Google should do something (and soon) because Apple's metal API supports GPU compute workloads. Sure you can do GPGPU using OpenGL ES but that is more limited in scope than a full CL implementation...
First, I consider this a very cool development, that a major GPU manufacturer actually caught on that people use their hardware for more than just gaming. That said...
Be careful what you wish for. Offloading work from a CPU to a power-hungry GPU makes tons of sense in a desktop, or even server (for certain workloads) environment - ie, "plugged in". Doing the same on a mobile device, not so much. On IOS, people have consistently reported drastically reduced runtimes per battery charge when running "hardware accelerated" apps. And don't take that as a rant against Apple - I have no doubt we'll see the exact same problem when Android finally standardizes similar support.
If the systems were affordable without the special arrangements and tax breaks, this article wouldn't exist in the first place because the panels would be popping up all over Florida.
"Affordable" means different things to different people.
As the GP meant it, "affordable" means having a positive ROI with a reasonably short payback period (well under 5 years, currently, and that assumes going totally off-grid; a grid-tie installation can pay for itself in literally half that). As you mean it, someone living month to month on their minimum wage paycheck can't afford to sink $20k up-front into a PV installation.
As a cruel irony, Florida's law doesn't stop those who can front $20k from putting in their own solar array. Instead, it stops the people who most need it from using the "lease to own" model made popular by those companies already mentioned - Kinda the same idea as a cell phone subsidy with a two year contract, except on a bigger scale.
The ROI calculators show a first year 7% ROI (of course, this will increase as electricity prices increase).
Although not DIY tends to basically double the price, you realistically have a 2-3 year payboack, or an ROI of 33-50%.
I have a 5YO toy 500W DIY system, currently, and it has already more than paid for itself, without bothering to get a second meter to take advantage of generation in excess of consumption (yeah, you want to know why the utilities suddenly and "inexplicably" wanted to move to smartmeters? Unlike the old analog meters, they won't simply spin backward if you make more than you use, so FUCK YOU, consumer-with-solar).
The Brookings institute clearly analyzed this from the POV of a monopolistic unitility company, because for end-users, a home solar array practically counts as a no-brainer with current prices, assuming you can afford to sink a few grand into it up-front.
Seconding Ubiquiti gear. I use these (not your specific models, but I love their nanostations) and they simply don't die. Literally months of uptime without a glitch, and even after a power outage, they pick right back up doing their job without human intervention.
And range? I've used a pair of bridged nanostations, without any external antenna (they come with a built-in 120 degree sector), to cross slightly over a mile (with line of sight) pushing full speed without even breaking a sweat.
For about 50% more than a cheap consumer grade router (and the same price or less than the supposedly "high end" consumer crap), these suckers count as a no-brainer if you want something that just works.
Warning - These do not make a good "my first WAP". Getting them configured correctly (even legally, since they'll readily let you blow the doors off ERP and go outside local frequency restrictions) the first time can take even someone familiar with what all the features mean quite a few trials-and-error, and I'd consider that one of their weakest points. But they do it all, and they do it well... WAP? Router? Bridge? WDS node? Check.
Although I seem to recall recently reading (on Slashdot, even) about individual particles having a "temperature", at least in the quantum if not in the thermodynamic realm, by virtue of their entropy - Clearly that concept doesn't apply as used in TFS, which means it strictly in the thermodynamic sense.
Their thinking is that at very low temperatures, ordinary particles can sometimes behave like unparticles. In other words, their properties become independent of the scale at which they're observed.
So their properties become independent of scale... When one of their properties falls below a certain value on the scale of temperature?
And dogs can look like lemurs, as long as they don't look too much like dogs.
Ah, thank you for the correction! I didn't realize NASA's version actually came from someone other than Shawyer, or that they had in fact tested the original design (with more positive results).
If you've automated your job, *shouldn't* you get new tasks to do? You're being paid to do the job to the best of your ability. You've done that by automating - but that leaves you on-the-clock time to do other productive tasks.
If they want to pay me hourly, then yes, absolutely. As long as employers do their damnedest to push the limits of "exempt", however, then very much no. I get paid to perform certain tasks to the best of my ability. As long as my employer doesn't care whether that takes me 40 or 60 hours a week, then I don't care if it only takes me 20.
