It was originally developed by a company called KL Group, which changed their name to Sitraka. Most people only knew about JProbe though, so a lot of people thought that was the company name too. In 2002 Sitraka was acquired by Quest Software.
The one that says "Java succeeding where PHP has failed"? You know, where they cover system integration projects in banks where they tried to use PHP, but ended up scrapping it for Java? Oh wait - not even an idiot would use PHP for that.
What a non-article. Yes, PHP is better than servlets for some stuff. And C is better than Ruby for writing a UNIX-clone kernel. Is this not obvious to anyone with a basic education in computer science?
Merely because something is old does NOT mean it should be replaced. We're still building houses out of wood after thousands of years. Our cars run on internal combustion engines. And after all these years we're still carbon based life forms.
Oh boy did you bark up the wrong crowd with those words.
Uh-oh. Mixed metaphors are a bad start.
Houses would be better built with steel and concrete as they do less environmental damage, have a better resistance to natural disasters and depending on where you are from, it might save you some money on your energy bills.
Hm. Iron mine plus a steel plant versus a tree farm. Which does less environmental damage? And relatively few people make houses out of 100% wood - I can hardly imagine a situation where you need to absolutely avoid using wood at all costs.
Wood is light, strong, can be grown in a very environmentally sensitive manner (unless you build a house out of mahogany or something) and is easy to work with. It's really a very useful material that is unlikely to be supplanted anytime soon.
Cars need to be running on electricity, because those carbon-burning, environmentally destroying devices we all have in our garages are not maintainable.
Well, my car burns gasoline, not carbon. If you have a design for an engine that runs on carbon, please go away and enjoy your patents worth a bajillion dollars. And my car is pretty maintainable, thanks a lot. Changing the oil once in a while is about it.
I assume you mean that you don't like the idea of buring fossil fuels. Ask yourself, however, with electric cars: where will the electricity come from? Is it really more efficient to transmit power over lossy copper lines for hundreds of miles versus just converting the fule at the point where it's needed? And what about the environmental impact of creating and disposing of all those exotic chemicals in large electric car batteries? Your "solution" is hardly a clear improvement.
And I'm sure a hundred slashdotters would tell you that we'd rather be silicon-based lifeforms, and there's enough of us working on that possibility that it may become a possibility in the future.
Not my bag, but whatever, sure. Just don't shuffle your feet on the carpet in the winter. You might accidentally short-circuit yourself.
Of course, I'm being very brief to get my point across, but still. Because something is old, it needs to be evaluated for replacement. If it's still the best thing for the job, use it. Else, replace it.
Sure, fine. Just don't assume that anything newer is automatically better. Pretty much all of your examples demonstrate items in which the incumbent technology (wood, gasoline) is still the best solution for many situations.
He asks a candidate to design a house. They usually get several minutes in when he interrupts them and tells them it's a house for a family of blind giraffes.
The object lesson is that you're supposed to ask for more requirements and not just start going with the barest idea of what you're doing. It's just a way for interviewers to make themselves feel smart, IMO. I think they figure that if you don't leave on the spot then you'll be able to put up with the kind of assholes you'll be working with every day there.
The Jedi thing was nothing compared to the rest of the speech - are all Parlimentary speeches in England that long? Holy shit. He walked through his whole constitutency house by house and described what everyone did. What kind of speech is that?
The Blockbuster I worked in didn't function that way... Of course, this was 8 years ago
Ok, so I don't know exactly when it happened... but to quote from Blockbuster's 2000 10-K filing:
Since the late 1980s, revenue-sharing agreements have been available to home
video chains and independent video dealers through deals brokered by
distributors such as Rentrak Corporation and SuperComm, Inc.
So, 8 years ago would be 1997. My reading of BB's 2000 10-K is that revenue-sharing agreements were fairly new to BB then. Further down they indicate that a restructuring of their business model occured in 1998 and that they entered into revenue-sharing arrangements with six major studios. Anyway, you can always
read it youself.
Anyway, it's shocking how much companies are forced to reveal in their SEC filings. But your 8-year-old data is, unsurprisingly, pretty much out of date.
In order to rent you a DVD, the video store had to buy it. They're sharing it out among a few dozen people, but the disc is still sold and the movie company gets its inch of green (or in this case, millimeter of green, but millimeters add up.)
