Before the late fee the cost was 250 dollars, for a five day conference that includes food for 50 bucks a day...
I don't know what you think is a fair price but this is definately in the ball park. I really hate people that whine about "oh this conference is so expensive". Well there are a lot of expenses, getting speaker fees paid, renting the space, covering insurance, food, something nice for the volunteers... This stuff all takes money, why begrudge them the ability to break even...
Outside of creating an automated regression suite, I don't see much use in test cases. I mean so you test 10, 100, 1000, 100000000000000 things that the user might do... That leaves a lot of room for creativity on the end user. I actually had a manager who tried to say since a bug wasn't covered in a test case, it didn't need to be fixed. WOW.
I think there should be about 20% of time dedicated to running testcases/regression tests 60% of the time to automating the above tests, and 20% of time dedicated to allowing testers to just beat on the product... Get creative and think like a user...
It is the only way... Have users data automagically backed up from a central site... Say you will backup everything under some directory, and just do it. Then train your users to use that directory to save their important work.
Make sure you can restore systems from what is available in that directory though, all the backups in the world don't do a bit of good if you can't do a restore afterwards
Re:AOL cancel operators
on
Disconnecting
·
· Score: 2
Looks like a great time/money trade-off. If you have the time, you can save money...
I'd rather not deal with it personally, I'll stick with paying (way too much) for my DSL connection, but I know I did this quite a bit in my college days when my time wasn't worth quite what it is today
That is very simple... The legal system. I am a private organization/person. I want you to do something - I simply say Do it, or I will get a court to make you do it, and by the way it will cost you a lot of money cause you will have to pay your lawyers, my lawyers, and the damages
If you aren't breaking any licencing agreements, it just costs money to fight... But much like speeding - No large organization is perfect and someone, somewhere, will have some software that the licensing documentation isn't perfect on... The BSA is willing to bet for that (So you have to pay their legal bills, discovery, etc) are you willing to bet against it ???
Problem is that GCC's top goal isn't maximum performance, it is maximum portability. There are a lot of things you can do if you only have to target one architecture (and trust me Intel is only targetting one architecture) rather than the several dozen that GCC targets...
This said there is a need for both, ultimate portability and ultimate performance. The intel compilers have been delivering ultimate performance on their architecture for years, look at the difference 10 years ago between the MS compiler (internally developed) and the Watcom compiler (Intel License) guess who's compiler produced significantly faster executables...
Haven't heard any of these except for Vinge (and I haven't read that book) and LeGuinn and I only remember seeing a couple of her books in like middle school...
I have loved Dr. Vinge's books that I have read, very provacative, he doesn't try to explain his universes, just sets down a series of rules and follows them... That is cool.
Now I just need to attend one of his classes here in San Diego if he is still teaching
Re:Just don't shoot down mine!
on
Space Wars
·
· Score: 2
What makes you think satellites matter to the cell phone network... If it were we wouldn't have such crappy coverage... Cell phone networks are quite terestrial based...
Very little communications bandwidth goes through satellite anymore... The speed of light matters when you have to go 46000 miles, I prefer terestrial fiber thank you very much
I didn't say what I thought would pass legal muster, of course if you are suing you go after the person with the larger pockets (ie the company) rather than the person that is 10K in debt with no free cash flow.
That said, I still don't think the company should be held liable for content that it didn't authorize and is against company policy...
The lawyers always get their cut... A small town has one very poor lawyer, another lawyer comes into town and he is now rich...
There is a huge difference in my mind between 1) An employee putting an MP3 on employer owned equipment 2) An employee putting up a MP3 server without the employers knowledge 3) An employer sponsoring and condoning the spread of MP3 music throughout their corprate network
The first two are the employees problem, the third it is time to go after the employer.
I worked at a company where it was a firing offense to put up a shared MP3 repository... They had rather deep pockets and didn't want anyone to get their grubby hands on it
My favorite still has to be the reports that surfaced after the Gulf War that the US seeded Iraq with a bunch of virus loaded printers that caused the air defense system to shutdown on the appointed day.
The beauty of this was that the mainstream press picked it up, and reported it as fact...
Genius - The best work to come out of Infoworld...
Had a very intersting table listing the "features" that top 10 percent programmers had vs bottom 10% programmers. His disclaimer was that he didn't know if the features made programmers better, or if better programmers demanded the features and got them due to talent. Very interesting things on the list including the ability to put DND on the phone, office, office space, etc.
There should be ways of pointing.mp3 links on the comment section so that when the page loads, out pops the sound from the skit...
