. If you worked at a company that only made a 1% net profit, but invested in its people, its infrastructure and its goals, would that be worth it?
It may be worth it to work there, but solely as a return on investment, no it is not "worth it". There are numerous other items that could be invested in (bonds, real estate, commodities) that offer far better that a 1% return with far lower risk.
So no, it isn't worth it if you believe the sole function of a company is to generate profit. Thankfully there are a few people who believe creating great products is more important than great profits.
The ideal tool in my mind should be something that is independent of any application, browser, or computer; something that is easily carried, but which if lost poses no risk of compromise. What does the Slashdot crowd like in password tools?"
I like using my brain.
Seriously, how many passwords do you need to remember? 15? 20?
Figure out a reasonable mnemonic for remembering them and do just that...remember them.
Every other tool I've tried has ended up being not available at some point when I needed it (e.g. at a hotel, at a friend's house, on an airplane etc).
ost stuff follows the convention over configuration principle. At least that's the way it seems to me
I think you may be misinterpreting the "convention over configuration" principle. It is exactly the principle that Eclipse follows.
Convention over configuration means that if you are doing standard stuff, no configuration is required. If you want to do non-standard stuff, you need to configure it. This is why there are so many configuration options in Eclipse. 99.9% of them you don't need unless you are doing something unconventional.
Netbeans seems to follow the "My way or the highway" principle. You either squeeze yourself into the Netbeans box, or don't use it.
I seriously doubt Microsoft would do something nearly this stupid.
Please stop anthropomorphizing corporations. They get really pissed off when you do that.
I agree there was no corporate agenda to steal a dozen lines or so of code from the open source community. However, I could see the following:
1) Product A is behind schedule
2) Code Monkey B is under huge pressure to complete some feature for Product A. Luckily he finds some code on a blog which finishes off the routine he's working on. He doesn't perform due diligence to determine if this is GPL'd code or not. The blog doesn't provide references.
3) Manager C forgoes the code review process to ship Product A on time.
Compare AJAX Gmail with the HTML-only version of Gmail. It's pretty dramatic.
Dramatic. Sorry, no.
Flashy, yes.
Please list a requirement that is met by AJAX that isn't met by HTML. The only thing is "I don't want my page to briefly disappear during data updates".
That's it. That's all AJAX offers.
Wow.
For this we are willing to put up with a whole crap-load of non-standardized buggy security-hole ridden API's that try and pound the round peg of the web into the square hole of a technology we already had...thick clients.
Just goes to show that with a cool acronym and some flash, you can sell almost anything to the new breed of geeks.
The more you Idiot-Proof a system, the smarter the Idiots become. Not smarter at actually entering the correct data, just smarter at bypassing the protections you put in place.
Sigh.
This depresses me.
The same old lazy "users are idiots" arguments.
Did you bother finding out WHY users were going to such lengths to get around your validation routines? Maybe...just maybe, they had perfectly good reasons for not entering this piece of data. For the most part I have found that users have very good reasons for doing what they do. They might be the wrong reasons (i.e. in that what they are doing doesn't accomplish what they think it does), but they usually have a perfectly justifiable reason.
It may be enjoyable to try and build a system with nothing more that your awesome psychic powers for determining requirements, but sometimes you need to crawl out of your mom's basement and actually talk to some users to find out what they want. You may find that they are actually smarter than you thought...
By point is that grabbing a dictionary and harping on forever isn't the best way to ascertain extent. Sometimes people are being satirical. Sometimes people use the wrong word. Trying to say The Pirate Bay must be made to help piracy because it's The Pirate Bay isn't an argument, it's just noise.
Please. You, sir, are an idiot.
Oh, sorry, just because I called you an idiot, doesn't mean I actually meant that you are an idiot. Sometimes people are being satirical. Sometimes people use the wrong word. But more often than not, as is the case with the last word of the first sentence of this post, they don't.
You cannot seriously be arguing that The Pirate Bay was meant to be anything but a site for hosting torrents of copywritten material. Their "About" page specifically mentions that they themselves do not host copywritten material, just torrents. They have posted links to numerous complaints they have received regarding copywritten material that they host the torrents of. From day 1, 99% of their torrents have linked to copywritten material. And (in case you hadn't noticed), they named themselves "The Pirate Bay"!
The dichotomy between nerds and jocks is a false one, and it has been for some time. The stereotypes assert that "jocks" who are socially active, athletic, and attractive must not have any interest in technology, be smart, or value intellectual pursuits. Likewise, "nerds" who are smart and dedicated to learning must be slobs, socially awkward, and unattractive.
