Bosses don't think of outsourcing as telecommuting because the outsourced employees aren't working from home. They are usually in an office being supervised by someone. Bosses can relate to that; they can't stand the thought of somebody sitting at home working in their underware.
To the boss, the fact that the fully clothed workers' hourly wage is 1/4 that of the unshaven half-naked ones is another big factor.
I like how PHBs asses risks. Today's topic: save a few bucks on IT expenditures.
Option A: Save money on software by trying out a different operating system that has fewer up front and accounting costs and is known for stability.
Assesment: Oooohhhh.... that's risky. Somebody might need to be trained! Somebody else might make outrageous unsubstantiated claims over ownership! Can't see how we'd do it.
Option B: Save some money by firing the people who know how to run your business. Gather up the most intimate details and critical information about your operations and ship them 12,000 miles and 11 timezones to a second or third world country. Hope that nothing bad happens to your information. Hope that the world political climate stays stable enough to keep your business running over that tenuous link.
Assesment: Yes, it's a no brainer! Woohoo! Let's do it! We're a cutting edge organization!
Think about the implications of no pilots. Instead of huge ship-sized airliners, you could have small personal-sized planes fly you directly to your destination on your own schedule. It would be more like renting a car.
With small planes it beomes possible to provide ejection seats for each passenger. Even if automated planes had many times more mishaps than today's airliners, you could compensate for much of that risk with ejection seats.
With small automatic planes, you could use small local airstrips instead of mega-airports. Driving 100 extra total miles on a round trip to get to the airports at each end carries significant risk. Eliminating that driving risk could very well make up for any decrease in safety of the actual flights.
IIRC, the theory behind solar powered ventilation is to keep the cars from getting oven hot in the sun. That means that they can use a smaller lighter A/C system since they don't need to battle such extreme heat. (I remember reading somewhere that a typical car A/C unit could cool a small apartment.) The weight reduction provides the real energy savings by increasing the car's fuel economy.
Please recycle your electrons responsibly. It's a great shame that our e-landfil sites are filling up with so many bits and bytes that could otherwise be reused.
You've really hit the nail on the head with that point. It's the electrons that are taking up almost all of the space in our landfills, which is a shame because they only comprise 0.1% of the mass. In fact, you could fit the 99.9% of all of the electronic devices ever made in your shirt pocket if you only had to deal with the protons and neutrons. Maybe the government should fund research into degenerate matter.
Sounds like something you'd see in one of those cheesy catalogs full of practical joke gadgets:
"Try the one and only 'Pepper Coin' on your friends! It's coated with a layer of 100% capsaicin, the active ingredient in hot peppers and pepper spray! Slip a Pepper Coin into their spare change, and their fingers will be stinging and burning for hours! It's loads of fun at school, at the mall or anywhere! For a real hoot, try using it in a game of Quarters. Now that's a beer blast!"
The redhat iso is about 0.00000000001% of all bittorrent traffic.
WWGD? Let's see...
So the men turned from there, and went toward Sodom; but Abraham still stood before the Lord. Then Abraham drew near, and said, "Wilt thou indeed destroy the righteous with the wicked? Suppose there are fifty righteous within the city; wilt thou then destroy the place and not spare it for the fifty righteous who are in it? Far be it from thee to do such a thing, to slay the righteous with the wicked, so that the righteous fare as the wicked! Far be that from thee! Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?" And the Lord said, "if I find at Sodom fifty righteous in the city, I will spare the whole place for their sake".
[ At this point, the mortal Abraham, ignoring some thorny philosophy issues, dickers with the omnipotent creator of the universe and gradually sweetens the deal until the Lord concedes... ]
"For the sake of ten, I will not destroy it"
So the standard appears to be 10. If even 10 RedHat ISOs have been transferred, then BitTorrent must be spared.
I can't even understand your QUESTION, now tell me how is this piece of bloatware shit ever going to get mass appeal? Are you going to tell your mom, "Hey mom, how is the dog, OK try this kfmclient file:/opt/OpenOffice.org/progrms/swriter"
That's right, you don't understand the question. His problem was already fixed by KDE. Your mom doesn't need to know anything about it if she uses a distro that defaults to KDE; it automagically sets OOo's colors. For your mom, this is a non-problem. KDE papered over this detail, just like Windows would.