Oh well. I used to have a series of spam rules that would file it away, and play the audio from the skit... but then when the skit was ALWAYS playing in my headphones:(
Almost as much fun as attaching sounds to debugger events in windows. Attached the hindenburg catching fire to one in a debug lab. It was sooooooo much fun listening to the sound of the hindenburg crashing on a minute by minute basis (what a bad first day on the job for that announcer)
It is the small persons equalizer for corprate greed. Basically you can force a large company to show up and spend money on their lawyers, while you just show up and tell the judge what happened.
Used it twice, one time my bank was cashing my car payment checks, but not crediting my loan... Needless to say when they threatened to take my car away, I filled suit. Long story short, they paid up rather than spend the money on lawyers (which they would have lost anyway)
The other time it was my wifes employer not doing the right things with her termination... Got the district manager and ourselves infront of a mediator and a deal was struck...
You won't get rich with small claims court (I think it only covers up to 1,500 maybe 2,500) but it is very simple to file and win a reasonable case
There is a good chance that this will either a) Have no effect because everyone ignores the BCP b) Will get suitably dropped under due consideration because it isn't a smart thing to do
What I want to know is if the government wants this put in, why doesn't it just pay for a given SLA like everyone else that wants expedited traffic does. Then it is just a simple matter for the ISPs that service this traffic to engineer it correctly to meet the SLAs that have been negotiated/paid for...
(Cynically note: These kind of SLAs tend to be rather expensive, wonder if that is why the government doesn't want to pay for them, but to require them because of a "civic duty")
Unfortunately it is not always clean... I always make the arguement when people tell me to not use a process because of deadlines that maybe we should get rid of the process when we have plenty of time since it obviously isn't optimal. I have watched too many projects fall into chaos at the end not to have this attitude...
As for projects I have shipped several 100 staff year projects in my time, both as a peon, through a team lead... If you aren't always working the most efficiently - you will never ship
I don't think so, but then to many people this might be large...
Of course some of these problems sound like lack of planning early in the game...
For example changing headers that two developers need... The only headers that two groups need should be interface headers, these should be set early and not need a lot of change, with any change taking both developers changing the code internally...
Another note, I get really worried when people say that process problems only show up at the end crunch time. If it is crunchtime it is time to use all of your processes, because the processes should be designed to produce the best bug free code the quickest... otherwise it shouldn't be in the process...
First off, this is an Internet Draft. Anyone can write one, with a simple boilerplate saying that ISOC owns the copyrite on it (so they can publish it for 6 months) and some formatting I can publish an Internet Draft that says anything (I have published a few too...) THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS AN RFC Draft
Second this is going non-standards track, and as such has no weight, either protocol wise, or legally
Oh well... It must have been fun to write, ZDnet in London had a link to it a week ago, where they tried to pawn Mr. Culp off as the author... Oh well.
Dude. I hate to break it to you... But that is *so* last century. It didn't work then, and it won't work now. Especially for the smaller players that have nothing to really differentiate themselves from the pack and don't have mile-deep pockets.
I don't know, ABC/NBC/CBS/CNN all seem to be doing pretty well... Or should I say Disney/GE/CBS/AOL... I think CBS is still independant
Advertising works in MANY markets, just because the internet advertising market is collapsing doesn't mean that all advertising based services are failing
Well, I keep harping on this, but companies need to figure out how they will provide value and either lower their costs below this, or find a way of boosting revenues with advertising. Being that many companies can't sell advertising to their custommers, means that cost control is the key...
I have seen many pre-IPO small company plans and most of them scare the heck out of me... If everything goes perfectly and we ship product the day that we plan, with custommer demand that we expect, we will be able to survive...
Well software engineering isn't that exact, and frankly custommer demand for a new product is horribly hard to predict...
Having worked to identify the spread of Oak Wilt using digital imaging in the mid 80's, I love these biology projects. These problems aren't as easy as you think, given that you don't REALLY know what the bird sounds like (a 50 year old recording maybe ???) you don't know what else is happening in the area (did that jet just fly over ???) how the mic is tuned, etc. etc. etc.
I would love to sit in on this project and try to figure out what the various sounds are...
Depending on how theoretical/practical you want to be there are A LOT of great paying jobs in the field of cryptanalysis/cryptography/etc. that take people with a bent towards mathematics and computers.
I know how to implement crypto systems, however I have leaned heavily on a co-worker that has a Ph. D. in mathematics to do the proving stuff that shows why you can't break the system, and to explain to me 3/4 years ago why WEP was bad...
Ever since I bought my house I get several times weekly... You are pre-approved for a second mortgage/If your interest rate is above X we can save you money...
I'm not even going to talk about the credit card offers I get....
