Architecture -- another victim of having internal customers One of my former clients -- a large financial services firm -- had embraced the IT-as-a-business concept. When my firm arrived on the scene, the client's information architecture was in shambles because IT's internal customers weren't willing to invest in sustainable engineering. Why would they? To achieve a quality architecture, the internal customer of one project pays more so that a different internal customer, some time in the future, receives the benefit.
The client's IT staff described the resulting mess as going far beyond the usual spaghetti or spider web. They called it "The Hairball." In an average development project, much more than half the total effort was devoted to coping with The Hairball, leaving relatively few resources to devote to new features and functionality.
So true, but Bob Lewis' approach of asserting a more active role in shaping IT is not doable for everyone. Because you need some clout in the company or you will be flattened in office politics when you resist the day-to-day whims of the users. It seems Bob Lewis addresses his article to CIOs, which is the proper management level to start such an initiative. Lower managers or even individual programmers are more likely to get fired than to achieve something.
If he was trying to find out what was going on, he was doing it wrong. The CPAN blog probably gives all the information the guys at CPAN have. As outsiders, they probably don't know which department at Microsoft is running those bots. Except that we all can guess at Bing because that is the Microsoft search engine.
As a Microsoft manager in that situation, I'd try to reach someone in Bing network administration first. That someone might not have the tools or network privileges to track down the offending bots himself, but should at least be able to direct the call to the right people.
While he could be more polite, it is indeed embarrassing for Microsoft if they cannot check their own network a) for the existence of computers with given IPs b) what these computers are doing
I think that deserves an "insightful" that cancels out the "flamebait".
then try rotating and moving them in three dimensions instead of two
Rotation and movement in three dimensions is nothing new for computer graphics. Even if you just walk up and down some stairs, and look around and up/down in an game, the graphics engine has to do complete calculations for three dimensions.
A well known game which actually limited things (mostly) to two dimensions was Doom: In Doom, you cannot look up/down and there is no perspective adjustment for vertical parts of the environment - those always appear as parallel on the screen. That was one of the tricks which allowed Doom to run on a 80386 with acceptable frame rates. But those days are over in game development. Half-Life 1 had a full 3D engine ten years ago.
AMD is now supporting the development of Open Source drivers, and has released a lot of specification to make this possible. On the other hand, it is true that they have dropped support for older cards in their proprietary drivers. It seems they want to switch their Linux drivers from proprietary to Open Source.
Such Open Source Linux drivers are available by now for many ATI cards. For Ubuntu, see this list: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RadeonDriver The older cards are well supported while the new ones still don't have 3D acceleration in the Open Source drivers.
All they could have gained in performance they've instead cut in size.
Power consumption is down as well. Looking at some random HD 5670 card in my preferred online shops, they are typically listed with 61W maximum power consumption. That is about 10W less than in the 4670. For those of us who want a card with passable performance that is still easy on the power supply, the 5670 looks like a good compromise.
Eventually we may even see a 5650 that is good for passive cooling (the limit for that seems to be around 50W, if you don't want ridiculously large coolers).
And don't underestimate how many people will surf on dubious websites, even at work. An anecdote: I know a guy who works in IT at a medium-sized German corp. Surfing porn sites at work is forbidden. Yet that guy told me once that he built his porn collection by searching users' hard disks for porn and copying it for himself;-)
As someone else suggested, you could roll out Firefox (or Opera...) and tell everyone to use that for everything except the intranet. If possible, block IE6 from accessing the Internet, so the new browser is the only one that works for accessing dubious sites.
Yes I realize that some of your users will be pissed. That's why you need management behind that sort of discussion. Talk to your boss first. Maybe he needs to take it even higher, lest the CEO comes down on you for making his porn surfing less convenient;-)
Joel's argument is "code doesn't go bad. it is better to sand it and polish it because a given code base has already had a lot of bugs found and removed. writing a new codebase brings you back to bug rich code".
That works if the architecture of the existing code is reasonably sound, and only some minor flaws have to be corrected.
In the case of IE I doubt that. The close integration into the operating system alone makes it suspect, because that is the opposite of modular programming. The long history of security flaws also suggests that the coding isn't the best. IE may well be one of those abominations that are best terminated and replaced by something else.
