Firefox is their second most popular browser behind Internet Explorer 6's whopping 98.76% share.
You have to realize that Microsoft employees have practically no choice about using IE because MS pretty much runs its business on internal websites written for IE. But in my years there on and off as a contractor MANY people have told me they prefer to use Netscape, Firefox, etc. at home for various reasons.
Controlling requirements is essential, but there's more than one way to achieve that goal. As the article points out: "A one-methodology-fits-all mentality can lead to uneducated choices that can raise rather than lower project risk." When somebody says, "We use TSP for all our development," they are saying, "Our toolbox is a hammer."
I recently walked away from an outsourced, TSP-driven project that involved 6 or 8 local people and I think 10 in India. It took 3 weeks just to plan the 3-month dev schedule for an ASP.Net query/update app that consisted of 2 fairly complex pages and 6 or 8 dialog boxes. It was the type of project I and a couple other people could have pounded out in 6 or 8 weeks using a RAD approach. For small projects I strongly believe in RAD. It avoids the panicky finger-pointing and sense of failure that ensue when a rigid methodology encounters mistakes and omissions halfway down the road.
You're wrong to presume that people who object to the use of the word "theft" are ignoring everything else the guy said. His little anecdotes were interesting, and I share his suspicion that the entertainment industry probably loses less real profit to copyright infringement than they lose by alienating customers.
The reason a lot of us bristle at the word "theft" isn't that we're obsessed with nitpicking, it's that it gives the content industry an unfair PR advantage in the public debates going on about copyrights and the public domain.
Most people couldn't care less about copyright, and when called upon to vote on some copyright-related issue they are going to look at it in the simplest terms possible. Calling infringement "theft" or "piracy" lets the content industry undeservedly cast itself in the role of the little old lady chasing the purse snatcher.
If anything, the public is the one whose purse is getting snatched. The end payoff for years of copyright enforcement at public expense is supposed to be that a copyright eventually expires, and the public then gets to do whatever it wants with the material. Congress has broken that contract by repeatedly extending the term of existing copyrights. There's something wrong there that goes beyond law. If Congress suddenly passed a law turning all 30-year mortgages into 60-year mortgages, many people who have been making payments for 29 years would be understandably pissed off. If they refused to continue paying, calling them house thieves and kicking them out in the street might be legal but it wouldn't be right.
This is exactly the type of bold innovation more of our techno-billionnaires should be doing instead of buying football teams.
For years we've been reading about the idea of suborbital airlines that could take you anywhere in the world in 45 minutes or less. If we have to wait for Boeing or Lockheed to wait for the airlines to wait for their marketing experts to cost justify it, it won't happen in our lifetimes. But someone like Rutan with vision, money, and technical skills could bring us this type of technology before we know it.
Re:Not only Google looks for big brains
on
Defining Google
·
· Score: 1
If I were pirate 5 I would give pirates 4 and 3 50 coins each, give myself 0, and consider myself lucky to get out alive. Because I'm sure 4 and 3 would vote for that plan, and if the rest were smart enough to figure out the optimal solution they wouldn't be pirates.
I disagree. This is not an attempt to fix the copyright system, it's just another side effect of the system's brokenness. And it's not a "political fix," it's merely a lawsuit settlement. Siemens will have to charge a little more for every computer it sells merely because of their potential for illegal use. This is bad for several reasons.
For one, it sets a precedent of proactively collecting fines without any proof of guilt. If every single person who buys a computer must pay a penalty under the assumption that he is going to commit crimes with it, then so should every person who buys almost any other product, from cars (drunk driving levy) to guns (armed assault levy) to postage stamps (mail fraud levy).
VG Wort specifically is on the vanguard of the publishing industry's campaign to chip away at the ways in which the public has traditionally been allowed to use copyrighted materials. According to VG Wort's own website their leading source of revenue is "library royalties and reader circles for hiring and renting of books." The publishing industry's ongoing efforts to turn libraries into book rental agencies will have huge, long-term negative impact on public education. This VG Wort victory is another brick in their wall.
And remember, these copyright wars are not about protecting the rights of creative people, they are about protecting the mechanics of the system established by the content industry, which creates nothing and wants to own everything. Their vision of the world is another feudal one, in which they own the royal forest, artists and authors are hirelings who get paid to produce only what sells best, and poachers are kept outside the fence.
oops, hit some weird key combination and submitted before finishing, but I was trying to be sarcastic. Levying a penalty on everybody under the assumption that we're all criminals is a dumb idea. But hey, it's the King's forest, we only walk in it.
Last week there was a special program on the Science Channel (I think) highlighting the top 100 recent developments, with commentary by a panel of editors from Discover magazine. Maybe the print version was better, if there was one, but I was surprised by the fluffiness of the commentary and how uninformed the panel seem to be. These New Scientist articles are much more interesting.