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know what you think is a fair price but this is definately in the ball park. I really hate people that whine about "oh this conference is so expensive". Well there are a lot of expenses, getting speaker fees paid, renting the space, covering insurance, food, something nice for the volunteers... This stuff all takes money, why begrudge them the ability to break even...
Outside of creating an automated regression suite, I don't see much use in test cases. I mean so you test 10, 100, 1000, 100000000000000 things that the user might do... That leaves a lot of room for creativity on the end user. I actually had a manager who tried to say since a bug wasn't covered in a test case, it didn't need to be fixed. WOW.
I think there should be about 20% of time dedicated to running testcases/regression tests 60% of the time to automating the above tests, and 20% of time dedicated to allowing testers to just beat on the product... Get creative and think like a user...
It is the only way... Have users data automagically backed up from a central site... Say you will backup everything under some directory, and just do it. Then train your users to use that directory to save their important work.
Make sure you can restore systems from what is available in that directory though, all the backups in the world don't do a bit of good if you can't do a restore afterwards
Looks like a great time/money trade-off. If you have the time, you can save money...
I'd rather not deal with it personally, I'll stick with paying (way too much) for my DSL connection, but I know I did this quite a bit in my college days when my time wasn't worth quite what it is today
That is very simple... The legal system. I am a private organization/person. I want you to do something - I simply say Do it, or I will get a court to make you do it, and by the way it will cost you a lot of money cause you will have to pay your lawyers, my lawyers, and the damages
If you aren't breaking any licencing agreements, it just costs money to fight... But much like speeding - No large organization is perfect and someone, somewhere, will have some software that the licensing documentation isn't perfect on... The BSA is willing to bet for that (So you have to pay their legal bills, discovery, etc) are you willing to bet against it ???
Problem is that GCC's top goal isn't maximum performance, it is maximum portability. There are a lot of things you can do if you only have to target one architecture (and trust me Intel is only targetting one architecture) rather than the several dozen that GCC targets...
This said there is a need for both, ultimate portability and ultimate performance. The intel compilers have been delivering ultimate performance on their architecture for years, look at the difference 10 years ago between the MS compiler (internally developed) and the Watcom compiler (Intel License) guess who's compiler produced significantly faster executables...
Haven't heard any of these except for Vinge (and I haven't read that book) and LeGuinn and I only remember seeing a couple of her books in like middle school...
I have loved Dr. Vinge's books that I have read, very provacative, he doesn't try to explain his universes, just sets down a series of rules and follows them... That is cool.
Now I just need to attend one of his classes here in San Diego if he is still teaching
What makes you think satellites matter to the cell phone network... If it were we wouldn't have such crappy coverage... Cell phone networks are quite terestrial based...
Very little communications bandwidth goes through satellite anymore... The speed of light matters when you have to go 46000 miles, I prefer terestrial fiber thank you very much
I didn't say what I thought would pass legal muster, of course if you are suing you go after the person with the larger pockets (ie the company) rather than the person that is 10K in debt with no free cash flow.
That said, I still don't think the company should be held liable for content that it didn't authorize and is against company policy...
The lawyers always get their cut... A small town has one very poor lawyer, another lawyer comes into town and he is now rich...
There is a huge difference in my mind between
1) An employee putting an MP3 on employer owned equipment
2) An employee putting up a MP3 server without the employers knowledge
3) An employer sponsoring and condoning the spread of MP3 music throughout their corprate network
The first two are the employees problem, the third it is time to go after the employer.
I worked at a company where it was a firing offense to put up a shared MP3 repository... They had rather deep pockets and didn't want anyone to get their grubby hands on it
You've got to LOVE the quality of the prank then... 10 years later people still believe it...
My work is done
My favorite still has to be the reports that surfaced after the Gulf War that the US seeded Iraq with a bunch of virus loaded printers that caused the air defense system to shutdown on the appointed day.
The beauty of this was that the mainstream press picked it up, and reported it as fact...
Genius - The best work to come out of Infoworld...
By Yourdin (sp?)
Had a very intersting table listing the "features" that top 10 percent programmers had vs bottom 10% programmers. His disclaimer was that he didn't know if the features made programmers better, or if better programmers demanded the features and got them due to talent. Very interesting things on the list including the ability to put DND on the phone, office, office space, etc.
Worth a look, even if it didn't pan out
There are minor problems with the majority of vacuum cleaners on the market...
Can you say "Van Degraph" (sp?)
There should be ways of pointing .mp3 links on the comment section so that when the page loads, out pops the sound from the skit...