You should read Blockbuster's annual report or NetFlix's. They have revenue sharing agreements with many (if not all for BB) major studios. They essentially get the DVDs for free but split the profit between themselves and the studio. How else could Blockbuster put (literally) hundreds of copies of new DVDs in each of its thousands of stores without tying up a huge amount of capital? Answer: they don't. The studios pony up the capital cost of the DVDs, BB throws in their distribution chain and presto, win-win.
I see stuff like this as a PR effort primarily aimed at the less technically-savvy. As long as the bulk of the market thinks piracy is impossible (or at least hard) then the studios have what they want. Mass defection, like what happened with MP3s, is what the studios want to avoid. Or at least delay.
Think of it as a "single-payer music royalty" system, like health care. You pay for hospitals whether you're sick or healthy. So now you pay for music whether the CD is for backups or eDonkey downloads.
Uuuhhh... have you ever read The Economist? There's no "these people" there - it's a magazine, like Time or Newsweek, with a global perspective. But it's just a magazine, dude.
Awesome. Why would someone post this anon though, as it's unlikely anyone will see you telling me how full of shit I am.
Not that I'm doing it on purpose - the number of radiologists working with ye shitte olde x-ray is probably two orders of magnitude higher than your multi-detector CT scanner, so my point isn't entirely bogus.
Radiologists are getting outsourced because x-ray machines produce shitty images and there simply aren't enough radiologists being trained to meet demands in the US & Canada.
Invent a better x-ray machine and you could put radiologists out of business faster than you could break a leg.
Notice how dedicated radio operators have gone the way of the dodo? Telephone operators? People who add up bills manually? Some day radiologists will be in the same bucket as buggy whip manufacturers.
It just seems like a bunch of 20-something "kids" who are backpacking around the world and trying to stay solvent. It hardly seems any different from the fact that every youth hostel I stayed in during a brief trip to Australia was also staffed (nearly 100%) with non-Australians. Oddly, there was fairly little outcry about the loss of hostel-desk-clerk-jobs to those damn Europeans.
I doubt they're making a huge dent in the overall world of outsourcing. Here in Canada more than 10% of the company where I work is people from outside of Canada, but that's not considered odd. Why would it be considered odd for there to be foreigners working in India? There's probably a lot going for those Indian cities. And has anyone ever eaten out in Switzerland? The food alone would motivate me to leave the country. I like cheese, sure, but come on - a whole meal consisting of cheese? No wonder all those Swiss kids are going to India.
Aren't a few of those companies on the "don't have a clue"/"will parrot any opinion for a price" list?
I make no claims about the quality of opinions. And they may even have opinions that you disagree with! But if you're looking for opinions, forecasts, comparisons and analysis, it's there. Sure, some may be biased, but how could it be worse than just going straight to vendors?
Besides, most of them just repeat what other users are doing... so if you ask what OS to use, they just tell you what everyone else uses. Lame perhaps, but usually not outright corrupt.
I like Gartner, for example. All those magic quadrants and hype cycle curves may be lame, but there's usually a lot of information condensed in there.
And yes, they all cost money. If you're an enterprise and you want input on how to spend you tens-of-thousands to multi-million-dollar IT budget, you can shell out a few more dollars to get some research.
Both Sun and MS dislike Linux. More specifically, they dislike Red Hat, who is stealing some of their more profitable server-centric customers. So attack Red hat where they're weak - IP portfolio.
"Buy Red Hat - Get Sued!" - sure, it's FUD, but hey, FUD works. Both MS and Sun are cash-rich and can afford to make these (probably hollow) gestures. Red Hat can't. It ain't going to put RHAT out of business, but it's one more thing on the CIO's checklist.
That's why we settled - not to validate Kodak, not to validate those patents, but to let our customers and employees and stockholders focus on market opportunity, not litigation.
Slashdot Mirror
It was originally developed by a company called KL Group, which changed their name to Sitraka. Most people only knew about JProbe though, so a lot of people thought that was the company name too. In 2002 Sitraka was acquired by Quest Software.
The one that says "Java succeeding where PHP has failed"? You know, where they cover system integration projects in banks where they tried to use PHP, but ended up scrapping it for Java? Oh wait - not even an idiot would use PHP for that.
What a non-article. Yes, PHP is better than servlets for some stuff. And C is better than Ruby for writing a UNIX-clone kernel. Is this not obvious to anyone with a basic education in computer science?
http://www.cuttingarchives.com/
They seem to have lots of information on obsolete audio formats.
Oh boy did you bark up the wrong crowd with those words.