On the subject of powerful boosters, here's a long but interesting article about nuclear powered rockets. It describes a non-polluting, 100% reusable rocket powered by seven Gas Core Nuclear Reactor engines, which could lift 1000 TONS into orbit and return to a powered landing.
This story is guaranteed to be very boring for 99% of readers, but it's probably my only chance to tell it where anybody might be remotely interested.
Back in the 80s I was part of an IT group in a manufacturing dept at Tektronix. Our software involved inventory control, tracking batches of work through assembly steps, that sort of thing. One of the computer operators asked if I could help him solve a problem for the stockroom people. Their job was to hand out parts to assembly workers, receive and store the finished subassemblies and hand them out for additional steps until they left the area as finished goods.
All movement of material was tracked by a giant MRP system on an IBM mainframe in another building. The IBM machine generated stacks of PUNCH CARDS which were delivered to our computer room and loaded into our VAX 11/750. As the stockroom people handed out and received material, they had to manually keep track of what they did, noting shortages and errors. Then they entered the information into the 750, which wrote it nightly to a tape that was hand-carried back to the building where the IBM system was.
The stockroom data entry program was very cumbersome to use. It simply did a one-way scroll through the entire inventory -- thousands and thousands of parts and subassemblies -- and allowed the user enter a code on the few items that mattered. To get to an item near the bottom, the clerks had to hit the Page key dozens of times and wait for the slow page refresh in between. Sometimes they would hold the Page key down for a while and go away until it caught up. If they overshot they had to start over because there was no Back function. The stockroom people spent most of their time doing data entry and were consistently several weeks behind, which forced them to come up with various manual ways of keeping track of things. This affected their ability to hand out parts and was starting to have an impact on manufacturing deadlines, and ultimately profits.
In spite of the importance of the situation, the stockroom was low on the IT priority list. So we had a couple clandestine meetings in which the staff told me how the business end of the system worked and the computer operator explained the behind the scenes parts. Working a couple hours a day on the sly for about 2 weeks, I came up with a new data structure and an editor that let the users search for what they wanted and produced various on-screen reports. I also changed the loading procedures to use a tape instead of the stupid cards, and my operator friend persuaded an IBM sysop to bypass the change control process and generate a tape for us instead of cards.
When the users were satisfied with the way everything worked, we put it into production one afternoon as the swing shift person came on duty. In that one shift she cleaned up their entire 3-week backlog of data entry. When the morning people arrived they were speechless. With the extra time they now had, they set about reorganizing their operation and making improvements that they had wanted to do for months.
It was amazing to see what this change did for the morale of these people. Their jobs had been absolutely miserable when they had to work with the old system. They were so happy they brought me a great big apple pie, and were almost in tears giving it to me. Best award I ever got.
Since the press release is slashdotted/farked and the site is somewhat incoherent, here's a clearer explanation of the details by Richard McClendon, who actually invented this calendar. The guy in the posted article is merely promoting it.
I'm afraid they both lost me at the part about keeping the "lord's day" holy. Sure guys. And while you're at it, Death to Infidels!
Notice that when people put phrases like "making bombs" and "weapons-grade plutonium" in their posts, they feel the need to explicitly add that they aren't terrorists. Because in the back of our minds we all know or at least suspect that everything we post on the web is being monitored, filtered and scrutinized for suspicious content, and we don't want any trouble, right? We claim to be free to speak our minds, but still we can't resist tipping our white hats to an unseen big brother who might not like what we said. There's a difference between freedom of speech and being sure not to say any of the wrong things.
Believe it or not, there is (or maybe was) a company planning to do this with piloted jets flying around 60,000 feet, instead of higher-altitude unmanned airships. Angel Technologies site doesn't appear to have been updated lately, but says Scaled Composites was manufacturing special planes for them. A fleet of three jets per city would fly in shifts to provide 24-hr service. Can you imagine making a profit on this while fueling and maintaining 3 jets around the clock, in addition to paying the pilots?
What if the principle of eminent domain were applied to some of these sleeper patents? In cases where IP rights have been unenforced for years and a thing has come into widespread use, the public good should outweigh belated claims of infringement. Alternately, a statute of limitations on infringement would force IP holders to either exercise their rights in a timely fashion or not at all. Products that are on the market for say two years with no infringement claims against them should become immune to such claims. That might make it harder for patent holders to wait in the shadows for somebody else to do all the hard work before snatching a share of the profits.
Slashdot Mirror
Firefox is their second most popular browser behind Internet Explorer 6's whopping 98.76% share.
You have to realize that Microsoft employees have practically no choice about using IE because MS pretty much runs its business on internal websites written for IE. But in my years there on and off as a contractor MANY people have told me they prefer to use Netscape, Firefox, etc. at home for various reasons.
Who remembers this?
Computer built into a Batman lunchbox.