Note that I mean this somewhat in the abstract, in the sense that I refuse to work for someone who expects me to work more than 40 a week regulary. My current employer actually treats me pretty well, and as a result, yes, if I automate task X, I'll spend my newly-found time doing the rest of my work somewhat better (I wouldn't specifically say "picking up new tasks", because we all know that what we can do in 40 hours doesn't mean we should to produce the optimal result).
Interesting. I wonder what other popular and controversial "science" is missing this particular step.
Well, in this case, NASA's version of this experiment lacks exactly that. They deliberately used a different design from that used (with reproduceable results) by both the British and the Chinese.
Yes, Kudos to NASA for going to the trouble of setting up an actual "null" hypothesis test - Except, how about they try the experiment as documented before they go tweaking the conditions in unknown ways? Yes, they thought they built a zero-thrust version of the setup... Except, that presumes that Shawyer actually has the correct theory behind his understanding of the effect. He can have the underlying physics completely wrong, yet still have discovered one of the most important effects ever.
Just over a century ago, N rays were detected by over a hundred researchers and discussed in some three hundred publications
And just over two hundred years ago, the French Academy of Sciences steadfastly refused to believe that rocks could fall from space, with an abundance of supporting evidence to demonstrate that these "meteorites" had clearly come from weather conditions right here on Earth picking up rocks and flinging them about.
Funny thing about (good) science - It doesn't simply dismiss new ideas simply because they disagree with existing theories. Oh, but for the first time in human history we have it right? Yeah, about that unified theory of quantum gravity, Doctor...
A HUD should be limited to presenting information that helps people drive. Talking on the phone even hands free is still a distraction, visual navigation systems are also an unnecessary distraction.
It distracts me far less to take a brief glance at the GPS map at a time of my choosing, than to have it yell at me every 30 seconds and I then have to figure out if it means turn here, or the next exit, or I missed my turn, or it wanted me to magically teleport to the road below the bridge I just went over, etc.
Honestly people put the phone down and pay attention to the road, your life and the lives of others depends on it.
Putting the ability to wave and glance at that map right in front of me, rather than needing to fumble with something in my lap while trying to make brief glances at it? I'd call that a net win.
I will agree with you 100% about the non-navigational capabilities of this device, however. Seriously, a fucking Twitter feed? C'mon, what sane person consider that a good idea?
It must be wonderful to run a mom and pop operation where none of your customers, suppliers or anyone else has an international mail address. And it certainly won't work for any other country but the US, a canadian business that doesn't accept.ca mail? Don't think so.
Yellow flag: Failure to extrapolate.
Canadians can't block.ca, of course. They probably feel pretty much the same as I do about.il,.ru. and.cn, however. Canadians can't block the few diacriticals used in French (although in my experience, most Canadians would probably consider blocking Quebecois a feature, not a bug); I doubt they have a lot of use for Cyrillic, however. Similarly, a Russian mom-n'-pop probably doesn't get all that much email in Mandarin, even if they need to allow Cyrillic through.
Yes, as I originally said, the largest scale entities don't have the luxury of blocking based on the local norm. For the rest of us, yes, "WORKS4ME". You can find your own solution.
This is about MOOCs, not degree work. [...] Bro, do you even RTFA?
Tu quoque?
FTA: But the professors on the MIT committee that drafted the report argue that the numbers show that larger percentages explored significant parts of courses, which may be all they wanted or needed. "This in many ways mirrors the preferences of students on campus," they wrote. "In a survey of students, approximately 40 percent of respondents report that they have taken MIT classes that they feel would benefit from modularization." (emphasis mine)
TFA starts the discussion with the fact that students of MOOCs may have a high failure rate because they only want to learn certain parts of them and don't care about passing. But the article most assuredly generalizes that theme into a possible future of all coursework, not just MOOCs.
Courses serve a purpose that customized "modules" do not, will not, and can not - They force you to learn the less "fun" parts required to properly understand the material you want to learn. If you allow students to only eat ham cubes, they'll never touch the broccoli. If you don't take five ranks in metallurgy, you can't open the "intelligent liquid metal" skill tree.
Realistically, this would mean they'll just require a long chain of prerequisite "modules" for anything students actually want to take. Almost like structuring "modules" in to a "course" - Imagine that! Except, without the advantage of having a single professor aware of your progress through each step. You think the current semester-long course structure has a lot of duplication? Wait until each module needs to basically spend the first half making sure you actually know the half a dozen prerequisites, and still remember it enough to apply to the present topic. "Oh, yeah, I took module X two years ago to get into module Z. Something about derivatives, IIRC... Don't worry, I have it!"
