Very good point, and your analysis puts me in mind of the "Just In Time" process which took over in manufacturing in the U.S. over the past 15 years or so. We, in California, just witnessed a critical weakness of the model, when the dockworkers and port owners on the west coast came to such loggerheads that all shipping shut down. The factories which were expecting today's parts to have showed up yesterday ran out of material to process and shut down.
If there were never a labor dispute, then the factories would save big because they wouldn't need to stock several weeks' worth of supplies at an onsite warehouse. However, those savings would evaporate if the longshoremen or the port owners were congenital buttheads.
The future of this model, I guess, will depend on the price level of this on-demand processing power.
Y'know, that's what I thought, too. But this might not really be such a bad move, when one considers, for example, the recently reported standardization of the U.S. military. From the article:
IBM, he said, hoped to fashion a computing grid that would allow services to be shifted from company to company as they are needed. For instance, a car company might need the computing power of a supercomputer for a short period as it designs a new model but then have little need for that added horsepower once production begins. Other services could be delivered in much the same way, assuming IBM can pull together the networks, computers and software needed to manage and automate the chore. Palmisano said the industry would first need to embrace greater standardization.
I haven't ever worked in a place where the need for computing power has varied wildly over time (which is the only scenario for which this model seems to make any sense) so I don't know how common this market is or how valuable the service will be. But the part that creeps me out is that last sentence, talking about greater standardization. As a developer, I'm in favor of standard data interchange formats, but somehow I suspect that what this really means is a standardization on a single suite of software tools, and that's more along Microsoft's line of thinking.
Wait a minute. I thought there were penguins on the Falkland Islands -- a mere hop from Argentina. And aren't there penguins in the southern bits of Chile?
The system you describe is something I'd like, too. Now, a quick Google search led me to look at Zeus Phonstuff over here. The price of this particular model is USD 249, but the device provides you a simple interface from caller ID box to PC (via serial cable). From there, doing the matching of the number against a database (perhaps even a shared database, much like spam blacklists) shouldn't be difficult. I just glanced through the online manual for this 2 line unit and it says that that unit doesn't do blocking (but this suggests that the 4 line unit does, since the switch is present, just not selectable).
It's cool that people are engineering plants and critters to concentrate these potentially toxic compounds...but what happens when the plant or bug dies? You still have the question of collecting the remains and then doing something safe with them.
Also, some plants already concentrate arsenic in their seeds. (It's been a while since I heard this, but I seem to recall it's either apples or apricots.)
When I'm surfing, I tend to visit text-heavy pages, so I do a lot of scrolling. I use the mouse to click on a link and then I get it out of the way. I use the arrow keys on the keyboard to scroll through the page and to go back. My hand gets cramped up when I hold a mouse for long, and this works for me. Besides, it keeps me in practice for those occasions when I still use lynx to browse.
I had a similar problem a couple years ago. I had switched from a vegetarian diet to a vegan diet, and the loss of the fats from cheese meant that I dropped ten pounds without even noticing. At 6'7", 175 pounds is scrawny. I wanted to bulk up to about 195, and I didn't want it to be gut.
I worked weights three times a week, and did cardio on the off days. If I was awake, then I was either working out or chewing. I ate oat cakes and smoothies in the morning, and grazed all afternoon. It took me a few months, but eventually I did make it up to my goal. Maintaining the weight is a lot easier than gaining it, since my appetite has adjusted.
It mostly just required a lifestyle change: I had to plan on eating, so I became more organized about shopping and cooking. Once I had adjusted my daily routine, though, it was well-integrated into my life and I found it easy to keep with my program. I could be at work, at my desk, coding furiously and simultaneously eating the food I'd packed.
My own reason for moving to PHP for web development (having done several apps in mod_perl first) is simply that I hate having to restart apache every time I want to test some code. :w
and then clicking a browser refresh button is a lot easier than :w :!apachectl graceful
And what the heck, PHP does everything I need a web application to do -- so I maintain web pages in PHP and I do back end processing in Perl.
Sorta. I take your tongue-in-cheek sarcastic point, but you're not quite correct about the BSD license. It, too, requires that derivative works retain the copyright information -- which is the violation of the GPL that we're seeing.
"The power to tax is the power to destroy." -- John Marshall
In the U.S., we have a long legal precedent that if something is protected under the Constitution, then it's not taxable. This is why churches aren't taxable.
You're wrong. The state IS offering tax breaks to members of the consortium, just not for this particular deal. The NYTimes story left a whole lot out. Trust me, there is plenty of reciprocity in this deal.
