Just because they gave you a list doesn't mean that it's legitimate, otherwise J&J wouldn't expect a profit on their products, would they? If they wanted to look out for their customers, they'd just give it away.
You obviously didn't read the credo:
We believe our first responsibility is to the doctors, nurses and patients,
to mothers and fathers and all others who use our products and services.
In meeting their needs everything we do must be of high quality.
We must constantly strive to reduce our costs
in order to maintain reasonable prices.
Customers' orders must be serviced promptly and accurately.
Our suppliers and distributors must have an opportunity
to make a fair profit.
In other words, outsourcing has actually helped our economy and provided new employment opportunities for the displaced, just like almost every respectable economist has said it would, just like it has always done over the years. Yes, perhaps Paul Krugman disagrees, but I said "respectable" economist, which immediately disqualifies him.
Not always. That's why there used to be a vicious cycle of depressions until the 1950s (of course, some argue that recessions are just muted depressions).
But there are several things you glossed over. One is: face-to-face. As mentioned in TFA, having someone there you can talk to at the same working hours makes a big difference, and a lot of companies are needing that more and more.
Secondly. From the people I've talked to who directly work with the low-wage offshoring crowd, the quality of work is proportional to pay. I.e., crap. Because if you want better productivity & quality, you still have to pay for it even in China. So to get the same quality, the wages in those regions are now going up to match ours. And once you've lost the wage advantage, why chose China over Des Moine? You don't thus the re-emergence of IT hiring here.
The offshoring boom was caused by delusional thinking of some very big companies. I've seen no evidence any of them thought that wages would rise like in any free market. It didn't occur to them that even if they were cheap, it didn't mean they were good. Now, as several articles in the past year have shown, offshoring has lost its glamour and now if people hire offshore, it's because there is good talent there. No other reason.
This brings up the real reason for growth in off-shoring, touched upon by several previous articles on Slashdot and in the article itself: lack of talent. Now I'll leave it up to you to decide what causes our local dearth of new talent, but please don't dismiss the complaints of people scared about losing their jobs and saying "it will all work out". It doesn't always, and saying "it will all work out" lets us ignore facing up to the problems and asking hard questions ("Is our local talent good enough? Is our government policy bad?") that will encourage growth. I believe in the Free Market, but I don't believe in an unconscious free market like you do.
Also, Paul Krugman has been more right than wrong, and considering the abysmal track record of most economists, he still has lots of credibility for the reality-based community.
At first, it read like he was just whining because things were different now, but the best part of the article is near the end with the Terms of Service to enforce gameplay both inside and outside the game. That's just stupid.
For the anime fans out there, they might remember.hack/SIGN which deals with a WoW-like MMORPG and how the player/characters interact on-line and off. One of the important things about the game was that there were no rules: just decisions and consequences. What made the "game" good was the freedom to do anything and interact in any way you want: from bullying to protecting the weak with your own guild, from playing solo to playing as a group. It was all supported.
Trying to use Terms of Service to enforce gameplay is just really, really stupid, Blizzard. And you won't have much of a future unless you also learn the lesson that Freedom == Good Gameplay. The biggest raves I've heard from recent games has been the freedom to explore the environment (e.g., Spiderman, The Hulk, GTA) and the freedom to play the story line or not. Heck, that's what made previous Blizzard games so successful, right?
"Our SAMBA connection is broken. Something changed over the weekend." "Nothing changed over the weekend." "You sure about it? Why does the AD server report it's running Server 2003 now?" "Oh that? We tried to implement Windows Server 2003 to replace our AD server, but we backed it out." *boggle*
That conversation was with our IT dept. In any controlled environment, things should be thought out, documented and multiple sanity checks performed. Even a dev system can impact a production system if they run on the same segment.
Now, having said that, our IT dept tends to mindlessly enforce rules without thinking about them and getting them to wake up to new technologies (e.g., SOAP, web apps) is like trying to bring around a corpse with smelling salts.