Controlling requirements is essential, but there's more than one way to achieve that goal. As the article points out: "A one-methodology-fits-all mentality can lead to uneducated choices that can raise rather than lower project risk." When somebody says, "We use TSP for all our development," they are saying, "Our toolbox is a hammer."
I recently walked away from an outsourced, TSP-driven project that involved 6 or 8 local people and I think 10 in India. It took 3 weeks just to plan the 3-month dev schedule for an ASP.Net query/update app that consisted of 2 fairly complex pages and 6 or 8 dialog boxes. It was the type of project I and a couple other people could have pounded out in 6 or 8 weeks using a RAD approach. For small projects I strongly believe in RAD. It avoids the panicky finger-pointing and sense of failure that ensue when a rigid methodology encounters mistakes and omissions halfway down the road.
How can Big Media make money off this phenomenon? And which laws will have to be changed to make it hard for everybody else?
You're wrong to presume that people who object to the use of the word "theft" are ignoring everything else the guy said. His little anecdotes were interesting, and I share his suspicion that the entertainment industry probably loses less real profit to copyright infringement than they lose by alienating customers.
The reason a lot of us bristle at the word "theft" isn't that we're obsessed with nitpicking, it's that it gives the content industry an unfair PR advantage in the public debates going on about copyrights and the public domain.
Most people couldn't care less about copyright, and when called upon to vote on some copyright-related issue they are going to look at it in the simplest terms possible. Calling infringement "theft" or "piracy" lets the content industry undeservedly cast itself in the role of the little old lady chasing the purse snatcher.
If anything, the public is the one whose purse is getting snatched. The end payoff for years of copyright enforcement at public expense is supposed to be that a copyright eventually expires, and the public then gets to do whatever it wants with the material. Congress has broken that contract by repeatedly extending the term of existing copyrights. There's something wrong there that goes beyond law. If Congress suddenly passed a law turning all 30-year mortgages into 60-year mortgages, many people who have been making payments for 29 years would be understandably pissed off. If they refused to continue paying, calling them house thieves and kicking them out in the street might be legal but it wouldn't be right.
This is exactly the type of bold innovation more of our techno-billionnaires should be doing instead of buying football teams.
For years we've been reading about the idea of suborbital airlines that could take you anywhere in the world in 45 minutes or less. If we have to wait for Boeing or Lockheed to wait for the airlines to wait for their marketing experts to cost justify it, it won't happen in our lifetimes. But someone like Rutan with vision, money, and technical skills could bring us this type of technology before we know it.
If I were pirate 5 I would give pirates 4 and 3 50 coins each, give myself 0, and consider myself lucky to get out alive. Because I'm sure 4 and 3 would vote for that plan, and if the rest were smart enough to figure out the optimal solution they wouldn't be pirates.
I disagree. This is not an attempt to fix the copyright system, it's just another side effect of the system's brokenness. And it's not a "political fix," it's merely a lawsuit settlement. Siemens will have to charge a little more for every computer it sells merely because of their potential for illegal use. This is bad for several reasons.
For one, it sets a precedent of proactively collecting fines without any proof of guilt. If every single person who buys a computer must pay a penalty under the assumption that he is going to commit crimes with it, then so should every person who buys almost any other product, from cars (drunk driving levy) to guns (armed assault levy) to postage stamps (mail fraud levy).
VG Wort specifically is on the vanguard of the publishing industry's campaign to chip away at the ways in which the public has traditionally been allowed to use copyrighted materials. According to VG Wort's own website their leading source of revenue is "library royalties and reader circles for hiring and renting of books." The publishing industry's ongoing efforts to turn libraries into book rental agencies will have huge, long-term negative impact on public education. This VG Wort victory is another brick in their wall.
And remember, these copyright wars are not about protecting the rights of creative people, they are about protecting the mechanics of the system established by the content industry, which creates nothing and wants to own everything. Their vision of the world is another feudal one, in which they own the royal forest, artists and authors are hirelings who get paid to produce only what sells best, and poachers are kept outside the fence.
oops, hit some weird key combination and submitted before finishing, but I was trying to be sarcastic. Levying a penalty on everybody under the assumption that we're all criminals is a dumb idea. But hey, it's the King's forest, we only walk in it.
Tax every beer and give the money to insurance companies to pay for drunk driver damages.
Tax every car to pay for the ones that get stolen from dealerships.
Last week there was a special program on the Science Channel (I think) highlighting the top 100 recent developments, with commentary by a panel of editors from Discover magazine. Maybe the print version was better, if there was one, but I was surprised by the fluffiness of the commentary and how uninformed the panel seem to be. These New Scientist articles are much more interesting.
A one-joke posting stretched way too far.
cost:
$175 billion over 50 years
"could" return:
$130 billion over 50 years (plus the nebulous "could generate new business")
So obviously this is a good thing.
