The two Indian outsourcing firms doing a review of my company's tech needs for impending move to offshore have readily acknowledged that they can compete only because the Indian government is heavily subsidizing their operations. How long does that last?
Factor that into your discussion regarding whether this is a blip or a paradigm shift.
My firm is getting a fat chunk of cash because a MAJOR tech firm is paying us to make our product work on netscape, and a rather old version at that. It's enough of an extra on our contract with them to pay your salary and mine both, I'm sure.
You are certainly free to practice your beliefs and promote them as publicly as you wish. I am just as free to laugh and ridicule the notion that you follow a charlatan and base your beliefs on nothing more than a book that's been translated and manipulated for over a thousand years.
I'm also free to point out the inconsistency you maintain in discrediting evolution, both geological and genetic, which uses the same science that cures your ailments and predicts your weather. How can you blindly discredit one idea and blindly accept that part of science that helps you?
I think you might reword your quote. "The fool says in his heart 'There is a God'... for the time will come when reason will support sound belief, but they will gather themselves teachers after their own illusions. And they will not listen to truth, and will listen to fables." Tired fables that have lead to nothing but world-wide upheaval.
The first is quality guarantee. Most reputable software consulting firms have some sort of guarantee. The firm I worked for for several years had a full satisfaction guarantee, and on occasion they had to pay on it. They sometimes put a bonehead somewhere and it didn't work out.
The second has to do with third-party software vendors. Most of the time if they sell you something there is a clause about time to production, overall usability or some such thing along that line. If what you've agreed to buy won't work for you the deal can fall through entirely, it can come at a significantly reduced price, or their consultants can come in and figure out why and try to make it right.
And there is always the right to bring damage litigation (law suits) against any firm whose product has cost you time, money, market presence, whatever. If you can quantify it and show proof that the damage is directly attributable to the failure of a particular product, make your case and see what you can get. Most of the time I'd bet it's settled.
Your argument sounds as though you expect all testing to be done after the code has been written. You don't use unit tests? Pre-defined functional tests? Capacity tests? Integration tests? You just write something and test when it's all done? I hope to hell you never work for my firm if you don't think testing is part of the development process.
Perhaps that works if you're reimplementing Mine Sweeper, but not when you're writing a piece of enterprise-class business software, which is likely what the article has studied. In the big show you write the test plan first and implement the test harness as you go. You define a set of test data that covers the problem space, and you make testing part of the day-to-day routine. Generally you have a QA group who makes sure things measure up, and they're talking to business stake-holders as well as developers and end users.
In the last ten years I've worked for the one of the top financial data firms in the US, a top-ten brokerage house, one of the biggest telco in the US, a top-5 pharmaceutical beneifts firm, and now the top performance improvement firm. I've written custom middlware, data warehousing, web and internet apps, and e-business software. Testing has ALWAYS been a major component of the development process.
How much does sloppy construction practices cost? How much does sloppy auto repair cost? Sloppy housekeeping? Sloppy dry cleaning? Sloppy food preparation? Sloppy medical service?
What about sloppy bookkeeping and auditing at major firms in the US?
Why has somene singled out the computer business for assessing the cost of shoddy work?
Probably not such a bad response actually. Any other response is admitting something that may not be in their favor. It's like asking them, "When did you stop beating your [wife|dog|kids]?" Any answer but a fullly explained denial of the plausability of the question is an admission of guilt.
Revenue is, in one sense, a measure of a company's ability to adapt to a growing clientel. If you don't have a large enough revenue stream the tiny profit margin that one of these companies has cannot offer the capital necessary to support innovation.
Unless Debian reaches a critical mass that can support the type of innovation, both technical and business, required to support large industry clients it can never be a large-scale player.
This same argument goes for the distros involved in the merger. And you have to admit that without the industry support that comes from large-scale enterprise installations Linux will remain a fad.
I probably wouldn't mind a M$ distro, as long as it's still Linux and it's still open. I don't like Windows, but I do admire the functionality and the ubiquity of their other products. If they can do a real linux and add some of their other products to it while maintaining the Linux model, let them have at it. I'm waiting.