A good IT department should make sure things happen in a controlled and documented way, but should also make it as painless as possible to follow the rules. They should be proactive so if you come to them with something new you want to implement. Not only will they know what you're talking about, but have already prepared a white paper of preferred architecture for performance & security.
A really good IT department brings something to the table.
In other words, 39% chose creationism, as there is no discernable difference between creationism and ID.
Actually, there is. I think most of the people in the survey and in Canada & America (I'm Canadian) think of Intelligent Design = Evolution + God's Tweaks (the Miraculous Beast of Darwin). And the Special Creationists (6 days, 4000 years, etc.) are using that chink to push their own views in.
I'm in the Evolution is God's Way camp, but I don't support the teaching of Intelligent Design because the main purpose seems to be to completely undermine evolution (which I accept & believe in) and replace it with theocratic bullshit. I don't mind Intelligent Design in Evolution as a philosophical talking point along with Dawkin's Blind Watchmaker. But to push it as science seems questionable, at best.
...is a new technology that becomes hugely popular in Japan & Europe, but that is banned in the US because of some law introduced at the request of the *AA.
My friend at a video game company has been saying everyone much prefers working on XBox 360 than the PS3, and the biggest complaint is no one really knows how to write the high performance code Sony boasts about. Also, he says Sony's developer support has gone down hill and Microsoft has been bending over backwards to help developers working on 360 games.
Anyone else in the game industry care to confirm/refute this?
These people, althought sad and with no job at first, will find other jobs and society will be better off in general.
Typical libertarian clap-trap. History says otherwise. When out of a job, populations tend to go through this cycle in Western countries:
Massive unemployment
Restive population. Popular demonstrations and sometimes leading to violence against private property and factory owners. (Look up the history of the word "sabotage")
Law & Order crackdown which causes the disorganized to organize. In one case, they became the Luddites. The other, modern labour unions.
Protracted battles between the displaced and employers until the employers offer some sort of cushion until new jobs appear. The Luddites were successful in doing this through violence; labour unions through collective agreements.
Once peace has been re-established, the new jobs began to appear.
Simply dismissing the displaced's problems just leads to chaos which disrupts our society and economy. Now I do generally agree with you that new jobs appear, but assuming the displaced WILL find new jobs is Polyanna thinking at best. I still think society needs an adaptive cushion to help the initially displaced until they move on, and for those who CAN'T move on, help them find a place in the new world so they're less likely to join disruptive groups. It's enlightened self-interest on the part of business people too since they tend to take the brunt of the disruptions.
Can someone explain to me how.NET is so fundamentally different from Java that it could escape Java's fate?
Visual Studio.NET. It's Eclipse with a GUI builder plugin minus the the headaches, bloat and slow downs.
.NET's Windows Forms API is a LOT easier to work with and customise than JAVA's Swing. It takes me mere seconds to create a scrolling notepad as opposed to 15 minutes in Eclipse and nearly half an hour with just an editor.
.Net has multi-language support so I can write any of my modules in C++, VB, C#, Python, etc. and link them together painlessly.
ASP.NET's API to web controls is so slick it doesn't feel like you're even programming a web app. It takes a fraction of the effort to create a database interactive web app than with even PHP.
Having said all that, from what I've read of Ruby on Rails, it sounds like Ruby could be an ASP.Net killer. They just need the equivalent of Visual Studio.NET (an HTML/Gui editor integrated with a code generator for interface code with the page controls) to make it really popular.
China already outsources some of its low end manufacturing to Vietnam citing lower labor costs.
I saw an interesting documentary about the marine excavation of an old Chinese junk (circa 1700s) and that the chinaware on it was made in Viet Nam... for lower labor costs.
Re:So standard electrical plugs destroyed capitali
on
The Demise of IP?
·
· Score: 1
Wait. Are you saying that corporations stealing IP is a GOOD thing because it creates companies like Nestle?
I'd mod that funny if I could.:-) But to the point, I didn't say it was good or bad; just that the claim "weak IP destroys competition and wealth creation" is demonstrably false.