While THX has no convenient spec for download on their homepage, I have gleaned the following from various forums (errors of the posters possible;-) -80 Hz is the crossover frequency between subwoofer and full range speakers -The subwoofer is fed the signal over a low pass filter with 24db/oct at 80 Hz -The full range speakers are fed the signal over a high pass filter with 12db/oct at 80 Hz. Together with the natural roll off that amounts to a high pass filter with 24db/oct.
My semi-educated opinion (electrical engineer but not specializing in audio) is that 1) This setup actually makes sense for a subwoofer system. 2) If you don't want to use a subwoofer, ignore it and get some non-THX setup without the high pass filter for the full range speakers. Good full range speakers will cover significantly lower frequencies than 80 Hz, and with the high pass filter you would throw those away.
I know such a fool. A pretty large corporation in fact. They bought a smaller corp to acquire a certain product. A few weeks later the old owner, who was also the main developer, left. As a result, it was difficult if not impossible to develop the (poorly documented) software of the instrument in question further.
If NASA does not want to pay for supply and maintenance, will the other participating nations step up and pay for the flights? If yes, an extension should be easy to negotiate. After all, de-orbiting the ISS won't bring any NASA Money back. If no, you might as well de-orbit the station.
If you have a company that is a buyout target: Only sell out if there is enough $$$ in it that you don't have to keep working there. Maybe stay for another 6-12 months to ensure a smooth transition, but then get lost. Of course, very few posters here actually have a company that might get bought...
In terms of supported APIs, however, the stated API requirement is only DirectX9. The midrange 7600 should support that as well as the high end 7950. So the obvious conclusion (if you take the specs at face value) is that it is about graphics horsepower.
OS: Windows XP SP2 / Windows Vista / Windows 7 (32 or 64-bit) CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo 1.8 Ghz or AMD Athlon X2 3800+ Memory: 1GB RAM (minimum) Video: NVIDIA GeForce 7950 / ATI Radeon X1800 / Intel HD Graphics Sound: DirectX 9.0c Compatible Soundcard DirectX: Version 9.0c or Higher HDD: 8GB Free Disk Space Network: Internet Broadband Connection Required Disc: 6X DVD-ROM
Recommended System Configuration
OS: Windows XP SP2 / Windows Vista / Windows 7 (32 or 64-bit) CPU: Intel E8400 Core 2 Duo or AMD Athlon X2 5600+ Memory: 2GB RAM+ Video: NVIDIA GeForce 8800 / ATI Radeon HD 3850+ Sound: DirectX 9.0c Compatible Soundcard DirectX: Version 9.0c or Higher HDD: 8GB Free Disk Space Network: Internet Broadband Connection Required Disc: 6X DVD-ROM
The minimum graphics alone leave my 2 1/2 year old midrange CPU in the dust (it is a NVidia 8600 GT). I guess Cryptic is not really interested in reaching a really large audience;-)
While IANAL, it seems to me that the small vendors who were kicked out of the hotels have a claim against the hotels, not against CES. After all, it was hotel management who had them removed.
So they can sue the hotels, who will then think twice next time about kicking out paying guests. At that point, CES can either -pay off the hotels so they will explicitly not allow the use of the suites as private showrooms -or do nothing, at which point the "parallel tech expo" can happen again.
I guess this may take two or three years to make its way through the courts, but if a few of the evicted vendors sue, I expect it to happen.
While it does not happen often, sometimes pre-built PCs actually have an attractive set of hardware. In that case, buying the thing and reinstalling the OS and the applications from scratch may be attractive. I remember a discount PC from the early 2000s that actually had components from reputable brands. A friend asked "can you recommend that?", I said yes and the PC actually worked fine for several years.
Of course, that requires a user that CAN do a reinstall if necessary. A DRM-free pirate version of your preferred software may also help;-)
Also, once Oracle creates that kind of ill will, how fast will MS move MS-SQL to Linux/Unix? It would happen within 3 months. They would KILL to have all those OSS coders switch DBs.
I have my doubts about that, because it would also make it easier for MS-SQL users to switch to Linux. My impression of Microsoft is that they really want to keep their customers on the combination of Windows/MS Office/SQL Server. Anything that makes it easier to "unbundle" those is probably seen as a threat by MS.