Worse; they will come from root@gmail.com, administrator@gmail.com or BillGates@gmail.com, only those o's and a's will be Cyrillic or something like that (can't do it here; Slashdot doesn't display them).
"Rich company problems". XD
Bluntly, this won't affect most Americans for the same reason spam from.il, ru, or.cn doesn't matter - Because we simply don't get any legitimate email from those domains. It doesn't take your spam filter long to figure out "if the address contains character-X, 100% chance of spam"... And that assumes your mail server doesn't outright block those as a hardcoded rule (in a former life I had to babysit the Exchange server for a small business; if you came from anywhere not in one of the big-six TLDs, auto-junk).
So by all means, spammers, please start using Cyrillic or vowels with diacritics in addresses - It will make you that much easier to filter.
Give it the ability to back up? Why the hell would we want to waste our time doing that?
Yeah, pretty much my exact first thought too... Even if it can only back up at a few dozen feet per hour, after a few days, it pops back out of the hole and they can work on it without a herculean effort.
For that matter, why can't they just drag it out? Connect it to a big-assed winch outside the tunnel, and pull. Certainly seems like a hell of a lot less work than building an access shaft.
We have an awfully lot of boy-scouts in this discussion, and while I only believe about 10% of them, they do actually give the right answer if for the wrong reasons.
The real problem with knowing things you shouldn't comes from your (in)ability to act on them, and the risk of accidentally letting something slip at the worst possible time.
Consider the best possible case - You find out about a major organizational change, and have some ability to position yourself to exploit it. That happens once a decade, at best, and a lot can go wrong (while you position yourself to take over as the regional director of IT after a merger, you later learn that the buying company plans to 100% centralize their IT infrastructure and you don't even have a job - Or the exact opposite, you start looking for a new job and later learn that those employees who stuck it out through the merger got some insane multi-year severance package).
Now consider the worst case - You company's stage four drug looks awesome, highly effective with low side effects, and the FDA will rule on approving it next week. You buy a shitload of stock. Option 1) The FDA approves it, you make a fortune, and the SEC immediately starts breathing down your neck. Option 2) the FDA rejects it for unknown reasons, and you take a bath.
Basically, your FP has the right idea - Play ostrich. Every time you visit Joe's computer, he has facebook/youtube/a game up and you have to clean out hundreds of porn-related spyware sites? You see nothing. Who cares about Joe - Best for your sanity.
No, the best part is that NASA were able to prove 1000 times more accurately than the Chinese that the "engine" produced NO thrust and that there are some inaccuracies that they haven't eliminated.
...By arbitrarily ignoring the design used by not just the Chinese, but also the British, and coming up with their own entirely different and untested version. "Hah, we've proven that your Bugatti Veyron can't do 0-6 in under 2.5 seconds, because we tried it in our Ford Fiesta and it took over 9 seconds!".
It is only simple because you speak English. You need to widen your cultural perspectives.
Sorry, which culture has come begging the other to employ them?
Maybe you should take that as a hint as to which of us needs to change their perspective.
And for the record, I vehemently oppose the indentured-H1B program (particularly while we have above-average unemployment and college-educated CS grads working as Barristas). I've worked with H1Bs before, and although skill-wise I've found them basically comparable to middle-of-the-pack Americans (not saying much there, but I wouldn't call them totally incompetent), the exact cultural barrier you describe made them nearly useless. They'd agree on a detailed spec for a printer driver, and three months later, proudly show off a photo editing suite. Okay, not quite that bad, but getting good work out of an H1B requires daily (or more) handholding and walking them through the same shit over and over and over. And at the end of the project, I could have just done it (and my own work) faster without the extra body in the way.
Sorry but DevOps requires you upgrade all servers at the same time very fast, with no regard to individual server ordering.
Did you mean NetOps? DevOps refers to a development paradigm. If your development paradigm risks actual user-impacting down-time, you need firing ASAP.