I believe Hodgeman's point is more around the dichotomy between society's celebration of jockdom as opposed to nerddom. How many current professional athletes can the average person name? 50? 100?. How many Nobel prize scientiest? Maybe 3?
Sure, those Nobel prize winners may also be rock climbers, rugby players, what have you, and those professional athletes may have IQ's in th 140's, but that is not what they are being recognized for.
The fact is, society rewards elite jockdom much more that in does elite nerddom.
Let's see, you upload images and text onto Facebook. Now, what's stopping you from uploading the same images and text onto MySpace? _Nothing_.
The author's bitch is that you don't have a one-click Export-Import function. Should you? Should Facebook or whoever be required to make the structure that they have provided for free use on their system portable?
That's the business deal here. There's structural lock-in, but not data lock-in, in exchange for free use of the structure. If you don't like it, you're not required to use it, and even if you do, you remain free to use your images and text however you want.
So the Insightful comment here is bascially that there is no such thing as data lock in? After all, you can always recreate the data you put in. It's not like these services make it up...
Sorry, but that's a bit like saying "Microsoft Word documents aren't proprietary, you could always re-type the same thing in Open Office!".
The Facbook / MySpace examples are inane. Do people really really care so much about migrating their social networking data? The article is more apt for SaaS "clouds" such as Salesforce or AWS. The author doesn't appear to indicate cloud providers should be mandated to prevent data lock in, just that customers should be aware of the data lock in of most cloud services.
imply put, Google has provided an absolutely awesome, sky is the limit, technology. If multiple killer applications are not in place which leverage Wave within a year or two, I'd declare this a failure of developers and imagination rather than a failure of Google and/or Wave.
In this case, I'd say the reviewer has failed everyone.
So your "insightful" comment is that Wave is an incredible success and no amount of public opinion or evidence will convince you otherwise?
But that's the point. Everyone owns a phone, so you can't really add the price of that phone to the calculation. The only additional cost will be the game. On the other hand, to get the games on a console, you have to buy a console.
And for consoles: Everyone owns a DVD player, so you can't really add the price of that DVD player to the calculation. The only additional cost will be the game.
Or they could just move 140 miles north to Canada. Very minor shift in culture, no language barriers, no tariffs, and the US government already uses a proprietary Canadian OS on some of their devices.
Or they could just move to Nevada.
In any case, the article doesn't provide any evidence that Microsoft is doing anything illegal, though they heavily imply it. The article links to a couple of other sites (written by the same author, how original!) that basically spew the same nonsense, but there is no indication why Microsoft can't do exactly what they are doing.
Access to the information that it relays back would be the part of it that you lose, not the ability of the watch to pick up GPS signals or talk to the satellites.
Which brings me back to the original post: is there a service provider in the middle of Outback
Yes. The middleman will have the ability to know where your kid is, they just won't tell you without the subscription
No, they won't know where your kid is. GPS signals are read only. This watch does not "talk" to the satellites, it only listens. My guess is they use cellular SMS messaging to broadcast the data back to the middleman.
That's why this watch won't work in the middle of the Outback. It has no way to communicate back to the middleman as cell phone service is not available.
9V at 18 watts = 2 AMPS at 9 volts. The teenager is lying, the summary is lying, or whole thing is fake.
so this kid stumbled upon a cheap system that is 900X more efficient than the best Solar panels made by industry? either that or his solar panel is 30 feet long by 2 feet wide.
It's the latest take on thin-client to server connectivity. Why buy a $1500 computer when you can get 100x more power from a $100 thin client and $20 a month. (or what ever)
Numerous reasons: a) I don't want my data floating about "the cloud". Sorry, I don't care how much "we aren't evil" marketing corporations spew, in the end, it's my data, and I'll take care of it myself thank you very much.
b) A PC to manage my data doesn't cost $1500. It costs more like $500-$600.
c) I don't need 100x the power of my $600 PC.
d) Cloud applications cost (e.g. $50/year for Google apps). Sorry, I'd rather use free stuff or even buy that other evil office package for $100, and manage the data myself.
e) I'm not always connected. I like to have access to my data even when my ISP is down.
Basically, I don't want my property at the mercy of corporations. It's the same reason I don't like hosted music, hosted games, hosted television, etc. When I buy something, I want to own it on my terms. The cloud seems all like paying money to companies to play on their terms. Bleh. No thank you.
Here are a bunch of reasons why I prefer PC's over consoles. Therefore, publishers release the same items for free to PC's that they charge for consoles.