:(
Oh well. I used to have a series of spam rules that would file it away, and play the audio from the skit... but then when the skit was ALWAYS playing in my headphones
Almost as much fun as attaching sounds to debugger events in windows. Attached the hindenburg catching fire to one in a debug lab. It was sooooooo much fun listening to the sound of the hindenburg crashing on a minute by minute basis (what a bad first day on the job for that announcer)
It is the small persons equalizer for corprate greed. Basically you can force a large company to show up and spend money on their lawyers, while you just show up and tell the judge what happened.
Used it twice, one time my bank was cashing my car payment checks, but not crediting my loan... Needless to say when they threatened to take my car away, I filled suit. Long story short, they paid up rather than spend the money on lawyers (which they would have lost anyway)
The other time it was my wifes employer not doing the right things with her termination... Got the district manager and ourselves infront of a mediator and a deal was struck...
You won't get rich with small claims court (I think it only covers up to 1,500 maybe 2,500) but it is very simple to file and win a reasonable case
There is a good chance that this will either
a) Have no effect because everyone ignores the BCP
b) Will get suitably dropped under due consideration because it isn't a smart thing to do
What I want to know is if the government wants this put in, why doesn't it just pay for a given SLA like everyone else that wants expedited traffic does. Then it is just a simple matter for the ISPs that service this traffic to engineer it correctly to meet the SLAs that have been negotiated/paid for...
(Cynically note: These kind of SLAs tend to be rather expensive, wonder if that is why the government doesn't want to pay for them, but to require them because of a "civic duty")
Unfortunately it is not always clean... I always make the arguement when people tell me to not use a process because of deadlines that maybe we should get rid of the process when we have plenty of time since it obviously isn't optimal. I have watched too many projects fall into chaos at the end not to have this attitude...
As for projects I have shipped several 100 staff year projects in my time, both as a peon, through a team lead... If you aren't always working the most efficiently - you will never ship
I don't think so, but then to many people this might be large...
Of course some of these problems sound like lack of planning early in the game...
For example changing headers that two developers need... The only headers that two groups need should be interface headers, these should be set early and not need a lot of change, with any change taking both developers changing the code internally...
Another note, I get really worried when people say that process problems only show up at the end crunch time. If it is crunchtime it is time to use all of your processes, because the processes should be designed to produce the best bug free code the quickest... otherwise it shouldn't be in the process...
That is just my 2c worth however
First off, this is an Internet Draft. Anyone can write one, with a simple boilerplate saying that ISOC owns the copyrite on it (so they can publish it for 6 months) and some formatting I can publish an Internet Draft that says anything (I have published a few too...) THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS AN RFC Draft
Second this is going non-standards track, and as such has no weight, either protocol wise, or legally
Oh well... It must have been fun to write, ZDnet in London had a link to it a week ago, where they tried to pawn Mr. Culp off as the author... Oh well.
Thank you... Come again
Dude. I hate to break it to you... But that is *so* last century. It didn't work then, and it won't work now. Especially for the smaller players that have nothing to really differentiate themselves from the pack and don't have mile-deep pockets.
... I think CBS is still independant
I don't know, ABC/NBC/CBS/CNN all seem to be doing pretty well... Or should I say Disney/GE/CBS/AOL
Advertising works in MANY markets, just because the internet advertising market is collapsing doesn't mean that all advertising based services are failing
Well, I keep harping on this, but companies need to figure out how they will provide value and either lower their costs below this, or find a way of boosting revenues with advertising. Being that many companies can't sell advertising to their custommers, means that cost control is the key...
I have seen many pre-IPO small company plans and most of them scare the heck out of me... If everything goes perfectly and we ship product the day that we plan, with custommer demand that we expect, we will be able to survive...
Well software engineering isn't that exact, and frankly custommer demand for a new product is horribly hard to predict...
Oh well another entry for fsck'dcompany.com
Having worked to identify the spread of Oak Wilt using digital imaging in the mid 80's, I love these biology projects. These problems aren't as easy as you think, given that you don't REALLY know what the bird sounds like (a 50 year old recording maybe ???) you don't know what else is happening in the area (did that jet just fly over ???) how the mic is tuned, etc. etc. etc.
I would love to sit in on this project and try to figure out what the various sounds are...
Depending on how theoretical/practical you want to be there are A LOT of great paying jobs in the field of cryptanalysis/cryptography/etc. that take people with a bent towards mathematics and computers.
I know how to implement crypto systems, however I have leaned heavily on a co-worker that has a Ph. D. in mathematics to do the proving stuff that shows why you can't break the system, and to explain to me 3/4 years ago why WEP was bad...
I take it you don't own a house...
Ever since I bought my house I get several times weekly... You are pre-approved for a second mortgage/If your interest rate is above X we can save you money...
I'm not even going to talk about the credit card offers I get....