Uh-oh. Mixed metaphors are a bad start.
Houses would be better built with steel and concrete as they do less environmental damage, have a better resistance to natural disasters and depending on where you are from, it might save you some money on your energy bills.
Hm. Iron mine plus a steel plant versus a tree farm. Which does less environmental damage? And relatively few people make houses out of 100% wood - I can hardly imagine a situation where you need to absolutely avoid using wood at all costs.
Wood is light, strong, can be grown in a very environmentally sensitive manner (unless you build a house out of mahogany or something) and is easy to work with. It's really a very useful material that is unlikely to be supplanted anytime soon.
Cars need to be running on electricity, because those carbon-burning, environmentally destroying devices we all have in our garages are not maintainable.
Well, my car burns gasoline, not carbon. If you have a design for an engine that runs on carbon, please go away and enjoy your patents worth a bajillion dollars. And my car is pretty maintainable, thanks a lot. Changing the oil once in a while is about it.
I assume you mean that you don't like the idea of buring fossil fuels. Ask yourself, however, with electric cars: where will the electricity come from? Is it really more efficient to transmit power over lossy copper lines for hundreds of miles versus just converting the fule at the point where it's needed? And what about the environmental impact of creating and disposing of all those exotic chemicals in large electric car batteries? Your "solution" is hardly a clear improvement.
And I'm sure a hundred slashdotters would tell you that we'd rather be silicon-based lifeforms, and there's enough of us working on that possibility that it may become a possibility in the future.
Not my bag, but whatever, sure. Just don't shuffle your feet on the carpet in the winter. You might accidentally short-circuit yourself.
Of course, I'm being very brief to get my point across, but still. Because something is old, it needs to be evaluated for replacement. If it's still the best thing for the job, use it. Else, replace it.
Sure, fine. Just don't assume that anything newer is automatically better. Pretty much all of your examples demonstrate items in which the incumbent technology (wood, gasoline) is still the best solution for many situations.
Holy shit. A useful answer. This actually works.
Joel (from http://www.joelonsoftware.com/ ) describes a similar interview strategy.
He asks a candidate to design a house. They usually get several minutes in when he interrupts them and tells them it's a house for a family of blind giraffes.
The object lesson is that you're supposed to ask for more requirements and not just start going with the barest idea of what you're doing. It's just a way for interviewers to make themselves feel smart, IMO. I think they figure that if you don't leave on the spot then you'll be able to put up with the kind of assholes you'll be working with every day there.
Ok, I didn't read it either, but I skimmed it.
The Jedi thing was nothing compared to the rest of the speech - are all Parlimentary speeches in England that long? Holy shit. He walked through his whole constitutency house by house and described what everyone did. What kind of speech is that?
I plan on doing the same thing with some old gym shorts and my car next week.
The Blockbuster I worked in didn't function that way... Of course, this was 8 years ago
Ok, so I don't know exactly when it happened... but to quote from Blockbuster's 2000 10-K filing:
Since the late 1980s, revenue-sharing agreements have been available to home video chains and independent video dealers through deals brokered by distributors such as Rentrak Corporation and SuperComm, Inc.
So, 8 years ago would be 1997. My reading of BB's 2000 10-K is that revenue-sharing agreements were fairly new to BB then. Further down they indicate that a restructuring of their business model occured in 1998 and that they entered into revenue-sharing arrangements with six major studios. Anyway, you can always read it youself.
Anyway, it's shocking how much companies are forced to reveal in their SEC filings. But your 8-year-old data is, unsurprisingly, pretty much out of date.
In order to rent you a DVD, the video store had to buy it. They're sharing it out among a few dozen people, but the disc is still sold and the movie company gets its inch of green (or in this case, millimeter of green, but millimeters add up.)
You should read Blockbuster's annual report or NetFlix's. They have revenue sharing agreements with many (if not all for BB) major studios. They essentially get the DVDs for free but split the profit between themselves and the studio. How else could Blockbuster put (literally) hundreds of copies of new DVDs in each of its thousands of stores without tying up a huge amount of capital? Answer: they don't. The studios pony up the capital cost of the DVDs, BB throws in their distribution chain and presto, win-win.
I see stuff like this as a PR effort primarily aimed at the less technically-savvy. As long as the bulk of the market thinks piracy is impossible (or at least hard) then the studios have what they want. Mass defection, like what happened with MP3s, is what the studios want to avoid. Or at least delay.