China is pretty capitalist these days. Not to the point that the ruling party listens to Big Business when making laws like in the US and Europe, but according to Wikipedia free markets have mostly replaced the planned economy that is characteristic for communism. Of course China is still a dictatorship, so the idea that free markets would lead to more freedom has not worked out (yet?).
We're in a transitional period of history, IMO (did I mention I'm a historian too?) where the status of employees as resources rather than liabilities is in danger from too many people thinking that better/faster/cheaper can apply to people as well as processes.
"Resources" can be bad enough for the worker, if management thinks of a resource as something that has to be exploited to the maximum. "Liabilities" usually means that the layoff is being prepared (and never mind that the company really needs the employees - many managers seem to go by "fire them first, then ask who is going to do the job in the future").
For most people it would not be an attractive solution, because business connections tend to be more expensive than renting a server (at least in Germany where I live). But if you have spare bandwidth, why not?
The US debt might be what the US court declares impounded, that is, the US would (according to the US court) owe the money to plaintiff instead of China.
The Chinese could claim they are not under US jurisdiction, and retaliate by impounding the US part of US-Chinese joint ventures in China.
Possible consequences: -Other nations (especially China) would no longer buy US government securities because they don't trust the US anymore. -Dollar gets weaker, on top of the effects that "printing" lots of money by the Fed has -Euro becomes new lead currency
Good points, and I guess that is why other game vendors (Valve) offer dedicated servers for download. You can install those on some rented server at an ISP which has a much better internet connection than at your home. This way, the game vendor has to support only the matchmaking service which is presumably much cheaper to run - Valve still supports Half-Life 1 under Steam which is 10 years old. The obvious downside is that you pay for the game server. But I still like this model better than having my games killed after a year.
As the US is prosecuting the American companies on the basis of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), I fail to see the EU as doing anything similar.
I'm not aware of a EU wide law like this, but Germany has it: Until a few years ago, bribes for foreign officials were tax-deductible as "useful expenses". Today, bribing the same guys is a felony.
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Personally, I can relate to this:
Architecture -- another victim of having internal customers
One of my former clients -- a large financial services firm -- had embraced the IT-as-a-business concept. When my firm arrived on the scene, the client's information architecture was in shambles because IT's internal customers weren't willing to invest in sustainable engineering. Why would they? To achieve a quality architecture, the internal customer of one project pays more so that a different internal customer, some time in the future, receives the benefit.
The client's IT staff described the resulting mess as going far beyond the usual spaghetti or spider web. They called it "The Hairball." In an average development project, much more than half the total effort was devoted to coping with The Hairball, leaving relatively few resources to devote to new features and functionality.
So true, but Bob Lewis' approach of asserting a more active role in shaping IT is not doable for everyone. Because you need some clout in the company or you will be flattened in office politics when you resist the day-to-day whims of the users. It seems Bob Lewis addresses his article to CIOs, which is the proper management level to start such an initiative. Lower managers or even individual programmers are more likely to get fired than to achieve something.
If he was trying to find out what was going on, he was doing it wrong. The CPAN blog probably gives all the information the guys at CPAN have. As outsiders, they probably don't know which department at Microsoft is running those bots. Except that we all can guess at Bing because that is the Microsoft search engine.
As a Microsoft manager in that situation, I'd try to reach someone in Bing network administration first. That someone might not have the tools or network privileges to track down the offending bots himself, but should at least be able to direct the call to the right people.
While he could be more polite, it is indeed embarrassing for Microsoft if they cannot check their own network
a) for the existence of computers with given IPs
b) what these computers are doing
I think that deserves an "insightful" that cancels out the "flamebait".
then try rotating and moving them in three dimensions instead of two
Rotation and movement in three dimensions is nothing new for computer graphics. Even if you just walk up and down some stairs, and look around and up/down in an game, the graphics engine has to do complete calculations for three dimensions.
A well known game which actually limited things (mostly) to two dimensions was Doom:
In Doom, you cannot look up/down and there is no perspective adjustment for vertical parts of the environment - those always appear as parallel on the screen. That was one of the tricks which allowed Doom to run on a 80386 with acceptable frame rates. But those days are over in game development. Half-Life 1 had a full 3D engine ten years ago.
AMD is now supporting the development of Open Source drivers, and has released a lot of specification to make this possible. On the other hand, it is true that they have dropped support for older cards in their proprietary drivers. It seems they want to switch their Linux drivers from proprietary to Open Source.