Nobody seems to have mentioned the fact that the state of NY has spent a considerable amount of time and money "pre-permitting" semiconductor manufacturing sites, trying to attract semiconductor manufacturing into the area. Of five sites, one was already snapped up by IBM, and the state of NY gave the company a sweetheart deal amounting to tax breaks that totalled 20% of the total project cost (it costs $2-3 BILLION to build a semiconductor manufacturing facility - you do the math). Albany Nanotech has also been in the works for quite a while. They went public with their plans for the 300 mm site last year at SEMICON West in San Francisco, so I guess nobody told the board at Albany Nanotech that the whole thing was a secret. And what they're touting as the benefits of the site are huge (for the companies involved). Imagine, having someone else pay for the privilege of doing YOUR COMPANY'S R&D.
What does the state get out of it? They get the $$$ that come with hosting a semiconductor fab (1000-1500 jobs just within the fab itself) that pay well, plus the added jobs that come with vendors and secondary businesses, which raise the taxes in the region. The state of NY stands to make itself a tidy bundle, so they're looking at is as a long-term investment.
Actually, in the U.S. the DEA (or local law enforcement in many states) can sieze your property if you are suspected -- not even charged, mind you -- of being a drug dealer. In California, this is also true for being in a gang or being associated with a gang. You then have to go to court to get your stuff back, even if you're never charged -- and what are you gonna use to pay for that suit? Mm hm.
So, don't count too heavily on your constitutional protection from unreasonable search and siezure.
Why does there need to be a new word? What's wrong with "oligarchy"? What value is added by conflating "oligarchy" and "monopoly"? Why not just learn the language, instead?
Well, it sort of depends on what kind of code you're writing, doesn't it? In applications development, the dev cycle can be 1 year long or longer, with support cycles that run about 3 to 6 months.
In web development, your dev cycle is often 3 months or fewer, with support cycles measured in days or even hours. The practice of shifting requirements up until the ship date is one that we, as professionals, have a duty to curb. If you're implementing new requirements during the final 10% of the project, then you're allowing the customer to break the project and blame you.
Unfortunately, the nature of programming doesn't really change between those extremes: it's still a question of figuring out what the problem (the product requirements) is, designing a solution to the problem (writing a spec and, hopefully, designing it so that three cycles from now when you get a requirement to change the product, you can), and then writing the code that implements the design.
The comments we always see in these discussions along the lines of, "comments are for the weak; real programmers don't use comments..." don't take into consideration the fact that the odds are very good that you won't be supporting your own code in a year, you'll be dealing with someone else's crap. As professionals, it behooves us to provide as many clues as we can to the poor sods who'll follow after us -- because what goes around, comes around.
When I'm doing really fast web development, the spec is often a drawing on a white board -- so I take a picture. The design is often a doodle in a notebook -- which I label and keep on my bookshelf. And when I start banging out code, the first thing I do is pseudocode in comments, then interleave the real thing. That way, when I'm interrupted in the process, I can pick up again quite easily.
I've handed off a lot of code to other people, and I've never gotten any complaints about too many comments (or about useless ones). I have gotten comments about how easy it is to follow what I'm doing, and that's enough. Do what you need to do to get the job done, but keep in mind that the job doesn't stop with getting the thing to compile and link.
Check out SecurityFocus, particularly the ARIS. You can set up a cron job to submit snort reports. This is exactly the thing you're talking about, and it's been around for a while. Why don't people use it? Because it costs money (to subscribe -- submitting reports is free), because they don't know how, because they don't care...
If you're trying to replace Blockbuster, then check out Netflix -- no late fees, and the DVDs get delivered by the mailman. I doubt that any "movies on demand" system is going to be a Blockbuster killer, since with a rental system you get to have the movie over a period of days, and the opportunity to watch it multiple times or episodically. (And the episodic capability is really nice if you've got little kids. I've now only got half-hour chunks of time in which to watch movies.)
A satellite in geostationary orbit still receives a lot of radio noise from Earth. That's sort of the point of GEO, after all. On the far side of the moon, though, there's this big hunk of radio absorbing rock between the antenna and Earth, which would allow the 'scope to pick up much fainter signals.
Slashdot Mirror
Very good point, and your analysis puts me in mind of the "Just In Time" process which took over in manufacturing in the U.S. over the past 15 years or so. We, in California, just witnessed a critical weakness of the model, when the dockworkers and port owners on the west coast came to such loggerheads that all shipping shut down. The factories which were expecting today's parts to have showed up yesterday ran out of material to process and shut down.