OTOH, if your mom were 31337 enough to be running WindowMaker like the guy who asked the question, then she'd have no problems understanding this question or the example command line.
I fail to see how preventing others from making ink cartridges promotes the progress of science and useful arts, therefore this should not fall under federal copyright law.
Hey- I just happen to be a struggling inkjet cartridge chip author. I've been working my ass off for years, holding down night jobs, working like a slave to support myself so I can write my chips. It's been a living hell, but I still hold on to my dream. One day I'm going to write an inkjet chip that hits the big time. And when I do, you better bet that I want all of the IP protection that I can get on my chips. I'm not going to pour my soul into little cartridges just so that some petty thieves can steal my hard work! I think I speak for all inkjet chip artists when I say we need strong copyright laws like the DMCA.
Re:Misconception
on
Head First Java
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Another misconception he seems to have is that JavaScript isn't object oriented. It actually uses an interesting object system that uses "prototypes" rather than classes. This system, while somewhat strange, is actually more flexible than a lot of class-based systems. (IIRC, one of the more extreme examples of a prototype-based language is "self".
It's worth checking out if just to help you understand by counterexample exactly what's going on when you use classes in a normal OO langague.)
Well, ok. Not raw materials, but cheap heavy consumer products. (Anyway, there are cheaper raw materials that probably still won't be shipped from overseas, like sand. Invest in sand.)
You are just using a 747 rather than a rocket booster. I would think this would be MORE expensive.
You're exactly right, and the struggling U.S. airline industry realizes that, too. That's why next year they are phasing out their jet airliners in favor of disposable solid-fuel rocket boosters for most passenger air travel.
Coach class passengers are strapped onto the side, first class travellers get to crouch under an aerodynamic fairing. Although safety and comfort will be nowhere near current standards, the flight time on most routes will be dramatically shortened. Moreover, GPS technology will be enable them to deliver you with pinpoint accuracy to within a few meters of your ultimate destination.
Add to this the low barriers to commerce as a result of WTO membership and extensive fiber networks and the result is that we are about to enter a period of hypercompetition that will result in massive profit deflations for many American firms.
I've been thinking about this trend lately, and I believe the best strategy going forward is to base your future career choices on dollars per pound.
What does that mean? I've noticed that if you go to Wal-Mart, for example, almost everything in the store that is priced above a dollar or two per pound is made in China or somewhere similar. This includes toys, appliances, electronics, clothing, etc. The only things that tend to be made in the U.S.A. are things that are too heavy and cheap to ship economically: things like water softener salt, plastic garbage bags, detergent, soda pop, etc.
Since software has essentially zero mass, I think that in the future almost none of it will be made here.
The trend is clear. If you want to minimize your risk of being displaced, get a job making cheap heavy stuff.
Devfs is an over-engineered solution to a non-existant problem..
That's exactly what I've thought for a long time now. I've come up with a much simpler solution that I call "drvlttrd". I'm going to submit the patch as soon as I do a little more cleanup. Basically, the devices get short convenient names that can be used like URL prefixes. Example:
does anyone seriously believe that enough people are going to buy an XBox and use it for non gaming purposes to actually hurt M$ financially ?.
Probably not. But they're worried that the broad availability of hacks around their XBox restriction technologies will allow widespread copying of games. That's a valid concern, but they would have been better off selling a box that was not usable as a PC.
Making it a PC attracts far more interest in hacking the box, which makes the circumvention methods much more easily available. This also makes it much more difficult to justify squashing the hackers on legal grounds because the small minority of people running Linux have an arguably valid reason to hack the box.
don't think this is some new business strategy that MS through the years, this is standard practice, and it works for gaming systems (otherwise all of the gaming companies would be out of business by now)
The main difference is that older gaming systems had hardware that was either an underpowered toy, or totally incompatible with any software, or both. It was intrinsically useless for most other purposes.
Microsoft may have made a mistake by boxing up a standard PC that can run off-the-shelf software, selling it below cost, and then trying to lock it up with a flimsy electronic scheme. I realize that they were trying to leverage PC game software for their platform, but there are downsides to that approach that they have to live with now.