There's an article out there on the web that lists the major corporations we have today who got their start by ignoring other people's patents.
Re:So standard electrical plugs destroyed capitali
on
The Demise of IP?
·
· Score: 1
When WW-II ended the US subsidiaries of German chemical companies plundered their patents as if there were no tomorrow.
Are you it was WW2 and not WWI? I remember a lot of American subsidiaries had to be spun off into true American companies to protect their IP (e.g., Bayer).
Germany could've popped right back up if the US companies hadn't decided to ignore proper ownership rights.
I was unaware Germany didn't "pop back up" after WWII because of this. Could you provide a reference?
So standard electrical plugs destroyed capitalism?
on
The Demise of IP?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I see...
So having standard electrical plugs, standards for phone jacks & POTS destroyed creativity and wealth. I see...
When I think of the number of coroporations that benefited from ignoring patents in the 19th century, like Nestle, I find this argument of stronger IP = stronger economy a lot of bull[crap].
I agree with PBS's Robert X Cringely: the leak's just a distraction. It's only there to make Wall St. think Microsoft is still relevant and on the edge of the wave.
I would normally stay away from flamebait like this, but I'm sorry, I can't...
As the head of sales of one of the largest PM training companies in the world,
Mod -1 right there
I was interested in this book. Upon reading this chapter however, all I can say is... what crap! The author has no concept of what project management really is, or how it works. Unfortuantaly, he appears to be yet another person assigned to the job of project manager that did not bother to see if he could actually learn anything about the discipline of project management while in his job, and taught himself everything he knows, and now considers himself an expert.
Anecdotal experience: The best project managers I ever worked with never learned anything from PMI. The worst ones I worked with had PMI certifications. Seriously. As you can tell, I'm a tad jaded about PMI.
He learned a few PM buzzwords and he does not even use them correctly. Critical path has 2 definitions, neither of which jive with his. His idea of managing a critical path has more in common with a rugby scrum than a well thought out process. Had the author been smart, he would have ventured outside his own little world of software development and gotten real training in project management from a vendor that is in line with the Project Management Institutes "Project Management Body of Knowledge".
To me, Critical path is a PERT thing. Nothing more, nothing less. It's now become something that's been grafted into all project management methodologies, and most of those methodologies have no way of properly tracking it and adjusting it. I know the definition: the longest duration path through a task dependency chart. The corollary: the critical path is the shortest time the project can be completed. Somehow the two get confused and become "2 definitions", but it isn't: it's just the one.
And in practice, you critical path is not what shows up on your chart. It's the path with that unexpected bogey man: the vendor who ships your server 3 months late; the "simple middleware layer" that becomes a nightmare due to mismanagement; the composite liquid hydrogen tank that scuttles your multi-billion dollar project. I've seen PMIs dash their projects against the rock because they swear the PMI PMBOK tells them their critical path is still ABCD and refuse to face the fact their critical path has chanegd. PMI and PMBOK give software managers a false sense of control & understanding. That's why us geeks are willing to listen to this guy.
With over 1000 books available on project management, this one should fall into the "dont waste your money" category. Anyone that wants an easy to read primer on what project management REALLY is would be much better served by reading a book such as "The Fast Forward MBA in Project Management" by Eric Verzuh and published by Wiley.
I've skimmed most of those books. I gave up reading them. The PMBOK from PMI is mostly a joke. It doesn't deal with the problems Software projects have. It looks great for construction or even organizational planning type activities, but there's precious little in there useful to software. My company spent the money to get 2 PMIs and set up a PMO using PMI "best practices". The 2 PMIs got turfed in the last re-org and the PMO is being re-evaluated. It wasn't worth the money because it didn't help up with the day to day help I needed. Now, I've taken a PMI certified course and even was a member of the PMI for a year, but I found the material it provided _useless_ to me in software. Some neat articles about bridge construction though and I did learn one neat thing about monte carlo simulation of project risk, but that's it.
So please, spare us your sanctomonious slashvertisement for PMI. Most of us with trench experience with PMIs would rather take the guy who learned it on the job than a PMI any day.
for [frak]'s sake, do we have to read this twice? it was dull the first time round!