Assuming you meant NetOps, can they live with provisioning me at least four (dev, test, UAT, and training) clones of the entire production environment? No? well then, they can make their case to the CTO whether inconveniencing them or our end users will have more of an impact on the bottom line. If the CTO says "go", hell, I'll code right in the production environment - Oh, you wanted that mortgage payment to go through this week? Bummer!
Developers should never have the power to affect end users. If they do, it represents a failure not on their part, but on the entire IT corporate food chain, all the way to the top. Choosing customer-facing downtime over a few more terabytes and VMs amounts to corporate suicide.
It takes two to fail to communicate. You should not be asking questions that require a direct "yes or no" answer. In many cultures, that is considered rude.
Sorry, what part of paying you to do a job requires me to give a shit about whether or not your failed third-world culture doesn't like answering direct fucking questions?
"Rude" does not apply. Breach of contract, however, does. I just wish more companies would catch on to this before they decide to outsource, rather than paying extra for literally nothing more than a built-in scapegoat for any and all problems.
Many of have absolutely nothing to do with Enterprise resource planning in our day-to-day lives. A lot of us don't care about a strategic business unit. Most slashdotters are in the field of making software, not babbling almost-but-not-quite-meaningless business jargon about software.
I agree with you in general, but in this case, if you don't know those acronyms intimately, I can safely say you have zero ability to provide a useful answer to the underlying question.
As for the question at hand - They seriously use Access and Excel as the interface? Fire them now. Access and Excel have their place, and enterprise level data access ain't it. Buy a working ERP package that meets your needs, and spend your in-house development time on integrating with something that meets 95% of your needs rather than trying to bolt functionality on to a piss-poor 50% solution.
Although you might at first prefer to work with the Devil you know, the biggest problem with extending what you have now will rear its head when you try to upgrade it to the latest version, and find that virtually all your customizations have broken. Even if you pay your vendor to make those customizations, you may have somewhere to point a finger, but you can still expect months of pain telling them which parts of their own damned software they broke and need to repair.
Slashdot Mirror
Google should do something (and soon) because Apple's metal API supports GPU compute workloads. Sure you can do GPGPU using OpenGL ES but that is more limited in scope than a full CL implementation...
First, I consider this a very cool development, that a major GPU manufacturer actually caught on that people use their hardware for more than just gaming. That said...
Be careful what you wish for. Offloading work from a CPU to a power-hungry GPU makes tons of sense in a desktop, or even server (for certain workloads) environment - ie, "plugged in". Doing the same on a mobile device, not so much. On IOS, people have consistently reported drastically reduced runtimes per battery charge when running "hardware accelerated" apps. And don't take that as a rant against Apple - I have no doubt we'll see the exact same problem when Android finally standardizes similar support.
If the systems were affordable without the special arrangements and tax breaks, this article wouldn't exist in the first place because the panels would be popping up all over Florida.
"Affordable" means different things to different people.
As the GP meant it, "affordable" means having a positive ROI with a reasonably short payback period (well under 5 years, currently, and that assumes going totally off-grid; a grid-tie installation can pay for itself in literally half that). As you mean it, someone living month to month on their minimum wage paycheck can't afford to sink $20k up-front into a PV installation.
As a cruel irony, Florida's law doesn't stop those who can front $20k from putting in their own solar array. Instead, it stops the people who most need it from using the "lease to own" model made popular by those companies already mentioned - Kinda the same idea as a cell phone subsidy with a two year contract, except on a bigger scale.
The ROI calculators show a first year 7% ROI (of course, this will increase as electricity prices increase).
Although not DIY tends to basically double the price, you realistically have a 2-3 year payboack, or an ROI of 33-50%.
I have a 5YO toy 500W DIY system, currently, and it has already more than paid for itself, without bothering to get a second meter to take advantage of generation in excess of consumption (yeah, you want to know why the utilities suddenly and "inexplicably" wanted to move to smartmeters? Unlike the old analog meters, they won't simply spin backward if you make more than you use, so FUCK YOU, consumer-with-solar).
The Brookings institute clearly analyzed this from the POV of a monopolistic unitility company, because for end-users, a home solar array practically counts as a no-brainer with current prices, assuming you can afford to sink a few grand into it up-front.
Seconding Ubiquiti gear. I use these (not your specific models, but I love their nanostations) and they simply don't die. Literally months of uptime without a glitch, and even after a power outage, they pick right back up doing their job without human intervention.