To be fair, if you really were going to make progress on an interstellar journey in the timespan of one TV episode, you'd need to be using some kind of warp-type drive. Moving at superluminal velocities by bending time and space might not be frictionless like classical motion.
In particular, fewer and smaller registers means more swapping to memory, which in turn reduces speed and increases code size.
That's the "glass is half empty" viewpoint. The "half full" viewpoint says that the 6502 gives you 256 registers with the special optimized opcodes for fast access to the lowest 8 bits of memory space.
An obvious architecture enhancement for the 6502 would be to implement those 256 memory locations in on-chip registers. (I'm not familiar with the 65816, so I dont' know if they actually did anything like that.)
the problem is that the escape pod for seven people would be huge and would not leave much to the rest of the shuttle.
That's why it would be better to pack 7 of these in the carry-on baggage:
MOOSE was perhaps the most celebrated bail-out from orbit system of the early 1960's. The suited astronaut would strap the MOOSE to his back, and jump out of the spacecraft or station into free space. The MOOSE consisted of a chest-mounted parachute, a flexible, folded 1.8 m diameter elastomeric heat shield, and a canister of polyurethane foam. Pulling the deployment cord would fill the shield into shape and encase the back of the astronaut in perfectly form-fitting polyurethane. The astronaut would use a small hand-held gas get device to orient himself for retro-fire, and then fire a solid rocket motor mounted in the device. After aligning himself for re-entry and putting the MOOSE into a slow roll, he would throw the gas gun away. After a ballistic re-entry, the astronaut would pull the ripcord of the chest-parachute, which would pull him away from the heat shield for a parachute landing.
Um, when industry and government gets together, we have a word for this: fascism.
I don't disagree with your terminology, but I still predict that they're going to do it.
And, once again, the free market counteracts fascism. In a word -- 802.11x. Need I say more?
Unless you figure out a way to seamlessly connect the entire continent with 100 meter radio links (an impossible routing/bandwidth problem), you've still got to hook into the Internet backbone somewhere. This is the chokepoint where the government/industry can assert control. There will be no high-speed uplinks off of wireless networks.
Not to mention, I predict that equipment capable of making non-authenticated 802.11 connections will be banned for "security" reasons within 5 years as well.
With Freenet, you *can't* go after filesharers, because you don't know who the filesharers are? What are you going to to do?
There is a very simple fix that will make all P2P networks useless. Industry and government will get together and come up with a plan to cap all residential broadband upstream bitrates to the low kilobit/sec range (uncapped service might be offered for say $50/month extra; very few will buy it). Educational institutes will be pressured to do the same on student accounts. Businesses will gladly crack down on employee P2P usage. Result: P2P dries up quickly.
Since this is a win/win situation for every party except the individual end user, I'm predicting we'll see these limits in place within 5 years.
Has anyone ever done a study to find out if the time saved by not debugging dynamic type problems is greater than the time wasted by developers worrying about compiler typing rules? In my experience, dynamic type issues are somewhat rare in a language like Python, but when programming in a language like C++ it seems that a large fraction your time can be consumed with trying to get the compiler happy with your type declarations. (Or structuring your code in an unnatural way to match someone else's type declarations. Or writing adapter layers between your type system and some library's type system.)
Because extensive user testing has shown that some people can type their passwords so fast that even a GHz-class RISC processor can't keep up unless the password capture program is written in C. The system can fall behind if it takes more than a handful opcodes per character in the inner loop. Unfortunately, these performance constraints preclude checking array bounds between each typed character.
It's regrettable that we have to live with risks like these, but we have little choice when dealing with data input at these kinds of speeds.
Slashdot Mirror
What's truly ironic is that so many would-be grammar scholars flag every usage of the word ironic as an error, even when it is used correctly.
To the boss, the fact that the fully clothed workers' hourly wage is 1/4 that of the unshaven half-naked ones is another big factor.
Option A: Save money on software by trying out a different operating system that has fewer up front and accounting costs and is known for stability.
Assesment: Oooohhhh.... that's risky. Somebody might need to be trained! Somebody else might make outrageous unsubstantiated claims over ownership! Can't see how we'd do it.