<sarcasm style="dripping"> I'm sorry today's omelette wasn't to your taste. Maybe tomorrow they'll talk about Halo and Doom 3 instead! That'd be more interesting, right? </sarcasm>
Just because there are "Democrats" who are unjustly accused of being communists does not mean that there aren't "Democrats" who most certainly ARE socialists/communists. For every Joe Leiberman there are 4 or 5 Howard Deans and Hillary Clintons.
*blink-blink* Are you seriously suggesting they're leftists!? Not even by the standards of the American left are they left-wing. Howard Dean was considered the most pro-business and right-wing governor Vermont had in years, and the NRA gave him a strong endorsement when he was governor.
In fact that is the precise reason why the Democratic party has become so anemic, it's been overrun with ignorant loony-left whackjobs whose perception of reality is heavily distorted by the dead-end idiocy that makes up the closest thing they have to a political philosophy.
You might want to check out actual honest-to-goodness American left-wing blogs. Most American left wingers consider the Democratic party to have become so right wing (thanks to the DLC) that they're lame copies of the Republicans. The "loony-left" were escorted from the party after 1988 and then became Greens.
You are right that most Americans have never really seen a real-life example of european socialists/communists. We have to rely on historical accounts of people like Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, etc. If we were to actually come face to face with such a person, I do agree that our reaction would be very negative. I don't think our heads would explode though. I think it is much more likely that the communist's head would explode as a result of shot with a high-powered rifle.
How does a statically charged jacket "give off an electric current" -- and why would firefighters take possession of it anyway? All they'd need to do to discharge it is pour a bucket of water over it.
Statically charged jacket would not give off a current unless discharged. The reporter, if the story is true, was ignorantly referring to the electrical field strength (which was measured in volts in the article). Firefighters would have the meter for this because they sometimes have to find out if a downed wire is still live.
Now for the story: it's begging a lot of questions. 1) How could the jacket hold its charge after being handled? 2) How could he re-build up such a charge after discharging into the carpet? 3) How could he not notice the massive jolts he'd get touching metal furnishings or even his computer? There's a strong whiff of bs from this story.
I can feel your pain. I've seen perfectly good systems thrown away for no other reason than politics and focusing on the one feature that doesn't work well ignoring the 95% that performs exceptionally and delivers value. But I gotta say to this:
Those baggage handlers are full of shit, it should be known. One of the main reasons it eats baggage is because those asshats load the baggage like morons. I've seen more panties strewn about than you'd like to know, and it's almost always a women's bag that gets ate. You know why? They pack the fuckers like sausages, and the baggage handlers just plain don't load them correctly. They won't put them flat, one end will be hanging out--and it's always the heavy end. The machine has close tolerances in some places where tracks intersect go over-under, and tight turns that can fling the bags out if they're loaded poorly, I mean they're going 30mph at some points, an improperly loaded bag will get tossed, regardless of it's weight or size.
I'm sorry. That's like saying "Because the user didn't click in PRECISELY the right spot the program crashed" or "because the assembly tech didn't cut to the 1/4" tolerance required for this car, it shook itself apart". If, at the end of the day, you have humans at either end of the system, you need to design for them. How they do their work and how they will use it. If you get frustrated that they won't behave like a computer, then the problem is with you -- not the people.
What OS did Amigas run (don't tell me they called it Amigos)? What was it based on? Also why was the OS "far ahead of its time"?
The whole collection of components was called Kickstart (because it was the low level OS) and the GUI interface component was called the Workbench.
the Amiga OS was largely written from scratch with the exception of the AmigaDOS component (Filesystem/Disk manager) which was written in BCPL based on a legacy DOS that was available. AmigaDOS was a last minute addition which is why it wasn't written from scratch.
The OS was the first desktop computer to use a microkernel approach where all the components of the OS were independent objects which communicated via message passing. It also was the first desktop OS to provide pre-emptive multi-tasking but because it didn't have a "smart" scheduler, the system could still be brought to its knees with busy-loops.