If there were never a labor dispute, then the factories would save big because they wouldn't need to stock several weeks' worth of supplies at an onsite warehouse. However, those savings would evaporate if the longshoremen or the port owners were congenital buttheads.
The future of this model, I guess, will depend on the price level of this on-demand processing power.
I haven't ever worked in a place where the need for computing power has varied wildly over time (which is the only scenario for which this model seems to make any sense) so I don't know how common this market is or how valuable the service will be. But the part that creeps me out is that last sentence, talking about greater standardization. As a developer, I'm in favor of standard data interchange formats, but somehow I suspect that what this really means is a standardization on a single suite of software tools, and that's more along Microsoft's line of thinking.
Except for when = tests for equality and := assigns a value. (Pascal)
Or when thing.equals(otherthing) tests for equality and new thing(otherthing) assigns a value.
Or...
Wait a minute. I thought there were penguins on the Falkland Islands -- a mere hop from Argentina. And aren't there penguins in the southern bits of Chile?
The system you describe is something I'd like, too. Now, a quick Google search led me to look at Zeus Phonstuff over here. The price of this particular model is USD 249, but the device provides you a simple interface from caller ID box to PC (via serial cable). From there, doing the matching of the number against a database (perhaps even a shared database, much like spam blacklists) shouldn't be difficult. I just glanced through the online manual for this 2 line unit and it says that that unit doesn't do blocking (but this suggests that the 4 line unit does, since the switch is present, just not selectable).
It's cool that people are engineering plants and critters to concentrate these potentially toxic compounds...but what happens when the plant or bug dies? You still have the question of collecting the remains and then doing something safe with them.
Also, some plants already concentrate arsenic in their seeds. (It's been a while since I heard this, but I seem to recall it's either apples or apricots.)
Oh yeah. First post!
When I'm surfing, I tend to visit text-heavy pages, so I do a lot of scrolling. I use the mouse to click on a link and then I get it out of the way. I use the arrow keys on the keyboard to scroll through the page and to go back. My hand gets cramped up when I hold a mouse for long, and this works for me. Besides, it keeps me in practice for those occasions when I still use lynx to browse.
If you're just grabbing a Coke at the 7-Eleven, just use cash, for crissakes!
I had a similar problem a couple years ago. I had switched from a vegetarian diet to a vegan diet, and the loss of the fats from cheese meant that I dropped ten pounds without even noticing. At 6'7", 175 pounds is scrawny. I wanted to bulk up to about 195, and I didn't want it to be gut.
I worked weights three times a week, and did cardio on the off days. If I was awake, then I was either working out or chewing. I ate oat cakes and smoothies in the morning, and grazed all afternoon. It took me a few months, but eventually I did make it up to my goal. Maintaining the weight is a lot easier than gaining it, since my appetite has adjusted.
It mostly just required a lifestyle change: I had to plan on eating, so I became more organized about shopping and cooking. Once I had adjusted my daily routine, though, it was well-integrated into my life and I found it easy to keep with my program. I could be at work, at my desk, coding furiously and simultaneously eating the food I'd packed.
My own reason for moving to PHP for web development (having done several apps in mod_perl first) is simply that I hate having to restart apache every time I want to test some code.
:w
:w
:!apachectl graceful
and then clicking a browser refresh button is a lot easier than
And what the heck, PHP does everything I need a web application to do -- so I maintain web pages in PHP and I do back end processing in Perl.
Sorta. I take your tongue-in-cheek sarcastic point, but you're not quite correct about the BSD license. It, too, requires that derivative works retain the copyright information -- which is the violation of the GPL that we're seeing.
"The power to tax is the power to destroy." -- John Marshall
In the U.S., we have a long legal precedent that if something is protected under the Constitution, then it's not taxable. This is why churches aren't taxable.
You're wrong. The state IS offering tax breaks to members of the consortium, just not for this particular deal. The NYTimes story left a whole lot out. Trust me, there is plenty of reciprocity in this deal.