I imagine that it's not Red Hat they're scared of, but of IBM, HP, and other big names using Linux on enterprise class machines. Unless they can reach some critical mass in the market place, which requires some true innovation and real expertise, these smaller distros won't make it in the big leagues. One fat enterprise deal on some big hardware with some support bundled in is going to pay for a hell of a lot of $49 boxes for Joe Hacker.
I don't care if you like the Windows defaults, and it's not a relevant issue if you like it. Nothing about the suit says you won't be able to get just what you've always had.
And regarding communism, there is no playing field there, because there's no playing! It's all marching, and just where they tell you to.
Why not? Because I have a business to run. Because my budget doesn't provide for a wholesale change of major aspects of my IT operation. Because I can't take the time to have several departments of users trained.
You can also get an NFS client for windows. It'll allow you to mount the Linux or other NFS shares and move files with the same ease as the Samba share.
I don't want to press '4' to speak to a customer service representative. I just want hardware labelled completely, precisely, and plainly. I want to know who really manufactured the item. I want to know the complete and succinct list of features on the item I bought. After that, I want the URL of a site that has a complete, meaningful, and well-organized PDF documentation. The time I can spend getting and reading that document will most often lead me to a solution or workable conclusion more quickly than time on the phone.
There's little doubt that Java won't continue to grow without some fundamental changes. There has to be a breakthrough in the JVM for it to remain successful. It's far too limiting in so many ways. It forces you to live in a tiny address space. You have to give up those wonder OS goodies like signals and semaphores. The classpath, in any large development effort, gets cumbersome, especially when portions of your project require different versions of a particular class. And all those types of packaging. Jar, war, ear, loose classes.
No doubt, Java has been wonderful for the development community, but it's not the pinnacle of computing languages and runtime environments. It's handy, and that's what's selling it.
I have a Sony Clie (Palm like substitute) that syncs with a USB port, and a HP deskjet with a USB connection. And a USB mouse, digital camera, scanner, keyboard, and modem. Even my UPS has a USB connection. What do I have connected to the old-fashioned parallel or serial connection, or even PS/2 connector? NOTHING!
In the mean time, I'm using four ATA hard drives, a CD-ROM drive, a CD-burner. I have an ide tape drive sitting here too. I also have a couple SCSI drives sitting here too, and guess what, they'd work on the new board with my PCI adapter!
Stupid is as stupid does, and I'm doing the new board.
More recently, however, American Express officials have told computer industry executives that they remain concerned about being displaced by Microsoft's brand in such a partnership.
They're afraid of the monopoly and its corrupt power.
You'll need a much more expensive pump to push mineral oil, or about anything but water. The extra viscosity will likely cause the pump to overheat. And the seals and such may decay with other materials.
I can see why the search warrant was not allowed. At best it would provide circumstancial evidence. How can the purchase of a book imply anything other than book ownership? You'd have to prove that the owner could read, and then that he had opportunity, and then that he did, and then that he had the capacity to use the information in the book. And then you'd have to prove, still the heart of the matter, that he used the information to commit a crime.
They're keeping a list of invoices, standard business records. Do you expect a merchant to destroy any notion of what they sold to whom? Are they disolved of liability then when products are recalled and they don't know who they are to notify? Or what about the fraud who waltzes in with a banged up item wanting a refund, but who the merchant doesn't recognize. Or someone claiming damages from an item, again with no proof that it came from the store. Should they have no opportunity to verify the purchase from their store?
If you're going to take away a merchant's ability to protect himself from fraudulent or simply incorrect claims then you've got to take away his liability, and most people wouldn't stand for that.
You only need 80Gb/sec memory if there is only one memory path. If you have 20 paths and a controller to manage it you only need 4Gb/sec throughput, which isn't hard to come by.
I just bought the big book a couple weeks ago, and I'm now starting the second of the Merlin books. I have to concur. Corwin was much more fun to read.
Overall i'm loving the series. I toyed with them earlier and never got much out of them, but this time I'm finding it much more fun.