Such Open Source Linux drivers are available by now for many ATI cards. For Ubuntu, see this list:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RadeonDriver
The older cards are well supported while the new ones still don't have 3D acceleration in the Open Source drivers.
All they could have gained in performance they've instead cut in size.
Power consumption is down as well. Looking at some random HD 5670 card in my preferred online shops, they are typically listed with 61W maximum power consumption. That is about 10W less than in the 4670. For those of us who want a card with passable performance that is still easy on the power supply, the 5670 looks like a good compromise.
Eventually we may even see a 5650 that is good for passive cooling (the limit for that seems to be around 50W, if you don't want ridiculously large coolers).
And don't underestimate how many people will surf on dubious websites, even at work. An anecdote: ;-)
I know a guy who works in IT at a medium-sized German corp. Surfing porn sites at work is forbidden. Yet that guy told me once that he built his porn collection by searching users' hard disks for porn and copying it for himself
As someone else suggested, you could roll out Firefox (or Opera...) and tell everyone to use that for everything except the intranet. If possible, block IE6 from accessing the Internet, so the new browser is the only one that works for accessing dubious sites.
Yes I realize that some of your users will be pissed. That's why you need management behind that sort of discussion. Talk to your boss first. Maybe he needs to take it even higher, lest the CEO comes down on you for making his porn surfing less convenient ;-)
Joel's argument is "code doesn't go bad. it is better to sand it and polish it because a given code base has already had a lot of bugs found and removed. writing a new codebase brings you back to bug rich code".
That works if the architecture of the existing code is reasonably sound, and only some minor flaws have to be corrected.
In the case of IE I doubt that. The close integration into the operating system alone makes it suspect, because that is the opposite of modular programming. The long history of security flaws also suggests that the coding isn't the best. IE may well be one of those abominations that are best terminated and replaced by something else.
While THX has no convenient spec for download on their homepage, I have gleaned the following from various forums (errors of the posters possible ;-)
-80 Hz is the crossover frequency between subwoofer and full range speakers
-The subwoofer is fed the signal over a low pass filter with 24db/oct at 80 Hz
-The full range speakers are fed the signal over a high pass filter with 12db/oct at 80 Hz. Together with the natural roll off that amounts to a high pass filter with 24db/oct.
My semi-educated opinion (electrical engineer but not specializing in audio) is that
1) This setup actually makes sense for a subwoofer system.
2) If you don't want to use a subwoofer, ignore it and get some non-THX setup without the high pass filter for the full range speakers. Good full range speakers will cover significantly lower frequencies than 80 Hz, and with the high pass filter you would throw those away.
I know such a fool. A pretty large corporation in fact. They bought a smaller corp to acquire a certain product. A few weeks later the old owner, who was also the main developer, left. As a result, it was difficult if not impossible to develop the (poorly documented) software of the instrument in question further.
If NASA does not want to pay for supply and maintenance, will the other participating nations step up and pay for the flights?
If yes, an extension should be easy to negotiate. After all, de-orbiting the ISS won't bring any NASA Money back.
If no, you might as well de-orbit the station.
If you have a company that is a buyout target:
Only sell out if there is enough $$$ in it that you don't have to keep working there. Maybe stay for another 6-12 months to ensure a smooth transition, but then get lost. Of course, very few posters here actually have a company that might get bought...
Got me with the CPU/GPU. Stupid typo.
In terms of supported APIs, however, the stated API requirement is only DirectX9. The midrange 7600 should support that as well as the high end 7950. So the obvious conclusion (if you take the specs at face value) is that it is about graphics horsepower.