1) not a number, free man
2) find out who is #1?
3) plug the fucking keyhole on front door
This post perfect summarizes why, to me, economists are like pro athletes. I love watching what they do, but never in a million years could I do it.
You've summarized the several hundred posts here, minus the pissing-contest flames, in 4 lines. Kudos.
Might I also suggest Engineers Without Borders?
/. crowd.
http://www.ewb.ca
http://www.ewb-usa.org/
A similarily worthwhile cause that probably resonates with the
Ha! Excellent. Thanks.
Canadian comic Sean Cullen does a great bit on this guy. http://www.seancullen.com/
The formula is:
* "In a world..."
* followed by some sort of contradiction
* "one man..."
* is doing some generic action
They run the bit on those "Just for Laughs" shows on CBC every so often.
Nah, media levies don't make you a pirate.
Think of it as a "single-payer music royalty" system, like health care. You pay for hospitals whether you're sick or healthy. So now you pay for music whether the CD is for backups or eDonkey downloads.
It's not so much a country as a big buffet!
Uuuhhh... have you ever read The Economist? There's no "these people" there - it's a magazine, like Time or Newsweek, with a global perspective. But it's just a magazine, dude.
Ah, US Thanksgiving, when generations come together... on Slashdot.
Awesome. Why would someone post this anon though, as it's unlikely anyone will see you telling me how full of shit I am.
Not that I'm doing it on purpose - the number of radiologists working with ye shitte olde x-ray is probably two orders of magnitude higher than your multi-detector CT scanner, so my point isn't entirely bogus.
Radiologists are getting outsourced because x-ray machines produce shitty images and there simply aren't enough radiologists being trained to meet demands in the US & Canada.
Invent a better x-ray machine and you could put radiologists out of business faster than you could break a leg.
Notice how dedicated radio operators have gone the way of the dodo? Telephone operators? People who add up bills manually? Some day radiologists will be in the same bucket as buggy whip manufacturers.
It just seems like a bunch of 20-something "kids" who are backpacking around the world and trying to stay solvent. It hardly seems any different from the fact that every youth hostel I stayed in during a brief trip to Australia was also staffed (nearly 100%) with non-Australians. Oddly, there was fairly little outcry about the loss of hostel-desk-clerk-jobs to those damn Europeans.
I doubt they're making a huge dent in the overall world of outsourcing. Here in Canada more than 10% of the company where I work is people from outside of Canada, but that's not considered odd. Why would it be considered odd for there to be foreigners working in India? There's probably a lot going for those Indian cities. And has anyone ever eaten out in Switzerland? The food alone would motivate me to leave the country. I like cheese, sure, but come on - a whole meal consisting of cheese? No wonder all those Swiss kids are going to India.
Aren't a few of those companies on the "don't have a clue"/"will parrot any opinion for a price" list?
I make no claims about the quality of opinions. And they may even have opinions that you disagree with! But if you're looking for opinions, forecasts, comparisons and analysis, it's there. Sure, some may be biased, but how could it be worse than just going straight to vendors?
Besides, most of them just repeat what other users are doing... so if you ask what OS to use, they just tell you what everyone else uses. Lame perhaps, but usually not outright corrupt.
I like Gartner, for example. All those magic quadrants and hype cycle curves may be lame, but there's usually a lot of information condensed in there.
http://www.gartner.com/
http://www.metagroup.com/
http://www.idc.com/
http://www.forrester.com/
http://www.idg.com/
http://www.jupiterresearch.com/
http://www.yankeegroup.com/
http://www.aberdeen.com/
http://www.amrresearch.com/
And yes, they all cost money. If you're an enterprise and you want input on how to spend you tens-of-thousands to multi-million-dollar IT budget, you can shell out a few more dollars to get some research.
Uuuhhh... why not? Do you have a specific issue?
Both Sun and MS dislike Linux. More specifically, they dislike Red Hat, who is stealing some of their more profitable server-centric customers. So attack Red hat where they're weak - IP portfolio.
"Buy Red Hat - Get Sued!" - sure, it's FUD, but hey, FUD works. Both MS and Sun are cash-rich and can afford to make these (probably hollow) gestures. Red Hat can't. It ain't going to put RHAT out of business, but it's one more thing on the CIO's checklist.
That's it exactly. Sun said the same thing a few weeks back...
Jonathan Schwart's Blog. In regards to settling a lawsuit with Kodak...
It's a direct attack on Linux.