Your logic doesn't make any sense. The relative power / lack of power of each platform has nothing to do with the publishers financial decision to charge on one platform vs. the other.
My guess is the reasons are more likely one of the following: 1) If we charge on the PC, it's likely just gonna get pirated anyways, so lets not bother 2) The PC has a declining audience for games, let's do what we can to keep the last members of that audience interested. 3) Because historically, these types of things have been free on PC's and there will be a lot of resentment if we suddenly start charging for them. The largest demographic of console owners were NOT previously PC gamers, so they won't miss what they never had.
How many copies of XP were sold? If Microsoft has sold 300 million copies, than at $150m development cost they could sell the OS for $2 and make a $150m profit.
Yes, but the quote was $150million for 100,000 lines of code.
XP had over 40 million lines of code, so assuming the costs scale linearly (which is optimistic IMHO), it would cost $60 billion dollars to develop a "bug free" version of XP.
For reference, Red Hat 7.1 contains approx 30 million lines of code
My mind read your first sentence as, "I was charged with writing [Piece of Shit] software where I work." "Point of Sale" is only a secondary parsing of that acronym for my language framework.;)
Give him the benefit of the doubt, it may have been both!
I read it that way too, even though I've worked on some POS POS software.
Slashdot Mirror
It may be worth it to work there, but solely as a return on investment, no it is not "worth it". There are numerous other items that could be invested in (bonds, real estate, commodities) that offer far better that a 1% return with far lower risk.
So no, it isn't worth it if you believe the sole function of a company is to generate profit. Thankfully there are a few people who believe creating great products is more important than great profits.
Where the hell are you parking your car? Mt. Vesuvius?
Hey, wait...how did you know my password?
I like using my brain.
Seriously, how many passwords do you need to remember? 15? 20?
Figure out a reasonable mnemonic for remembering them and do just that...remember them.
Every other tool I've tried has ended up being not available at some point when I needed it (e.g. at a hotel, at a friend's house, on an airplane etc).
I think you may be misinterpreting the "convention over configuration" principle. It is exactly the principle that Eclipse follows.
Convention over configuration means that if you are doing standard stuff, no configuration is required. If you want to do non-standard stuff, you need to configure it. This is why there are so many configuration options in Eclipse. 99.9% of them you don't need unless you are doing something unconventional.
Netbeans seems to follow the "My way or the highway" principle. You either squeeze yourself into the Netbeans box, or don't use it.
Please stop anthropomorphizing corporations. They get really pissed off when you do that.
I agree there was no corporate agenda to steal a dozen lines or so of code from the open source community. However, I could see the following:
1) Product A is behind schedule
2) Code Monkey B is under huge pressure to complete some feature for Product A. Luckily he finds some code on a blog which finishes off the routine he's working on. He doesn't perform due diligence to determine if this is GPL'd code or not. The blog doesn't provide references.
3) Manager C forgoes the code review process to ship Product A on time.
Yes, it is
Dramatic. Sorry, no.
Flashy, yes.
Please list a requirement that is met by AJAX that isn't met by HTML. The only thing is "I don't want my page to briefly disappear during data updates".
That's it. That's all AJAX offers.
Wow.
For this we are willing to put up with a whole crap-load of non-standardized buggy security-hole ridden API's that try and pound the round peg of the web into the square hole of a technology we already had...thick clients.
Just goes to show that with a cool acronym and some flash, you can sell almost anything to the new breed of geeks.
Sigh.
This depresses me.
The same old lazy "users are idiots" arguments.
Did you bother finding out WHY users were going to such lengths to get around your validation routines? Maybe...just maybe, they had perfectly good reasons for not entering this piece of data. For the most part I have found that users have very good reasons for doing what they do. They might be the wrong reasons (i.e. in that what they are doing doesn't accomplish what they think it does), but they usually have a perfectly justifiable reason.
It may be enjoyable to try and build a system with nothing more that your awesome psychic powers for determining requirements, but sometimes you need to crawl out of your mom's basement and actually talk to some users to find out what they want. You may find that they are actually smarter than you thought...
Please. You, sir, are an idiot.
Oh, sorry, just because I called you an idiot, doesn't mean I actually meant that you are an idiot. Sometimes people are being satirical. Sometimes people use the wrong word. But more often than not, as is the case with the last word of the first sentence of this post, they don't.