There were many features that made the Amiga's OS a joy. The filesystem layout of a separate library (equiv of DLLs) and font directories made keeping your installation clean a breeze. In fact, in Kickstart/Workbench 2.0 and up, you could do the UNIX trick of specifying an environment variable for your library and font paths so you could have MULTIPLE library and font directories. In fact, the Amiga environment variable system was implemented as a RAM drive so it could have directory structures. Fond memories of setenv "SASC/scoptions" -g.
Device I/O was asynchronous. You passed and received messages to the hardware while your code could go off and do other things. Where this really made a difference was in the Sound device which allowed some fairly inventive sound mixing to go on because while the sound device went off to play your sample, you could mix up the next sample for it to play. In the mid-80s, no one was doing that on a desktop/home PC.
The GUI library, called Intuition, had a nice clean design. Things were properly partitioned into their own libraries/modules and the API was clean and easy to learn. The designer of Intuition said his only regret was he couldn't make it into a pure device for completely asynchronous operation.
The message scheme of the Amiga is still, IMHO, the best there ever was. Based on what amounted to a primitive C-based version of classes, you allocated a structure for your message, filled out the required fields and sent it to a Message Port. You could wait around for a response, or do other things while periodically checking on the message port. This made creating event driven code a dream. With one function call, I could watch a dozen MessagePorts (or just one, actually -- a MessagePort could receive any message). With that one call, I can listen for:
Input events
Sound device responses
TCP/IP connection requests or data received
Messages from other processes
AREXX messages
Trying to do the same thing in Windows was a severe pain until very recently, and even now, it's still a pain.
The Amiga had its flaws. For example, by chosing the cheaper 680x0 processors, the Amiga never had memory protection or virtual memory which made for some fun crashes. The memory allocation code was such a piece of crap that if you weren't careful, you could fragment all of the system memory and even other applications would be affected (see the no memory protection or virtual memory flaw). Also as mentioned, the pre-emptive schedule did not adapt to "bad" programs such as programs doing busy loops.
All in all, it was still a dream. I still miss programming it. The NeXTStep OS is the closest I've ever seen any other OS get to it.
Slashdot Mirror
You obviously didn't read the credo:
Not always. That's why there used to be a vicious cycle of depressions until the 1950s (of course, some argue that recessions are just muted depressions).
But there are several things you glossed over. One is: face-to-face. As mentioned in TFA, having someone there you can talk to at the same working hours makes a big difference, and a lot of companies are needing that more and more.
Secondly. From the people I've talked to who directly work with the low-wage offshoring crowd, the quality of work is proportional to pay. I.e., crap. Because if you want better productivity & quality, you still have to pay for it even in China. So to get the same quality, the wages in those regions are now going up to match ours. And once you've lost the wage advantage, why chose China over Des Moine? You don't thus the re-emergence of IT hiring here.
The offshoring boom was caused by delusional thinking of some very big companies. I've seen no evidence any of them thought that wages would rise like in any free market. It didn't occur to them that even if they were cheap, it didn't mean they were good. Now, as several articles in the past year have shown, offshoring has lost its glamour and now if people hire offshore, it's because there is good talent there. No other reason.
This brings up the real reason for growth in off-shoring, touched upon by several previous articles on Slashdot and in the article itself: lack of talent. Now I'll leave it up to you to decide what causes our local dearth of new talent, but please don't dismiss the complaints of people scared about losing their jobs and saying "it will all work out". It doesn't always, and saying "it will all work out" lets us ignore facing up to the problems and asking hard questions ("Is our local talent good enough? Is our government policy bad?") that will encourage growth. I believe in the Free Market, but I don't believe in an unconscious free market like you do.
Also, Paul Krugman has been more right than wrong, and considering the abysmal track record of most economists, he still has lots of credibility for the reality-based community.
At first, it read like he was just whining because things were different now, but the best part of the article is near the end with the Terms of Service to enforce gameplay both inside and outside the game. That's just stupid.