I've written APC monitoring software. Just contact them for the communication protocol for the model you're using. When I was writing it, it was as simple as opening a com port and reading and writing characters. It was a bit screwy though because you'd query for a long string of info and if there was an alert during the response you'd get the alert interspersed with query data. But overall it's not hard.
Hard-core music, D&D, science-fiction books. They've been associated with suicides in a causal relationship when they are simply coincidental or perhaps in some instances contributory.
Some psychological, sometimes physical, need is going unmet. That circumstance leads the individual to find a surrogate. The surrogate is not filling the need, but may be displacing it temporarily. When the situation progresses, the individual displaces more of life with the surrogate, to the point of social or physical disfunction. When there is a breakdown, the surrogate is blamed as a cause.
The game is not addictive. The nature of its play will not induce unrestrained indulgence in every paritcular individual if exposed for a sufficient length of time. It may have a predilection for abuse. It may be the object of a compulsion, but that compulsion most probably stems from personality and environmental factors.
If Mom had worked half as hard at taking care of her son's known problems, spent half as much money on therapy for him, as she's going to on this fight for warning labels, Junior would probably have lost weight, found a job that's not an enabling factor in his depression, and perhaps have matured beyond his reliance on video games as a separation from reality.
When I graduated nearly ten years ago from a respected engineering school there were three recruiters on campus for over 100 CS grads. Most of us didn't even get to see an interviewer, much less get a shot at the job.
We didn't waste time looking for some neato project to keep us busy so we could try to con someone into thinking we had experience. We went to work for the government. We did real work for much less pay than we might have found in the corporate sector.
And in the end, after two years of that, guess what! We had two years of experience when the market turned around! And we went to work in the corporate world ahead of the guys just out of school and ahead of the guys hacking in their basements on BBS and lame ass game software while working at the grocery or building decks for old folks.
The market doesn't owe you anything just because you now know what made people rich five years ago. Do your time and pay the dues. The smoke and mirrors that this idea presents is akin to that which made the dot coms go bust.
Slashdot Mirror
The two Indian outsourcing firms doing a review of my company's tech needs for impending move to offshore have readily acknowledged that they can compete only because the Indian government is heavily subsidizing their operations. How long does that last?
Factor that into your discussion regarding whether this is a blip or a paradigm shift.
My firm is getting a fat chunk of cash because a MAJOR tech firm is paying us to make our product work on netscape, and a rather old version at that. It's enough of an extra on our contract with them to pay your salary and mine both, I'm sure.
You are certainly free to practice your beliefs and promote them as publicly as you wish. I am just as free to laugh and ridicule the notion that you follow a charlatan and base your beliefs on nothing more than a book that's been translated and manipulated for over a thousand years.
... for the time will come when reason will support sound belief, but they will gather themselves teachers after their own illusions. And they will not listen to truth, and will listen to fables." Tired fables that have lead to nothing but world-wide upheaval.
I'm also free to point out the inconsistency you maintain in discrediting evolution, both geological and genetic, which uses the same science that cures your ailments and predicts your weather. How can you blindly discredit one idea and blindly accept that part of science that helps you?
I think you might reword your quote. "The fool says in his heart 'There is a God'
There are two precidents.
The first is quality guarantee. Most reputable software consulting firms have some sort of guarantee. The firm I worked for for several years had a full satisfaction guarantee, and on occasion they had to pay on it. They sometimes put a bonehead somewhere and it didn't work out.
The second has to do with third-party software vendors. Most of the time if they sell you something there is a clause about time to production, overall usability or some such thing along that line. If what you've agreed to buy won't work for you the deal can fall through entirely, it can come at a significantly reduced price, or their consultants can come in and figure out why and try to make it right.
And there is always the right to bring damage litigation (law suits) against any firm whose product has cost you time, money, market presence, whatever. If you can quantify it and show proof that the damage is directly attributable to the failure of a particular product, make your case and see what you can get. Most of the time I'd bet it's settled.
Your argument sounds as though you expect all testing to be done after the code has been written. You don't use unit tests? Pre-defined functional tests? Capacity tests? Integration tests? You just write something and test when it's all done? I hope to hell you never work for my firm if you don't think testing is part of the development process.