Nobody seems to have mentioned the fact that the state of NY has spent a considerable amount of time and money "pre-permitting" semiconductor manufacturing sites, trying to attract semiconductor manufacturing into the area. Of five sites, one was already snapped up by IBM, and the state of NY gave the company a sweetheart deal amounting to tax breaks that totalled 20% of the total project cost (it costs $2-3 BILLION to build a semiconductor manufacturing facility - you do the math). Albany Nanotech has also been in the works for quite a while. They went public with their plans for the 300 mm site last year at SEMICON West in San Francisco, so I guess nobody told the board at Albany Nanotech that the whole thing was a secret. And what they're touting as the benefits of the site are huge (for the companies involved). Imagine, having someone else pay for the privilege of doing YOUR COMPANY'S R&D. What does the state get out of it? They get the $$$ that come with hosting a semiconductor fab (1000-1500 jobs just within the fab itself) that pay well, plus the added jobs that come with vendors and secondary businesses, which raise the taxes in the region. The state of NY stands to make itself a tidy bundle, so they're looking at is as a long-term investment.
Tried to RTFA, but the site's Slashdotted.
Actually, in the U.S. the DEA (or local law enforcement in many states) can sieze your property if you are suspected -- not even charged, mind you -- of being a drug dealer. In California, this is also true for being in a gang or being associated with a gang. You then have to go to court to get your stuff back, even if you're never charged -- and what are you gonna use to pay for that suit? Mm hm.
So, don't count too heavily on your constitutional protection from unreasonable search and siezure.
Why does there need to be a new word? What's wrong with "oligarchy"? What value is added by conflating "oligarchy" and "monopoly"? Why not just learn the language, instead?
...the plural of "automaton" is "automata".
In web development, your dev cycle is often 3 months or fewer, with support cycles measured in days or even hours. The practice of shifting requirements up until the ship date is one that we, as professionals, have a duty to curb. If you're implementing new requirements during the final 10% of the project, then you're allowing the customer to break the project and blame you.
Unfortunately, the nature of programming doesn't really change between those extremes: it's still a question of figuring out what the problem (the product requirements) is, designing a solution to the problem (writing a spec and, hopefully, designing it so that three cycles from now when you get a requirement to change the product, you can), and then writing the code that implements the design.
The comments we always see in these discussions along the lines of, "comments are for the weak; real programmers don't use comments..." don't take into consideration the fact that the odds are very good that you won't be supporting your own code in a year, you'll be dealing with someone else's crap. As professionals, it behooves us to provide as many clues as we can to the poor sods who'll follow after us -- because what goes around, comes around.
When I'm doing really fast web development, the spec is often a drawing on a white board -- so I take a picture. The design is often a doodle in a notebook -- which I label and keep on my bookshelf. And when I start banging out code, the first thing I do is pseudocode in comments, then interleave the real thing. That way, when I'm interrupted in the process, I can pick up again quite easily.
I've handed off a lot of code to other people, and I've never gotten any complaints about too many comments (or about useless ones). I have gotten comments about how easy it is to follow what I'm doing, and that's enough. Do what you need to do to get the job done, but keep in mind that the job doesn't stop with getting the thing to compile and link.
Hydrogen storage is different for a couple of reasons:
Check out SecurityFocus, particularly the ARIS. You can set up a cron job to submit snort reports. This is exactly the thing you're talking about, and it's been around for a while. Why don't people use it? Because it costs money (to subscribe -- submitting reports is free), because they don't know how, because they don't care...
If you're trying to replace Blockbuster, then check out Netflix -- no late fees, and the DVDs get delivered by the mailman. I doubt that any "movies on demand" system is going to be a Blockbuster killer, since with a rental system you get to have the movie over a period of days, and the opportunity to watch it multiple times or episodically. (And the episodic capability is really nice if you've got little kids. I've now only got half-hour chunks of time in which to watch movies.)
A satellite in geostationary orbit still receives a lot of radio noise from Earth. That's sort of the point of GEO, after all. On the far side of the moon, though, there's this big hunk of radio absorbing rock between the antenna and Earth, which would allow the 'scope to pick up much fainter signals.
I tried decrypting the "die american infidels" text through the extremely strong ROT13 cipher, but all I got was this junk:
suhjrvbdeljeuysnfqbshbrde
wtutwxyfqazikuwfbusjrssuv
hrehvbljrehrlbelcedlcjcjr
qvrnzrevpnavasvqryfvjvyyo
ronpxsbegurjuvgrubhfrfvta
rqbfnznovaynqrawbvjrwebew
hlghghvlebvldhveljebdlvje
ewjrbvewrebrjvebvwjweiiqf
rjdorwexdueuhrjduedhvedbj
hverdelhcdgetuwtsutsuwnsn
xrdweoweohvrjuehdvjhevuhs
What version of MPACK do I have to use to see the naked Lewinsky JPEG?
More like the 'i' in 'Windows'.