For the anime fans out there, they might remember .hack/SIGN which deals with a WoW-like MMORPG and how the player/characters interact on-line and off. One of the important things about the game was that there were no rules: just decisions and consequences. What made the "game" good was the freedom to do anything and interact in any way you want: from bullying to protecting the weak with your own guild, from playing solo to playing as a group. It was all supported.
Trying to use Terms of Service to enforce gameplay is just really, really stupid, Blizzard. And you won't have much of a future unless you also learn the lesson that Freedom == Good Gameplay. The biggest raves I've heard from recent games has been the freedom to explore the environment (e.g., Spiderman, The Hulk, GTA) and the freedom to play the story line or not. Heck, that's what made previous Blizzard games so successful, right?
"Our SAMBA connection is broken. Something changed over the weekend."
"Nothing changed over the weekend."
"You sure about it? Why does the AD server report it's running Server 2003 now?"
"Oh that? We tried to implement Windows Server 2003 to replace our AD server, but we backed it out."
*boggle*
That conversation was with our IT dept. In any controlled environment, things should be thought out, documented and multiple sanity checks performed. Even a dev system can impact a production system if they run on the same segment.
Now, having said that, our IT dept tends to mindlessly enforce rules without thinking about them and getting them to wake up to new technologies (e.g., SOAP, web apps) is like trying to bring around a corpse with smelling salts.
A good IT department should make sure things happen in a controlled and documented way, but should also make it as painless as possible to follow the rules. They should be proactive so if you come to them with something new you want to implement. Not only will they know what you're talking about, but have already prepared a white paper of preferred architecture for performance & security.
A really good IT department brings something to the table.
Actually, there is. I think most of the people in the survey and in Canada & America (I'm Canadian) think of Intelligent Design = Evolution + God's Tweaks (the Miraculous Beast of Darwin). And the Special Creationists (6 days, 4000 years, etc.) are using that chink to push their own views in.
I'm in the Evolution is God's Way camp, but I don't support the teaching of Intelligent Design because the main purpose seems to be to completely undermine evolution (which I accept & believe in) and replace it with theocratic bullshit. I don't mind Intelligent Design in Evolution as a philosophical talking point along with Dawkin's Blind Watchmaker. But to push it as science seems questionable, at best.
Digital Audio Tape
My friend at a video game company has been saying everyone much prefers working on XBox 360 than the PS3, and the biggest complaint is no one really knows how to write the high performance code Sony boasts about. Also, he says Sony's developer support has gone down hill and Microsoft has been bending over backwards to help developers working on 360 games.
Anyone else in the game industry care to confirm/refute this?
Typical libertarian clap-trap. History says otherwise. When out of a job, populations tend to go through this cycle in Western countries:
Simply dismissing the displaced's problems just leads to chaos which disrupts our society and economy. Now I do generally agree with you that new jobs appear, but assuming the displaced WILL find new jobs is Polyanna thinking at best. I still think society needs an adaptive cushion to help the initially displaced until they move on, and for those who CAN'T move on, help them find a place in the new world so they're less likely to join disruptive groups. It's enlightened self-interest on the part of business people too since they tend to take the brunt of the disruptions.
*sigh* Money does indeed talk.
Visual Studio.NET. It's Eclipse with a GUI builder plugin minus the the headaches, bloat and slow downs.
.NET's Windows Forms API is a LOT easier to work with and customise than JAVA's Swing. It takes me mere seconds to create a scrolling notepad as opposed to 15 minutes in Eclipse and nearly half an hour with just an editor.
.Net has multi-language support so I can write any of my modules in C++, VB, C#, Python, etc. and link them together painlessly.
ASP.NET's API to web controls is so slick it doesn't feel like you're even programming a web app. It takes a fraction of the effort to create a database interactive web app than with even PHP.
Having said all that, from what I've read of Ruby on Rails, it sounds like Ruby could be an ASP.Net killer. They just need the equivalent of Visual Studio.NET (an HTML/Gui editor integrated with a code generator for interface code with the page controls) to make it really popular.