And range? I've used a pair of bridged nanostations, without any external antenna (they come with a built-in 120 degree sector), to cross slightly over a mile (with line of sight) pushing full speed without even breaking a sweat.
For about 50% more than a cheap consumer grade router (and the same price or less than the supposedly "high end" consumer crap), these suckers count as a no-brainer if you want something that just works.
Warning - These do not make a good "my first WAP". Getting them configured correctly (even legally, since they'll readily let you blow the doors off ERP and go outside local frequency restrictions) the first time can take even someone familiar with what all the features mean quite a few trials-and-error, and I'd consider that one of their weakest points. But they do it all, and they do it well... WAP? Router? Bridge? WDS node? Check.
/ No, I don't work for them.
Ah, good point. Thanks!
Although I seem to recall recently reading (on Slashdot, even) about individual particles having a "temperature", at least in the quantum if not in the thermodynamic realm, by virtue of their entropy - Clearly that concept doesn't apply as used in TFS, which means it strictly in the thermodynamic sense.
Their thinking is that at very low temperatures, ordinary particles can sometimes behave like unparticles. In other words, their properties become independent of the scale at which they're observed.
So their properties become independent of scale... When one of their properties falls below a certain value on the scale of temperature?
And dogs can look like lemurs, as long as they don't look too much like dogs.
Ah, thank you for the correction! I didn't realize NASA's version actually came from someone other than Shawyer, or that they had in fact tested the original design (with more positive results).
If you've automated your job, *shouldn't* you get new tasks to do? You're being paid to do the job to the best of your ability. You've done that by automating - but that leaves you on-the-clock time to do other productive tasks.
If they want to pay me hourly, then yes, absolutely. As long as employers do their damnedest to push the limits of "exempt", however, then very much no. I get paid to perform certain tasks to the best of my ability. As long as my employer doesn't care whether that takes me 40 or 60 hours a week, then I don't care if it only takes me 20.
Note that I mean this somewhat in the abstract, in the sense that I refuse to work for someone who expects me to work more than 40 a week regulary. My current employer actually treats me pretty well, and as a result, yes, if I automate task X, I'll spend my newly-found time doing the rest of my work somewhat better (I wouldn't specifically say "picking up new tasks", because we all know that what we can do in 40 hours doesn't mean we should to produce the optimal result).
Interesting. I wonder what other popular and controversial "science" is missing this particular step.
Well, in this case, NASA's version of this experiment lacks exactly that. They deliberately used a different design from that used (with reproduceable results) by both the British and the Chinese.
Yes, Kudos to NASA for going to the trouble of setting up an actual "null" hypothesis test - Except, how about they try the experiment as documented before they go tweaking the conditions in unknown ways? Yes, they thought they built a zero-thrust version of the setup... Except, that presumes that Shawyer actually has the correct theory behind his understanding of the effect. He can have the underlying physics completely wrong, yet still have discovered one of the most important effects ever.
Just over a century ago, N rays were detected by over a hundred researchers and discussed in some three hundred publications
And just over two hundred years ago, the French Academy of Sciences steadfastly refused to believe that rocks could fall from space, with an abundance of supporting evidence to demonstrate that these "meteorites" had clearly come from weather conditions right here on Earth picking up rocks and flinging them about.
Funny thing about (good) science - It doesn't simply dismiss new ideas simply because they disagree with existing theories. Oh, but for the first time in human history we have it right? Yeah, about that unified theory of quantum gravity, Doctor...
A HUD should be limited to presenting information that helps people drive. Talking on the phone even hands free is still a distraction, visual navigation systems are also an unnecessary distraction.
It distracts me far less to take a brief glance at the GPS map at a time of my choosing, than to have it yell at me every 30 seconds and I then have to figure out if it means turn here, or the next exit, or I missed my turn, or it wanted me to magically teleport to the road below the bridge I just went over, etc.
Honestly people put the phone down and pay attention to the road, your life and the lives of others depends on it.
Putting the ability to wave and glance at that map right in front of me, rather than needing to fumble with something in my lap while trying to make brief glances at it? I'd call that a net win.
I will agree with you 100% about the non-navigational capabilities of this device, however. Seriously, a fucking Twitter feed? C'mon, what sane person consider that a good idea?
As a long-time biker, I often see the drivers working their smartphone whilst swerving through traffic and chatting up their passengers
Magnificent, 10/10! You will get many fish to bite.