Option B: Save some money by firing the people who know how to run your business. Gather up the most intimate details and critical information about your operations and ship them 12,000 miles and 11 timezones to a second or third world country. Hope that nothing bad happens to your information. Hope that the world political climate stays stable enough to keep your business running over that tenuous link.
Assesment: Yes, it's a no brainer! Woohoo! Let's do it! We're a cutting edge organization!
With small planes it beomes possible to provide ejection seats for each passenger. Even if automated planes had many times more mishaps than today's airliners, you could compensate for much of that risk with ejection seats.
With small automatic planes, you could use small local airstrips instead of mega-airports. Driving 100 extra total miles on a round trip to get to the airports at each end carries significant risk. Eliminating that driving risk could very well make up for any decrease in safety of the actual flights.
IIRC, the theory behind solar powered ventilation is to keep the cars from getting oven hot in the sun. That means that they can use a smaller lighter A/C system since they don't need to battle such extreme heat. (I remember reading somewhere that a typical car A/C unit could cool a small apartment.) The weight reduction provides the real energy savings by increasing the car's fuel economy.
You've really hit the nail on the head with that point. It's the electrons that are taking up almost all of the space in our landfills, which is a shame because they only comprise 0.1% of the mass. In fact, you could fit the 99.9% of all of the electronic devices ever made in your shirt pocket if you only had to deal with the protons and neutrons. Maybe the government should fund research into degenerate matter.
Sounds like something you'd see in one of those cheesy catalogs full of practical joke gadgets:
"Try the one and only 'Pepper Coin' on your friends! It's coated with a layer of 100% capsaicin, the active ingredient in hot peppers and pepper spray! Slip a Pepper Coin into their spare change, and their fingers will be stinging and burning for hours! It's loads of fun at school, at the mall or anywhere! For a real hoot, try using it in a game of Quarters. Now that's a beer blast!"
WWGD? Let's see...
[ At this point, the mortal Abraham, ignoring some thorny philosophy issues, dickers with the omnipotent creator of the universe and gradually sweetens the deal until the Lord concedes... ]
So the standard appears to be 10. If even 10 RedHat ISOs have been transferred, then BitTorrent must be spared.
That's right, you don't understand the question. His problem was already fixed by KDE. Your mom doesn't need to know anything about it if she uses a distro that defaults to KDE; it automagically sets OOo's colors. For your mom, this is a non-problem. KDE papered over this detail, just like Windows would.
OTOH, if your mom were 31337 enough to be running WindowMaker like the guy who asked the question, then she'd have no problems understanding this question or the example command line.
Hey- I just happen to be a struggling inkjet cartridge chip author. I've been working my ass off for years, holding down night jobs, working like a slave to support myself so I can write my chips. It's been a living hell, but I still hold on to my dream. One day I'm going to write an inkjet chip that hits the big time. And when I do, you better bet that I want all of the IP protection that I can get on my chips. I'm not going to pour my soul into little cartridges just so that some petty thieves can steal my hard work! I think I speak for all inkjet chip artists when I say we need strong copyright laws like the DMCA.
Another misconception he seems to have is that JavaScript isn't object oriented. It actually uses an interesting object system that uses "prototypes" rather than classes. This system, while somewhat strange, is actually more flexible than a lot of class-based systems. (IIRC, one of the more extreme examples of a prototype-based language is "self". It's worth checking out if just to help you understand by counterexample exactly what's going on when you use classes in a normal OO langague.)
Well, ok. Not raw materials, but cheap heavy consumer products. (Anyway, there are cheaper raw materials that probably still won't be shipped from overseas, like sand. Invest in sand.)
You're exactly right, and the struggling U.S. airline industry realizes that, too. That's why next year they are phasing out their jet airliners in favor of disposable solid-fuel rocket boosters for most passenger air travel.
Coach class passengers are strapped onto the side, first class travellers get to crouch under an aerodynamic fairing. Although safety and comfort will be nowhere near current standards, the flight time on most routes will be dramatically shortened. Moreover, GPS technology will be enable them to deliver you with pinpoint accuracy to within a few meters of your ultimate destination.