You cannot seriously be arguing that The Pirate Bay was meant to be anything but a site for hosting torrents of copywritten material. Their "About" page specifically mentions that they themselves do not host copywritten material, just torrents. They have posted links to numerous complaints they have received regarding copywritten material that they host the torrents of. From day 1, 99% of their torrents have linked to copywritten material. And (in case you hadn't noticed), they named themselves "The Pirate Bay"!
I believe Hodgeman's point is more around the dichotomy between society's celebration of jockdom as opposed to nerddom. How many current professional athletes can the average person name? 50? 100?. How many Nobel prize scientiest? Maybe 3?
Sure, those Nobel prize winners may also be rock climbers, rugby players, what have you, and those professional athletes may have IQ's in th 140's, but that is not what they are being recognized for.
The fact is, society rewards elite jockdom much more that in does elite nerddom.
As a logician, I know that statements like the above are meaningless without evidence.
So the Insightful comment here is bascially that there is no such thing as data lock in? After all, you can always recreate the data you put in. It's not like these services make it up...
Sorry, but that's a bit like saying "Microsoft Word documents aren't proprietary, you could always re-type the same thing in Open Office!".
The Facbook / MySpace examples are inane. Do people really really care so much about migrating their social networking data? The article is more apt for SaaS "clouds" such as Salesforce or AWS. The author doesn't appear to indicate cloud providers should be mandated to prevent data lock in, just that customers should be aware of the data lock in of most cloud services.
So your "insightful" comment is that Wave is an incredible success and no amount of public opinion or evidence will convince you otherwise?
I'd say your post has failed everyone.
No, there are not. Please provide these "scenarios" or STFU.
And for consoles: Everyone owns a DVD player, so you can't really add the price of that DVD player to the calculation. The only additional cost will be the game.
See the flaw in your logic?
Hint: I have a phone. It's not an IPhone.
Or they could just move 140 miles north to Canada. Very minor shift in culture, no language barriers, no tariffs, and the US government already uses a proprietary Canadian OS on some of their devices.
Or they could just move to Nevada.
In any case, the article doesn't provide any evidence that Microsoft is doing anything illegal, though they heavily imply it. The article links to a couple of other sites (written by the same author, how original!) that basically spew the same nonsense, but there is no indication why Microsoft can't do exactly what they are doing.
No, they won't know where your kid is. GPS signals are read only. This watch does not "talk" to the satellites, it only listens. My guess is they use cellular SMS messaging to broadcast the data back to the middleman.
That's why this watch won't work in the middle of the Outback. It has no way to communicate back to the middleman as cell phone service is not available.
How do you figure? A 1200mA solar panel is fairly common:
http://www.google.ca/search?q=1200mA+solar+panel
Numerous reasons:
a) I don't want my data floating about "the cloud". Sorry, I don't care how much "we aren't evil" marketing corporations spew, in the end, it's my data, and I'll take care of it myself thank you very much.
b) A PC to manage my data doesn't cost $1500. It costs more like $500-$600.
c) I don't need 100x the power of my $600 PC.
d) Cloud applications cost (e.g. $50/year for Google apps). Sorry, I'd rather use free stuff or even buy that other evil office package for $100, and manage the data myself.
e) I'm not always connected. I like to have access to my data even when my ISP is down.
f) The cloud isn't always connected
Basically, I don't want my property at the mercy of corporations. It's the same reason I don't like hosted music, hosted games, hosted television, etc. When I buy something, I want to own it on my terms. The cloud seems all like paying money to companies to play on their terms. Bleh. No thank you.
So basically your argument is:
Here are a bunch of reasons why I prefer PC's over consoles.
Therefore, publishers release the same items for free to PC's that they charge for consoles.
Your logic doesn't make any sense. The relative power / lack of power of each platform has nothing to do with the publishers financial decision to charge on one platform vs. the other.
My guess is the reasons are more likely one of the following:
1) If we charge on the PC, it's likely just gonna get pirated anyways, so lets not bother
2) The PC has a declining audience for games, let's do what we can to keep the last members of that audience interested.
3) Because historically, these types of things have been free on PC's and there will be a lot of resentment if we suddenly start charging for them. The largest demographic of console owners were NOT previously PC gamers, so they won't miss what they never had.
You have Windows and Linux confused, as far as I can tell.
Yes, but the quote was $150million for 100,000 lines of code.
XP had over 40 million lines of code, so assuming the costs scale linearly (which is optimistic IMHO), it would cost $60 billion dollars to develop a "bug free" version of XP.
For reference, Red Hat 7.1 contains approx 30 million lines of code
Give him the benefit of the doubt, it may have been both!
I read it that way too, even though I've worked on some POS POS software.