It must be wonderful to run a mom and pop operation where none of your customers, suppliers or anyone else has an international mail address. And it certainly won't work for any other country but the US, a canadian business that doesn't accept .ca mail? Don't think so.
.ca, of course. They probably feel pretty much the same as I do about .il, .ru. and .cn, however. Canadians can't block the few diacriticals used in French (although in my experience, most Canadians would probably consider blocking Quebecois a feature, not a bug); I doubt they have a lot of use for Cyrillic, however. Similarly, a Russian mom-n'-pop probably doesn't get all that much email in Mandarin, even if they need to allow Cyrillic through.
Yellow flag: Failure to extrapolate.
Canadians can't block
Yes, as I originally said, the largest scale entities don't have the luxury of blocking based on the local norm. For the rest of us, yes, "WORKS4ME". You can find your own solution.
This is about MOOCs, not degree work. [...] Bro, do you even RTFA?
Tu quoque?
FTA: But the professors on the MIT committee that drafted the report argue that the numbers show that larger percentages explored significant parts of courses, which may be all they wanted or needed. "This in many ways mirrors the preferences of students on campus," they wrote. "In a survey of students, approximately 40 percent of respondents report that they have taken MIT classes that they feel would benefit from modularization." (emphasis mine)
TFA starts the discussion with the fact that students of MOOCs may have a high failure rate because they only want to learn certain parts of them and don't care about passing. But the article most assuredly generalizes that theme into a possible future of all coursework, not just MOOCs.
"No".
Courses serve a purpose that customized "modules" do not, will not, and can not - They force you to learn the less "fun" parts required to properly understand the material you want to learn. If you allow students to only eat ham cubes, they'll never touch the broccoli. If you don't take five ranks in metallurgy, you can't open the "intelligent liquid metal" skill tree.
Realistically, this would mean they'll just require a long chain of prerequisite "modules" for anything students actually want to take. Almost like structuring "modules" in to a "course" - Imagine that! Except, without the advantage of having a single professor aware of your progress through each step. You think the current semester-long course structure has a lot of duplication? Wait until each module needs to basically spend the first half making sure you actually know the half a dozen prerequisites, and still remember it enough to apply to the present topic. "Oh, yeah, I took module X two years ago to get into module Z. Something about derivatives, IIRC... Don't worry, I have it!"
Worse; they will come from root@gmail.com, administrator@gmail.com or BillGates@gmail.com, only those o's and a's will be Cyrillic or something like that (can't do it here; Slashdot doesn't display them).
.il, ru, or .cn doesn't matter - Because we simply don't get any legitimate email from those domains. It doesn't take your spam filter long to figure out "if the address contains character-X, 100% chance of spam"... And that assumes your mail server doesn't outright block those as a hardcoded rule (in a former life I had to babysit the Exchange server for a small business; if you came from anywhere not in one of the big-six TLDs, auto-junk).
"Rich company problems". XD
Bluntly, this won't affect most Americans for the same reason spam from
So by all means, spammers, please start using Cyrillic or vowels with diacritics in addresses - It will make you that much easier to filter.
Give it the ability to back up? Why the hell would we want to waste our time doing that?
Yeah, pretty much my exact first thought too... Even if it can only back up at a few dozen feet per hour, after a few days, it pops back out of the hole and they can work on it without a herculean effort.
For that matter, why can't they just drag it out? Connect it to a big-assed winch outside the tunnel, and pull. Certainly seems like a hell of a lot less work than building an access shaft.
We have an awfully lot of boy-scouts in this discussion, and while I only believe about 10% of them, they do actually give the right answer if for the wrong reasons.
The real problem with knowing things you shouldn't comes from your (in)ability to act on them, and the risk of accidentally letting something slip at the worst possible time.
Consider the best possible case - You find out about a major organizational change, and have some ability to position yourself to exploit it. That happens once a decade, at best, and a lot can go wrong (while you position yourself to take over as the regional director of IT after a merger, you later learn that the buying company plans to 100% centralize their IT infrastructure and you don't even have a job - Or the exact opposite, you start looking for a new job and later learn that those employees who stuck it out through the merger got some insane multi-year severance package).