Perhaps that works if you're reimplementing Mine Sweeper, but not when you're writing a piece of enterprise-class business software, which is likely what the article has studied. In the big show you write the test plan first and implement the test harness as you go. You define a set of test data that covers the problem space, and you make testing part of the day-to-day routine. Generally you have a QA group who makes sure things measure up, and they're talking to business stake-holders as well as developers and end users.
In the last ten years I've worked for the one of the top financial data firms in the US, a top-ten brokerage house, one of the biggest telco in the US, a top-5 pharmaceutical beneifts firm, and now the top performance improvement firm. I've written custom middlware, data warehousing, web and internet apps, and e-business software. Testing has ALWAYS been a major component of the development process.
How much does sloppy construction practices cost? How much does sloppy auto repair cost? Sloppy housekeeping? Sloppy dry cleaning? Sloppy food preparation? Sloppy medical service?
What about sloppy bookkeeping and auditing at major firms in the US?
Why has somene singled out the computer business for assessing the cost of shoddy work?
Probably not such a bad response actually. Any other response is admitting something that may not be in their favor. It's like asking them, "When did you stop beating your [wife|dog|kids]?" Any answer but a fullly explained denial of the plausability of the question is an admission of guilt.
Revenue is, in one sense, a measure of a company's ability to adapt to a growing clientel. If you don't have a large enough revenue stream the tiny profit margin that one of these companies has cannot offer the capital necessary to support innovation.
Unless Debian reaches a critical mass that can support the type of innovation, both technical and business, required to support large industry clients it can never be a large-scale player.
This same argument goes for the distros involved in the merger. And you have to admit that without the industry support that comes from large-scale enterprise installations Linux will remain a fad.
I probably wouldn't mind a M$ distro, as long as it's still Linux and it's still open. I don't like Windows, but I do admire the functionality and the ubiquity of their other products. If they can do a real linux and add some of their other products to it while maintaining the Linux model, let them have at it. I'm waiting.
I imagine that it's not Red Hat they're scared of, but of IBM, HP, and other big names using Linux on enterprise class machines. Unless they can reach some critical mass in the market place, which requires some true innovation and real expertise, these smaller distros won't make it in the big leagues. One fat enterprise deal on some big hardware with some support bundled in is going to pay for a hell of a lot of $49 boxes for Joe Hacker.
I don't care if you like the Windows defaults, and it's not a relevant issue if you like it. Nothing about the suit says you won't be able to get just what you've always had.
And regarding communism, there is no playing field there, because there's no playing! It's all marching, and just where they tell you to.
Why not? Because I have a business to run. Because my budget doesn't provide for a wholesale change of major aspects of my IT operation. Because I can't take the time to have several departments of users trained.
Because pipe dreams don't pay the bills.
You can also get an NFS client for windows. It'll allow you to mount the Linux or other NFS shares and move files with the same ease as the Samba share.
I don't want to press '4' to speak to a customer service representative. I just want hardware labelled completely, precisely, and plainly. I want to know who really manufactured the item. I want to know the complete and succinct list of features on the item I bought. After that, I want the URL of a site that has a complete, meaningful, and well-organized PDF documentation. The time I can spend getting and reading that document will most often lead me to a solution or workable conclusion more quickly than time on the phone.
There's little doubt that Java won't continue to grow without some fundamental changes. There has to be a breakthrough in the JVM for it to remain successful. It's far too limiting in so many ways. It forces you to live in a tiny address space. You have to give up those wonder OS goodies like signals and semaphores. The classpath, in any large development effort, gets cumbersome, especially when portions of your project require different versions of a particular class. And all those types of packaging. Jar, war, ear, loose classes.
No doubt, Java has been wonderful for the development community, but it's not the pinnacle of computing languages and runtime environments. It's handy, and that's what's selling it.