I've been thinking about this trend lately, and I believe the best strategy going forward is to base your future career choices on dollars per pound.
What does that mean? I've noticed that if you go to Wal-Mart, for example, almost everything in the store that is priced above a dollar or two per pound is made in China or somewhere similar. This includes toys, appliances, electronics, clothing, etc. The only things that tend to be made in the U.S.A. are things that are too heavy and cheap to ship economically: things like water softener salt, plastic garbage bags, detergent, soda pop, etc.
Since software has essentially zero mass, I think that in the future almost none of it will be made here.
The trend is clear. If you want to minimize your risk of being displaced, get a job making cheap heavy stuff.
That's exactly what I've thought for a long time now. I've come up with a much simpler solution that I call "drvlttrd". I'm going to submit the patch as soon as I do a little more cleanup. Basically, the devices get short convenient names that can be used like URL prefixes. Example:
etc...
Probably not. But they're worried that the broad availability of hacks around their XBox restriction technologies will allow widespread copying of games. That's a valid concern, but they would have been better off selling a box that was not usable as a PC.
Making it a PC attracts far more interest in hacking the box, which makes the circumvention methods much more easily available. This also makes it much more difficult to justify squashing the hackers on legal grounds because the small minority of people running Linux have an arguably valid reason to hack the box.
The main difference is that older gaming systems had hardware that was either an underpowered toy, or totally incompatible with any software, or both. It was intrinsically useless for most other purposes.
Microsoft may have made a mistake by boxing up a standard PC that can run off-the-shelf software, selling it below cost, and then trying to lock it up with a flimsy electronic scheme. I realize that they were trying to leverage PC game software for their platform, but there are downsides to that approach that they have to live with now.
To be fair, if you really were going to make progress on an interstellar journey in the timespan of one TV episode, you'd need to be using some kind of warp-type drive. Moving at superluminal velocities by bending time and space might not be frictionless like classical motion.
That's the "glass is half empty" viewpoint. The "half full" viewpoint says that the 6502 gives you 256 registers with the special optimized opcodes for fast access to the lowest 8 bits of memory space.
An obvious architecture enhancement for the 6502 would be to implement those 256 memory locations in on-chip registers. (I'm not familiar with the 65816, so I dont' know if they actually did anything like that.)
At least try to get your terminology right. It's TAH/WTMA.
That's why it would be better to pack 7 of these in the carry-on baggage:
I don't disagree with your terminology, but I still predict that they're going to do it.
And, once again, the free market counteracts fascism. In a word -- 802.11x. Need I say more?
Unless you figure out a way to seamlessly connect the entire continent with 100 meter radio links (an impossible routing/bandwidth problem), you've still got to hook into the Internet backbone somewhere. This is the chokepoint where the government/industry can assert control. There will be no high-speed uplinks off of wireless networks.
Not to mention, I predict that equipment capable of making non-authenticated 802.11 connections will be banned for "security" reasons within 5 years as well.
There is a very simple fix that will make all P2P networks useless. Industry and government will get together and come up with a plan to cap all residential broadband upstream bitrates to the low kilobit/sec range (uncapped service might be offered for say $50/month extra; very few will buy it). Educational institutes will be pressured to do the same on student accounts. Businesses will gladly crack down on employee P2P usage. Result: P2P dries up quickly.
Since this is a win/win situation for every party except the individual end user, I'm predicting we'll see these limits in place within 5 years.
Has anyone ever done a study to find out if the time saved by not debugging dynamic type problems is greater than the time wasted by developers worrying about compiler typing rules? In my experience, dynamic type issues are somewhat rare in a language like Python, but when programming in a language like C++ it seems that a large fraction your time can be consumed with trying to get the compiler happy with your type declarations. (Or structuring your code in an unnatural way to match someone else's type declarations. Or writing adapter layers between your type system and some library's type system.)
Because extensive user testing has shown that some people can type their passwords so fast that even a GHz-class RISC processor can't keep up unless the password capture program is written in C. The system can fall behind if it takes more than a handful opcodes per character in the inner loop. Unfortunately, these performance constraints preclude checking array bounds between each typed character.
It's regrettable that we have to live with risks like these, but we have little choice when dealing with data input at these kinds of speeds.