System Requirements
OS: Windows XP SP2 / Windows Vista / Windows 7 (32 or 64-bit)
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo 1.8 Ghz or AMD Athlon X2 3800+
Memory: 1GB RAM (minimum)
Video: NVIDIA GeForce 7950 / ATI Radeon X1800 / Intel HD Graphics
Sound: DirectX 9.0c Compatible Soundcard
DirectX: Version 9.0c or Higher
HDD: 8GB Free Disk Space
Network: Internet Broadband Connection Required
Disc: 6X DVD-ROM
Recommended System Configuration
OS: Windows XP SP2 / Windows Vista / Windows 7 (32 or 64-bit)
CPU: Intel E8400 Core 2 Duo or AMD Athlon X2 5600+
Memory: 2GB RAM+
Video: NVIDIA GeForce 8800 / ATI Radeon HD 3850+
Sound: DirectX 9.0c Compatible Soundcard
DirectX: Version 9.0c or Higher
HDD: 8GB Free Disk Space
Network: Internet Broadband Connection Required
Disc: 6X DVD-ROM
The minimum graphics alone leave my 2 1/2 year old midrange CPU in the dust (it is a NVidia 8600 GT). ;-)
I guess Cryptic is not really interested in reaching a really large audience
While IANAL, it seems to me that the small vendors who were kicked out of the hotels have a claim against the hotels, not against CES. After all, it was hotel management who had them removed.
So they can sue the hotels, who will then think twice next time about kicking out paying guests. At that point, CES can either
-pay off the hotels so they will explicitly not allow the use of the suites as private showrooms
-or do nothing, at which point the "parallel tech expo" can happen again.
I guess this may take two or three years to make its way through the courts, but if a few of the evicted vendors sue, I expect it to happen.
While it does not happen often, sometimes pre-built PCs actually have an attractive set of hardware. In that case, buying the thing and reinstalling the OS and the applications from scratch may be attractive. I remember a discount PC from the early 2000s that actually had components from reputable brands. A friend asked "can you recommend that?", I said yes and the PC actually worked fine for several years.
Of course, that requires a user that CAN do a reinstall if necessary. A DRM-free pirate version of your preferred software may also help ;-)
Also, once Oracle creates that kind of ill will, how fast will MS move MS-SQL to Linux/Unix? It would happen within 3 months. They would KILL to have all those OSS coders switch DBs.
I have my doubts about that, because it would also make it easier for MS-SQL users to switch to Linux.
My impression of Microsoft is that they really want to keep their customers on the combination of Windows/MS Office/SQL Server. Anything that makes it easier to "unbundle" those is probably seen as a threat by MS.
In one way it has actually worked:
China is pretty capitalist these days. Not to the point that the ruling party listens to Big Business when making laws like in the US and Europe, but according to Wikipedia free markets have mostly replaced the planned economy that is characteristic for communism.
Of course China is still a dictatorship, so the idea that free markets would lead to more freedom has not worked out (yet?).
We're in a transitional period of history, IMO (did I mention I'm a historian too?) where the status of employees as resources rather than liabilities is in danger from too many people thinking that better/faster/cheaper can apply to people as well as processes.
"Resources" can be bad enough for the worker, if management thinks of a resource as something that has to be exploited to the maximum.
"Liabilities" usually means that the layoff is being prepared (and never mind that the company really needs the employees - many managers seem to go by "fire them first, then ask who is going to do the job in the future").
Yes, I think so.
For most people it would not be an attractive solution, because business connections tend to be more expensive than renting a server (at least in Germany where I live). But if you have spare bandwidth, why not?
The US debt might be what the US court declares impounded, that is, the US would (according to the US court) owe the money to plaintiff instead of China.
The Chinese could claim they are not under US jurisdiction, and retaliate by impounding the US part of US-Chinese joint ventures in China.
Possible consequences:
-Other nations (especially China) would no longer buy US government securities because they don't trust the US anymore.
-Dollar gets weaker, on top of the effects that "printing" lots of money by the Fed has
-Euro becomes new lead currency
Good points, and I guess that is why other game vendors (Valve) offer dedicated servers for download. You can install those on some rented server at an ISP which has a much better internet connection than at your home. This way, the game vendor has to support only the matchmaking service which is presumably much cheaper to run - Valve still supports Half-Life 1 under Steam which is 10 years old. The obvious downside is that you pay for the game server. But I still like this model better than having my games killed after a year.
EA could do this too of course.
As the US is prosecuting the American companies on the basis of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), I fail to see the EU as doing anything similar.
I'm not aware of a EU wide law like this, but Germany has it:
Until a few years ago, bribes for foreign officials were tax-deductible as "useful expenses". Today, bribing the same guys is a felony.
I think you have missed the news about Sony misbehaving. Like this: /. readers were Not Amused.
http://it.slashdot.org/it/05/10/31/2016223.shtml
Most