I have a Sony Clie (Palm like substitute) that syncs with a USB port, and a HP deskjet with a USB connection. And a USB mouse, digital camera, scanner, keyboard, and modem. Even my UPS has a USB connection. What do I have connected to the old-fashioned parallel or serial connection, or even PS/2 connector? NOTHING!
In the mean time, I'm using four ATA hard drives, a CD-ROM drive, a CD-burner. I have an ide tape drive sitting here too. I also have a couple SCSI drives sitting here too, and guess what, they'd work on the new board with my PCI adapter!
Stupid is as stupid does, and I'm doing the new board.
More recently, however, American Express officials have told computer industry executives that they remain concerned about being displaced by Microsoft's brand in such a partnership.
They're afraid of the monopoly and its corrupt power.
You'll need a much more expensive pump to push mineral oil, or about anything but water. The extra viscosity will likely cause the pump to overheat. And the seals and such may decay with other materials.
I can see why the search warrant was not allowed. At best it would provide circumstancial evidence. How can the purchase of a book imply anything other than book ownership? You'd have to prove that the owner could read, and then that he had opportunity, and then that he did, and then that he had the capacity to use the information in the book. And then you'd have to prove, still the heart of the matter, that he used the information to commit a crime.
They're keeping a list of invoices, standard business records. Do you expect a merchant to destroy any notion of what they sold to whom? Are they disolved of liability then when products are recalled and they don't know who they are to notify? Or what about the fraud who waltzes in with a banged up item wanting a refund, but who the merchant doesn't recognize. Or someone claiming damages from an item, again with no proof that it came from the store. Should they have no opportunity to verify the purchase from their store?
If you're going to take away a merchant's ability to protect himself from fraudulent or simply incorrect claims then you've got to take away his liability, and most people wouldn't stand for that.
You only need 80Gb/sec memory if there is only one memory path. If you have 20 paths and a controller to manage it you only need 4Gb/sec throughput, which isn't hard to come by.
I just bought the big book a couple weeks ago, and I'm now starting the second of the Merlin books. I have to concur. Corwin was much more fun to read.
Overall i'm loving the series. I toyed with them earlier and never got much out of them, but this time I'm finding it much more fun.
I've written APC monitoring software. Just contact them for the communication protocol for the model you're using. When I was writing it, it was as simple as opening a com port and reading and writing characters. It was a bit screwy though because you'd query for a long string of info and if there was an alert during the response you'd get the alert interspersed with query data. But overall it's not hard.
Hard-core music, D&D, science-fiction books. They've been associated with suicides in a causal relationship when they are simply coincidental or perhaps in some instances contributory.
Some psychological, sometimes physical, need is going unmet. That circumstance leads the individual to find a surrogate. The surrogate is not filling the need, but may be displacing it temporarily. When the situation progresses, the individual displaces more of life with the surrogate, to the point of social or physical disfunction. When there is a breakdown, the surrogate is blamed as a cause.
The game is not addictive. The nature of its play will not induce unrestrained indulgence in every paritcular individual if exposed for a sufficient length of time. It may have a predilection for abuse. It may be the object of a compulsion, but that compulsion most probably stems from personality and environmental factors.
If Mom had worked half as hard at taking care of her son's known problems, spent half as much money on therapy for him, as she's going to on this fight for warning labels, Junior would probably have lost weight, found a job that's not an enabling factor in his depression, and perhaps have matured beyond his reliance on video games as a separation from reality.
When I graduated nearly ten years ago from a respected engineering school there were three recruiters on campus for over 100 CS grads. Most of us didn't even get to see an interviewer, much less get a shot at the job.
We didn't waste time looking for some neato project to keep us busy so we could try to con someone into thinking we had experience. We went to work for the government. We did real work for much less pay than we might have found in the corporate sector.
And in the end, after two years of that, guess what! We had two years of experience when the market turned around! And we went to work in the corporate world ahead of the guys just out of school and ahead of the guys hacking in their basements on BBS and lame ass game software while working at the grocery or building decks for old folks.
The market doesn't owe you anything just because you now know what made people rich five years ago. Do your time and pay the dues. The smoke and mirrors that this idea presents is akin to that which made the dot coms go bust.