I saw an interesting documentary about the marine excavation of an old Chinese junk (circa 1700s) and that the chinaware on it was made in Viet Nam... for lower labor costs.
Link to PDFLink to HTML version
I'd mod that funny if I could. :-) But to the point, I didn't say it was good or bad; just that the claim "weak IP destroys competition and wealth creation" is demonstrably false.
There's an article out there on the web that lists the major corporations we have today who got their start by ignoring other people's patents.
Are you it was WW2 and not WWI? I remember a lot of American subsidiaries had to be spun off into true American companies to protect their IP (e.g., Bayer).
I was unaware Germany didn't "pop back up" after WWII because of this. Could you provide a reference?
I see...
So having standard electrical plugs, standards for phone jacks & POTS destroyed creativity and wealth. I see...
When I think of the number of coroporations that benefited from ignoring patents in the 19th century, like Nestle, I find this argument of stronger IP = stronger economy a lot of bull[crap].
And by that calculation, I get .3 cup coffee heated per second.
I agree with PBS's Robert X Cringely: the leak's just a distraction. It's only there to make Wall St. think Microsoft is still relevant and on the edge of the wave.
I would normally stay away from flamebait like this, but I'm sorry, I can't...
As the head of sales of one of the largest PM training companies in the world,Mod -1 right there
Anecdotal experience: The best project managers I ever worked with never learned anything from PMI. The worst ones I worked with had PMI certifications. Seriously. As you can tell, I'm a tad jaded about PMI.
To me, Critical path is a PERT thing. Nothing more, nothing less. It's now become something that's been grafted into all project management methodologies, and most of those methodologies have no way of properly tracking it and adjusting it. I know the definition: the longest duration path through a task dependency chart. The corollary: the critical path is the shortest time the project can be completed. Somehow the two get confused and become "2 definitions", but it isn't: it's just the one.
And in practice, you critical path is not what shows up on your chart. It's the path with that unexpected bogey man: the vendor who ships your server 3 months late; the "simple middleware layer" that becomes a nightmare due to mismanagement; the composite liquid hydrogen tank that scuttles your multi-billion dollar project. I've seen PMIs dash their projects against the rock because they swear the PMI PMBOK tells them their critical path is still ABCD and refuse to face the fact their critical path has chanegd. PMI and PMBOK give software managers a false sense of control & understanding. That's why us geeks are willing to listen to this guy.
I've skimmed most of those books. I gave up reading them. The PMBOK from PMI is mostly a joke. It doesn't deal with the problems Software projects have. It looks great for construction or even organizational planning type activities, but there's precious little in there useful to software. My company spent the money to get 2 PMIs and set up a PMO using PMI "best practices". The 2 PMIs got turfed in the last re-org and the PMO is being re-evaluated. It wasn't worth the money because it didn't help up with the day to day help I needed. Now, I've taken a PMI certified course and even was a member of the PMI for a year, but I found the material it provided _useless_ to me in software. Some neat articles about bridge construction though and I did learn one neat thing about monte carlo simulation of project risk, but that's it.
So please, spare us your sanctomonious slashvertisement for PMI. Most of us with trench experience with PMIs would rather take the guy who learned it on the job than a PMI any day.
If FreeBSD can't survive a simple /.'ing. :-P
<sarcasm style="dripping">
I'm sorry today's omelette wasn't to your taste. Maybe tomorrow they'll talk about Halo and Doom 3 instead! That'd be more interesting, right?
</sarcasm>
*blink-blink* Are you seriously suggesting they're leftists!? Not even by the standards of the American left are they left-wing. Howard Dean was considered the most pro-business and right-wing governor Vermont had in years, and the NRA gave him a strong endorsement when he was governor.
You might want to check out actual honest-to-goodness American left-wing blogs. Most American left wingers consider the Democratic party to have become so right wing (thanks to the DLC) that they're lame copies of the Republicans. The "loony-left" were escorted from the party after 1988 and then became Greens.
