantastic professor, if you were a motivated student. I had networking and Linux device drivers coursework by Dr. Doupnik as a grad. student and enjoyed it immensely. I was puzzled why so many other students had troubles with his teaching style, until I realized they were mostly frustrated by his refusal to spoon feed them answers rather than demand they seek knowledge on their own.
NES has been abandoned. You cannot buy a retail NES at the store brand new.
GameCube has been abandoned. You cannot buy a retail GameCube at the store brand new.
Copyright law does not agree with your definition of piracy. "Abandoned" (not being sold at retail at the moment) does not automatically mean a work enters the public domain or that at work is in any way less protected by copyright. Just because I can't buy a 1982-era PacMan arcade game, does not mean that I can freely copy the ROMs.
Yes, and good risk management means that you must assume that at some point, everyone MUST be replaced.
The reality is that people die, find new jobs, quit due to family problems, etc. Counting on someone always being there is a bad plan. If the company cannot continue with the hole one person leaves, they are only one heartbeat away from failure at any time.
On the principle of the thing, I think the VAT is the way to go; you spend more, you pay more in taxes. What I worry about as a American is that I often see new ideas floated to introduce new taxes, but these are always in addition to existing tax sources, never as a replacement.
Here's an example of how things work here. Right now, the federal government offers tax rebates for the purchase of "clean air" vehicles (natural gas, electric, hybrids above a certain Miles Per Gallon efficiency). The tax income needed to maintain our road system is largely based on fuel taxes, so as more and more of these vehicles displace gas-hungry cars, the government's revenue from the gas tax is reduced. We're starting to hear rumblings that a road tax based on miles driven needs to be introduced to offset this effect, never mind that the government's offer of reduced taxes was one of the incentives to get a cleaner (but more expensive) vehicle. At the same time, other people are saying that we need to increase the fuel tax to encourage people to choose more efficient cars and be smarter about their driving.
The pessimist in me fully expects that a "National Sales Tax" would start out that way, but that states would then slowly re-introduce their own tax to augment their revenues.
At home (Australia FWIW), sales tax (GST) is a single Federal tax. The revenue collected by the Federal Govt. is then distributed among the State Governments according to some formula.
The problem with this is that it's up to the federal government to redistribute the tax back to the states at their whim. Then it becomes the carrot and stick that encourages the states to go along with unpopular programs. Right now, if a state does not fall in line with No Child Left Behind, they risk losing federal funding for their school systems, for example. Federal highway funds and medicaid reimbursements are also huge pressure points with states to encourage compliance with federal guidelines.
If this system eliminate the states' revenue source of state taxes, they would be even more dependent on the federal dollars coming back their way.
In those days, getting online was an adventure. There was gold out there. You just had the figure out the right mix of technical and social engineering to get to it.
I remember the sense of awe connecting halfway across the country to banks and other businesses trying random ports after connecting to the local number of the Telenet (later Sprintnet) service...
But Leech Zmodem was the best of all!
This. The last place I worked had a bonus structure tied at three levels: personal, departmental, and company-wide. It wasn't 33.3% at each level, but the idea was to tie the company's overall performance to your piece of the pie.
At my current company, the structure is: "Bonus? Work is its own reward, heathen!"
I'm curious if the surgeon that assisted with this "art project" is still licensed to practice medicine. I'm no MD, but if I were on an ethics board reviewing his malpractice insurance application or continued employment at my hospital, it would be a tough sell to justify to me attaching an experimental camera to a normally-sighted man's skull for the entertainment value.
The issue of semi-random device names at deployment time is a good point. Maybe an extension to udev that allows you to pick the bus type/port to assign each name to?
Sadly, Android doesn't seem much better at a system level. A pared-out init process with a totally new, undocumented init.rc format. Wifi support based on a stripped out version of wpa_supplicant, a stripped-down version of the C libraries. It gets better if you are an app developer only interested in using the virtualized Java layer; but if you are a system developer, the pain is bleeding-from-the-eyes level.
Yes. A huge pitfall is to assume that if it's somebody else's job, it must be easy to do or trivial.
I'm a software engineer, I know how to launch Photoshop, how hard could could it be to do the work of those industrial designers in the next row of cubicles? I mean, they're just picking colors and shapes, right?
I'm a hardware engineer, I understand the product in and out, and all those marketing and sales guys do is visit customers to take their orders, so we could probably just replace that whole department with an e-commerce site with a kick-ass shopping cart, right?
But they used to only be a dime a dozen, so their value is going up.
TO DO: Invent and patent pistol that does not fire (no firing pin?). Fund lawsuit against firearm company for accidental shooting, requiring all firearms to license my patent.
The real savings is if you decide for some reason to cancel your service and go elsewhere. The draconian charges for cancellation make the idea of just buying the phone up front the only option I'd consider.
Except apparently (from the article) the phone will not work with AT&T, the other GSM carrier in the US. So, then I suppose your recourse to get your money back on the phone is to try and sell it?
The Digital TV transition has been in the works for what, 10-12 years now? All that fancy-pants h.264 stuff takes processing power to decode, which means extra cost in every TV set.
Just ask yourself: which is more valuable, the programmers' time, or the computer's time?
When your processor's running at 2GHz, optimizing a loop to squeeze 4 million instructions into 3.4 million instructions saves the computer less than 1/10 of a second, while costing the programmer how many minutes? At that's a generous guess, assuming that your compiler can't do a better job of optimization that the programmer, anyway.
In most cases, every programmer trying to learn your code (and that includes you, 4 weeks after writing it) is better served by making it as dead-simple-easy to understand as possible than trying to shave instructions.
Of course, then there are the special cases; if that loop is going to be run 500 times a second, then maybe the computer's time is starting to get more valuable, and shifts the calculation in its favor. Then the real question isn't when to be clever, but knowing how to measure that.
And, it lessens the the enemy's confidence in their weapons systems, which will cause them to spend money and resources.
Spain?!?! I'm an American, and I lived in Spain for two years. Gorgeous country, friendly people. High unemployment, broken health care system. Regressive tax system.
New Zealand does have an appeal; maybe it's the mystique of it, but I could see living there.