Now consider the worst case - You company's stage four drug looks awesome, highly effective with low side effects, and the FDA will rule on approving it next week. You buy a shitload of stock. Option 1) The FDA approves it, you make a fortune, and the SEC immediately starts breathing down your neck. Option 2) the FDA rejects it for unknown reasons, and you take a bath.
Basically, your FP has the right idea - Play ostrich. Every time you visit Joe's computer, he has facebook/youtube/a game up and you have to clean out hundreds of porn-related spyware sites? You see nothing. Who cares about Joe - Best for your sanity.
When are people going to stop buying products that they feel the need to jailbreak instead of buying unlocked or open alternatives?
As soon as my employer decides to offer a choice other than "windows or IOS", I'll take it.
Until then, jailbreaking remains the only option.
governments come and go, just ask the ottomans
That's nobody's business but the Turks.
No, the best part is that NASA were able to prove 1000 times more accurately than the Chinese that the "engine" produced NO thrust and that there are some inaccuracies that they haven't eliminated.
...By arbitrarily ignoring the design used by not just the Chinese, but also the British, and coming up with their own entirely different and untested version. "Hah, we've proven that your Bugatti Veyron can't do 0-6 in under 2.5 seconds, because we tried it in our Ford Fiesta and it took over 9 seconds!".
Wee bit of "Not built here" syndrome, I wonder?
It is only simple because you speak English. You need to widen your cultural perspectives.
Sorry, which culture has come begging the other to employ them?
Maybe you should take that as a hint as to which of us needs to change their perspective.
And for the record, I vehemently oppose the indentured-H1B program (particularly while we have above-average unemployment and college-educated CS grads working as Barristas). I've worked with H1Bs before, and although skill-wise I've found them basically comparable to middle-of-the-pack Americans (not saying much there, but I wouldn't call them totally incompetent), the exact cultural barrier you describe made them nearly useless. They'd agree on a detailed spec for a printer driver, and three months later, proudly show off a photo editing suite. Okay, not quite that bad, but getting good work out of an H1B requires daily (or more) handholding and walking them through the same shit over and over and over. And at the end of the project, I could have just done it (and my own work) faster without the extra body in the way.
Sorry but DevOps requires you upgrade all servers at the same time very fast, with no regard to individual server ordering.
Did you mean NetOps? DevOps refers to a development paradigm. If your development paradigm risks actual user-impacting down-time, you need firing ASAP.
Assuming you meant NetOps, can they live with provisioning me at least four (dev, test, UAT, and training) clones of the entire production environment? No? well then, they can make their case to the CTO whether inconveniencing them or our end users will have more of an impact on the bottom line. If the CTO says "go", hell, I'll code right in the production environment - Oh, you wanted that mortgage payment to go through this week? Bummer!
Developers should never have the power to affect end users. If they do, it represents a failure not on their part, but on the entire IT corporate food chain, all the way to the top. Choosing customer-facing downtime over a few more terabytes and VMs amounts to corporate suicide.
It takes two to fail to communicate. You should not be asking questions that require a direct "yes or no" answer. In many cultures, that is considered rude.
Sorry, what part of paying you to do a job requires me to give a shit about whether or not your failed third-world culture doesn't like answering direct fucking questions?
"Rude" does not apply. Breach of contract, however, does. I just wish more companies would catch on to this before they decide to outsource, rather than paying extra for literally nothing more than a built-in scapegoat for any and all problems.
Many of have absolutely nothing to do with Enterprise resource planning in our day-to-day lives. A lot of us don't care about a strategic business unit. Most slashdotters are in the field of making software, not babbling almost-but-not-quite-meaningless business jargon about software.
I agree with you in general, but in this case, if you don't know those acronyms intimately, I can safely say you have zero ability to provide a useful answer to the underlying question.
As for the question at hand - They seriously use Access and Excel as the interface? Fire them now. Access and Excel have their place, and enterprise level data access ain't it. Buy a working ERP package that meets your needs, and spend your in-house development time on integrating with something that meets 95% of your needs rather than trying to bolt functionality on to a piss-poor 50% solution.
Although you might at first prefer to work with the Devil you know, the biggest problem with extending what you have now will rear its head when you try to upgrade it to the latest version, and find that virtually all your customizations have broken. Even if you pay your vendor to make those customizations, you may have somewhere to point a finger, but you can still expect months of pain telling them which parts of their own damned software they broke and need to repair.