This tells me all we need to know about you.
Statically charged jacket would not give off a current unless discharged. The reporter, if the story is true, was ignorantly referring to the electrical field strength (which was measured in volts in the article). Firefighters would have the meter for this because they sometimes have to find out if a downed wire is still live.
Now for the story: it's begging a lot of questions. 1) How could the jacket hold its charge after being handled? 2) How could he re-build up such a charge after discharging into the carpet? 3) How could he not notice the massive jolts he'd get touching metal furnishings or even his computer? There's a strong whiff of bs from this story.
I can feel your pain. I've seen perfectly good systems thrown away for no other reason than politics and focusing on the one feature that doesn't work well ignoring the 95% that performs exceptionally and delivers value. But I gotta say to this:
I'm sorry. That's like saying "Because the user didn't click in PRECISELY the right spot the program crashed" or "because the assembly tech didn't cut to the 1/4" tolerance required for this car, it shook itself apart". If, at the end of the day, you have humans at either end of the system, you need to design for them. How they do their work and how they will use it. If you get frustrated that they won't behave like a computer, then the problem is with you -- not the people.
That's hands down the most biased "news" posting I've seen on Slashdot... this month.
How is this different than writing a ksh or bash script virus? Ksh and bash script viruses can be just as bad. Heck, remember the Morris worm?
./er, but this might not be their bad just yet.
I like bashing M$ just as much as the next
The whole collection of components was called Kickstart (because it was the low level OS) and the GUI interface component was called the Workbench.
the Amiga OS was largely written from scratch with the exception of the AmigaDOS component (Filesystem/Disk manager) which was written in BCPL based on a legacy DOS that was available. AmigaDOS was a last minute addition which is why it wasn't written from scratch.
The OS was the first desktop computer to use a microkernel approach where all the components of the OS were independent objects which communicated via message passing. It also was the first desktop OS to provide pre-emptive multi-tasking but because it didn't have a "smart" scheduler, the system could still be brought to its knees with busy-loops.
There were many features that made the Amiga's OS a joy. The filesystem layout of a separate library (equiv of DLLs) and font directories made keeping your installation clean a breeze. In fact, in Kickstart/Workbench 2.0 and up, you could do the UNIX trick of specifying an environment variable for your library and font paths so you could have MULTIPLE library and font directories. In fact, the Amiga environment variable system was implemented as a RAM drive so it could have directory structures. Fond memories of setenv "SASC/scoptions" -g.
Device I/O was asynchronous. You passed and received messages to the hardware while your code could go off and do other things. Where this really made a difference was in the Sound device which allowed some fairly inventive sound mixing to go on because while the sound device went off to play your sample, you could mix up the next sample for it to play. In the mid-80s, no one was doing that on a desktop/home PC.
The GUI library, called Intuition, had a nice clean design. Things were properly partitioned into their own libraries/modules and the API was clean and easy to learn. The designer of Intuition said his only regret was he couldn't make it into a pure device for completely asynchronous operation.
The message scheme of the Amiga is still, IMHO, the best there ever was. Based on what amounted to a primitive C-based version of classes, you allocated a structure for your message, filled out the required fields and sent it to a Message Port. You could wait around for a response, or do other things while periodically checking on the message port. This made creating event driven code a dream. With one function call, I could watch a dozen MessagePorts (or just one, actually -- a MessagePort could receive any message). With that one call, I can listen for:
Trying to do the same thing in Windows was a severe pain until very recently, and even now, it's still a pain.
The Amiga had its flaws. For example, by chosing the cheaper 680x0 processors, the Amiga never had memory protection or virtual memory which made for some fun crashes. The memory allocation code was such a piece of crap that if you weren't careful, you could fragment all of the system memory and even other applications would be affected (see the no memory protection or virtual memory flaw). Also as mentioned, the pre-emptive schedule did not adapt to "bad" programs such as programs doing busy loops.
All in all, it was still a dream. I still miss programming it. The NeXTStep OS is the closest I've ever seen any other OS get to it.