Even 2% would make me happy.
Good one!
On the subject of powerful boosters, here's a long but interesting article about nuclear powered rockets. It describes a non-polluting, 100% reusable rocket powered by seven Gas Core Nuclear Reactor engines, which could lift 1000 TONS into orbit and return to a powered landing.
This story is guaranteed to be very boring for 99% of readers, but it's probably my only chance to tell it where anybody might be remotely interested.
Back in the 80s I was part of an IT group in a manufacturing dept at Tektronix. Our software involved inventory control, tracking batches of work through assembly steps, that sort of thing. One of the computer operators asked if I could help him solve a problem for the stockroom people. Their job was to hand out parts to assembly workers, receive and store the finished subassemblies and hand them out for additional steps until they left the area as finished goods.
All movement of material was tracked by a giant MRP system on an IBM mainframe in another building. The IBM machine generated stacks of PUNCH CARDS which were delivered to our computer room and loaded into our VAX 11/750. As the stockroom people handed out and received material, they had to manually keep track of what they did, noting shortages and errors. Then they entered the information into the 750, which wrote it nightly to a tape that was hand-carried back to the building where the IBM system was.
The stockroom data entry program was very cumbersome to use. It simply did a one-way scroll through the entire inventory -- thousands and thousands of parts and subassemblies -- and allowed the user enter a code on the few items that mattered. To get to an item near the bottom, the clerks had to hit the Page key dozens of times and wait for the slow page refresh in between. Sometimes they would hold the Page key down for a while and go away until it caught up. If they overshot they had to start over because there was no Back function. The stockroom people spent most of their time doing data entry and were consistently several weeks behind, which forced them to come up with various manual ways of keeping track of things. This affected their ability to hand out parts and was starting to have an impact on manufacturing deadlines, and ultimately profits.
In spite of the importance of the situation, the stockroom was low on the IT priority list. So we had a couple clandestine meetings in which the staff told me how the business end of the system worked and the computer operator explained the behind the scenes parts. Working a couple hours a day on the sly for about 2 weeks, I came up with a new data structure and an editor that let the users search for what they wanted and produced various on-screen reports. I also changed the loading procedures to use a tape instead of the stupid cards, and my operator friend persuaded an IBM sysop to bypass the change control process and generate a tape for us instead of cards.
When the users were satisfied with the way everything worked, we put it into production one afternoon as the swing shift person came on duty. In that one shift she cleaned up their entire 3-week backlog of data entry. When the morning people arrived they were speechless. With the extra time they now had, they set about reorganizing their operation and making improvements that they had wanted to do for months.
It was amazing to see what this change did for the morale of these people. Their jobs had been absolutely miserable when they had to work with the old system. They were so happy they brought me a great big apple pie, and were almost in tears giving it to me. Best award I ever got.
Since the press release is slashdotted/farked and the site is somewhat incoherent, here's a clearer explanation of the details by Richard McClendon, who actually invented this calendar. The guy in the posted article is merely promoting it.
I'm afraid they both lost me at the part about keeping the "lord's day" holy. Sure guys. And while you're at it, Death to Infidels!
Notice that when people put phrases like "making bombs" and "weapons-grade plutonium" in their posts, they feel the need to explicitly add that they aren't terrorists. Because in the back of our minds we all know or at least suspect that everything we post on the web is being monitored, filtered and scrutinized for suspicious content, and we don't want any trouble, right? We claim to be free to speak our minds, but still we can't resist tipping our white hats to an unseen big brother who might not like what we said. There's a difference between freedom of speech and being sure not to say any of the wrong things.
Believe it or not, there is (or maybe was) a company planning to do this with piloted jets flying around 60,000 feet, instead of higher-altitude unmanned airships. Angel Technologies site doesn't appear to have been updated lately, but says Scaled Composites was manufacturing special planes for them. A fleet of three jets per city would fly in shifts to provide 24-hr service. Can you imagine making a profit on this while fueling and maintaining 3 jets around the clock, in addition to paying the pilots?
Didn't Spock build a time machine out of Legos at some point? Or was it Wesley Crusher?
Well if they didn't they should have.
What if the principle of eminent domain were applied to some of these sleeper patents? In cases where IP rights have been unenforced for years and a thing has come into widespread use, the public good should outweigh belated claims of infringement. Alternately, a statute of limitations on infringement would force IP holders to either exercise their rights in a timely fashion or not at all. Products that are on the market for say two years with no infringement claims against them should become immune to such claims. That might make it harder for patent holders to wait in the shadows for somebody else to do all the hard work before snatching a share of the profits.
Pitting malware against malware has all the advantages of an interfamily mafia war, but without the annoying bloated corpses in the river.
Actually I think they would hire about 8 experienced developers and demand that they work overtime.
Curse you, Anonymous Coward! You beat me to it.